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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash A-O-M. Left and went and passed out and woke up the next day and he said it seemed like a dream. And he remembered thinking to himself, what in the hell did I do last night? What did I do? I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anasiga Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murders.
Last year in Charlotte, North Carolina, there was a homicide investigation that got our attention, both for the method in which the case was solved, which involved new methods of DNA forensics, as well as the extraordinary circumstances behind its final dramatic conclusion. Extraordinary because it had been 39 years since this double homicide was committed. And to say it had long gone cold was an understatement.
This case was frozen solid with no leads, no suspects, and no justice for his victims for nearly four decades. But as you will hear, there was a dedicated group of law enforcement officers that just refused to let it go. And one of them was today's guest, Detective Matt Hefner, a veteran investigator and native of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. ♪
I've been a police officer for 25 years, and around 2019, I switched over to the Homicide Cold Case Unit. That's basically all I've ever done at Charlotte is work murders. As a member of the Cold Case Squad, he inherited a case that has stumped many detectives before him, a case that began all the way back on March 14, 1984, when friends of 27-year-old Sarah Mobley Hall went to her apartment after failing to reach her by phone.
According to the friends, as soon as they knocked on the door, they immediately knew that something was wrong. They had a foul smell coming from inside and the door was partially open. This was in the evening time. They went upstairs and got a neighbor. And this male neighbor and the two ladies came back to the apartment. The male brought a flashlight. As they made entry, the male sees a body in the hallway and they exit and call police.
When first responders arrived, they immediately saw signs of a violent struggle. They saw the broken glass. There was some overturned furniture items in the living room. There was a table turned over. The end table of the couch was turned over. The television had been knocked off the stand. It was on the floor. Techno saw what appeared to be teeth on the living room carpet.
And in the midst of that chaos were the targets of that violence, the body of both Sarah Mobley Hall and her 10-year-old son, Derek. Sarah Hall was found in her bedroom partially nude, and Derek Mobley was found in the hallway.
The injuries to both mother and son, which included blunt force trauma and ligature strangulation, made it plainly clear that their deaths were deliberate and excessively violent. We do want to give you the warning that the following description is unavoidably graphic in some ways and definitely disturbing.
Detectives on the scene also believed that Sarah had likely been sexually assaulted.
So in addition to the obvious signs of a ligature, this lamp cord appeared to be wrapped around Sarah's neck. Her nightgown was pushed up, exposing her breasts. The robe was over her face. Once detectives moved that robe, Sarah had severe damage to her face. She had been assaulted severely. She was missing teeth. Her face was very swollen. It was very obvious she had suffered a horrible beating about the head, all over her head.
And the injuries to 10-year-old Derek were just as shocking. Derek was lying face down on the carpet. He had bruises.
Obvious ligatures around his neck. There was what appeared to be a towel shoved into his mouth as a gag, potentially. There was a scarf tied around his head and face. And then there was an electrical cord that appeared to be off of like a lamp or an appliance of some sort, yanked off of that, and that was used around his neck as well. Eric was wearing his pajamas. He had some like thermal underwear pajamas on and was lying just outside of his room and also outside of his mother's room.
You know, Scott, beyond the obvious just horror for law enforcement walking into this, you know, what were some of the first ideas that you had just even hearing about this, what this may have been about?
In your interview with Matt, let me just start with that. I think he said it best. It looked like a violent scene where the perpetrator showed incredible anger and rage. You'd have to assume there is one strong factor in the theory that the victim and her killer knew each other. And there's also, of course, Anastasia, as you mentioned, some type of evidence of a sexual assault. You know, we often talk about the fact that a victim's face can be covered.
Is that something that involves shame, that they don't want themselves to see what they have done? So my first instincts within this case, obviously, is violence and rage. But I also want to think more about what other physical evidence could be there.
And, you know, here you have two victims, both mother, adult, obviously, and her son. And as you notice, Scott, that evidence of sexual assault, like automatically it's like, well, if she is the target, whether known or unknown to the perpetrator, you just have to believe that based on the child's dress, he's wearing pajamas, that he walked in on something that the attacker didn't expect or want him to see.
Sarah Hall was 27 years old. She was divorced. She was a single mother to Derek. She was a teacher's aide. She worked at St. Mark's Center, which is a school for handicapped children.
