Someone Was Watching

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Speaker 6 This is a tragedy on top of a tragedy now.

Speaker 7 It happened so quickly. Their parents in the backyard spa.

Speaker 8 Their mom in trouble.

Speaker 6 My dad just panicked.

Speaker 10 A sudden slip?

Speaker 11 A fatal fall?

Speaker 12 You're losing your mother by watching her go right in front of you.

Speaker 7 Someone else was watching her too. A curious neighbor, just moments before, witnessed something astonishing.

Speaker 6 It was scary. The look on his face was almost undescribable.

Speaker 7 What had she seen? Was this drowning really an accident?

Speaker 13 She's got a huge cache on her head. Something like that's not consistent with just falling down.

Speaker 7 A husband and father is suddenly under suspicion.

Speaker 14 He's crying.

Speaker 6 We're crying. He said, they think I hurt mom.

Speaker 7 Three daughters stand by their dad, and one prosecutor stands firm.

Speaker 16 He's holding his wife of almost three decades under the water. My job is to get justice for Christy Hall.

Speaker 7 Was it murder?

Speaker 7 Someone was watching.

Speaker 7 Good evening and welcome to Dateline. I'm Lester Holt.
Tonight, a story that calls to mind the master of suspense, a plot straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock film.

Speaker 7 A young woman peers into her neighbor's yard and sees something for a few mysterious seconds. A man, a woman, and a moment that's unsettling.

Speaker 7 Was it some kind of accident, a crime, maybe even a murder? What she saw and what she did would set in motion a chain of events that would divide a family and a jury. Here's Keith Morrison.

Speaker 6 We know the truth and we know everything that happened.

Speaker 18 How do we know what we know?

Speaker 16 It's emotionally unsatisfying not to have that answer.

Speaker 19 So it is, even if we've seen something or if we think we have.

Speaker 22 And thus the question at the heart of the whole puzzle, is this woman right?

Speaker 6 I know what I saw, and I know the conclusion of my story.

Speaker 14 Of course she does. Of course she does.

Speaker 26 So why does this other woman think this?

Speaker 6 She didn't know for sure what she saw.

Speaker 27 A question, we say, on which all the rest will turn.

Speaker 29 Why don't we begin in Calamesa, California, Riverside County, historic missions, sprawling suburbs creeping out to the rim of mountains around the eastern flank of L.A.

Speaker 20 It's where Chris and Christie Hall had come to live out their golden years, though they were far from old when it happened, just experienced with life and each other.

Speaker 6 As far back as I can remember, it's always been Chris and Christie. They were never

Speaker 6 thought of as separate.

Speaker 6 They were a unit.

Speaker 2 There are three daughters, Courtney, the eldest, Brianna, the middle, and Ashton, the youngest.

Speaker 31 And all of them, of course, have heard scores of times the story of how their parents met.

Speaker 30 It was 1978.

Speaker 35 Christy had gone to see a relative at the Air Force Base in nearby San Bernardino, and quite by chance, while she was there, encountered a security guard who, to her at least, looked just like Elvis.

Speaker 14 It was Blair Christopher Hall, Chris to his friends.

Speaker 6 Apparently she was a a little flirty at the gate.

Speaker 29 In short order, Chris and Christy got married.

Speaker 40 She was 17, he 20.

Speaker 42 And as the girls grew up, they said they never doubted for a single moment the powerful bond of love.

Speaker 36 Their parents with them and with each other.

Speaker 6 I venture to say we're probably closer with our parents than most children. They're the parents that I

Speaker 6 hope to one day be.

Speaker 27 For years, Chris Hall was a police officer in San Bernardino until he was shot in the line of duty.

Speaker 1 And then he went off to become police chief in two small towns in Idaho.

Speaker 1 And then, in 2005, anticipating an empty nest and eventual retirement, the Halls bought a place back in Calamesa, which they loved for its backyard pool and spa.

Speaker 1 And life in the spring of 2007 seemed to have hit a sweet spot, as Ashton and Brianna remember their mother telling them.

Speaker 6 We happened to be laying on the bed with her. She just started talking.

Speaker 6 She was like, I'm just, I'm so happy that I have you girls and dad. It was kind of one of those conversations

Speaker 6 that you don't have every day.

Speaker 31 Still, there was work to be done.

Speaker 21 It was not a new house, could use some remodeling, particularly the bathroom.

Speaker 17 Courtney was still living with her parents as the work began.

Speaker 6 They were going to be doing the tile work and stuff, so we wouldn't have a shower for her that day.

Speaker 28 So, shower out of commission, they decided to wake up early, put on their bathing suits, and rinse off in the outdoor spa before the contractor arrived at 6.45 a.m.

Speaker 46 It was June 7th, 2007.

Speaker 18 Chris got up first, turned on the spa to warm it up, and then called Brianna at her college dorm in San Diego.

