It only took an instant for two families to be destroyed forever.
Three gunshots in a Walgreens parking lot on March 11, 2011 would leave one man dead and another behind bars for decades.
It was a violent end to the torrid affair between married mom of two Kandi Hall and her boss, Emmett Corrigan — an attorney and married father of five himself.
Emmett was killed when Kandi’s husband, Rob, fired two bullets into his wife’s lover, but was it self-defense or cold-blooded murder?
“Among tales of deceit and betrayal, and there are many, this one is unforgettable,” reporter Keith Morrison reflected in Oxygen’s Dateline: Unforgettable.
Who are Kandi Hall and her husband, Rob Hall?
The Halls’ life had been filled with such promise when they moved from southern California to Meridian, Idaho in 2006.
The couple had been together for years and were parents to two teenage daughters. Rob took a job as a computer specialist at the Ada County Sheriff’s Office, while his wife worked as a paralegal.
But Kandi told Dateline: Unforgettable the couple’s marriage began to struggle after she found out that Rob was having an affair. They worked to try to rebuild their relationship, but Kandi’s self-esteem took a huge hit and the nearly 40-year-old began to believe that Rob had stepped out on the marriage because she “just was boring.”
Kandi Hall’s Relationship with Emmett Corrigan
It may have been why she was so immediately smitten with Emmett when she began working for him at his new law office. Emmett — who married his college sweetheart Ashlee and was the father of five — was much younger and seemed to be equally drawn to her. Within weeks, they were having a steamy affair in the fall of 2010.
“I would like to be put on that pedestal. Emmett made me feel that way. It was pretty much an ego boost to me,” Kandi recalled.
Kandi insisted she wasn’t trying to get back at her husband, but she also wasn’t thinking about anyone else who may have been hurt by the affair.
“I was thinking about me and only me. You know what, it made me feel good, it made me feel like I was on top of the world,” Kandi confessed.
While the romance between Emmett and Kandi was heating up, Emmett’s young wife, Ashlee, was wondering why her seemingly happy marriage was suddenly unraveling.
Ashlee — who was more than 10 years younger than Kandi — never suspected he was having an affair with the paralegal.
“The way he described her was an older woman he looked up to in a motherly way,” Ashlee told Morrison. “He said, ‘She just believes in me, she thinks I’m going to be this great lawyer.’”
Yet, by February of 2011, Ashlee knew there was something wrong. Emmett seemed stressed and was spending less time at the house.
“There was one time my son asked me if he lived with us anymore,” she remembered.
When Ashlee tried to confront her husband, she felt “pushed away” and began to go to marriage counseling on her own to see if she could try to save the union.
“You want to be everything that they want. It was hard not to take personal,” she said of her husband’s disinterest in their once happy home life.
When was Emmett Corrigan killed?
Just a month later, Ashlee still had no idea why her husband seemed to be withdrawing from the marriage.
On the night of March 11, 2011, Emmett and Ashlee got into a fight after she told him that her family was praying for them.
“He said, ‘Your family? I hate your family. I could beat your brother up. I could kill all of you,’ and I grabbed his face and I was like, ‘You know what? I love you. I’m not going anywhere. I don’t care what it is, just tell me what’s happening,’” she recalled of the dramatic exchange. “I don’t know, I felt like that was the last chance and he — he didn’t take it. He didn’t open up about anything.”
Then, in the middle of their argument, Emmett announced he was going to Walgreens.
Just a few miles across town, Kandi and her husband, Rob, who had discovered the affair months earlier, were talking about a possibility of reconciling and trying to patch up their badly damaged marriage, when Kandi also announced that she was going to Walgreens.
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Kandi and Emmett met up at the store, where she left her car and hopped into Emmett’s pickup truck. After they drove to a secluded spot to have sex, Kandi got a call from her teenage daughter, who had seen her car at the Walgreens and was wondering where she was.
Her daughter said she had also told her father about spotting the car at the drugstore.
Surveillance footage from the Walgreens showed Rob arriving in his own pickup truck, walking into the store in search of his wife and then returning to his truck.
Inside the truck, he called Kandi and asked if she was with Emmett.
After confirming that she was with her boss, Kandi said Emmett took the phone from her.
“He goes, ‘Yeah, what’s up, chief?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, wait right there, we’ll be right there. You wait right there,’” she remembered.
Kandi claimed she tried to de-escalate the situation, but Emmett drove to the Walgreens where they met up with Rob in the parking lot, outside the view of the store’s security cameras.
Kandi told Dateline that Emmett instigated a fight by shoving Rob. According to her account, she told both men to head back to their trucks and started to walk away when she heard a series of gunshots and turned to see her husband covered in blood and bleeding from the head.
Emmett lay on the ground with a shot to his head and another to his heart. Kandi rushed over and kissed her dying lover before placing a frantic call to 911.
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Robert. Robert. Robert. Robert,” she can be heard screaming in the call.
Was Rob Hall convicted of murdering Emmett Corrigan?
Rob would later claim that during a scuffle between the two men, his loaded pistol fell from his pocket and Emmett grabbed it, firing a shot that grazed his head, before he got control of the weapon and fired the two fatal shots into Emmett’s body.
“I didn’t bring a gun there to gun down Emmett Corrigan,” he insisted to Morrison.
His attorneys argued that Emmett, who had amphetamines and steroids in his truck, had flown into a rage that night, starting the violence.
Prosecutors, however, didn’t believe that the shooting had been in self-defense. They believed Rob fired the two shots at Emmett, then turned the gun on himself and tried to take his own life with a third bullet that just grazed his skull.
“I think that Robert Hall went to the Walgreens in order to confront Emmett Corrigan, that he took a loaded gun, and Rob decided that was his opportunity to get his Kandi back by killing Emmett,” prosecutor Jason Spillman said.
Rob was the only one who had gunshot residue on his hand and his DNA was the only DNA found on the trigger of the gun.
Kandi took the stand in her husband’s defense and professed her love for him during her testimony, but prosecutors honed in on a number of inconsistencies in her changing stories about what happened that night.
In the end, Rob was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 30 years behind bars. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2028.
What happened After Emmett Corrigan’s death?
For Ashlee, learning of her husband’s infidelity and death in the same night was a staggering blow.
“It was like the ultimate humiliation,” she said. “It was, not only is your husband gone, but you know that marriage you were trying so hard to save, here’s all the answers of why it was going wrong. But, now you don’t have a marriage to save anymore.”
Despite the tragedy, Ashlee later got remarried, wrote a book, and became a successful public speaker encouraging others to put their family first.
As for Kandi, she went on to serve 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to grand theft for embezzling $30,000 from the employer she worked for before Emmett.
She told Dateline she’s still haunted by the fatal end to her love affair.
“I have a lot of guilt still in me, a lot, and it has to do with my kids and his kids and it makes me sick how I could do something like that,” Kandi said. “I’m the responsible one and it’s something that, I don’t know, are they ever going to be able to get through that? I mean, hopefully I can prove to them one day that it was just a mistake.”
