Death of a Heartsong

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Speaker 12 It was a time, or so it seemed, of endless possibility.

Speaker 7 Drop out, grow a beard, call yourself a hippie, invent life all over again.

Speaker 15 And maybe, if you were very, very lucky, you'd answer your door one day and find yourself looking at the love of your life.

Speaker 3 I looked in her eyes. That was the first feature I looked at on her.
And her eyes just, like I've known them all of my life, or all my lifetimes.

Speaker 17 Ah, yes, Kismet.

Speaker 18 It was 1973.

Speaker 19 Bob Eckhart was 29 then, and temporarily caretaking an old mansion in Miami Beach.

Speaker 6 And she, the girl with the eyes, was a 24-year-old named Tony Soren.

Speaker 3 My jaw drops to the floor. This

Speaker 3 just absolutely incredibly beautiful woman is at my front door.

Speaker 12 She asked him if she could park her car in his driveway.

Speaker 10 He invited her in.

Speaker 7 They talked the rest of the day, all night.

Speaker 3 We just

Speaker 3 found so much in common, so much spiritually we found in in each other. So she shared this.

Speaker 3 Right. Everything was open.
Every door was open.

Speaker 6 She moved in that very night. A day and a half later, they had an unofficial wedding ceremony.

Speaker 1 A day and a half.

Speaker 3 And we wrote a paper between us and God that said that we're, you know,

Speaker 3 this is it.

Speaker 6 Seven months later, they made it official, an actual marriage license.

Speaker 22 And she was, for the young Eckhart, a soulmate and in some ways a savior because he'd been lost.

Speaker 27 You went off the rails a bit.

Speaker 3 I got involved with somebody loaned a kid some money and got a little close to what he was doing and I was arrested for a conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine and

Speaker 3 pled guilty.

Speaker 6 He spent four and a half months in prison then, which in retrospect he said wasn't such a bad thing, really.

Speaker 3 Became a vegetarian the day I walked in.

Speaker 3 Walked in weighing 220 pounds, walked out weighing 160.

Speaker 3 Just changed my life. I read a lot of Herman Hess, Siddhartha.
Just open-minded.

Speaker 31 You're one of those guys who actually got scared straight in a good way by this.

Speaker 3 Well, I don't want to say scared. I just looked at it and I said, this is not me.
What am I doing? So I said, I've got to make a change.

Speaker 11 And lo and behold, there was Toni.

Speaker 34 She was orphaned at 16, became a free spirit, a wanderer.

Speaker 36 This is a person that went out west and lived in a small house without running water. And I mean, she was just an adventure.

Speaker 25 This is Tony's friend, Linda Armstrong, Tony and Bob's friend.

Speaker 3 How would you describe Bob? Hippie.

Speaker 36 Very passive. easygoing.
And Tony was more the

Speaker 36 standing up, you know, saying whatever she was thinking.

Speaker 13 Here is what they were like, said Linda.

Speaker 38 Here's the sort of thing they did.

Speaker 36 They went to Hawaii, and I said, oh, that must have been wonderful. She said, until they realized that they spent all their money getting to Hawaii and had no way of getting back.

Speaker 36 So they lived on the beach. That's the kind of person.
She was just ready for anything.

Speaker 33 They decided that the ancient practice of female name shifting, woman taking the husband's name, just wasn't appropriate anymore, not for them, anyway.

Speaker 3 She just wanted something that was ours. So we sat down and we made heart out of Eckhart,

Speaker 3 and we made song out of Soren, and we put heart and song together, and we were Bob and Tony Heart Song.

Speaker 2 Heart song?

Speaker 18 Yes, that's what they decided to be.

Speaker 19 And they even went to court and made it official.

Speaker 15 A son, Elijah, was born, then another, Jacob.

Speaker 10 They settled in Florida, discovered that for all their hippie notions, they were natural entrepreneurs.

Speaker 39 They started a business promoting tofu.

Speaker 10 Tony wrote and designed a tofu cookbook.

Speaker 10 Bob discovered a talent for high-end landscaping, which evolved into a business, creating expensive pool and waterfall installations throughout southern Florida.

Speaker 37 Linda Armstrong became their accountant.

Speaker 36 I've got a lot of couples that have businesses together, and they do raise their voices.

Speaker 36 But that's something Bob and Tony never did. Bob always kissed Tony before he left.
He never, ever forgot to kiss Tony goodbye.

Speaker 12 And in the years and decades that passed, said Bob, they retained somehow the soul of the hippie couple they once had been.

