The Hart Family Murders | #464

**Hannah Maguire** (0:09)
On Facebook, Jen and Sarah Hart seemed like perfect mothers. But in the middle of the night, in March 2018, they drove their whole family of a picturesque California cliff into the Pacific Ocean. Killing themselves and all six of their adopted black children, Marcus, Hannah, Devonte, Jeremiah, Abigail, and Sierra. To their online friends, the tragedy made no sense. Jen and Sarah had been an inspirational lesbian power couple. They were social justice warriors who'd given six disadvantaged kids the idyllic life that they otherwise never would have had. And they were even sort of famous. Ever since, a picture of Devonte tearfully hugging a white cop during a protest went viral back in 2014 But as investigators dug deeper, a more sinister picture emerged.
Because behind the carefully curated Facebook posts, Jen and Sarah Hart were hiding years of abuse against their adoptive kids, escaping punishment from child welfare authorities in four different states. It was only in the aftermath of the crash that people realized just how little they really knew about the Hart family.
And just how tragically those six children had been betrayed. I'm Hannah.

**Suruthi Bala** (1:54)
I'm Saruti.

**Hannah Maguire** (1:56)
And this is RedHanded.

**Suruthi Bala** (1:58)
To understand what led the Hart family to the edge of that 100-foot cliff in California, we have to go back to the beginning. Who were Jen and Sarah Hart? And how had they gone from being a carefree 20-something couple to the mothers of six troubled kids in the span of just a few years?
Jen and Sarah both grew up in small towns in South Dakota, where the populations were about as white-bred American as you can imagine. It was the Heartland, with farms as far as the eye could see, and big Christian families. Childhood friends described Sarah Gengler as shy in public but goofy in private, and they said how she loved to make up dances to Depeche Mode during weekend sleepovers. And while Sarah was actually engaged to her high school boyfriend, she broke up with him, just before flying the nest to attend Northern State University.

**Hannah Maguire** (2:52)
Tale as old as time.

**Suruthi Bala** (2:55)
Which is where she met and fell in love with the gorgeous Jennifer Hart.
And while Jen did come from a similar background, otherwise she was everything Sarah wasn't. While Sarah was the type of teacher's pet student to maintain the perfect GPA, and get her name on the Dean's List, Jen took things a lot less seriously. She once even got arrested for shoplifting, and just shrugged it off by telling the officer that she didn't know why she did it.

**Hannah Maguire** (3:25)
So what was it that drew these two souls together? Maybe it was the opposites attracting, because apart from a shared obsession with the Green Bay Packers, Jen and Sarah didn't really seem to have much in common.
Jen actually dropped out of uni just a semester shy of graduation, while Sarah finished with a degree in special education. By now, Sarah and Jen stopped telling their friends that they were just roommates.
They were a bonafide couple. And it was around this time that they began distancing themselves from their own families. This wasn't totally out of character for Jen, who didn't speak to her dad, but it was highly unusual for Sarah, who was incredibly close with her mum, or at least had been. Jen implied that homophobia was to blame, later writing on Facebook, that the Midwestern mindset had been unforgiving and unaccepting when she and Sarah came out as a couple. And this might well have been a part of why some of their relationships crumbled.

**Suruthi Bala** (4:28)
But as you'll soon learn, anything Jen writes on Facebook needs to be taken with a massive fuck-off pinch of salt. Because according to family friends on both sides, the breaking contact had nothing to do with Jen and Sarah's sexuality at all. For one thing, Jen never explicitly came out to her family, so how could they have cut her out for being a lesbian? Not to mention one of her brothers was gay, and still very much welcome in the familial fold. The excuses just didn't wash.
So where had this sudden rejection of all of their loved ones really come from?
If you ask Sarah's mum, it actually came down to an ultimatum posed by Jen. She claims that Jen forced Sarah to choose between her family or their relationship. And Sarah, clearly too blinded by love for Jen to see how manipulative this proposition really was, made one of the most damning decisions she'd ever make. She chose Jen.

**Hannah Maguire** (5:28)
Newly estranged from their families, the pair made a fresh start miles away from anyone they knew in the town of Alexandria, Minnesota. Let's look up the state motto of Minnesota. I don't know that one.