In December, Sarah Hartsfield told a friend that her husband and marriage had become a “nightmare” and that she had a plan to get out, according to private Facebook messages the friend provided to NBC News.
Weeks later, the husband was dead; Hartsfield, a former Army sergeant, was charged with first-degree murder; and authorities in Minnesota had decided to re-examine the death of a former partner who they had previously said Hartsfield killed in self-defense in 2018.
In a Dec. 19 message, Hartsfield, 48, called her husband, Joseph Hartsfield, 46, an “empty person” and derided his “financial irresponsibility.”
“I’ve paid for everything to the point I have nothing left,” she said. “He was just looking for a meal ticket and way back to a lifestyle he could never attain on his own,” she wrote in the messages, which NBC News confirmed came from an account that belonged to Hartsfield.
Hartsfield, who did not detail any specific plans to her friend and neighbor, wrote that “it’s now a matter of implementing / executing.”
The friend, who asked not to be identified for fear of being publicly linked to Hartsfield, said she’d thought her friend’s message meant she wanted out of her marriage and to get on with her life — not that she was “planning to kill him.”
Sarah Hartsfield has pleaded not guilty.
Five years before she was accused in her husband’s death, Hartsfield fatally shot another partner. Authorities in Minnesota determined that she fired in self-defense and that the killing was justified. But days after her Feb. 3 indictment in the killing of Joseph Hartsfield, authorities said they had reopened the investigation into the 2018 death of David Bragg.
Chambers County, Texas, Sheriff Brian Hawthorne alluded to other episodes in Hartsfield’s past, telling NBC affiliate KPRC of Houston that she had been married five times in relationships that often ended under grim circumstances.
“Everybody wants out of it because they…
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