Speaker 37 If you can give me the sort of state of your marriage, the state of your life in 2000.

Speaker 3 It was fabulous at that time. I mean, I often said

Speaker 3 I live in Nirvana.

Speaker 3 See that?

Speaker 10 And then it was September 26th, 2000.

Speaker 34 Bob got up at the usual time, went to work in the usual way, a pool installation in Delray Beach about 40 minutes from their home in Jupiter.

Speaker 18 Tony went to the grocery store and then to the bank.

Speaker 39 They had arranged to meet around 3 p.m.

Speaker 20 at a Delray auto dealership. They were buying a car.

Speaker 29 Bob was there at 3.

Speaker 37 No Tony.

Speaker 3 He called.

Speaker 11 No answer.

Speaker 3 I'm starting to get a little worried.

Speaker 27 Why were you concerned about not being able to reach her on the phone?

Speaker 3 Because we talk all the time.

Speaker 40 It was 5 p.m. when Bob Hartsong parked outside his house and walked past the carefully landscaped greenery to his side door.

Speaker 34 And that was the moment, imprinted now on his brain.

Speaker 45 There she was.

Speaker 3 And I find her laying on the transom of the door.

Speaker 3 And I look and I'm like, I'm like in shock.

Speaker 3 She's been beat by somebody,

Speaker 3 blood is all over,

Speaker 3 and then she's got no pulse. She's cold.

Speaker 3 Oh my god, God, I need help.

Speaker 15 Bob and Tony Hartzong were flower children once.

Speaker 13 Free spirits, two souls locked in eternal embrace, and then in parenthood, and then in business.

Speaker 14 And then, one September day in 2000, Bob came home to find his wife's cold body crumpled on the floor at the side entrance to their fine suburban home.

Speaker 10 She was covered in blood.

Speaker 41 She'd been brutally beaten, particularly around those eyes of hers, the eyes that had so captivated young Bob Eckhart at the entrance to that mansion more than 26 years earlier.

Speaker 3 When I lifted her up and I saw what somebody had done to her face, my whole world just shattered. I was just completely lost.

Speaker 10 Their son, Jake, arrived home from school.

Speaker 12 He could sense as he walked from the bus stop that something was awfully wrong.

Speaker 50 I saw my dad like wailing his arms

Speaker 50 in the driveway and stuff.

Speaker 37 Kind of sticks in your mind, doesn't it?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 50 I'll probably forever remember that. It's like branded to my brain, I suppose.

Speaker 13 Police swarmed the area.

Speaker 33 They videotaped the bloody crime scene, searching for clues.

Speaker 2 They could see right away that Toni Hartzong, a strong woman, had fought valiantly for her life.

Speaker 38 Sergeant John Van Houten, though he wasn't there that day, would eventually become one of the investigators.

Speaker 7 He read the reports, though, and here's what they said.

Speaker 23 It was a frontal, brutal attack, vicious.

Speaker 11 Rage.

Speaker 23 And you can see after she's beaten, and she's laying on the floor there, there's blood on the bottom of her foot because she still tried to get up.

Speaker 23 And then she's stabbed seven times in the neck, and she falls inside the doorway right there.

Speaker 20 That much was obvious, the rest less so.

Speaker 13 No matter how thoroughly he devoured the initial reports, Van Houghton could find no evidence at all for any kind of motive behind something so unspeakably vicious.

Speaker 23 There's nothing missing of jewelry or value from the house. There's no burglary.
Nobody broke in. The front door is locked.

Speaker 28 Any evidence at all of sexual assault?

Speaker 23 No evidence of a sexual assault.

Speaker 33 Now, generally speaking, the grisly work of a crime scene investigator, while very difficult, is fairly straightforward.

Speaker 10 Collect every speck of available evidence, and then, more often than not, especially if no other motive is apparent, draw a line from the victim to someone very close.

Speaker 3 She laid right here.

Speaker 38 But that someone was freely answering questions from television reporters.

Speaker 3 Shelf on the other side of the wall right there that

Speaker 3 her body lay around. She was half in and half half out.

Speaker 35 And perhaps more pointed ones from police.

Speaker 3 People are going to think that you did it, you know, it's just very typical. They asked about the relationship.
They asked if we had any girlfriends or boyfriends or do we have any monetary problems?

Speaker 3 And they asked, have you had any physical confrontations with your wife?

Speaker 31 And the answers were.

Speaker 3 No. The idea of hitting my wife and doing something like that is just

Speaker 3 way out past the kind of being that I would even consider being.

Speaker 3 You know, I just don't have that kind of person in me.