And as you can imagine, the sheer brutality of this double homicide left a deep impact on both the investigators involved as well as the community and friends and colleagues that knew Sarah and her son. Derek was Sarah's only son. He was 10 years old. He was an elementary school student at a nearby elementary school. Sarah was a mom, a teacher, and a beloved caregiver.
And at 10 years old, Derek was an innocent child. And I know we all know that. As anyone in law enforcement will tell you, all victims deserve the full attention and efforts of law enforcement. But there is something different when it comes to a child victim of murder. Whether that manifests itself as anger or sorrow, it tends to create a certain drive or motivation among cops to achieve justice, no matter how long that may take.
And that journey would begin right there at the crime scene, searching for any clues that might help them tell the story of this just most brutal of attacks and point investigators towards the attacker or perpetrator. And just a few moments ago, I talked about physical evidence at the scene, what may be possible to learn from it. As it turns out, there wasn't much to go on, at least by 1980 standards.
Being in 1984, things were much different. We weren't thinking of DNA. We were dusting for prints. Prints led the way as far as evidence would go.
In addition to the fingerprints, police recovered blood, hair, and a semen sample. Whether any of this could help ID the killer, they still didn't know, but there were other clues at the scene too. The only entry point to this apartment was the front door. There was no sign of forced entry. It appeared whoever was in either came in through an unlocked door or was let in by Sarah or Derek.
Which could be that clue that the killer was known to the victims or just that Sarah didn't lock her door. The one thing investigators were pretty sure of that this was probably not a robbery. No items missing that anyone could note. No sign that the apartment was ransacked. No sign that anyone took anything from the apartment. No sign of robbery.
So if robbery isn't the motive, it's either going to be someone that is there for the sole purpose of that sexual assault that then went even further, or that the motive is more personal and that Sarah may have known the individual who attacked her. And so to narrow the pool of suspects down, investigators would want to do two things. Create a timeline of the murder and identify any potential witnesses to the crime.
Then detectives started working around and doing a canvas of the apartment buildings. After some extensive work, they did great work. They were able to come up with kind of a time frame for when this murder would have occurred. And that came courtesy of a neighbor that lived in the apartment directly behind Sarah and Derek's.
Those residents came forward a day or two after and said that they had heard this struggle. It appeared to be some heated domestic violence type situation. Some arguing, some yelling. They heard things being knocked over, definitely a fight going on. This was about 11:30 at night, 11:45 at night on the previous Friday. It went on for a while, 10 to 15 minutes, and then it got quiet.
There was a pause and then they heard music come on. So whoever was in the apartment turned on a stereo very loud for about 30 minutes. After that 30 minutes or so, the stereo got quiet and they heard nothing else.
Tragically, the neighbor did not call police. Apparently, in this large apartment complex, loud noise and music on a Saturday night was pretty commonplace. It was something they were kind of accustomed to hearing. It wasn't until they learned of the murders when it became something that was important. But it gives us a good time frame of when this likely occurred at Friday evening into the early Saturday morning hours.
So police did have a window of when they believed that Sarah and Derek were killed, and a pretty good notion that she at least recognized whoever came into her apartment that night.
Which means now it was time to look through victimology, look into her personal life, at any ex-boyfriends she might have had a problematic history with, or anyone who was even capable of this type of violence. They started looking into Sarah, who Sarah was, and tried to put together her last weeks of life to see who she might have been with or been around.
And just to state the obvious, that considering the evidence of sexual assault, they were likely looking for a man, possibly someone that Sarah knew or had had a prior relationship with.
They also started looking at her relationships. She didn't have a lot of close female friends. She only had a few. But then they started learning about relationships she had with men. She had met a man that worked as another teacher's aide and drove the school bus. She had a relationship with a guy who had formerly been a Charlotte police officer.
Detectives tracked down these men and others and started collecting alibis, as well as blood and hair samples to compare to what they had found at the crime scene.
They were collecting hairs from the scene and they were looking at hairs from these men. They were blood typing, so they had blood from the scene and they were blood typing and looking at some of the markers and blood. But it's important to note here that in 1984, there was one crucial modern forensic tool still unavailable to police. DNA profiling, blood type testing, hair comparisons, and fingerprinting were still the tools of the trade.
