and now, the prosecutor was ready. in may 2011, one year after the first jury deadlocked, burke strunsky went back to court armed with new evidence for a brand-new panel of hall s peers. jurors heard medical experts testify about the injuries to cristi s head and once again heard lindsay s 911 call. i saw him put her under water. cristi s co-workers testified for the prosecution. and jerry winkel travelled from idaho to tell jurors what he thought of chris hall. i was ashamed to admit that he was once a police officer. but if the prosecution had upped its game between the two years of trial, so had the defense. that s when well-known attorneys steve harmon and paul gretch entered the scene and they came out swinging. that story about cristi s affair, for example? there s a shadow hanging over all of this stuff. a very human sort of shadow, which is that she was having a little affair, right, had a boyfriend.
she s still nowhere to be seen. the look on his face was almost undescribable. it was almost as if he had just gone into another world. it was scary. it was instinct that told her something was wrong, said lindsay. so she called 911. 911, state your emergency. a woman was killed. so now, hours and hours later, the detectives confronted chris with lindsay s story. why, they asked, didn t her story match his? so am i supposed to believe the witness is lying? i m not going to say she s lying, she sounds like a truthful kid or whatever but i don t know. i can t explain what she s saying she saw. so now that question we posed as we began. did lindsay patterson really know what she saw? dateline returns after saw? dateline returns after the
accidental death, not a homicide. this was not some ordinary hired gun. this was a public official who said straight out that cristi s head injuries could and perhaps should be explained by an accidental fall. he didn t rule out homicide? he didn t rule out homicide. but he said the preponderance of the evidence was towards an accidental drowning. border, if cristi had slipped and fell four or five blocks over, the pathologist in that county would never have filed criminal charges. an accident of geography. so now a second jury would sort through these two sets of allegations, these two opposing realities. and decide whether chris hall would turn and embrace home and his loving
said two things. special man, special situation. i think both of us can say this is a man that we like and we know. we don t feel he could have done anything like this. 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. there was never, in 30 years of marriage, never one moment of there was no motive for this man to kill his wife. they had a look at neighbor lindsay patterson s eyewitness account and suggested it was not conclusive at all. it was tragically incomplete. 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. see this sharp corner sticking out into the spa? hitting your head on this would certainly have opened a gash and knocked cristi out, said the attorney. she didn t see what was really
yes. if the husband knew about it, but the wife never, ever mentions it and tells the husband. no one tells the husband. quite right, said the judge. and because there was no evidence that chris knew about his wife s affair, he ruled it out of the trial. the story about hall shooting himself for retirement benefits? 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. anyway, the story was prejudicial, said the judge, so he threw that out too. 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. this is what she described seeing in her testimony. but on the close-up, what do you