Speaker 31 Still, at that moment, the police had to take a very close look at Robert Hartzong. So they had him take off his shirt.
They looked at his body very carefully up and down.

Speaker 31 They looked for bruises or cuts that would indicate defensive wounds.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 31 not a scratch on Bob, though you'd think there would be if Tony had been fighting back.

Speaker 10 Chaos in the front hall indicated Tony had valiantly fought for her life.

Speaker 23 Well, the chair was turned over by the front door and her toenail was by the front door.

Speaker 23 And there was a swipe of blood on that deadbolt, which means that she was trying to get out that front door at one point.

Speaker 34 She'd finally died trying to escape through a side door.

Speaker 48 But of course, Bob had to be there, if indeed he killed his wife.

Speaker 21 And it appeared he was nowhere near.

Speaker 2 He had an alibi.

Speaker 10 Tony had been murdered sometime early to mid-afternoon, but Bob's employees told police he was there with them, a 40-minute drive away till after 2.30.

Speaker 22 And then at 3, he was at that Delray car dealer's.

Speaker 10 And besides, some of the evidence of the crime scene seemed to indicate somebody else was there.

Speaker 17 Was that somebody, the murderer?

Speaker 3 I had fingerprints on a deadbolt, a lock that we never used. They found footprints.

Speaker 3 Didn't match anybody else in the family's footprints. There were beard hairs found on her body.

Speaker 51 Beard hairs.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Did you have a beard? No.
I was clean-shaven.

Speaker 11 Police tried to discover the source of those mysterious prints and hairs.

Speaker 42 No luck.

Speaker 10 They talked to the neighbors, some of whom said they saw a drifter in the area right around the time of the murder.

Speaker 53 But by the time police went looking, that drifter was long gone.

Speaker 40 And time went by, and with it, the chance of finding anything helpful or new.

Speaker 2 The boys struggled without her, and Bob couldn't figure out how to be without her.

Speaker 3 All of a sudden I'm completely numb.

Speaker 3 All of a sudden

Speaker 3 I've got a vacuum.

Speaker 3 I have no insights to myself.

Speaker 55 But quietly, invisibly, As the heart song file migrated out of active view, a few people hung on to a nagging feeling that something wasn't right, that maybe the solution was in what they already knew.

Speaker 23 No one can remember anyone just being killed for nothing and nothing being taken, excluding sexual assault, you know, your robbery, your burger, whatever. Just

Speaker 23 it's definitely a domestic, there's no doubt.

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Speaker 10 Now began a bad year for Bob Hartzong and for the investigation of Tony Hartzong's murder.

Speaker 59 Keeley Strawberry, it's good for you.

Speaker 3 But you're dealing with you. You're dealing with what you've lost, you know.

Speaker 3 And really, nobody can really understand what you feel.

Speaker 53 The only real lead was that report of a drifter some neighbors said they thought they may have seen around the area about the time of the murder.

Speaker 31 If it was the killer, he may have escaped to vegetation behind the house afterwards, but nobody ever found him.

Speaker 31 And as for what they did find, the hair, the fingerprints, the bloody boot prints, strange thing was they didn't seem to match anybody.

Speaker 27 Oh, and there was one rather inconvenient complication.

Speaker 12 It appeared that certain crime scene protocols weren't too carefully observed.

Speaker 10 For example, the footprints might have been made by police personnel themselves.

Speaker 23 Could have been a paramedic walked in the house. There they do it all the time.
They walk in, and they don't mean to. They step on the blood.

Speaker 23 It could have been a police officer, stepped on the blood and searched the rest of the house looking for another suspect, maybe.

Speaker 3 So you got to throw all that evidence away, really. Right.

Speaker 2 But there was more.

Speaker 35 For some reason, police waited at least a day before they got around to searching the woods out behind the house.

Speaker 11 And that, of course, turned out to be too late.

Speaker 40 What about the footprints going out of the house, through the backyard, into the woods?

Speaker 28 It rained, and they didn't take the evidence before that. How damaging was that to the state's case?

Speaker 23 It would have been nice to have.

Speaker 3 She laid right here. She was half in and half out.

Speaker 38 And then there was the question of Bob Hartsong's appearance.

Speaker 14 There was a problem with that, too.

Speaker 60 Did they look at his body? Did they check for cuts?

Speaker 23 The detective did look at his body, but it was never photographed or documented.

Speaker 3 Isn't that the normal procedure to take a picture?

Speaker 23 For myself, for senior detectives, yes. For someone learning,

Speaker 3 he probably didn't know.