Speaker 6 Here's your wake-up call, babe.

Speaker 6 Get out and go on that run.

Speaker 19 Back at the house, Courtney dozed through her first wake-up, while Chris and Christy made their way outside to the spa.

Speaker 43 Just after 6.30, Chris looked in on Courtney again, second call, then headed back to the spa.

Speaker 24 Life's last normal moments.

Speaker 28 6.37 a.m.

Speaker 6 I got up out of bed and I was putting on my robe and I just heard this

Speaker 6 panicked,

Speaker 6 just panicked scream from my dad yelling for me. And I ran down the hallway to the back porch and I saw him

Speaker 6 just trying to pull out my mom out of the spa.

Speaker 22 It was she who dialed 911 as she and her father struggled to lift her mother out of the spa.

Speaker 6 It was the first moments of the worst day of our lives.

Speaker 12 Is it possible for people to understand what it's like to be in that situation?

Speaker 6 I don't think so.

Speaker 38 It's to see

Speaker 6 just both your parents in the worst

Speaker 6 times. that you've ever seen them.
Obviously my mom, unconscious, and my dad just panicked and for the first time in my life

Speaker 6 seeing him just

Speaker 6 that way not knowing what to do.

Speaker 46 Because he was a cop.

Speaker 12 He was used to dealing with those kinds of things.

Speaker 6 He's a cop used to dealing with those kinds of things with people that weren't not his wife.

Speaker 14 So Courtney took charge.

Speaker 39 After calling 911 she started CPR on her mother with her father.

Speaker 10 EMTN firefighter Eric Norwood was the first to respond.

Speaker 36 It just started.

Speaker 42 Help my wife. Oh my God.

Speaker 49 help my wife, help my wife.

Speaker 10 Chris Hall was kneeling at his wife's side, more in the way than anything, and so hysterical it was hard for the EMTs to help.

Speaker 51 It took us a little bit to get him out of the way.

Speaker 6 He didn't want to leave her.

Speaker 6 He was just holding her hand, yelling her name.

Speaker 18 The paramedics worked on Christie for more than 20 minutes.

Speaker 33 No vital signs. None.

Speaker 6 And no words to describe. Just the fear and the anxiety.

Speaker 12 You're losing your mother.

Speaker 15 And you're watching her go right in front of you.

Speaker 6 We tried to say we're together and we just couldn't.

Speaker 25 The ambulance rushed her off to the hospital where she was declared dead.

Speaker 18 She had drowned in the family spa.

Speaker 14 A private family tragedy.

Speaker 20 Except

Speaker 53 maybe not so private after all.

Speaker 31 Someone was watching.

Speaker 7 Coming up.

Speaker 6 It was a horrible screen.

Speaker 23 A witness. But to what?

Speaker 8 What exactly did she see?

Speaker 48 I don't don't know. You know,

Speaker 54 I can't explain what she's saying she saw.

Speaker 7 When dateline continues.

Speaker 20 On the morning of June 7, 2007, Breonna Hall was on the road from San Diego, driving home from college to what she didn't know, except that her elder sister, Courtney, had called and it sounded bad.

Speaker 6 She said, there was an accident, and you need to just, you know, come home right away.

Speaker 10 It was Courtney who eventually broke the news to Ashton and Brianna. Their mother, their father's wife of close to 30 years, was dead.

Speaker 28 But neither Courtney nor Chris waited at the house to tell the sisters what happened or to comfort them, nor did they linger over the body at the hospital.

Speaker 43 They couldn't.

Speaker 10 Because father and daughter were escorted to separate squad cars and driven to the police station to talk about the accident.

Speaker 15 What was that ride like?

Speaker 38 Quiet.

Speaker 6 You know, I just remember crying the whole time. I couldn't comfort my father, he couldn't comfort me.
It was.

Speaker 6 We got to the station, and he said that my dad would just be a few more minutes.

Speaker 43 Chris, so frenzied at the scene, had calmed down by then. He was a cop among cops, after all.

Speaker 31 And he understood, he said, what was necessary to help them sort out what happened.

Speaker 13 I can't even start to imagine what you're going through, okay?

Speaker 48 And

Speaker 13 just, you know,

Speaker 13 it's a death investigation, and we have to do this, okay?

Speaker 5 Happy to help, he said.

Speaker 27 Whatever would get him back home to comfort his daughters as quickly as possible.

Speaker 27 This is going to kill them.

Speaker 27 They're all so close.

Speaker 50 Chris told investigators what happened.

Speaker 10 How, as Courtney slept, he and Christy were in the spa bathing.

Speaker 13 She got out,

Speaker 13 went in,

Speaker 13 went to the bathroom, got some more coffee, tried to wake up Courtney.

Speaker 48 Courtney didn't wake up, apparently.

Speaker 13 She came back out.

Speaker 10 As Christie returned to the spa, said Chris, they passed each other in the patio.