And then as they did often back then, and we do much less now, they polygraphed everybody. These detectives brought these friends in and these male acquaintances in. They polygraphed everybody to see if they can figure out who was telling the truth and who was not telling the truth. And of these suspects, one in particular stood out, a suspect that for our purposes, we will call Mike Dupree.
And they zeroed in on Mike. And really, he didn't fit a particularly different profile from the rest of the men. He had a little bit longer relationship with Sarah. One of Sarah's friends had mentioned something to the effect that she wanted Mike to leave her alone and that she had told Mike this and that she knew Mike was married and she was going to go to Mike's wife if he didn't lay off of her, if he didn't leave her alone.
So he was a romantic partner of Sarah's and a married one at that with a history of potentially obsessive behavior. And not only that, there was some blood evidence that pointed to him as a potential suspect as well.
They were able to take some of those items from the scene and compare it to the blood information about these different males. And one of the only ones that fit was Mike. It didn't say it is Mike, it just says that Mike fits in this large pool of people. I believe something I read on one of the old reports said that it was 30% of the population had these markers. But of all the people talked to in the case, Mike was the only one that had this same information.
So it was not exact, but if you tell me that 30% of a population has a specific characteristic and one of Sarah's exes shares that same characteristics, I would certainly say, and I think most would agree, that that warrants a follow-up visit.
He denied any involvement. He didn't deny his relationships, but he denied ever harming them. He had no motivation to harm them. And in fact, it stated and it was kind of proven that they had not been in a relationship in the maybe even weeks leading up to her murder. So he was the best they had, but he was not enough to keep focusing on him.
So at this point, Charlotte police knew they were going to have to cast a net a little bit wider. Maybe the perp wasn't actually someone she knew, even though there were no signs of forced entry, as we said before. According to Matt, who grew up in this area, it would not have been crazy in the 1980s for people to leave their doors unlocked. And we see that in a lot of our cases.
Or even to just answer the door for a stranger knocking. So while detectives are eliminating men known to Sarah, they're also checking other cases from the area with a similar M.O. or modus operandi. I know they looked at old cases from around that time. They looked at similar burglaries. They looked at similar rape cases to see if there was break-in rapes or burglary cases. And there's notes from the detectives that none of those appeared to be related. ♪
Eventually, their leads dry up and Sarah and Derek's case begins to go cold. As Matt explains, the detective leading the investigation faced the same challenges so many do, a seemingly never-ending caseload. When you're working a case and that case is not solved,
You don't get to stop all your other work to work on this one case. So you can imagine, my assumption is that the lead detective and those that were working this case got more cases and they had to go to those cases and focus on those cases. There were more murders happening, more people to arrest, more trials to participate in. There were things that were pulling them away from this case and with nothing else to go on and no technology to push it forward, the case goes cold.
The double homicide of a mother and her son went unsolved for months, and then years. But Sarah and Derek's case continued to haunt the investigators within the Charlotte Mecklenburg PD, and it was frequently revisited by detectives.
And then in 1998, 14 years after the crime, a new detective decided to take a crack at it, hoping to utilize new advances in DNA technology, which was a new forensic science that, courtesy of the high-profile murder trial of O.J. Simpson, which was taking the policing world by storm. So in 1998, Detective Johnny Jennings started working the case.
Johnny Jennings, by the way, is not just one of Matt's predecessors in the detective bureau. He is now currently the county's chief of police.
DNA has become a thing. In 1998, we now have DNA. He starts looking at the case to see if we can reevaluate some of that evidence to see if DNA will take us anywhere. As long as it was preserved, there is a good chance that the blood, hair, and semen samples collected from the original crime scene might still be able to provide a DNA profile of the suspect. But of course, things are never that easy.
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14 years after the brutal double murder of Sarah Hall and her son Derek, a detective in Charlotte, North Carolina is hoping to use new DNA technology to identify some of the biological evidence at the crime scene. There's only one problem.
