Chambers County – When 48-year-old Sarah Hartsfield was indicted for murdering her fifth husband in February, stories from across the country about the mother of four’s past started surfacing and unraveling a twisted web.
From her little brother’s bizarre death in 1990 to a murder plot she allegedly concocted, and even the fatal shooting of a fiancé, KPRC 2 has been uncovering more about Hartsfield every step of the way.
Sarah has not been arrested or charged in connection with the death of any person other than Joseph Hartsfield. Sarah is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
This in-depth, special look at the case comes as Sarah is indicted for murder, awaiting trial in Chambers County, and in jail on a $4.5 million bond.
Covering the story
Chambers County Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook on February 5 with the headline: “$5 MILLION BOND ON MURDER SUSPECT.”
Like many who knew Sarah, that’s how the news came into the KPRC 2 newsroom.
“Every relationship that it appears that she’s been in, everybody wants out of it because they fear for their life,” Chambers County Sheriff Brian Hawthorne told KPRC 2 on Feb. 6. “A number of them have either made the statement, ‘I needed out because I felt like my life was in danger,’ and some have found where their life was clearly in danger.”
The comments on the post started stacking up quickly and people from all over seemed to have a story about Sarah.
That’s when the calls started and didn’t stop for months, some stories that didn’t even sound real, and launched a cross-country journey to find out more.
Joseph Hartsfield dies in hospital
“I worried all the time and prayed about it, that God would protect him,” 46-year-old Joseph Hartsfield’s mother Helen told only KPRC 2.
- Sarah and Joe met on Facebook.
- The couple dated for three months before getting married in February 2022.
- They bought a home in Beach City, Texas.
- Joe was a diabetic whose sugar usually ran high, according to family members.
- Joe wore a glucose monitor that would send alerts to both of their phones.
“I won’t say I was surprised at all. I expected something was going to happen,” Helen Hartsfield said.
On Jan. 7, Joe’s glucose level dropped dangerously low. Sarah told investigators she left juice on the counter for him to help bring it up and tried to get jam to put in his mouth.
After Sarah found Joe unresponsive, he was rushed to Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital, where doctors tried to raise his sugar, but nothing seemed to work.
“I had so many different feelings because I thought, ‘What did he go through? Was he in pain? Did he suffer?’” Helen Hartsfield said.
He died eight days later.
“I know more about while he was in a coma because my mom was, like, texting me updates and stuff,” Sarah’s only son, Ryan Donohue, said. “She was like insinuating that, you know, he might have taken too much insulin.”
Donohue said he had a weird feeling and decided to wait to see how it played out.
He wasn’t the only one who suspected something – doctors did too, possibly foul play – which is when Chambers County Sheriff’s Office investigators were called in.
When he died on Jan. 15, Sarah posted a video on Facebook as she wept over his hospital bed.
“I thought it was a woman who really loved her husband, but I was shocked that someone videoed it. There’s no way in hell I would want someone videotaping me in my darkest moments of sorrow,” Sarah’s classmate, Charissa Farris, said.
“I shook my head, and I didn’t, I didn’t quite feel it,” one of Sarah’s foster mothers, Barb Stuart, said.
When it was time to say goodbye, Sarah told her son she only let Joe’s mother be involved because “she told me, she’s like, ‘oh, his brother and his sister were just so ugly to me, you know, like, that’s my husband,’” Donohue said.
- Investigators say Sarah waited an hour to call 911 after finding Joe unresponsive.
- Detectives found up to 10 insulin pens on his side of the bed.
- Joe’s online obituary indicates he died of an “ischemic stroke, with his loving wife at his side.”
“She was sad, like she would just be crying all the time on the phone,” Donohue described.
- An autopsy was conducted by the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.
- The autopsy was reviewed by a panel of doctors before release on March 30.
- The cause was determined to be “complications of toxic effects of insulin.”
- The manner of death was left undetermined.
Sarah’s Childhood
Sarah’s life started in Otterville, Missouri, a town of only a few hundred people, about 100 miles southeast of Kansas City.
“They called us with Sarah, and we ended up with her,” said Stuart, one of Sarah’s foster mothers. “They said that she’d been through some trauma situations with her natural biological family. She was required to go to counseling. And so I was prepared for a troubled early adolescent going into teenhood situation.”
The trauma, according to many who know Sarah, involved sexual abuse allegations against her biological father and stepfather.
Stuart said she focused on giving Sarah a typical teenage upbringing – they’d go shopping and buy clothes, go on family vacations, go to a lake property, and Sarah would go to school dances.
“I met Sarah the summer between sixth and seventh grade when she moved in next door,” Farris said. “It was like having a sister that I really, really wanted.”
As a kid, Stuart said Sarah wasn’t disrespectful or loud and didn’t really talk back.
“Her thing was she might be sneaky. You know, she wanted to do something, she might sneak off or not tell you the whole story of what she’s up to,” Stuart said. “She would just be quiet if she was mad about something, just quiet and give the evil eye and go to a room. I never really knew of anything outlandishly crazy back then.”
Life with Stuart appeared to be different than Sarah’s biological family. Records revealed her stepfather had a criminal history and, in 1973, was convicted of murder. The case involved a love triangle that ended in a shotgun killing, according to records and news reports. He was paroled in 1984, according to the Missouri Department of Corrections.
Six years later, in 1990, while Sarah lived with Stuart’s family, her 10-year-old biological brother still lived with the family and died an “accidental death,” according to a police report.
The 10-year-old was allegedly playing with a nylon dog leash on the front porch of the family home when he fell off it and the leash got caught on the stair railing, according to the police report. Their mother found him, face down with the leash around his neck.