Speaker 3 He went in the house, then, he said, stopped by Courtney's room to make sure she was awake, then went right back outside and saw his wife floating face down in the spa.

Speaker 28 He called Courtney then, he said, and they began a frantic effort to revive her.

Speaker 38 I can tell you this minute.

Speaker 18 From what?

Speaker 20 A fall?

Speaker 22 Must have been.

Speaker 13 Pain your guns. Tell me what you think happened.

Speaker 54 I'm thinking she slipped in. She slipped or something.

Speaker 60 I don't know.

Speaker 54 That's the only thing I can think of.

Speaker 1 But Chris apparently hadn't noticed the nasty three-inch laceration on Christie's head.

Speaker 14 And here, suddenly, the point of the police interview is revealed.

Speaker 13 The gash she has on her head...

Speaker 54 She's got a gash.

Speaker 13 She's got a huge gash on her head.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 13 Something like that's not consistent with just falling down.

Speaker 2 Not consistent with just falling down?

Speaker 35 Why would the police think that?

Speaker 60 Yeah, I mean, you've been around for a while. Sure, I know where you're going, and no, there's nothing to do.

Speaker 59 Why, in fact, was this ex-police chief being questioned at all about the apparently disastrous accident that killed the love of his life?

Speaker 9 And the answer was, right next door.

Speaker 35 When Chris and Christy Hall took their outdoor bath that morning in June, someone was watching.

Speaker 6 I got up at 6, got my coffee.

Speaker 1 Lindsay Patterson was on leave from her IT job in the Navy, visiting her mom's house, just over the backyard wall from the hall house.

Speaker 39 Lindsay was inside, in the bathroom that faced away from the hall house and out into the street, when she heard a noise.

Speaker 6 It was a horrible scream. It was just something was wrong kind of scream.

Speaker 57 A woman's, she thought.

Speaker 28 She went outside to tell her mom.

Speaker 6 And I said, did you hear that scream? And she said, yeah, but I think it's just kids

Speaker 6 playing in the pool.

Speaker 61 Kids?

Speaker 35 At six something in the morning?

Speaker 55 Lindsay walked over to the six-foot brick wall between their yard and the halls.

Speaker 39 She stepped on the planter, she said, and looked over the wall.

Speaker 6 At that point, I saw a man with

Speaker 6 his hand, one hand on top of a woman's head and then one hand on her back. And she was face down down in the water.

Speaker 12 Like something was going on?

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's what I assumed.

Speaker 18 That is, she thought she was looking at a sex act in progress.

Speaker 6 I don't know why it didn't seem right, but something made me want to look again.

Speaker 28 Perhaps 90 seconds, she said, between her first and second looks.

Speaker 18 And this time she said she only saw the man in the spa.

Speaker 6 He's leaning back, just relaxed in the hot tub, but I don't see her. He's got his elbows back and he's just kind of looking around like nothing.

Speaker 4 Where did the woman go?

Speaker 35 Lindsay told her mom something seemed strange.

Speaker 6 She again tells me, Lindsay, stop in Nosy, don't worry about it.

Speaker 6 But it just didn't seem right.

Speaker 6 It wasn't enough time for her to have gotten out and gone inside the house.

Speaker 59 So, said Lindsay, she went to the wall again.

Speaker 11 Her third and final look.

Speaker 6 At that point, he was getting out of the jacuzzi, and he was in a very big rush. She's still nowhere to be seen.
The look on his face was

Speaker 6 almost undescribable. It was almost as if he had just gone into another world.

Speaker 6 It was scary.

Speaker 46 It was instinct that told her something was wrong, said Lindsay.

Speaker 12 So she called 911.

Speaker 63 911 state emergency.

Speaker 12 I'm gonna woman.

Speaker 19 So now, hours and hours later, the detectives confronted Chris with Lindsay's story.

Speaker 57 Why, they asked, didn't her story match his?

Speaker 49 So, am I supposed to believe the witness is lying?

Speaker 54 I don't want to say she's lying.

Speaker 60 She sounded like a truthful kid or whatever, but I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 38 You know,

Speaker 54 I can't explain what she's saying she saw.

Speaker 35 So, now that question we posed as we began: did Lindsay Patterson really know what she saw?

Speaker 64 Coming up, she didn't see what was really happening.

Speaker 7 What had really happened? There would soon be a turn in the case.

Speaker 65 This was not an accidental drowning.

Speaker 51 It was purely much more suspicious than that.

Speaker 7 When someone was watching continues.

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Speaker 10 Chris and Christy Hall's three daughters clung together in grief and shock all through the dismal evening hours of that worst of all all days, June 7th, 2007, waiting for their father to return from the police station and they wondered why it was taking so long.

Speaker 24 Then the phone rang and they had their answer.

Speaker 6 You know,

Speaker 6 broken up words and he's crying and we're crying and that that was when he said

Speaker 6 they they think I hurt mom. I mean he was very upset.