The first thing you learned is a lot of the evidence has been destroyed. The original rape kit that was done on Sarah is destroyed. This is painful, but unfortunately, it is commonplace. As you know, Anastigio, for the last two years, I had been working a cold case in South Florida, which had a good amount of evidence, albeit collected 40 years ago, which could have been instrumental in solving the murder. And each time we were testing another piece of evidence,
Complete disappointment. And as we learned, the DNA had been degraded. Also factoring in, the DNA may not have been stored properly or even been collected properly. But in the end, we did solve the murder utilizing your favorite type of evidence, Anasiga, which is circumstantial evidence. But investigators all over the country run into these types of brick walls. But you know, when we talk about evidence being destroyed, which is what happened here, I
I'd love to tell you I've never seen it before, but we have, especially with the passage of time. You know, there's things such as, you know, in New York City, there's these large facilities that hold evidence. We had floods that literally wiped out just barrels and barrels of evidence. Sometimes things actually get lost. So it is rarely nefarious. You know, sometimes it is sloppiness, obviously, like everything else. We're all human. But
especially the passes of time, you start to see this stuff happen. However, in this case, and very luckily, not all the evidence had been destroyed. Critically, that semen sample that was collected from the pillow next to Sarah's body was still in evidence.
March of 98, he meets with Sarah's family, Sarah and Derek's family, tells them he's working the case. He re-interviews some of the people, the ones that are still around, some of those same males, the witnesses that went to the apartment and found Sarah and Derek, they're re-interviewed. Jenning also attempts to track down some of the men police had initially identified as past acquaintances of Sarah's. He's just grinding. He's doing what he does as a detective. He's grinding in the case, trying to see what he can stir up.
And he comes upon Mike, and he sees that Mike looked good in 1984, and so he kind of goes back to refocus on Mike to see if he can make something happen there. It's been 15 years since the murders, but now Jennings potentially has DNA of the killer to try to match against any potential suspect. ♪
Mike is cooperative. He's totally cooperative. He comes in when he's asked to. He's interviewed when he's asked to. He's previously taken a polygraph and he's passed that polygraph. This was in the 80s. And so even though the pressure is being put on him, he's cooperating.
That cooperation includes providing a DNA sample. But here's the thing. Even in the late 1990s, creating a DNA profile to compare to evidence was not a matter of weeks, but months, or in this case, years. Fast forward to January of 2001, we get DNA. We have DNA found on the pillowcase. The lab identifies it, says we have a full, good profile. It's male DNA. It is semen.
It's not Mike, and everything we can see, it doesn't match anyone you have in the case. The prospect of using DNA had lifted hopes that Sarah and Derek's murders would finally be solved. But it only resulted in yet another dead end. But there was a silver lining.
In 2001, it was still in its infancy, but the national DNA database for known offenders was growing by the year. The DNA profile is loaded into the FBI's CODIS database, and it just sits with no matches, no hits. For years, nothing happens. Year by painful year passed by, and for Sarah and Derek's family, their reality must have set in that their murders might never be solved.
Even for the survivors of victims of violent crime, there does come a time, at least for some, that they decide they just need to move on. Only in this case, no one was giving up hope. Not the cops or Sarah's family. And in November of 2020, a phone call came in to the desk of Detective Matt Hefner, who had recently joined the Charlotte Cold Case Squad.
I had several cases I was juggling at the time. I got a phone call on my desk phone from a cousin of these victims. And he told me who he was and told me about the case and asked me to look into it.
He told me about his cousin, Sarah Hall, and her son, Derek Mobley, that they'd been killed in 1984, and kind of gave me a list of enough information to find the case. Matt pulled the file and immersed himself into the facts. The original incident reports, the crime scene evidence, the witness interviews, the detective notes, everything he could get his hands on.
And there was one piece of evidence that immediately stood out, the still unidentified sample of DNA. So when I read through it, I saw there was DNA in the case. The DNA had been loaded into the FBI's CODIS database. We had a good DNA profile from a suspect, and it had been loaded into CODIS many years prior, and there had never been a match or a hit in CODIS. Even though we had no hits in CODIS, we were hoping we could find a new way to move forward with it.
Matt didn't have the answer, but he knew that with the advances in DNA technology, there was always the potential that this case could still be solved. And all it took was just one look at the crime scene photos for him to know, more importantly, that it had to be solved.
