NEWS

Parent killer’s convictions upheld

Douglas Walker
dwalker@muncie.gannett.com
  • Brian Scott Hartman was sentenced to 120 years in prison for the 2010 murders of his parents.
  • Authorities said Hartman shot his father, then gave his mother a fatal drug overdose.

WINCHESTER – The Indiana Court of Appeals has upheld the convictions of a Randolph County man who killed his parents.

A Randolph Circuit Court jury last October found Brian Scott Hartman, now 37, guilty of two counts of murder in the February 2010 slayings. Judge Jay Toney later imposed a 120-year sentence, calling Hartman “the definition of a cold-blooded killer.”

Prosecutor David Daly said Hartman fatally shot his 53-year-old father, also named Brian Hartman, in the family’s southwestern Randolph County home. He then caused the death of his 52-year-old mother, Cheri Ann, likely with a fatal overdose of her prescription medication.

Cheri Hartman had suffered from cancer and emphysema, and her remains were cremated — at her son’s direction — before authorities learned her husband had been slain.

In an appeal, Hartman contended:

• The murder charge stemming from his mother’s death was filed against him based on “a desire to punish the defendant for something the law allowed him to do.”

Hartman had at first been charged with assisting a suicide in his mother’s death. After the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that a statement the defendant gave to police — in which he admitted to shooting his father and giving his mother a fatal overdose — could not be used as evidence, Daly filed the murder count in Cheri’s Hartman’s death.

The three-member appeals panel ruled there was no evidence that charge was “punishment for (Hartman’s) pre-trial motion to suppress.”

• He should have been tried separately on each murder count.

“Acknowledging the overwhelming evidence against him in the death of his father, Hartman argues he was only convicted of killing his mother because the evidence showed that he killed his father ... (creating) an improper inference of guilt,” Judge Margret Robb wrote in the 3-0 opinion.

Robb wrote there was no evidence “the jury had difficulty in distinguishing the evidence at is related to (the elder Brian Hartman) or Cheri Ann, or that the jury had difficulty applying the law to each offense.”

Hartman is incarcerated at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. His projected release date is in February 2070, when he would be 93, according to a state Department of Correction website.

Contact news reporter Douglas Walker at (765) 213-5851. You can also follow him on Twitter @DouglasWalkerSP.