Speaker 12 But he didn't sound surprised when he said they think I hurt.

Speaker 38 He was crying.

Speaker 6 He was crying. He was upset.

Speaker 38 Very upset.

Speaker 52 But by the time police investigators were questioning Chris, remember?

Speaker 53 They'd heard from Lindsay Patterson.

Speaker 22 And at the station, Chris's version of events in the spa differed in one crucial detail from what Lindsay described seeing that first time she peered over the wall and into the hall's backyard.

Speaker 54 That specifically, me holding her down in there, there's nothing that took place in that jacuzzi that would

Speaker 60 explain that.

Speaker 54 There was no sex.

Speaker 60 There was none there.

Speaker 38 I I don't even think we had any contact while we were in the Jacobson, other than when I was getting her out of the 50s.

Speaker 36 But investigators were getting a good look at Christie's body and saw wounds that, to them, suggested a struggle and more than just one nasty blow to the head.

Speaker 50 So the police had to choose which version, Chris Hall's or Lindsey Patterson's, was more likely the true story of what happened.

Speaker 32 Tom Dove led the investigation for the Riverside DA.

Speaker 65 I think they felt there was enough to say this was not an accidental drowning.

Speaker 51 It was purely much more suspicious than that.

Speaker 7 And so, before the night was over, Chris Hall was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife.

Speaker 47 The girls could stop waiting.

Speaker 53 He wasn't coming home.

Speaker 6 It was obviously a tragedy losing our mother that day, but this is a tragedy on top of a tragedy now.

Speaker 6 Because knowing our parents isn't just the farthest thing from the truth.

Speaker 30 And one that felt infected by some kind of madness, said the girls.

Speaker 48 Christy was the love of their father's life, after all, the center of everything for him.

Speaker 40 How they wondered, could anyone so happy in his marriage and his life be accused of harming her?

Speaker 30 And she was happy, too, they said, as happy as she'd ever been.

Speaker 33 They knew it, they said, based on that mother-daughter talk they had.

Speaker 53 Not long before she died.

Speaker 6 She just kept reiterating. It was how happy she was.

Speaker 38 How odd.

Speaker 6 And me and Bri always, of course, didn't think much of it at that time.

Speaker 6 But that being the last time we actually saw her.

Speaker 1 Kind of burned into your memory.

Speaker 20 But right or wrong, the legal trigger had been pulled.

Speaker 27 Chris Hall spent almost two months in jail until his daughters received the payout from Christie's life insurance policy and used the money to meet his million-dollar bail.

Speaker 10 And then he went back to what was to be his retirement retreat to prepare with the help of his daughters for a murder trial.

Speaker 64 That's very surprising to have a client in a murder case out on bail, but he was a special man and this was a special situation.

Speaker 1 Steve Harmon and Paul Gretsch are attorneys who would eventually defend him, though at first they only heard about the case.

Speaker 12 You've said two things there, special man, special situation.

Speaker 51 I think both of us can say that this is a man that we like and that we know, and we don't feel he could have done anything like this.

Speaker 9 So Chris Hall and his daughters prepared for a trial which they hoped would make clear to everybody, the police, the neighbor, the world, that Chris would not, could not, did not harm the love of his life.

Speaker 64 There was never in 30 years of marriage, never one moment of violence. There was no motive for this man to kill his wife.

Speaker 43 Harmon and Gretch had a look at neighbor Lindsay Patterson's eyewitness account and suggested, it was really not conclusive at all.

Speaker 14 It was tragically incomplete.

Speaker 64 She saw three snapshots. What is missed by everyone is the wife getting into the jacuzzi, slipping, falling into the jacuzzi, hitting her head, going unconscious, and drowning.

Speaker 12 There's a sharp corner sticking out into the spa.

Speaker 1 Hitting her head on that would certainly have opened a gash and knocked Christie out, said the attorney.

Speaker 64 She didn't see what was really happening during the times when she was not looking.

Speaker 24 That scream that made Lindsay Patterson look over the wall?

Speaker 30 Lindsay, they pointed out, was in a bathroom that faced the street.

Speaker 28 She wasn't in the backyard when she says she heard it.

Speaker 24 Could have been anybody.

Speaker 18 And Courtney, who was inside her own house near the spa, didn't hear a thing.

Speaker 6 We don't think that she's lying. We just think she misinterpreted what she saw.

Speaker 30 And anyway, Lindsay, to a certain degree, concedes she didn't know what she was seeing.

Speaker 22 in her glimpses that morning.

Speaker 6 Something was wrong.

Speaker 45 And yet you hadn't really seen anything.

Speaker 31 it.

Speaker 6 I know, but I knew something was wrong. I don't know if in my brain I was putting things together, but from between the scream,

Speaker 6 the position that he was holding her, and then not just not having enough time for her to have gone inside.