I'll say again, this was a particularly heinous scene. The physical injury you could see on Sarah's face based on these crime scene photos was so severe that I think if you had this case looked at from a profile standpoint, who might have done it? There's a lot of anger, what looks like anger taken out on Sarah versus Derek appears to have just been there as a witness and therefore harmed because of it.
Matt was convinced that the killer was someone known to Sarah, maybe even someone who was close to her. A brutal killer hiding in plain sight for nearly 40 years. In July 2021, we met with one of our DNA analysts here at the CMPD. We have our own crime lab in the building, the great CMPD.
We meet with an analyst. We talk about the DNA from the pillowcase to see what we can do. We ask the DNA analyst to see if there's enough quantity of DNA to make it a good candidate for forensic genetic genealogy. Forensic genetic genealogy. If you're a regular listener, you've obviously heard us discuss this before. But basically, it's a relatively new method of identifying an unknown DNA profile by a combination of science and old school detective work.
That's right. So you start by entering your unknown profile into one of the publicly available DNA databases like GEDmatch or Family Tree DNA. And then you see what familial matches turn up. For the general public, a person might be looking for long-lost relatives. For the police, they're looking for family members of a possible murder suspect.
You build this family tree around this John Doe, hoping to figure out who his family is. And as you narrow down to who his family is, then you start to realize who is he. If we can identify his aunt or his grandmother or his sister, we might know who he is. Especially if that person is from the area or even better, someone that you can prove had some relationship or contact with your victim.
Well, by middle of December, early to middle of December, my partner and I had new leads from this new company, and we were out chasing these leads. The DNA profile developed from evidence collected at the crime scene had been entered into these large public databases, and the databases were returning names of possible family members.
And some of these names would be distant relatives of the unknown suspect, as Matt described them, the kind of relatives who don't even know each other and who might be more than a little shocked to find out that someone in the family may be a killer. Everyone we met was very cooperative. When you tell them about the case, and we did tell them, they wanted to help. And then on January 23rd, 2023, Matt got a visit from the department's resident DNA expert.
Our DNA analyst, Eve Rossi, comes to our desk and says, I need to see you guys right now. And we're like, what's going on? And she says, we got a match in the familial testing at a North Carolina state crime lab. It turns out that North Carolina had seen the success of forensic genealogy and had begun developing their own DNA database for North Carolina citizens. And it was in this database that they finally got a promising hit. So she gives us a guy.
and she tells us your suspect and this guy are related. To be specific, if you can figure out who this guy's father is, this suspect is somewhere in this father's life. And we start doing what we do best, which is just digging into records. So we start looking up this guy. We find his birth records. We identify his mother through the birth records, but on the birth certificate, there's no father listed.
But this person's mother was still alive and living right there in North Carolina. So they decided to visit her in person and ask her the name of her son's father. He was very polite, very cooperative. And she says his father, without a doubt, is James Pratt. The name James Pratt had appeared nowhere in the case file. And after a little digging, it doesn't seem like he matches the profile of a violent killer.
James Pratt's kind of a ghost to us. James Pratt had been a pretty good guy through most of his life. As most people go, he had gotten in a little trouble as older teenage years or early 20s, a little bit of trouble, but nothing major, nothing violent.
But Pratt would have been just 22 years old at the time of the murders. And a lot can change in that amount of time. I said, tell me about James Pratt. This lady we're interviewing says, well, he's 61 years old and he's still in contact with my son. And back when I knew him and met him, he grew up in the Hidden Valley community. Hidden Valley is where our murder happened. So that was the first aha moment. We might be on the right path.
But Matt had no idea just how close he really was. We meet this guy. This is James Pratt's son. We're standing in a parking lot and we didn't lie to him. I just said, we're investigating a murder that happened over 30 years ago. Two people were killed. And what we know now is that someone in your male line, someone in your father's line,
committed this murder. We know the suspect is in that male line and we're just trying to figure out who it is. Would you mind giving us a sample? Well, he agrees. So as we're filling out the paperwork, this guy calls James Pratt. He calls his father and he's like, yo, pops, you won't believe this. I'm standing here with the police. Somebody in our family killed two people 30 years ago and we got to figure out who this is, pop. We got to figure out who in our family is murdered.