Speaker 28 But those mistakes are

Speaker 28 real mistakes. They can last for a long time.

Speaker 53 That's right.

Speaker 23 And in this case, That mistake is

Speaker 23 not good.

Speaker 6 All that happened before Van Houten inherited the case.

Speaker 45 He just had to live with it.

Speaker 34 And with the fact that in the months after Tony's murder, the investigation went pretty much nowhere.

Speaker 17 And then a break.

Speaker 22 Or what seemed like a break.

Speaker 35 In January of 2001, that drifter turned up in California.

Speaker 2 A man by the name of Ronald Gagno.

Speaker 46 They took him in, asked him the appropriate questions.

Speaker 3 And what was your sense of the likelihood that he may have been culpable here? Not at all. What made you so convinced of that?

Speaker 23 When you beat someone like that, there's a reason. If you're a robber and you're going to do that, you're going to take something.

Speaker 23 Nobody took anything.

Speaker 46 And as for those mysterious hairs found on Tony's body, none of them matched the drifter.

Speaker 18 nor did the bloody boot prints.

Speaker 8 They let him go.

Speaker 33 Police moved on after that.

Speaker 14 And Bob?

Speaker 16 Well, everybody deals with grief in his or her own way.

Speaker 12 Bob mourned deeply, but he also had two sons to care for and a life to live.

Speaker 19 Some of his friends were a little surprised when after two years he got serious with a woman he met online, Susie Goldstein.

Speaker 3 I asked my son, Jake, whether he minded. And I asked Tony's best friend, who was Linda Armstrong, whether she thought it was appropriate.

Speaker 31 Was it appropriate, you think, to have a relationship that soon after?

Speaker 3 Well, what is appropriate? Having a relationship, trying to balance your life back out? You got a vacuum in your life, and you're trying to find balance again?

Speaker 13 Susie was bowled over. Bob seemed like just the right sort of guy for her, a soulmate.

Speaker 61 This guy has got a heart of gold. He wants what you want for you.

Speaker 10 And in fact, he told Susie all about Tony and about the suspicion that attached to him after the murder. Susie decided to be prudent.

Speaker 51 She checked out his story with police, and here's what they told her.

Speaker 61 You know, when they said, no, he's been exonerated. And once you get to know Bob, you know, there is no way.

Speaker 10 Three years after Tony's death, Bob and Susie were married. Tony became a cherished memory, represented by a small shrine.

Speaker 13 erected in the heart song's meditation room.

Speaker 6 And everybody thought that was the end of the story.

Speaker 47 Another three years went by, and then it was 2006, and suddenly the Hartzong case was red hot again.

Speaker 23 We got the federal grant and it was to review for DNA. With today's technologies compared to 2000, there's a big difference.

Speaker 20 Bob Hartzong, of course, had long since remarried and moved on with his life.

Speaker 18 It was August 2006 when Detective Van Houten called.

Speaker 1 He

Speaker 3 said on the phone, we found some new evidence in this case. We'd like you to come down and talk with us.

Speaker 60 What did you think when you heard that?

Speaker 3 I was excited.

Speaker 26 Finally, they're going to find out what happened.

Speaker 3 Yeah, finally, there was a break in the case.

Speaker 49 A break?

Speaker 17 Well, yes, just not the one he'd hoped for.

Speaker 23 As I said, Mr. Hartsong, I'll be back in two weeks with the warrant for your arrest.

Speaker 10 In September 2000, the investigation of Tony Hartsong's murder sputtered and died.

Speaker 21 There was evidence collected on and around her brutalized body, but it proved nothing.

Speaker 19 But by August 2006, that very same evidence began to speak, and Bob Hartsong was among the first to find out what it said.

Speaker 3 They showed me

Speaker 3 the blood under the thumbnail.

Speaker 27 Blood under the thumbnail.

Speaker 53 Her thumbnail.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and said it was my blood.

Speaker 16 They had found something under Tony's Tony's fingernails back in 2000.

Speaker 14 Hard to know what it was then.

Speaker 10 Now, six years later, advanced DNA testing could identify that something as blood.

Speaker 42 Bob's blood. What was that doing there?

Speaker 23 He was asked right from the beginning, was there a fight, an altercation? Was he bleeding anytime during the day? Did he bleed during work? Did he cut himself? Everything was negative.

Speaker 23 No, I wasn't bleeding that day. And then I asked him, I said, well, then how would your blood get under her left thumb?

Speaker 29 Well, how did he answer that question?

Speaker 23 And his answer to that was, it's not my blood.

Speaker 34 The DNA, the police told Bob, doesn't lie.