Speaker 12 So it's like you kind of got three different snapshots of something going on in there

Speaker 74 and had to kind of work out

Speaker 6 what this was.

Speaker 6 You know, I wasn't thinking at that point, oh, this man just murdered his wife but now based largely on that account chris hall would go on trial for murder and it was a trial for his daughters too he loved her they were each other's best friends and and this is just this is not fair to him because he truly loved her more than more than anyone coming up The case begins.

Speaker 7 Evidence is revealed in court.

Speaker 16 When you lose that amount of hair, it's not reasonably explained by any kind of fault.

Speaker 7 And secrets are revealed from the past.

Speaker 16 This man had an uncanny ability to fabricate stories.

Speaker 7 When someone was watching, continues.

Speaker 46 Eric Stronsky is a hard-charging man, ex-member in good standing of the San Francisco DA's office, now senior deputy DA in Riverside. That takes skill, persuasive powers.

Speaker 46 Stronsky would need them in the murder case against the former police chief and familyman, Chris Hall.

Speaker 16 Mr. Hall, on the surface, looks like a loving family man.
He looks like a good father. He was somebody that had the support of his family.

Speaker 20 So he did.

Speaker 28 But Stronsky wasn't buying the loving father and family man bit.

Speaker 50 No, when he heard about Chris Hall's very obvious grief, the wailing that went on after the so-called accident, the phrase that crossed his mind was, it's an act.

Speaker 16 And I think it was a wonderful performance by the defendant of acting like a bereaved husband. But when you look at his actions,

Speaker 16 how little he did to help his wife.

Speaker 50 Who tried harder to save Christie?

Speaker 18 Not Chris, said the prosecutor, but his daughter.

Speaker 16 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 truly helping his wife.

Speaker 39 A matter of opinion, of course.

Speaker 25 But Prosecutor Stronsky poked around in Chris Hall's past as a policeman.

Speaker 43 And what did he find?

Speaker 16 This man had an uncanny ability to fabricate stories.

Speaker 27 Seven years earlier, while Hall was chief of police in Cascade, Idaho, he was charged with and convicted of misuse of public money.

Speaker 26 Embezzled $19,000, spent 10 months in jail.

Speaker 24 A white-collar crime, hardly murder.

Speaker 53 But what struck the prosecutor is that he says Hall tried to cover it up.

Speaker 3 To plan a fraud, to lie about it, not just lie about it, but lie about it effectively.

Speaker 16 And I think that was very telling about who we were dealing with.

Speaker 10 Suddenly, the prosecutor's prospects were looking better.

Speaker 23 At the trial, Stromsky made Lindsay Patterson his star witness.

Speaker 24 Of course, it was her story, after all, that got the whole thing started.

Speaker 27 But almost as important, he called the Riverside County Medical Examiner, who testified that those lacerations on Christie's head could not, in his opinion, have been the result of a single accidental fall.

Speaker 27 And the ME argued the particular type of bruising on Christie's face and body was a hallmark of homicide.

Speaker 16 The totality of injuries were not consistent with somebody slipping and falling and then a rescue attempt.

Speaker 26 And there was a clump of hair in the bottom of the spa still entwined with a broken plastic hair clip.

Speaker 43 That, said the prosecutor, could only have come from a violent struggle.

Speaker 16 When you lose that amount of hair, it's not reasonably explained by any kind of fault.

Speaker 3 There were some minor hiccups in the case.

Speaker 39 Lindsay Patterson, for example, was a little inconsistent about how long she looked over the backyard wall that first time she saw something going on.

Speaker 59 Was it just a few seconds or as long as a minute?

Speaker 10 But either way, said the prosecutor, Lindsay was sure she saw physical contact.

Speaker 37 That was the important thing.

Speaker 16 He was given the opportunity to explain any physical contact that could in any way reasonably explain what Lindsay Patterson missaw. In other words, were they watching each other?

Speaker 16 Were they involved in a sex act? Was there anything that 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.

Speaker 16 You have to actually believe that Lindsay Patterson really hallucinated about everything she saw.

Speaker 50 And what made Lindsay's story all the more convincing, said Prosecutor Stronsky, was she told it before finding out what happened to Christie.

Speaker 28 She dialed 911 a full minute and a half before anyone from the hall house did, before Lindsay had any idea how it would end.

Speaker 29 Here's what the jury heard her say in that call.

Speaker 57 I really thought she put her underwater.

Speaker 38 There's also there.

Speaker 46 And she was still on the phone with 911 when Chris Hall came outside and found his wife's body floating in the spa, called out for Courtney.

Speaker 20 Oh, and now there's a screaming outside.

Speaker 29 The prosecution's theory?

Speaker 18 Somehow, sitting in the spa that morning, Chris was overcome by some private fury.

Speaker 43 Who knows what?

Speaker 28 A hidden violence is what Stromsky called it.