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Detectives believe that they were talking to a close relative of the unknown suspect in the murder of Sarah Hall and her son, Derek. According to genetic testing, the killer was somewhere in the male line of the man's father, James Pratt. He calls his father and he's like, yo, pops, we got to figure out who in our family is a murderer.
I'm going to give my DNA right now. So we swabbed him, went back to our office and continued doing the work that we do and trying to build out again who James Pratt's family is, who's James Pratt's brother, who's James Pratt's father, who else could fit in there and be this potential suspect. And that's where old school police work comes in. While CODIS might spit out a name, forensic genealogy still requires the research, the door knocking and the interviews of potential suspects.
Only this time, they actually got an unexpected break. So that's January the 23rd, two days from January 25th. Our DNA analyst, Eve Rossi, comes to see us. He's like, I need to show you something. So she showed us the more detailed data from the state crime lab on this familial match. And she explains to us what they are confident of now based on how close the information is, how close the DNA is, is that
The guy in the DNA profile and the suspect are absolutely father and son. Based on the numbers, based on the DNA markers, it has to be a father and son. But she said, if you know who this guy's dad is, that dad is your suspect. There's no doubt about it. We just need to focus on getting a DNA sample from him, from James Pratt.
Easier said than done. After all, if Pratt was indeed Sarah's killer, his own son had already tipped him off that police were still investigating the 40-year-old murder. So getting a voluntary DNA sample from Pratt was unlikely.
We wanted to get his DNA surreptitiously. We wanted to get his DNA without him knowing it. We have some people in our agency that had done this type of work before, had done the surveillance, had watched people and been able to collect their DNA through, say, a drink cup they discard and they get the straw or a drink bottle they discard and were able to get the bottle. Our team of guys who did this was tied up on other work, so our chain of command reached out to the FBI for assistance.
So with the help of the FBI, they tracked Pratt down to a hotel just across the border from Charlotte in South Carolina. And when they got there, those FBI agents decided to enlist the help of the hotel manager. The manager learns the room number from the FBI, and the manager basically says, I'm going to paraphrase, but the manager essentially says, oh, that's James' room. We know James. James works here. Hey, James, come here. Somebody wants to see you. So now the FBI agents are talking face-to-face with James Pratt.
Not exactly the way homicide detectives back in Charlotte, I'm sure, would have wanted this to go down. But nonetheless, the FBI agents tell Pratt that they're investigating a double murder and eliminating potential suspects by collecting DNA samples.
And James Pratt said he'd done nothing wrong and he would give his DNA willingly. So he did. He provided what we call a buckle swab. They were able to swab him, his cheek, and the FBI collected that and brought it to our Charlotte office. That was entered into our property and went eventually up to our crime lab.
And this time, detectives would not have to wait years for the results. The department's DNA analyst worked over the weekend. And bright and early Monday morning, she called Matt with the results. She tells us she's got the DNA finished and it is a match. Our profile from the pillow that Sarah was on, that semen profile from that pillow is a match to James Pratt.
39 years after the crime, this was definitive proof that Pratt had sexual contact with Sarah the night she was sexually assaulted and murdered. The decision was made just to get a warrant and have him arrested. One of the issues was we knew he'd been sitting brewing about this all weekend. We assumed he had figured out by now everything.
what this was about, you know, between the call from the son early in the week, telling him we were investigating a murder, him giving his DNA on Friday, and now the weekend's been sitting around. And if we go knock on his door again and try to talk to him, we thought, one, he could have armed himself. He could have prepared to go out in a blaze of glory. He could have been on the run. So we put an undercover team on him. It actually, without any issue, located him and arrested him based on our murder warrant.
According to Matt, he believed the case rested on this interview with Pratt. They had waited nearly 40 years for the truth. He was not going to rush it now. When we came into the room, a typical interview room, he was handcuffed. I've been in some training before with this person.
really good Texas Ranger. And he talked about using Dr. Pepper as a way to break the ice. So I'd actually stopped at a local store and I bought a bottle of Dr. Pepper for me and one for James and said, I'm going to see if this works. I took his handcuffs off and I set that bottle of Dr. Pepper down. And the first thing he did was ignore the water that had been in front of him. And he grabbed that bottle of Dr. Pepper, opened it up, and then he just chugged it. He just drank a big swig of this Dr. Pepper and he relaxed a little bit.
and we chatted for a little while. He waived his Fifth Amendment rights. He agreed to speak with us without an attorney. Matt knows the importance of building a rapport with his suspect, and he recalls Pratt being cooperative and forthcoming about his life and his background.