Speaker 31 And in this case, it seemed to confirm the detective's suspicion. It was not some intruder who struggled with Tony that dreadful day.
It was Bob.

Speaker 31 And the investigators worried away at some other bits of the story, too. One thing in particular.
Nobody ever found the murder weapon, the knife that killed Tony.

Speaker 30 A whole set of kitchen knives knives within easy reach on a counter was untouched, but there was a missing knife. In fact, the knife was the only thing missing from the house after the murder.

Speaker 10 It was Bob and Tony's favorite tofu knife, and they'd always kept it out of sight in a drawer, said then-DA Barbara Burns.

Speaker 59 Why would a stranger with all these knives in view and easy reach

Speaker 59 start looking in a drawer for a knife to use to kill Toni Hartsong.

Speaker 17 The DA also found it suspicious that Bob seemed to know a little too much about the state of his wife's clothing after the attack.

Speaker 54 Although she had not been sexually assaulted, her thong underwear had been awkwardly pulled low in the back.

Speaker 59 The actual position of the underwear had not been known to the investigators or the detective until the autopsy. Yet when the detective went back the next morning, Mr.

Speaker 59 Hartsong described to the detective at that time that the, quote, mysterious assailant must have come into the house and startled her while she was in the bathroom.

Speaker 59 And she must have pulled her shorts up without pulling her underwear up.

Speaker 28 Maybe it heard from somebody that they appeared to be pulled down was offering an explanation.

Speaker 59 It was too coincidental and too ironic to be able to explain all of that away.

Speaker 8 Still, why would a man as devoted as Bob Hartsong and a mild-mannered man at that attack the love of his life?

Speaker 48 D.A.

Speaker 34 Burns poked around in Tony's diary. Was this relationship really so idyllic?

Speaker 59 In her journal, in her own writing, she does make a statement, there's not enough to leave, but there's not enough to stay. Now, what does that mean? There's not enough love loss to leave?

Speaker 59 There's not enough love to stay.

Speaker 59 There are other things in the journal, too, where she talks about he's not as loving or he's not showing her and the kids as much attention. It's all about work, work, work.

Speaker 7 But is even the best marriage free of all dissatisfaction?

Speaker 3 In your relationships, don't you ever have a day that you struggle with?

Speaker 31 Can't think of a single one.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 We all have this. We go through this.
If you don't,

Speaker 3 is this a reason to be accused of killing your wife? One of the last things that she wrote in her diary, things that I'm grateful for, and she has a list, and Bob is on the list.

Speaker 37 Besides, said the friend Linda Armstrong, it wasn't just marriage to Bob that troubled Tony.

Speaker 36 Tony was turning 50. Tony had had thyroid cancer.
It wasn't necessarily Bob. It wasn't necessarily the business.
It was just everything at one time hitting her.

Speaker 47 Midlife angst, or as investigators had now come to believe, a confrontation over the family business.

Speaker 23 Another investigator I spoke to said that he was going broke and he was looking to get a partner in his business because he was financially strapped.

Speaker 33 And in fact, it was no secret.

Speaker 13 Tony had not been totally happy about the proposed partnership, but so upset she fought with Bob?

Speaker 15 Linda Armstrong didn't think so.

Speaker 36 She wasn't 100%,

Speaker 36 I'm thrilled to death about it.

Speaker 36 But she didn't disagree about it.

Speaker 10 But now police put together a theory that on September 26, 2000, Bob Hartzong left his job site in Delray Beach in the early afternoon, went home, argued with Tony, in a moment of uncontrolled rage, stabbed her to death with their favorite knife.

Speaker 37 Then, desperate for an alibi, he drove back to Delray to the car dealership before driving home again at five, discovering Tony's battered body and calling 911.

Speaker 37 Come over here, help me!

Speaker 13 All carefully thought out, decided the prosecutor, a little too carefully.

Speaker 59 Whether it's as a prosecutor or as a detective, an investigator, you start understanding that people

Speaker 59 who don't just answer a question, but feel a need to explain that question

Speaker 59 generally have something to hide.

Speaker 44 Bob Hartzong was arrested on September 26, 2006.

Speaker 34 Exactly six years to the day of his wife's murder.

Speaker 7 He was carted off to jail, where he stayed, incarcerated for almost two years, waiting to go on trial for his life.

Speaker 48 A trial in which the state would claim that this once soft-spoken old hippie suddenly and inexplicably snapped.

Speaker 35 killed the love of his life, and has covered it up ever since.