Speaker 44 And then killed his spouse when he thought nobody was looking.

Speaker 16 Chris Hull ambushed his wife, grabbed her by the hair, slammed her head twice into the concrete edge.

Speaker 16 He's holding his wife of almost three decades under the water, showing absolutely no mercy and no remorse and an absolute

Speaker 16 desire to end her life at that point.

Speaker 46 And then the Bias de Résistance.

Speaker 16 He then gets out of the spa, walks into the house where his plan is to wake his 22-year-old daughter who he can use as an alibi witness.

Speaker 9 One little quibble.

Speaker 5 Why?

Speaker 46 In fact, as convinced as he was of Hall's guilt, Stronsky conceded the why was a problem.

Speaker 3 Didn't legally have to know, he said, but he just didn't.

Speaker 37 There it was.

Speaker 16 It's emotionally unsatisfying not to have that answer, not to know the entire narrative of what happened.

Speaker 12 But you'd want to know why this guy, married to this woman for almost 30 years, apparently happily, would suddenly turn on her and drown her in the pool.

Speaker 16 Right, and I'm not sure we got the answers to that specific question.

Speaker 74 It's kind of an important question, isn't it?

Speaker 16 It's an important question, and a question that we ask in all spousal homicides.

Speaker 35 So, proof enough or reasonable doubt.

Speaker 29 Almost three years after Christy Hall's death, a Riverside jury would have to decide.

Speaker 7 Coming up.

Speaker 12 You expected a not-guilty murder?

Speaker 6 Oh, yes, not a doubt.

Speaker 7 But there was a surprise in store for both sides in and out of the courtroom.

Speaker 3 She was having a little affair, right?

Speaker 7 When dateline continues.

Speaker 26 Hey, everybody, it's Rob Lowe here.

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Speaker 75 There are new episodes out every Thursday. So subscribe, please, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 17 Chris Hall's daughters sat through every miserable minute of their dad's trial for murder at the courthouse in Riverside, California.

Speaker 25 Their review of the prosecutor's portrait of their father.

Speaker 27 It was a lie, they said.

Speaker 6 It's hurtful to us to hear someone basically say that he knows our parents better than we do.

Speaker 6 And he knows our father's a sociopath and that we're blind to it. And he knows that there was hidden violence in our parents' marriage and we just didn't see it.

Speaker 6 You're basically telling us that we didn't know that our whole lives were a lot. And there's the top of that, there's no proof of that.

Speaker 5 Chris Hall had never been violent, argued the defense.

Speaker 36 Had no motive, no reason to suddenly turn on his wife.

Speaker 10 It had to be a freak accident.

Speaker 30 So, said the defense, Lindsay Patterson didn't really know what she saw.

Speaker 36 In fact, if she'd really witnessed Chris Hall drowning his wife, why then didn't she claim to see Christie's body in the spa when she looked again?

Speaker 21 Didn't make sense.

Speaker 57 But the highlight was the Hall daughter's testimony, emotional, quite powerful.

Speaker 46 So it put Prosecutor Strunsky in a strange position, at odds with the victim's own family.

Speaker 31 We're so clear.

Speaker 5 If we had any inkling he had done this, believe me, we would have said so.

Speaker 28 And I think we would have seen it.

Speaker 16 I think that's what they truly believe in their hearts. And, you know, it weighs on me greatly, but my job is to get justice for Christy Hall.

Speaker 10 Now it was up to a jury to decide. After six days of testimony, two days of deliberation, they

Speaker 20 couldn't.

Speaker 40 It was a deadlock.

Speaker 10 The judge declared a mistrial.

Speaker 24 Chris Hall walked out of court with his family, free, but not quite in the clear.

Speaker 20 And nothing at all like a victory for the Hall daughters.

Speaker 12 What was it like to get that hung jury? What did you think then?

Speaker 6 That was tragic. That was devastating to us.

Speaker 12 You expected a not guilty verdict?

Speaker 6 Oh, yes, not a doubt.

Speaker 28 Deputy DA Burke Stronsky was disappointed too, and was also determined to retry the case.

Speaker 33 But first, he sent his investigator on a mission to explore the the life and marriage of Chris Hall.

Speaker 20 And what do you know?

Speaker 40 In Idaho, where Hall had been a disgraced police chief, the investigator uncovered a startling accusation.

Speaker 25 Chris

Speaker 52 was a great, great con man.

Speaker 52 Former Los Angeles police officer Jerry Winkle became a county commissioner up in Idaho.

Speaker 28 But once upon a time, he was Chris Hall's friend.

Speaker 1 That is, before a night of poker and booze, when he said Hall made a disturbing revelation that he'd shot himself in the leg when he was a cop in order to get medical retirement benefits.

Speaker 24 Chris had been drinking beer, and he came right out and told me that he had shot himself.

Speaker 9 But there was more.

