Background
On May 25, 2021, police were called to the home of Matt Hendershot in Berkeley County, West Virginia, after a neighbor reported a shooting. Matt Hendershot, who was the petitioner’s ex-husband, was found dead at the scene. Rida Shahid Hendershot, who was present when officers arrived, claimed she had accidentally shot him while the two were moving firearms into his bedroom. Police initially charged her with reckless use of a firearm, but after forensic testing revealed that the Ed Brown 1911 pistol used in the shooting had multiple manual safeties that made accidental discharge highly unlikely, she was indicted in February 2022 on first-degree murder and felony use of a firearm during the commission of a felony.
At trial, the State presented evidence that the petitioner had moved into the victim’s home in spring 2020 after her then-fiancé died, with the arrangement intended to be temporary. Instead, nearly a year elapsed amid mounting acrimony, with the victim repeatedly demanding that the petitioner leave while she refused. The State’s theory was that the shooting was not an accident but the culmination of an escalating pattern of domestic abuse perpetrated by the petitioner against the victim — a reversal of the more common dynamic, as the victim was male and had never reported the abuse to authorities. The jury convicted the petitioner of second-degree murder and use of a firearm during the commission of a felony, and the circuit court sentenced her to consecutive terms of forty and ten years. She appealed.
On appeal, the petitioner raised three assignments of error: (1) the circuit court improperly admitted evidence of five prior bad acts — pointing an AR-15 at the victim’s head, breaking three of his doors, brandishing a machete, striking him and attempting to stab him with a fork, and stabbing a prior boyfriend with a screwdriver — either as intrinsic evidence or under Rule 404(b); (2) the circuit court improperly admitted expert testimony about typical domestic violence dynamics and escalation patterns; and (3) the evidence was insufficient to support the verdicts, requiring judgment of acquittal or a new trial.
The Court’s Holding
The Supreme Court of Appeals affirmed on all three assignments of error. On the other-acts evidence, the court first rejected the circuit court’s rationale that the victim’s text messages describing the AR-15 and broken-doors incidents were non-hearsay party admissions, because the declarant was the victim, not a party. The court nonetheless upheld admission under West Virginia Rule of Evidence 807, the residual hearsay exception, finding that all four statutory requirements were satisfied: the victim’s statements were trustworthy in light of the totality of the evidence; they were offered on a material fact; they were the most probative evidence reasonably available since the victim was dead and had never reported the abuse; and admission served the interests of justice.
The court further held that the AR-15, broken-doors, fork, and machete incidents were properly admitted as evidence intrinsic to the charged crime rather than as extrinsic Rule 404(b) evidence. Because the State’s theory was that escalating domestic violence perpetrated by the petitioner led directly to a fatal outcome, those prior acts were inextricably intertwined with the murder and constituted necessary preliminaries to it — placing them outside Rule 404(b)’s scope entirely. The screwdriver stabbing of a former boyfriend, which was more temporally remote, was separately upheld as admissible under Rule 404(b) to show lack of accident and absence of mistake. The court found no abuse of discretion in the admission of the domestic violence expert’s testimony, and applying the heavy sufficiency standard from State v. Guthrie, concluded that ample evidence supported the jury’s verdict that the shooting was intentional rather than accidental.
On the expert testimony challenge, the court found no error in admitting the testimony of Katie Spriggs, the domestic violence expert, who testified about the power-and-control dynamic, the underreporting of abuse by male victims, and how escalating violence heightens the risk of a lethal outcome. Notably, Ms. Spriggs offered no opinion as to whether the petitioner was in fact an abuser or whether the victim was a domestic violence victim — limiting her testimony to general patterns — which weighed in favor of admissibility.
Key Takeaways
- A murder victim’s out-of-court statements describing a defendant’s prior acts of violence are not admissible as party admissions under Rule 801(d)(2) — the victim is not a party — but may qualify under the residual hearsay exception, Rule 807, where the totality of trial evidence establishes their trustworthiness and no better evidence is available.
- Prior acts of domestic violence by a defendant against a murder victim are properly treated as intrinsic evidence — not subject to Rule 404(b) — when the State’s theory is that those acts represent an escalating pattern inextricably intertwined with and necessary to the charged crime.
- Expert testimony on general domestic violence dynamics, including the underreporting of abuse by male victims and escalation toward lethal outcomes, is admissible without requiring the expert to opine on whether the specific defendant was an abuser or the specific victim was abused.
- On sufficiency review, a defendant bears a heavy burden; the appellate court views all evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution and will not disturb a verdict where the jury could rationally find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces that domestic violence prosecutions are not limited to cases where the stereotypical victim — female — seeks help from authorities. The court’s analysis explicitly recognizes that male victims of domestic abuse report at lower rates, and that a victim’s silence does not undermine the trustworthiness of statements he did make describing his abuser’s conduct. By upholding Rule 807 as an avenue for admitting a deceased victim’s contemporaneous accounts of abuse, the decision provides prosecutors a viable evidentiary path when the victim cannot testify and left no police reports.
The court’s intrinsic-evidence holding also carries practical significance: when the State frames a murder case as the lethal endpoint of a sustained abusive relationship, prior acts evidence documenting that relationship may bypass Rule 404(b)’s procedural hurdles altogether. Defense counsel in similar cases will need to challenge the State’s framing at the threshold, contesting whether the pattern of prior conduct is truly inextricably intertwined with the charged crime rather than impermissible propensity evidence dressed in intrinsic-evidence clothing.