Speaker 23 It's a three-minute murder. I lost my temper, and that's what happened.
Except after he beat her, he realized, oh boy, I really messed up now.

Speaker 23 And then when she went to get back up, he stamped her.

Speaker 23 He had to kill her.

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Speaker 7 Barry Maxwell was mystified, or so he claimed.

Speaker 10 Here at his law office in West Palm Beach, Florida, Defense Attorney Maxwell read and reread the state's allegation that Bob Hartsong hacked and slaughtered the love of his life with a tofu knife.

Speaker 29 Just wasn't any reason, said Maxwell, for Bob to murder Tony.

Speaker 63 The marriage was good. There wasn't any life insurance policy on Mrs.
Hartstong, therefore, there wasn't a motive.

Speaker 20 But a few miles away, prosecutor Barbara Burns, armed with brand new DNA technology, had carefully and slowly built what she believed was a solid case.

Speaker 59 These things standing alone might raise reasonable doubt when you pull them together and see: wait a minute, each of these is a piece of the puzzle, and by golly, they fit.

Speaker 34 And so, in September 2008, after after almost two years of jail time and house arrest, Bob Hartzong, still with the unwavering support of his sons and new wife, was ushered into the Palm Beach County Courthouse to face his accusers.

Speaker 59 The evidence presented by the state will show how the defendant orchestrated the events of the day and how he managed to return to his residence.

Speaker 59 to surprise his wife Toni Hartzong,

Speaker 59 engage in an argument with her, which led to unspeakable violence and a brutal bludgeoning and stabbing death of Tony Hartsong.

Speaker 59 Did you say the right hand? Yes.

Speaker 24 Step by step, Prosecutor Burns layered on the evidence of guilt.

Speaker 49 And she did have, after all, that DNA.

Speaker 59 The blood that you got the result on

Speaker 59 on the left thumb of Tony Hartsong was the blood of Robert Hartsong.

Speaker 13 And Hartsong, remember, had offered no explanation, reasonable or not, for how that blood had gotten there.

Speaker 16 But the blood under Tony's fingernail was not the only significant discovery.

Speaker 46 As Tony struggled with her attacker, she'd left a bit of her blood on a glass entertainment unit.

Speaker 52 Blood mixed with a substance from somebody else's DNA.

Speaker 15 And now that someone could be identified.

Speaker 59 For certain you do know that whatever the component is it's still Tony Hart's song and Robert Hart's song.

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 34 Though it was Bob's DNA they still couldn't figure out just what it was. Blood or something as simple as sweat.

Speaker 30 Nor could they say when it got there on the entertainment unit.

Speaker 40 But to prove guilt once and for all, the prosecutor set out to convince the jury that indeed there had been motive for the brutal crime.

Speaker 41 How would she prove it?

Speaker 33 With Bob's cellmate, a jailhouse snitch.

Speaker 59 Did he discuss with you the status of his marriage on or about the time of his wife's murder?

Speaker 65 Yes, he said it was not going well. His wife thought that there were money issues that he didn't see.
He wanted to bring a business partner in, and his wife said, no, it's not going to happen.

Speaker 65 And there was infidelity, actually, on both sides.

Speaker 41 Infidelity in the perfect relationship?

Speaker 2 Well, in fact, Bob did claim that Tony had an unfaithful interlude 15 years earlier, and that he had entertained the idea of an affair with someone else, but that's all it had been, a fantasy.

Speaker 48 But it was more than that, said the jailhouse informant.

Speaker 35 Just before the murder, he told the jurors, Bob Hartsong asked his wife for a divorce.

Speaker 16 Though Bob denied the allegation, the informant held fast to his story.

Speaker 65 She says, no, no divorce. Over my dead body, you're not going to get a divorce.
And he said he got so upset, he said he wished he was dead three times. He said, I wish I was dead.
I wish I was dead.

Speaker 65 I wish I was dead. And how ironic, a week or 10 days later, she was dead.

Speaker 52 It's a hell of a

Speaker 37 hell of a distance between driving around your truck and saying, I wish I were dead, to taking a knife and stabbing your wife's eyes out.

Speaker 30 That's not the same thing at all.

Speaker 59 It takes quite a rage. It takes quite a rage.
Most often, the most violent of all crimes and all killings are domestic related.

Speaker 59 And some of them have no history of violence.

Speaker 10 Could a jailhouse informant, though, be trusted?

Speaker 44 Some jurors might not think so.

Speaker 12 But what if the prosecutor could put Bob Hartzong at the crime scene at the very time of the murder?

Speaker 59 That's all I have. Thank you.