Speaker 41 DA investigator Tom Dove had discovered a secret, not in Chris's past, but in Christie's.

Speaker 51 There had been infidelity in the marriage six years prior, while Chris Hall was in custody in Idaho.

Speaker 50 Christie's affair was relatively brief, years earlier.

Speaker 5 But she'd been in phone contact with the man just days before she died.

Speaker 12 Had Chris found out?

Speaker 19 Impossible to know.

Speaker 3 But when Investigator Dove talked to Christie's co-workers at the clinic where she was an x-ray technician, several of them said they noticed a sudden change in her usually vibrant personality.

Speaker 18 One coworker offered more.

Speaker 61 She told us that she was contemplating a divorce.

Speaker 33 If true, and it was only an if, it might well persuade a jury.

Speaker 10 But also, prosecutor Stronsky needed to explain what Lindsay Patterson saw or didn't see.

Speaker 30 Why didn't she see Christie's drowned body when she peeked over the wall a second time?

Speaker 16 We were not able to explain to the jury why she didn't see Christie at that point. And I think that allowed the defense to make the argument that Christy Hall was inside.

Speaker 52 The prosecution hired a water expert to do a recreation at the Hall spa.

Speaker 5 They shot video, which said the prosecutor shows that if an injured Christie had sunk underwater, she would not have been visible from Lindsay's viewpoint.

Speaker 52 And now the prosecutor was ready.

Speaker 57 In May 2011, one year after the first jury deadlock, Burke Stromsky went back to court, armed with his new evidence for a brand new panel of Hall's peers.

Speaker 29 Jurors heard medical experts testify about the injuries to Christie's head and once again heard Lindsay's 911 call.

Speaker 57 I'm nice function for her and her mother.

Speaker 35 Christie's co-workers testified for the prosecution, and Jerry Winkle traveled from Idaho to tell jurors what he thought of Chris Hall.

Speaker 32 I was ashamed to admit that he was once a police officer.

Speaker 40 But if the prosecution had upped its game in the year between the two trials, so had the defense.

Speaker 53 That's when well-known attorneys Steve Harmon and Paul Gretsch entered the scene, and they came out swinging.

Speaker 25 That story about Christie's affair, for example?

Speaker 12 There's a shadow hanging over all of this stuff.

Speaker 46 A very human sort of shadow, which is that

Speaker 37 she was

Speaker 33 having a little affair, right?

Speaker 4 At a boyfriend.

Speaker 64 Yes, if the husband knew about it,

Speaker 64 but the wife never, ever mentions it and tells tells the husband. No one tells the husband.

Speaker 9 Quite right, said the judge.

Speaker 40 And because there was no evidence that Chris knew about his wife's affair, he ruled it out of the trial.

Speaker 19 And the story about Hall shooting himself for retirement benefits?

Speaker 64 That was just absolutely a lie. That's wrong.
There was never, never any evidence or indication or not even a moment's breath that he shot himself.

Speaker 55 Anyway, the story was prejudicial, said the judge, so he threw that out, too.

Speaker 27 As for what Lindsay Patterson says she saw Chris Hall holding his wife's head underwater, the defense had prepared its own visual demonstration, had taken pictures from her angle at the wall to show that it could look like two people were touching in the spa, even if they weren't.

Speaker 51 This is what she described seeing in her testimony. But on the close-up, what do you notice?

Speaker 1 They're not touching, but they're in position where they could be.

Speaker 64 But that's different than actually touching.

Speaker 10 Again, the Hall daughters were there every minute, their father's enduring champions.

Speaker 28 And this time, more family members came to court.

Speaker 10 Two of Christie's own siblings testified for Chris.

Speaker 64 And said the same thing. We have not a doubt in our minds that this was not a moment of violence.
This was not a murder.

Speaker 64 The victim's own sister and own brother, that's an amazing thing to see.

Speaker 40 Perhaps it was.

Speaker 24 But listen to this.

Speaker 53 The defense had one more very significant witness, a witness who oozed credibility, the sitting medical examiner from neighboring San Bernardino County, who stuck his neck way out to disagree publicly in a court of law with the medical examiner from Riverside.

Speaker 51 He found this to be an accidental death, not a homicide.

Speaker 27 This was not some ordinary hired gun.

Speaker 19 This was a public official who said straight out that Christie's head injuries could and perhaps should be explained by an accidental fall.

Speaker 57 He didn't rule out homicide.

Speaker 51 He didn't rule out homicide, but he said the preponderance of the evidence was towards an accidental drowning. What

Speaker 51 I've always been astounded by with this case is that the Hull family lives so close to the San Bernardino border. If Christie had slipped and fell four or five blocks over,

Speaker 51 the pathologist in that county would never have filed criminal charges. An accident of geography.

Speaker 44 So now a second jury would have to sort through these two sets of allegations, these two opposing realities,

Speaker 27 and decide whether Chris Hall would turn and embrace home and his loving daughters, or a pair of handcuffs and a life in prison.

