acting like a bereaved husband. but when you look at his actions, how little he did to help his wife. who tried harder to save cristi? not chris, said the prosecutor. but his daughter. she called 911. she helped him get the body out of the spa. she is the only one that did chest compression. he had no interest in truly helping his wife. a matter of opinion, of course. but prosecutor strunsky poked around in chris hall s past as a policeman. and what did he find? this man had an uncanny ability to fabricate stories. seven years earlier, while hall was chief of police in cascade, idaho, he was charged with and convicted of misuse of public money, embezzled $9,000, spent ten months in jail. a white collar crime, hardly murder. but what struck the prosecutor is that he says hall tried to cover it up. to plant a fraud, to lie about it, not just lie about it, but lie about it effectively. i think that was very telling about who we were dealing with. suddenly the prosecutor s pr
helping his wife. a matter of opinion, of course. but prosecutor strunsky poked around in chris hall s past as a policeman. and what did he find? this man had an uncanny ability to fabricate stories. seven years earlier, while hall was chief of police in cascade, idaho, he was charged with and convicted of misuse of public money, embezzled $9,000, spent ten months in jail. a white collar crime, hardly murder. but what struck the prosecutor is that he says hall tried to cover it up. to plant a fraud, to lie about it, not just lie about it, but lie about it effectively. i think that was very telling about who we were dealing with. suddenly the prosecutor s prospects were looking better. at the trial, strunsky made lindsay patterson his star witness, of course. it was her story, after all, that got the whole thing started. but almost as important, he called the riverside county medical examiner who testified that those lacerations in
thank you so much for coming. when it was over, hall convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life, some of cristi s relatives met with prosecutor strunsky and thanked him. thank you for putting him away because he is a murderer. and the hall daughters, having lost their beloved mother, fought to save a father they adored, and having lost that fight, aren t quite sure what they ll do now. for the family. to say we were close is an understatement, you know. to go from that to being not able to be there with each other. it s it s the biggest heartbreak that anyone can ever experience, i think. that s outline for this
but there was more. d.a. investigator tom dove discovered a secret. not in chris s past but in cristi s. there had been infidelity in the past. cristi s affair was relatively brief, years earlier. but she had been in phone contact with the man just days before she died. had chris found out? impossible to know. but when investigator dove talked to cristi s co-workers at the clinic where she was an x-ray technician, several said they noticed a change in her usually vibrant personality. one co-worker told them more. that she was contemplating a divorce. if true, it might persuade a jury. prosecutor strunsky also needed to explain why lindsay patterson didn t see cristi s body when she looked over the wall the
to explain any physical contact that could in any way reasonably explain what lindsay patterson saw. in other words, were they washing each other, were they involved in a sex act? was there anything she could have misinterpreted? and at the end of the day, you re not just stuck with the fact that lindsay patterson made a mistake. you have to actually believe that lindsay patterson really hallucinated about everything she saw. and what made lindsay s story all the more convincing, stayed prosecutor strunsky, was she told it before finding out what happened to cristi. she dialled 911 a full minute and a half before anyone from the hall house did. before lindsay had any idea how it would end. here is what the jury heard her say in that call. and i saw him put her underwater and hold her there. and she was still on the phone with 911 when chris hall came outside and found his wife s body floating in the spa and called out for courtney.