Her unexplained death at age 38 led to her husband, John Hill, becoming the first person to be indicted by the state of Texas on the charge of murder by omission.

Adopted as an infant by wealthy oil tycoon Davis Ashton "Ash" Robinson and his wife, Rhea, Joan became an equestrian at a young age.

Davis Ashton "Ash" Robinson studied dentistry at Tulane College, New Orleans, but disliked the subject and chose not to follow it as a career.

In March 1931, Rhea visited the Edna Gladney Home in Fort Worth, where she was introduced to the one-month-old Joan Olive, who had been given up for adoption by her unmarried mother.

[4][8] By the age of seven, she was regularly competing at an amateur level on three- and five-gaited American Saddlebred horses, and she continued to achieve success, attaining first or second place in almost every contest she entered between 1938 and 1945.

She married Spike Benton, who had a promising career as a Navy pilot, then New Orleans lawyer and childhood friend Cecil Burglass.

[4] Joan competed professionally throughout the 1950s and 1960s, winning as many as 500 trophies on her American Saddlebred horses CH Beloved Belinda (WCC, WC, RWCC, RWC.

[11] During the 1950s, Houston-based surgeons such as Michael E. DeBakey and Denton Cooley were pioneering new heart-surgery techniques, attracting a high volume of medical residents who wished to study under their tutelage.

Realizing that the city would soon be awash with cardiac surgeons, Hill looked at alternative surgical careers, eventually opting for plastic surgery.

He was a popular member of the residency program, but almost had his medical career cut short after perforating a patient's bowel during a routine operation, then stitching the man up without repairing the damage.

[14] Upon completing his residency, Hill was offered a partnership by Nathan Roth, a New York City-trained surgeon who had established himself in Houston, and he joined the practice in 1963.

Gold and white silk wall panels concealed shelves for records, music-related books, and Hill's musical instruments.

[10] Hill had embarked on an extramarital affair with Ann Kurth, a thrice-divorced mother of three sons whom he met when they were both collecting their respective children from summer camp in August 1968.

On the day following the argument, Hill took his son for a haircut, and during the drive, they went to his apartment to pick up some things; the boy talked with his mother about it when he arrived home.

[47] Joan invited her friend and neighbor Vann Maxwell over to discuss the matter, and when she arrived, announced an impromptu game of bridge with Settegast and Woolen in the music room.

She found Joan lying in her own body wastes and vomit as John Hill stood at the foot of his wife's bed.

Upon arrival at Sharpstown General, Robinson Hill's blood pressure was 60/40; the hospital nurse promptly took a second reading, as she believed that she had made some sort of error.

[57] After determining that the reading was correct, the nurse believed Joan was in shock and placed a call to Dr. Walter Bertinot, who was named as his wife's attending physician by John Hill.

She ran to the room's doorway and shouted to the nurses' station to have the resident on duty come immediately with cardiac failure equipment.

[5][20][66] Texas state law at the time required an autopsy, before any embalming or burial could take place, for anyone who died in a hospital within 24 hours of admission.

Morse concluded his autopsy at 11:30 am without finding any signs of what caused Robinson Hill's death aside from a maroon coloration of her pancreas and offered an opinion that she may have died from pancreatitis.

[68] Since receiving Dr. Morse's opinion that his daughter had died from pancreatitis, Robinson had been consulting doctors on the matter, who had advised him that this was an unlikely cause of death.

[73] Helpern examined the body of Joan Robinson Hill for seven and a half hours, then went back to New York City with his tissue samples, saying he would issue a report on his findings at a later date.

[72] The series of autopsies indicated that Robinson Hill had suffered a "massive infection" from an undetermined source, but because the body had been embalmed before an initial examination was conducted, an exact cause of death could not be identified.

[73] Following the autopsy, Joseph Jachimczyk issued a fresh report in which he observed, "It is now my opinion that Joan Robinson Hill came to her death as a result of a fulminating infectious process, the specific nature of which is no longer determinable.

[5] Following Hill's marriage to Kurth, Ash Robinson accused his former son-in-law of poisoning his daughter,[78] and petitioned the district attorney to launch a murder investigation.

[80] McMaster and his fellow assistant district attorney, Ernie Ernst, believed that Hill had murdered his wife, but that there was not enough evidence to indict him.

The jury voted 10–2 to indict Hill for murder by omission, deciding that he had "willfully, intentionally, and culpably" contributed to his wife's death because he had not given her sufficient medical help.

[97] Kurth published her own account of the case entitled Prescription Murder, in which she repeated her claim that Hill had tried to kill her, and alleged that he may have poisoned his first wife with bacteria-laced pastries.

[42] Journalist Jerry Buck noted in an article preceding the film's debut on NBC that the face of the shooting victim had been battered and that there were anomalies in the autopsy report, notably that Hill had a different eye color from that recorded for the dead person.