He was dead when he arrived at a hospital in Sedalia, Missouri. Emergency room records reveal the boy was estimated to be hanging between 10 and 20 minutes.
“It was supposedly an accident, is what we were told. I remember her having to go to that funeral and just being pretty devastated,” Farris said.
Investigators ruled it an “accidental death” but acknowledged the “bizarre nature” of it in documents. A county caseworker noted their mother “showed no emotion over the loss of her son” and follow-up reports in the investigation showed discrepancies in the story.
Earlier this year, the Cooper County, Missouri Sheriff’s Office reviewed but declined to re-open the case.
“There has been no evidence to show that we need to reopen the case. We will continue to look into it but, as of now, the case will not be reopened unless new information/evidence comes to light,” Cooper County Sheriff Chris Class told KPRC 2.
“It was really weird to hear that and to know that she had lost a brother because none of us had been through anything like that before so then I really felt bad for her,” Farris said.
Click on the images below to learn more about the men in Sarah’s past.
Sarah’s military career
Sarah joined the U.S. Army in 1997. She had a top-secret security clearance.
“I was shocked because she likes her own way and when you’re in the service, you’re going to follow the rules or you’re going to be in big trouble,” Stuart said, remembering when Sarah called to tell her about joining.
During her 20-year career as a motor transport operator and then intelligence analyst, Sgt. Sarah Donohue had assignments at Fort Hood, and deployed to Baghdad for less than a year, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Army. She spent three years at Fort Eustis in Newport News, Virginia.
“When I got there, she was in charge,” Ret. Capt. Alfonz Markovics told only KPRC 2.
“What were your first impressions?” KPRC 2′s Bryce Newberry asked.
“Anybody who tells you that Sarah Donohue does not produce a good intelligence product or is a good intelligence person, military intelligence, doesn’t know her the way I do,” Capt. Markovics said. “Sergeant Donohue never once indicated to me in her actions that she was not up to the task. She was whip-smart.”
Her son found her to be smart, too.
“Really almost genius,” her son said. “She could definitely play a room. If you let her talk long enough, like you’ll find inconsistencies every now and then.”
When Chambers County investigators started looking into her past, Sheriff Hawthorne said they found she lived in dozens of different places in states across the country, including in a rental home in Williamsburg, Virginia.
The upscale neighborhood was only about 20 miles from Fort Eustis and it was home for the Donohue family for about three years.
When Capt. Markovics was her supervisor, his first evaluation report of her didn’t reflect any problems. But he started hearing from troops who complained about her leadership style.
“There was no understanding of mistakes. There was no acceptance of mistakes. The same benefit of the doubt that she expected on her end, she never showed that courtesy to any of the troops working for her,” said Capt. Markovics. “We became very, very apprehensive and became very paper-oriented. We documented everything. We made sure we never talked to her one-on-one.”
- Sarah was in the Army until 2017, ranked a sergeant first class at the end of service, according to a U.S. Army spokesperson.
- She medically retired and started receiving 100% disability benefits from the VA.
- The disability involves pins and screws in her feet, PTSD, severe depression, and cancer three separate times, she said in court.
Sarah’s side of the story
- Sarah is in an all-women’s cell in the Chambers County Jail.
- The cell has bunk beds next to the dining and bathroom areas.
- A small TV in the corner airs local television.
- A kiosk inside the cell allows inmates to send and receive messages.
She gave KPRC 2 her first public statement using the jail cell kiosk, in which she denied the murder allegations, professed her love for Joe, and wrote in part: “It’s about time I quit being vilified, by his family, and by the public. I never deserved how I was treated, and Joe, our relationship, our marriage -- our story ended way too soon and not by any wrongdoing.”
After she saw that story air from jail, she sent pages of messages all night long.
“MY STORY and the TRUTH have me walking out of this jail, free of all the false accusation I’ve been subjected, in addition to what is seriously character assassination on a nationwide level,” she wrote.
She told this reporter to “quit the type of journalism found in grocery rags and be a reporter with class and dignity” and wrote, “if I’m guilty of anything, it’s picking horrible husbands.”
Soon after, she blocked any additional messages from being sent, but her court-appointed attorney Keaton Kirkwood spoke outside of her court hearing earlier this month.
“My issue with her was that I didn’t want her speaking with the media. And that’s because everything that’s read or the interview she says can be used in the court of law,” he said. “Sarah’s in a position where she’s never had to endure this type of treatment as far as being incarcerated.”
He said the case has diminished as far as reasonable doubt goes.
“Our defense is she had nothing to do with it and if you had nothing to do with it, I mean, that’s your defense, you know, I never gave him medication. I never did anything with his medical. I was going through my own recovery at the time,” he said. “They’re focusing on past events and not this current event.”
He urged others to “watch themselves” in terms of any judgment toward Sarah.
“Wait until this whole case is complete. We know that we have the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. And so, I just want to remind the public that,” Kirkwood said.
- After Sarah’s arrest, local law enforcement in at least three states reviewed cases from the past connected to her, including the deaths of fiancé David Bragg in 2018, her little brother in 1990, and her biological father in 2005.
- Law enforcement has not implicated her in any of the deaths and she has never been charged.
- Sarah has not been implicated or charged with any criminal misconduct in connection with the shooting death of David Bragg, but the case remains open.
- Her Texas murder trial date hasn’t been set.
“If she’s done what they say she’s done allegedly, she needs to be where she can’t hurt anybody else. And evidently, she’s hurt a lot of people,” Helen Hartsfield said.
“Like from five years, you know, you got three major incidences that many people would probably go to jail for,” Sarah’s son said. “There can only be so much coincidence.”