My father was raised and my grandparents lived on land that was really within sight of this crime scene and within sight of where James lived. So I was able to use that as my hook, my connection that, hey, we're kind of from the same area. So it got us talking. We talked about where he lived, how he grew up. It turns out he was a preacher's kid. His mother was a pastor. His father was a truck driver.
According to Pratt, he had lived a quiet life. He was a family man, a hard worker, and did not have any history of violence or criminal behavior. Here's a portion of Matt's recorded interview with James Pratt. Do you remember any crimes when you were living out there that way, in the Hidden Valley, in that area? Did anything ring a bell from that time frame? No, not really. No, not really. Nothing like a big mansion like that, no.
But he did admit to one very important detail. Eventually we get into a section where he admits to knowing Sarah Hall. He says that he had had a relationship with her. You and Sarah were kicking around. Tell me about that. That was it.
Talk to me about your time spent with Sarah. How many times did you meet up with her, see her, hang out with her, whatever you did? About three or four times. Not only that, he admitted to even knowing Sarah's son, Derek. Would he be there while y'all were hanging out? Like, be in bed? He'd be in bed if there was something like that. When we'd sit outside and my department would come back, sometimes we'd be inside. He'd sit down three or four times. Did you know she was murdered? No.
We got into the part of, I said, James, do you know why you're here? So why would you think we would have you here? How would you connect to her? How do you think we found you? So then how would we keep talking? How would we connect you to her? Okay. All right. Yeah, that's correct. Okay. That's correct.
He said, "You've got my DNA, don't you? You have my DNA?" And I said, "Yeah, I do." He said, "Why do you think I did this?" I said, "Because all the evidence points to you. All the evidence we have points to you." And he said, "Well, what did I do?" And I said, "No, James, that's a story for you to tell." He said, "That case file tells one story. I want you to tell your story."
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Matt then pointed to the photographs of Sarah and 10-year-old Derek that he had placed on the table in front of Pratt. James, I can't tell the story for you. Something happened there that night. And I know you don't want to tell me what happened. I know you're trying not to tell me what happened. But I told you I wouldn't lie. And no doubt in my mind that you did this.
I said, "James, I'm going to have to call their family. But in addition to calling their family, I'm going to have to call your family. I've already met your son. I'm going to have to speak with your son." And as I started saying this, he started to grab his head. He had a ball cap on. He kind of crushed the ball cap in his hands. And I could tell he was getting emotional. I said, "James, if you'll tell me the truth, I will make you a promise. If you'll tell me the truth, I'll never tell your family what you did to these people.
He just broke into the biggest wailing of a cry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It was the confession Matt had been hoping for, but it was even more than that.
Because at this point, detectives had never told Pratt how Sarah and Derek had been killed. The fact that they had been strangled was only information that the killer would have known. According to Matt, James Pratt's remorse did seem genuine. He's lived behind a secret for many, many years. And in those moments, all that came out. It just exploded out of him. And he cried and he wept and he talked about God and he talked about forgiveness and he talked about he had been to church.
But it's important to keep in mind that Pratt had had 39 years to come clean, but he never had. And no amount of remorse can make up for what he did to a young mother and her son.
Yes, he was remorseful. Yes, I feel he was genuinely sorry about what happened. But at this point, I was disregarding it because all I could think about was the joy of calling Sarah and Derek's family to tell them we had found out who killed them. Pratt never provided police with a reason he so brutally killed Sarah, pointing instead to his drug use at the time as a possible cause of his sudden rage and the gaping holes in his memory.
He admitted to being on cocaine heavily. He was using cocaine, and when he was using cocaine, he would just lose his mind. He admitted to strangling them with his hands, but he didn't remember wrapping anything around their necks. When I brought up the things he hit her with, he said that I hit her. And he said, I don't remember hitting her.
But for all his remorse, his confession stopped short of admitting to the sexual assault, despite all the evidence indicating that their encounter was non-consensual, from Sarah's horrific injuries to the way her clothing was pushed above her head.
