A five-time bride convicted of murdering her latest husband with a fatal dose of insulin — seven years after she fatally shot and killed her then-fiancé — has been sentenced to life in prison, a judge ruled on Thursday.
Sarah Hartsfield, a 50-year-old former US Army sergeant from Texas and mother of four, was found guilty of poisoning her diabetic husband Joseph Hartsfield in 2023 by shooting him up with lethal levels of insulin, as the high-profile trial revealed her troubling past relationships.
Chambers County Assistant District Attorney Mallory Vargas claimed during her closing arguments Wednesday that Hartsfield expected to get away with killing her husband “because it’s what she’s always done,” NBC News reported.
“What a wild coincidence that no person can leave her without consequences,” Vargas said.
The jury found her guilty of murder after just two hours of deliberation.
Sarah Hartsfield was arrested in February 2023 after Joseph, who had lived with diabetes for two decades, died in the hospital from complications from toxic insulin exposure.
Vargas said during the trial that Sarah and Joseph had been considering leaving his wife of 11 months for weeks before his death, but his wife did “whatever she could to stop” him.
“He told me he was worried she would kill him in his sleep,” Joseph Hartsfield’s sister, Jeannie Hartsfield, testified.
She injected him with a deadly dose of insulin — a medication that helps people with diabetes regulate their blood sugar — and delayed calling 911 for hours, evidence showed.
Sarah Hartsfield’s attorney, Case Darwin, maintained throughout the week-long trial that Joseph was responsible for his own death as he was taking medication that made him more sensitive to insulin, NBC News reported.
The convicted killer has a history of relationships that ended under violent or troubling circumstances.
In 2018, Hartsfield confessed to shooting dead her fiancé, David Bragg, at their Minnesota home.
She was cleared of all wrongdoing after the killing was ruled a justifiable act of self-defense at the time — but prosecutors have since reopened the case following her murder charge.
“Now, we have other cases that have been reopened in other states. I’m glad they’ve reopened those cases, because they’re probably going to find the very same, similar scenario as what we have,” Chambers County Sheriff Brian Hawthorne told KHOU.
No additional charges have been filed in that case.
Her four former ex-husbands also all raised red flags.
Hartsfield’s first marriage was to her high school sweetheart, Titus Knoernschild, in 1991 but they soon divorced in 1996. While they were separating, he said she threatened him.
“I’m very surprised I got out of the marriage alive,” he told NBC News.
Sarah was arrested in March 1996 for allegedly assaulting her second husband, Michael Traxler, during a dispute at their Texas home — but those charges were dropped a week later.
Her third marriage to Christopher Donohue ended in divorce in in 2017. Donohue remarried in 2021, and claimed in a request for a restraining order that Hartsfield was plotting to have her fourth husband, David George, kill his new wife. A judge granted the order.
She became engaged to Bragg, but after he died Sarah married George in 2019 but the pair split by 2021.
She married Joseph Hartsfield in 2022.
