A Question Of Murder

Did John Maloney Get A Fair Trial?

(CBS) 
Lola Cator has thought about her daughter Sandy every single day, since 1998, when her daughter died. "This is just something I'll never get over with," says Cator, who discovered Sandy's charred body the morning after the fire. "She was on the couch. She'd been burned."

And from that first instant, Cator blamed Maloney for her daughter's death: "He wanted her gone. He hated her."

Cator says she thinks Maloney hated Sandy because she was dragging her feet on the divorce. By now, Maloney had a new, much younger girlfriend, a 28-year-old IRS agent named Tracy Hellenbrand. Cator believed that Sandy was getting in the way of their new life: "I know he went there to kill her."

Special Prosecutor Joe Paulus shared Cator's certainty, and told the jury that Maloney was under stress, deeply in debt, and desperate to get out of the relationship. So, Paulus told the jury that Maloney went to Sandy's house that night to make sure that she'd be in court the next day. They argued, and Paulus says Maloney hit Sandy over the head with a blunt object; the wound bled onto her shirt.

Paulus then said Maloney panicked and strangled Sandy, putting his knee in her back as she lay on the couch. The medical examiner bolstered Paulus' case, concluding that Sandy probably had been strangled, and saying that he had found trauma to her neck.

Paulus said that after discarding the bloody shirt in a hamper in the basement, Maloney set the couch on fire to hide his crime – leaving behind half-smoked cigarettes to make it look like an accident.

However, the most damning evidence came from the Lady Luck Hotel in Las Vegas. Five months after Sandy's death, Maloney had flown there for a weekend with girlfriend, Tracy Hellenbrand.

"I don’t even know why I even went out there," recalls Maloney. "I guess that’s one of the foolish things that people do that think they’re in love."

What Maloney didn't know was that his love had had a change of heart and that Hellenbrand was now secretly working with prosecutors, who were still looking for concrete evidence again Maloney.

The hotel room was wired, and a video camera was hidden in a clock radio. Cops watched closely from next door. Hellenbrand's job was to get Maloney to confess. For hours, she asked him over and over again, "Did you kill Sandy? Did you?"

But Maloney kept denying he had killed his wife. Then, finally, he appeared to incriminate himself. He admits he was at Sandy's house the night she died.

"That videotape showed a man confessing to the crimes that he committed," says Paulus.

Prosecutors had heard enough. They arrested Maloney that same day.

But the tape also shows a man with an uncontrollable temper. "I'm not proud of being that angry," says Maloney.