Producer Sam Haskell is known for clean-cut family programs, but cops say his son Samuel Haskell IV was a bloodthirsty monster who hacked his wife and her parents into pieces and then took the cowardly way out — killing himself before standing trial.
The 37-year-old was found to have committed suicide in his L.A. cell just two days before a July 14 hearing, where prosecutors expected the father of three to plead guilty to the grisly murders of his wife, Mei Li, 37, her father, Gaoshan Li, 72, and mother, Yanxiang Wang, 64.
“Instead of standing before a judge and answering for the crimes he’s been charged with, the defendant managed to escape justice,” L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman told NBCLA.
“This is one last cruel act by someone who did the most horrific things for reasons we will never entirely know.”
Cops say that Haskell, whose dad produced family holiday TV specials for Dolly Parton and movies featuring the Waltons, went kill-crazy in his suburban Tarzana home, where he slaughtered the mother of his children and his in-laws before carving them up and tossing the pieces in a dumpster in 2023.
As the National Enquirer reported, a homeless man found the headless torso of Mei, mom of Haskell’s three kids, in a dumpster at an Encino strip mall Nov. 8.
A license plate of a man seen dumping a large bag was snapped by a witness and sent cops to Haskell’s $2.5 million home, where they found blood and other evidence of a crime.
Later, freaked-out day workers told cops Haskell paid them $500 to haul away three large 50-pound bags, supposedly of rocks, but instead containing something soft and soggy.
A worker who looked inside says, “I started seeing body parts, a belly button.”
The frightened men returned the bags to Haskell, but were ignored by cops when they tried to make a report.
Cops never found the bodies of Mei’s parents, but blood on a military knife reportedly matched all three victims.
Prosecutors say that before his suicide, Haskell was set to plead guilty to all the murders to save his children from an emotionally brutal trial.
Adds a source: “It’s bizarre that the son of a producer behind such wholesome family fare could do something so foul, violent and evil.”
