Skyler Rocz had been a detective for all of six weeks when she got a “once-in-a-lifetime case,” she said.
A deputy’s phone call that January day three years ago prompted Rocz to investigate Sarah Hartsfield, a former U.S. Army sergeant whose husband — her fifth — had been admitted to a Texas hospital in a diabetic coma that hospital staffers found suspicious.
That investigation quickly became far more sprawling and complex as Rocz discovered a web of allegations from Hartsfield’s past, including an alleged murder plot involving her third and fourth husbands — an accusation she denies — and the fatal shooting of a onetime fiancé that Hartsfield has described as self-defense.
Hartsfield, 50, has not been charged with any crimes related to those cases. But Rocz’s investigation led to a murder conviction for Hartsfield last year in the January 2023 death of Joseph Hartsfield, 46.
For more on the case, tune in to “The Trouble with Sarah” on “Dateline” at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT tonight.
In her first media interview about the case, Rocz told “Dateline” that her direct supervisors at the Texas sheriff’s office where she worked at the time were skeptical that there was a case.
“I was beating a dead horse,” Rocz, 30, said she was told. “I just had to disagree.”
A former commander at the Chambers County Sheriff’s Office confirmed Rocz’s account.
Rocz kept investigating and took her findings to the district attorney, who obtained a murder indictment against Sarah Hartsfield in the weeks after her husband’s Jan. 15 death. But had the detective initially listened to her direct boss, she said, that outcome could have been different.
“It would have been another injustice,” she said.
An unresponsive patient
When she was summoned to the hospital east of Houston where Joseph Hartsfield was taken on Jan. 7, 2023, she’d been a detective since November 2022 and was in her first week on call as an investigator with the sheriff’s office, she said.
“My first callout ever was on this case,” Rocz said.
Chambers County Sheriff and Skyler Rocz.Chambers County Sheriff’s Office
Now an investigator with the Chambers County District Attorney’s Office, Rocz worked for the Phoenix Police Department before landing a job in 2020 as a deputy with the Chambers County Sheriff’s Office.
Joseph Hartsfield had been admitted to the hospital in an unresponsive state. He was diabetic, and his blood sugar had crashed, Rocz recalled, but he wasn’t responding to treatment.
Hospital staff weren’t sure why, she said, though they thought there may have been too much insulin in his system. The lifesaving medication helps people with diabetes regulate their blood sugar but has also been used as a difficult-to-detect murder weapon.
Joseph Hartsfield.KPRC
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences later attributed his cause of death to complications from toxic effects of insulin. His manner of death was undetermined. At trial, prosecutors argued that Sarah Hartsfield killed her husband with a fatal dose of insulin.
Sarah Hartsfield has maintained her innocence in the death and said she’s “devastated” by the loss. At trial, her attorneys said that Joseph Hartsfield likely caused his own death because he didn’t properly manage his diabetes.
‘Bizarre’ behavior at the hospital
Rocz said her suspicion that the man did not die accidentally sharpened after her Jan. 7 visit to the hospital.
There, she learned that Sarah Hartsfield found her husband unresponsive at 1 p.m. but waited an hour to call 911. And to Rocz, Sarah Hartsfield’s demeanor seemed fake. One minute, she acted casually, Rocz said, the next she would “crumple her face and act as if she was sad for like 15 seconds.”
“Everybody has different responses to trauma,” Rocz said. “But typically, the response isn’t that bizarre to where it’s like, we’re casual, then we’re not, and then we’re casual, then we’re not.”
From Joseph Hartsfield’s family, the detective said she learned that he’d planned on leaving his wife and had recently opened a new bank account without his wife’s name on it in the part of Texas where his family was from. She learned that Sarah Hartsfield had told the relatives about how she fatally shot a former fiancé, Rocz recalled, and the detective found out about a protection order that barred Sarah Hartsfield from contacting her two youngest children.
Sarah Hartsfield has said that she shot David Bragg in 2018 in self-defense. That account was initially supported by the local prosecutor’s office, though after she was charged with murder in Joseph Hartsfield’s death, the investigation into Bragg’s death was reopened. Testimony at Sarah Hartsfield’s trial indicated that no charges were forthcoming in Bragg’s death, though the case remains active.
David Bragg.KPRC
The restraining order was linked to an alleged murder-for-hire plot involving Sarah Hartsfield’s third and fourth husbands. At her trial, the third husband testified that the fourth husband told him Sarah Hartsfield wanted his wife dead so he’d be too distracted to see their children.
An FBI agent who investigated the allegations said he corroborated the account, but federal prosecutors rejected the case after the fourth husband said that Sarah Hartsfield had played no role. Sarah Hartsfield has denied the allegations. She has not been charged in connection with the alleged plot.
What the cellphone showed
Rocz wound up investigating these and other accusations linked to Sarah Hartsfield’s past. But it wasn’t until she started sifting through Joseph Hartsfield’s cellphone that the detective’s supervisors came to think something might be “weird” with the case, she said.
There, Rocz found messages sent from his phone to Sarah Hartsfield’s the morning of Jan. 7, hours before Joseph Hartsfield was hospitalized.
Included in the messages was his driver’s license, a wedding photo, details for the bank account he’d recently opened and a key for his Apple Legacy Contact, which allowed her to access his phone data after his death.
Sarah Hartsfield in court.Rebeccah Glaser / Dateline
Rocz said she used the details gathered from that device to obtain a search warrant for Sarah Hartsfield’s phone. And what the detective found there was at odds with the statement Sarah Hartsfield provided to authorities about her husband’s final hours.
Before Joseph Hartsfield was hospitalized, Sarah Hartsfield said that she’d been asleep and on a narcotic pain medication for a recent surgery. But the data from her phone showed that she was on the device almost every hour, Rocz testified.
The detective found that Sarah Hartsfield’s recent internet search history had been deleted, Rocz told “Dateline,” and she found text messages showing that Sarah Hartsfield argued constantly with her husband. She wanted him out of the house, Rocz said, and she wanted out of the marriage.
On Feb. 3, 2023 — nearly a month after Rocz was called out to the hospital — Sarah Hartsfield was indicted in her husband’s murder. After a trial that focused as much on Sarah Hartsfield’s past as it did on her fifth husband’s death, she was convicted of first-degree murder in October and sentenced to life in prison.
“I kind of felt a little weak to my knees,” Rocz said about hearing the guilty verdict. “I was just thanking God that this is over.”