Speaker 66 Today may call the next witness, Carol Hartman.

Speaker 45 Now, this would be quite a surprise.

Speaker 2 The one witness of whom Bob Hartzong might quite properly be terrified.

Speaker 2 Wow,

Speaker 42 that's blinding.

Speaker 13 For years, Bob Hartsong had told his accusers he could not possibly have killed his wife because he wasn't home.

Speaker 59 What happened?

Speaker 21 He was miles and miles away when his wife was murdered.

Speaker 7 off your finger.

Speaker 22 And then along came a next-door neighbor by the name of Carol Parkman who said she knew exactly where Bob was just around the time his wife was killed.

Speaker 67 There was arguing going on at the heart songs at that time.

Speaker 59 How is it that you

Speaker 59 knew

Speaker 59 that it was Mr. and Mrs.
Hart song that were doing the arguing?

Speaker 67 Their voices.

Speaker 59 Do you know approximately what time you heard that arguing?

Speaker 67 It was between 12 and 1.

Speaker 4 A heated argument not long before the murder?

Speaker 11 Finally, an answer.

Speaker 42 Or was it?

Speaker 5 Back in 2000, Carol Parkman denied hearing anything at all from the Hartzong's house.

Speaker 10 Could a jury believe a completely different story six years later?

Speaker 26 So why did she come forward so much later?

Speaker 59 Her explanation was that only after his arrest did she feel comfortable.

Speaker 38 Hart song, she said, terrified her.

Speaker 67 I was scared to death to be here to begin with.

Speaker 46 But she wasn't afraid now, now that the evidence could clear away all doubt and put the man in prison for the rest of his life.

Speaker 2 Maybe.

Speaker 49 This case

Speaker 63 is about paradise

Speaker 63 and love lost.

Speaker 55 Unless the defense could tear the story down.

Speaker 13 There was a brutal murder.

Speaker 7 You'll see that.

Speaker 63 The bottom line is this, Mr.

Speaker 45 Hartzong wasn't there.

Speaker 13 He wasn't?

Speaker 63 You recognize this.

Speaker 16 Well, obviously Defense Attorney Maxwell would have to do something to impeach that nosy neighbor.

Speaker 33 No. And what do you know?

Speaker 43 A check of the record revealed that Mrs.

Speaker 7 Parkman had told a number of stories about what she did or did not hear that afternoon. There was one version of her story after Hartsong's arrest in 2006 where she admitted hearing something.

Speaker 63 You basically said that you heard voices, but you could not identify anyone. You told them that, didn't you?

Speaker 36 Yes.

Speaker 67 As I said, I did not open up to those those voices until I spoke to the state attorney.

Speaker 16 And then finally, in 2007, the last version.

Speaker 63 I asked you the question, you can't tell us that it was Tony Hartsong that you heard arguing then, and your answer was, no, I can't.

Speaker 24 Correct?

Speaker 67 That's correct.

Speaker 63 And by the same token, can you tell us for a fact that it was Robert Hartsong that you heard talking? And your answer was, no, I can't.

Speaker 24 Correct?

Speaker 49 That's correct.

Speaker 24 So, how reliable was Mrs. Parkman?

Speaker 63 Now, ma'am, you have some hearing loss in one of your ears, correct?

Speaker 67 That's correct.

Speaker 35 Did the neighbor really hear something or not?

Speaker 13 But in the unlikely event that she did, said the defense, it would not have been Bob attacking Tony.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 13 The defense called the doctor who treated Bob for a debilitating shoulder injury.

Speaker 21 Would he be able to punch out with any type of strength?

Speaker 10 It would affect that.

Speaker 68 He certainly would be able to punch, push out, but it would be much weaker than normal.

Speaker 14 And even if he had mustered the strength to battle his wife, wouldn't he have sustained some physical wound from the struggle with her?

Speaker 66 All testimony you give in court today will be.

Speaker 16 The family friend, Linda Armstrong, testified to what she saw when Bob Hartzong had dinner with her family hours after the murder.

Speaker 63 Did you see any injuries on Mr. Hartzong's face?

Speaker 16 There were none.

Speaker 16 Then, said the defense, there was that apparently sloppy crime scene investigation, bloody footprints that led toward the woods in the back, woods where further evidence could have been found.

Speaker 14 But...

Speaker 63 Did you put crime scene KF

Speaker 63 across the entryway, correct?

Speaker 21 I believe so, yes.

Speaker 49 Did you put any in the back?

Speaker 21 No, I didn't.

Speaker 65 They weren't really getting along.