Do I believe they had consensual sex? I do not. I don't believe they had consensual sex at all. What the scene tells me is that she probably said no. She probably didn't want to have sex. He probably made advances at her in some way, and James, you know, did what he did. He attacked her. Because this shows an attack. This shows a severe attack.
But one thing Pratt was willing to admit, the reason behind his murder of 10-year-old Derek, who by his own confession was a witness to his mother's brutal death. He remembers being on top of her and strangling her. And when he's finished, he looks up and he sees Derek standing there looking at him. And he says, I did him too.
And we question him about that, and he says, I knew that he knew who I was. He'd be able to identify me, and something to the effect of, I couldn't have that. I had to kill him, too. So he admits to killing Derek because Derek would have identified him as the killer of Sarah. I just flipped out. And then once that started going on, what happened? And then the next day, no, I just...
A 10-year-old child strangled by a man in the midst of a murderous, drug-fueled rage.
He left and went and passed out and woke up the next day and he said it seemed like a dream. And he remembered thinking to himself, what in the hell did I do last night? What did I do? How often would you say you think about this? Every day. Every day. Not just since we started this up. Every day since this happened. Every day. I pray. Faced with the DNA evidence and his own confession, Pratt opted to forego a trial and accept a plea deal.
While many will say that a trial feels like the only way to achieve the full measure of justice, Matt said that in this case, the plea deal was a way for Sarah's surviving family to avoid reliving that pain that a trial could have caused, as well as to eliminate the uncertainty of proving a case with 40-year-old evidence. We were out of the interview room minutes before
And I was already on the phone with the family. I don't use the word closure. I actually hate the word closure. I think the word closure indicates somebody's going to feel better. I don't think anybody feels better after a murder ever. I think you can hit points where you can take little steps towards getting better. And I think this was a giant step towards getting better, being able to make this call and tell her that through DNA. And I told her then that he had confessed, he'd admitted to it. It's just a great call to make.
Matt was able to share the news that Sarah and Derek's killer had been found, that their lives and their cruel deaths had not been forgotten, and that their killer would likely spend the rest of his life in prison. December of 2023, he pled guilty to counts of murder and received a 30-year sentence for each murder. In a letter to the judge during Pratt's sentencing, Sarah's cousin wrote...
Throughout this episode, Detective Matt Hefner detailed just how brutal and incredibly tragic this case was. A 10-year-old child and his mom, both taken in the most horrific way imaginable.
For an investigator, this is the kind of case that sticks with you, the kind that haunts your dreams. From the moment you step foot into the crime scene, the weight of the tragedy is undeniable. Every detail, no matter how small, becomes magnified. A misplaced toy, a half-eaten meal, a smudge on the wall. They're all potential clues, pieces of a puzzle the investigator desperately needs to put together.
We often talk about victimology and timelines. It's about piecing together the lives of these victims, understanding their routines, their relationships, their fears. The more you know about them, the better chances of finding the killer. This is the kind of case that demands every fiber of your being, a case that tests your limits of empathy and resolve. And then the phone rings again, and you pick yourself up and do it all over again.
Yet we can't forget this. For the families forever altered by these crimes, the pain is immeasurable. The loss of a loved one to violence leaves an enduring wound, a constant ache. Unlike detectives who move on to the next case, families are trapped in the aftermath, grappling with the absence and the unanswered questions. True closure, a sense of peace and resolution, often remains an elusive goal in the face of such a profound loss.
Sarah Hall and Derek Hall. Two lives gone because of what? A need for control? A need to cause terror and pain? The decision to take this child's life so their killer didn't get caught for the reprehensible acts he had committed against Derek's mom? All of it inexcusable, be it then or now. I am glad the defendant took responsibility and admitted to what he did, but it doesn't change that Sarah and Derek are gone forever.
Sarah was 27, Derek only 10. It took so many decades to solve this case, but law enforcement would not give up, did not give up. And I hope that message gives strength and a bit of optimism to the many people out there who are still waiting for similar answers in the many unsolved crimes. Sarah and Derek, you were not forgotten by so many men and women in Charlotte, North Carolina, who never even met you, but showed that they cared and that they loved you.
for years until they got the answers and accountability you both deserve. Rest in peace.
Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa, Megan Hayward, and Philjean Grande. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?
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