Hollywood agent's son accused of murdering wife and in-laws kills himself
Samuel Bond Haskell IV, 37, was arrested in November 2023 and charged with the murders of his wife, Mei Haskell, her mother, Yanxiang Wang, and her stepfather, Gaoshan Li. Haskell pleaded not guilty to the three murder counts in January 2024 and was being held without bail pending trial. He was facing a sentence of life in prison with no parole.
Haskell was found dead in his jail cell on Saturday morning, according to a statement from the LA county district attorney, Nathan Hochman, days before he was scheduled to appear in court for a preliminary hearing.
'Instead of standing before a judge and answering for the crimes he's been charged with, the defendant managed to escape justice,' Hochman said. 'This is one last cruel act by someone who did the most horrific things for reasons we will never entirely know. A family that has been dealing with unimaginable loss now has been robbed of their chance to face him, hold him accountable for his barbaric actions, and openly share their grief and their cherished memories of their loved ones.'
Haskell is the son of Sam Haskell III, who was the worldwide head of television for William Morris and represented clients including Dolly Parton, George Clooney and Prince Edward before his retirement 20 years ago.
In 2023, Haskell had been living with his wife, their three young children, and her parents in Tarzana, California.
On 8 November of that year, a person looking through a strip-mall Dumpster in Encino, California, 5 miles from Haskell's house, discovered a torso, later confirmed to belong to his wife, in a black garbage bag. The body was so unrecognizable after being chopped into pieces that it took the Los Angeles coroner's office more than a month to make a positive identification.
The case is among the most gruesome to hit the headlines in years, yet the Los Angeles police almost missed it because a group of day laborers who first found evidence of the murders on 7 November spoke only Spanish and were not taken seriously when they reported their findings.
Haskell had hired and paid the men $500 to take away heavy black plastic trash bags from his home in Tarzana. After opening the bag to find human body parts, the workers returned the bags and money to Haskell, then alerted police.
The same afternoon, Haskell was seen on video disposing of a black garbage bag in the Encino strip-mall.
The bodies of Wang and Li have never been found.
An uncle of Mei's told the Los Angeles Times that she had come to the United States from China to study accounting and met her future husband when they were both students at Cal State Northridge, a public university in the northern San Fernando Valley. After the first of their three children was born in 2010, Mei's parents emigrated from China and moved in with them.
According to the uncle, Mei worked several jobs and was the main breadwinner in the household. It is not clear what work, if any, Haskell did or whether his family supported him financially.
A lawyer for the Haskell family, Joseph A Weimortz Jr, told NBC News that Haskell was 'not afraid of prison, but was afraid of an even larger media spectacle', and how it would impact his children.
'Ultimately, my client was even willing to take his own life, believing that it would end this terrible chaos,' Weimortz said. 'The Haskell family grieves every single life lost in this case.'
Andrew Gumbel contributed reporting
In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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