Welcome back to Mama Mystery. I am your host, Kelly. In January of 2023, a 46-year-old man in Beach City, Texas,

went to bed next to his wife and never woke up. His family was told that it was a stroke. The obituary blamed

complications from his diabetes, but when doctors saw how his blood sugar kept crashing,

and when detectives pulled his wife's history, they didn't just see a medical mystery.

They saw four ex-husbands, a dead fiancé, a trail of fires, and one woman at the center

of it all. This is the story of Sarah Jean Hartsfield.

By January of 2023,

46-year-old Joseph Anthony Hartsfield was lying in a Baytown, Texas ICU,

unresponsive. His wife, Sarah, told people that he'd had a stroke. She told others it was complications

from his diabetes. His obituary would later repeat that he died from complications of an

eschemic stroke with his loving wife by his side.

But doctors weren't convinced. Every time they pushed his blood sugar up, something was

dragging it back down. Within weeks, investigators would learn that there was a lot more going

on in Sarah Jean Hartfield's life than a tragic medical event, and that Joseph

was just the last in a long line of men who thought they might not survive loving her.

Now Sarah's story starts in rural Missouri. She grew up in a small town in a house that never really

looked stable from the outside. Her stepfather had done time

for murder years before she was born, convicted in the 70s for killing a man in what was

described as a jealous love triangle shooting. He was then paroled in the 80s. When Sarah was still

young, her little brother died in what officials at the time

called a bizarre accident in the home. There were questions about how it happened and about how

oddly unemotional the children's mother seemed after the fact. Apparently, her little brother

...