holding her, and then just not having enough time for her to have gone inside. it s like you ve got three different snapshots. right. of something going on there. right. and had to kind of work out what this was. yeah. 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 this is just this is not fair to him because he truly loved her more than more than anyone. and yet the prosecutor was going to try to prove that this family man and former cop murdered his wife. could it be done? dateline returns after the break. th break.
for cristi hall. was it murder? hello and welcome to dateline a young woman peers into her neighbor s yard and sees something for a few mysterious seconds, a man a woman and the moment it s unsettling. what she saw and what she did would set in motion a chain of events that would divide a family and a jury. here is keith morrison. we know the truth. and we know everything that happened. how do we know what we know? emotionally unsatisfying not to have that answer. so it is. even if we ve seen something or we think we have. and that s the question at the heart of the whole puzzle. is this woman right? i know what i saw. and i
have seen it. and i think that s what they truly believe in their hearts. this weighs on my greatly. but my job is to get justice for cristi now it was up to a jury to decide, after six days of testimony, two days of deliberation, they couldn t. it was a deadlock. the judge declared a mistrial. chris hall walked out of court with his family free, but not quite in the clear. and nothing at all like a victory for the hall daughters. what was it like to get that hung jury? what did you think then? that was tragic. that was devastating to us. you expected a not guilty verdict? oh, yes. not a doubt. deputy d.a. burke strunsky was disappointed too. he was also determined to retry the case. but first he sent his investigator on a mission to explore the life and marriage of chris hall. and what do you know. in idaho, where hall had been a disgraced police chief, the investigator uncovered a startling accusation.
president today in the first up on a weeklong trip. blinken is trying to de-escalate conflict and tensions spike in the middle east with visits to israel, the occupied west bank, and for arab nations. meanwhile, iranian-backed hezbollah said a barrage of rockets into northern israel saturday. they categorized it as a preliminary response and assassination of a hamas senior leader. israel says it did respond to that attack. now back to dateline. welcome back. i m craig melvin. chris hall was charged in the drowning death of his wife cristi. hall s daughters stood by him, proclaiming his innocence. would anything change their minds about their dad? here again is keith morrison. this is a hard-charging man, ex-member in good standing of the san francisco d.a. s office, now senior deputy d.a. in
course. but prosecutor strunsky poked around in chris hall s past as a 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 $19, 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 plan 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 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 cristi s