Speaker 7 Coming up.

Speaker 6 Things can only go so wrong for so long before something has to actually go right.

Speaker 7 Guilty or not guilty? This time the answer from the jurors would be unanimous.

Speaker 7 When someone was watching continues

Speaker 59 May 2011 for the second time 12 men and women of Riverside County, California filed out of the courtroom.

Speaker 37 A second jury to make a life decision about Chris Hall.

Speaker 9 Did he murder his wife?

Speaker 28 Which of the medical examiners should they believe?

Speaker 27 Whose account of the defendant's character?

Speaker 28 And perhaps most important, what did Lindsay Patterson see when she peeked three times into the Hall's backyard?

Speaker 15 Do you ever have those sort of little dark moments of the soul where you think, oh,

Speaker 37 I

Speaker 12 may have misinterpreted.

Speaker 6 Misremembered. That is something I've thought about every day.
Whether I misinterpreted, whether I think I saw something that wasn't there, I didn't see everything.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 6 But I saw what I saw, and I know the conclusion of my story.

Speaker 6 I know it. I know it right here.
I know it.

Speaker 27 Of course, Chris Hall's daughters say they know the truth too.

Speaker 53 Real thing

Speaker 27 in their hearts.

Speaker 6 I think that we were the three most critical jurors in that courtroom.

Speaker 6 Believe me, if we had heard anything

Speaker 6 or had any inkling that our father could have done this,

Speaker 6 as much as it would hurt and as much as we love our father, we would want that justice for our mother.

Speaker 37 The jurors deliberated two days, then broke for the long weekend.

Speaker 35 It was Memorial Day.

Speaker 5 Paul's daughters felt good.

Speaker 6 Things can only go so wrong for so long before something has to actually

Speaker 38 go right for us.

Speaker 6 We just did a lot of talking about the future and this, you know, being over, this being

Speaker 6 finished and honestly I was concerned about dad and how he was finally going to be able to grieve for the loss of his wife.

Speaker 43 And then it was Tuesday, 8.45 in the morning.

Speaker 27 The jury gathered and minutes later a signal they were ready.

Speaker 41 Chris Hall and his daughters rushed to court and in the end it was very quick, guilty of first degree murder.

Speaker 27 Their father would not be coming home probably ever.

Speaker 6 He's being cuffed and potentially put away for life

Speaker 38 and

Speaker 6 yeah it hurts and we are angry about that.

Speaker 29 You can still hear those daughters

Speaker 12 accusing you of unfairly convicting their father.

Speaker 9 Absolutely.

Speaker 16 It weighs on me, but at the same time,

Speaker 16 I know who I'm dealing with when it comes to Chris Hall. In fact, he's the one that stolen their mother from them.

Speaker 36 It had been a peculiar fact of this case that the victims' and defendants' families had stood solidly together against the prosecution.

Speaker 27 But what no one knew was the truth was more complicated.

Speaker 10 After the verdict at Chris Hall's sentencing, a letter was introduced.

Speaker 59 It was from another of Christie Hall's brothers, Billy Carlton, who, until now, had said not one public word about the case.

Speaker 36 We would like to ask his honor for the maximum sentence, wrote Billy.

Speaker 28 The pain that my family has suffered through this tragedy is unforgivable.

Speaker 61 And I didn't want to hurt the girls, but I had to say what was on my mind.

Speaker 30 There was a deep divide in Christie's family, said Billy.

Speaker 20 Some of her relatives believed Chris was innocent, but he and he says others, including Christie's uncle Steve Mundy, silently urged on the prosecutor.

Speaker 61 Half the family was convinced he was innocent, and half the family was convinced he wasn't. And that's hard to do when you have a big family and you all have to be together every once in a while.

Speaker 12 And when it involves a member as loved as Christie was. Exactly.
Does that explain why this kind of group of people in the family decided just to let justice take its course?

Speaker 32 We had talked about it quite a bit.

Speaker 61 And you've got to know when to show up sometimes and when not to show up, just to keep what's left of the family as together as you can have it.

Speaker 16 Thank you so much for coming.

Speaker 5 And when it was over,

Speaker 27 Hall convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life, some of Christie's relatives met with Prosecutor Strunsky

Speaker 43 and thanked him.

Speaker 15 They want me to thank

Speaker 7 for putting a guy away because he's a murderer.

Speaker 39 And the Hall daughters, having lost their beloved mother, fought to save a father they adored.

Speaker 6 It's a devastating reality. It really is.

Speaker 6 Especially for a family that, you know, to say that we are close, it's an understatement, you know.

Speaker 6 To go from that to being not able to be there with each other.

Speaker 6 It's uh

Speaker 6 it's the greatest heartbreak that anyone can ever experience, I think.

Speaker 7 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.

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