The Horrifying True Story of the Hart
Family Murder-Suicide: Abuse, Lies and Unspeakable Tragedy
A white lesbian couple adopted six Black children…and one of the women drove off a cliff in March 2018. Today, investigators are still looking for answers.
Jen and Sarah Hart seemed like they had it all, which is exactly what Jen wanted her Facebook followers to believe.
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The young couple’s motherhood journey had been documented for friends and family to follow and fawn over ever since they adopted their first set of siblings in 2006.
Then, on March 26, 2018, German tourists found the family’s 2003 GMX Yukon XL after it flipped and fell off of a cliff on the 101 Highway in Northern California, with Jen, Sarah, both 38, and three of their six adopted Black children found dead at the scene. The shocking accident made national news.
But then the details started emerging, like the fact that Jen, who had been driving, had alcohol in her system, while Sarah and two of the children appeared to have taken Benadryl. No one seemed to have been wearing a seat belt at the time of the crash. And the speedometer was at 90 miles per hour. Had Jen not tried to brake at all? Or did she purposefully drive the SUV off the cliff?
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“I’m to the point where I no longer am calling this as an accident,” Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman said on HLN’s Crime & Justice shortly after the tragic event. “I’m calling it a crime.”
That crime and the unspeakable tragedy of the Hart family was once again examined in 2020’s documentary, A Thread of Deceit: The Hart Family Tragedy.
A Thread of Deceit’s producer Rachel Morgan isn’t the first person to look into the Hart family murder-suicide, with Internet sleuthers, investigators, podcasters and journalists all previously revealing the horrifying details of the alleged child abuse and domestic abuse leading up to the 2018 car incident.
“It was important for us to go into the documentary unbiased and let the story tell itself in any way that it took form,” Morgan told E! News of the new documentary. “I felt it crucial to allow the friends who were silenced by harassment to be able to speak their point of view.”
Morgan continued, “I felt it was just as important to share the cold hard facts from the investigation and inquest without sugar-coating it.”
And the cold hard facts that immediately started surfacing after the GMX Yukon XL was found flipped over at the bottom of a cliff will likely be difficult for many to hear, with investigators soon realizing there was more to the Hart family than what Jen’s cheery and inspirational Facebook posts had led people to believe.
As more information was uncovered, more and more questions about who Sarah and Jen arose, and in Broken Harts, an investigative podcast from Glamour and HowStuffWorks, their relationship history, ongoing troubles with Child Protective Services and allegations of abuse are being meticulously unpacked, as reporters talk to their friends, family, neighbors and the police to try and understand one of the most disturbing stories.
“Everyone was envious,” family friend Ian Sperling told Glamour of the couple. “They were the perfect people with the perfect kids.”
Another friend, Zippy Lomax, told the magazine, “There was nothing about the way Jen was presenting their life that seemed at all at odds with my understanding of who they were.”
But behind the endless stream of photos of their six children smiling, presented with long, happy-memory-filled captions, was a long history of abuse allegations, with the couple being reported and investigated in three different states.
In 2006, Jen and Sarah, who had then been dating for about a year, became first-time mothers in a big way: A set of siblings — Markis, 8, Hannah, 4, and Abigail, 2 — became their foster children.
In a detailed Facebook post, Jen recounted the hardships of their first night of motherhood, but said they remained committed to becoming mothers to the three Texas siblings. “If not us — WHO?” she wrote.
Two years later, they took in three more foster children, another trio of siblings: Devonte, 5, Jermiah, 4, and Ciera, 3, with the couple changing the spelling of latter children’s name to Jeremiah and Sierra.
And, as it turned out, the couple had actually fostered another child in 2004, when they were in their mid-twenties. A 15-year-old girl came to live with them and was expecting to be a big sister to the first set of siblings they would adopt…until they dropped her off at a therapist’s office and she never saw them again.
While there was some friction between the girl and the couple, mostly Jen, she told The Seattle Times, “I remember being devastated.”
While Sarah worked, Jen stayed home and raised the children, later home-schooling them after they were all abruptly pulled out of school following investigations by CPS. The couple was big into “transformational festivals,” which partially factored into their move from Minnesota to Portland in 2013. They would bring their kids to the days-long events, which included yoga, music and dancing.
Jen would often post photos from these festivals, with all of the children wearing huge smiles, and would share inspiring updates from their daily life. As a friend told Glamour, “She was a master poster.”
Commenters would leave glowing remarks about their parenting. Some even asked if they would ever think of doing a reality show. “She made parenting look unbelievably easy and awesome and there was no red flags,” Sperling said in episode 3 of Broken Harts. “Zero.”
But the first sign of something not being right in the Hart household actually happened ten years prior to the horrifying crash, with police interviewing the couple in September 2008 after Hannah showed up at school with bruises on her arm, telling a teacher she had been whipped with a belt, according to a police report.
No criminal charges were filed.
Still, how was the couple ultimately allowed to foster three more children, with the agency even using a photo of Jen and Sarah with their first three adopted kids? “Unless there’s a criminal charge, what can you do?” now-retired judge Patrick Shelton, who presided over the court that granted the couple custody of the second set of siblings, told The Appeal. “Believe it or not, kids get bruises that do not get beat.”
Then in 2010, Sarah was charged with malicious punishment of a child and misdemeanor domestic assault, according to Minnesota court records, after bruises were discovered on Abigail at school. But in the police report, Abigail had said it was Jen that had injured her because they thought she had stolen a penny that fell out of her pocket. When the other children were questioned, they revealed they were often spanked or sent to bed without food.
When Sarah told police she had been the one to spank Abigail, Jen backed up her account, with investigators believing them.
“They were a little guarded. They didn’t want anyone in their business,” Larry Dailey, the former police who interviewed the Harts,
In 2011, after Sarah plead guilty, she was sentenced to community service and one year probation. Around this time was when the couple pulled all six of the kids out of school and they never went back.
Following their move to Oregon in 2013, a few people called into CPS to report some troubling things they had noticed. According to one CPS report, an anonymous person, who called the children “trained robots,” brought attention to the alleged façade of Jen’s Facebook posts: “Jen does this thing for her Facebook page, where the kids pose and are made to look like one big happy family, but after the photo event, they go back to looking lifeless.”
The person also said they seemed “scared to death of Jen.”