Speaker 13 Still, there was that prison snitch, the man who told the jury that Bob admitted his marriage was in crisis, that Tony was enraged about Bob's plan to take on a business partner.

Speaker 26 The defense called the would-be partner, who did admit the Hartsongs argued about the deal, but that wasn't all he said.

Speaker 49 Good afternoon.

Speaker 63 After you spoke of Mr. and Mrs.

Speaker 2 Hartsong bumping heads,

Speaker 63 what was the rest of your paragraph?

Speaker 48 My answer was, I wish I had half the relationship with my wife that they had.

Speaker 48 I wish you could could see the look in their faces when they saw each other.

Speaker 49 It was, I mean, lit up.

Speaker 48 No, said Defense Attorney Maxwell.

Speaker 21 The killer must have been someone else.

Speaker 16 And they offered the jury one more piece of evidence found at the autopsy inside Tony Hartsong's underwear.

Speaker 63 We have what the lab describes it as a black man's hair.

Speaker 31 We have...

Speaker 63 a brown slash blonde beard hair.

Speaker 31 Two different kinds of hairs.

Speaker 3 That's bizarre. It is.

Speaker 63 Mrs. Hartstong, we know that she was at Burdines about nine o'clock the morning of the murder.

Speaker 63 And so the state argues she was trying on clothing, and therefore that's how the hair ended up in her pubic hair area.

Speaker 63 I'm sorry, but I don't know any woman present on this earth who's going to try clothing on and not have panties on.

Speaker 44 Was it enough to acquit?

Speaker 45 He pleaded with the jury.

Speaker 63 Give Mr. Hartstong his freedom back.

Speaker 45 Find him not guilty.

Speaker 63 Because in fact, he is

Speaker 45 not guilty.

Speaker 42 Thank you.

Speaker 59 Side of the neck.

Speaker 24 But for Prosecutor Burns, this was more than just one more cold case brought back to life.

Speaker 48 About this one, she said she was sure.

Speaker 67 But he can't admit it.

Speaker 59 And he never did.

Speaker 59 The evidence is there to convict as charge.

Speaker 7 There's no telling just what a jury will decide to do in an hour or a day or a week.

Speaker 47 In Bob Hartsong's case, it was just three hours.

Speaker 17 He stood at the defense table.

Speaker 59 State of Florida versus Robert Ben Hartzong, defendant.

Speaker 8 Waited.

Speaker 59 Verdict. We, the jury, finds as follows.
We find the defendant not guilty. So say we all the 10th day of October 2000.

Speaker 51 Not guilty.

Speaker 34 All that new DNA technology, all the evidence, the investigators and prosecutors' certainty did not amount to proof.

Speaker 3 All I'm going to say to you is I'm free, as I should be. I didn't do it.
I never could have done that to anybody.

Speaker 3 It's impossible for the kind of person that I am. And Bob Hartzong walked out of the courtroom and into the arms of the second love of his life and felt almost like a free man.

Speaker 27 Getting him not guilty wasn't quite enough.

Speaker 3 Put yourself in my shoes. Knowing that yourself, you're not guilty, but knowing that there's probably a good 20,

Speaker 3 25% of the people that have been exposed to this trial and think that you're guilty.

Speaker 10 Detective Sergeant John Van Houten was one of them.

Speaker 28 Here you have a case where a guy you believe is guilty of murder, and he's going on with his life. I suppose there's a cloud over his head.

Speaker 23 I can't tell you how it comes around and comes around. These people that beat you, I beat it.
I beat it.

Speaker 3 You beat it.

Speaker 23 And a year later, they were hit by a car and they ended up dead. And that's the hand of God.

Speaker 23 And that's how I justify when this happens.

Speaker 2 But in the eyes of the law, Bob Hartzong did not kill his wife and should pay no price at all.

Speaker 2 But pay, he has certainly done.

Speaker 22 In practical terms, the cost of the Hartsong family has been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention imprisonment while waiting for trial.

Speaker 17 He lost his career, his business, his time,

Speaker 25 and emotionally, well, he is a spiritual man, he says.

Speaker 3 You know, I might have my moments of bitterness, but I come out of it very quickly. I spend a good time doing what I call

Speaker 3 a grateful meditation. Still a little hippie in your life, isn't there? There's a lot of hippie in my life, and I don't mind it.

Speaker 4 And in her life, too.

Speaker 3 A lot of hippie.

Speaker 5 The flower child who loved him. The free spirit remembered at the shrine he made for her.

Speaker 5 But the question hovers.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 17 Someone killed Tony Hartzong.

Speaker 17 But who?

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