Life in prison for a murder that perhaps never even happened

Family and justice group want freedom for former detective convicted in wife's death

By GINA BARTON
of the Journal Sentinel staff

Last Updated: Aug. 3, 2002

Green Bay - If you believe the prosecution, here's what happened:

       John Maloney was sick of dealing with his estranged wife, Sandy. He thought she was neglecting their three sons. She was abusing alcohol and drugs. And she was missing court hearings in their pending divorce.

On the morning of Feb. 10, 1998, John called Sandy to tell her he would bring the boys for a visit later that day.

That was the only way she would let him onthe property without making a scene.

But John didn't bring the kids. Instead, he tried to impress on Sandy the importance of attending a hearing the following morning. The custody battle had dragged on for nine months. He wanted it done. He wanted his 20-year marriage ended, so he could move forward with his new girlfriend, Tracy Hellenbrand - who was going to break up with him unless Sandy was out of their lives.

In the prosecution version, John snapped. The former Green Bay police detective and arson investigator bashed his wife over the head, strangled her with his bare hands, set her house on fire and left her to burn.

The jurors believed it. Murder, after all, was the only theory they heard.

But evidence that never made it into court suggests the detective's wife might not have been murdered at all.

John Maloney's children are growing up virtually orphans as he serves life in prison - perhaps not only for a crime he didn't commit, but for a crime that didn't happen.

John Maloney, now 45, met Sandra Cator when both were students at Preble High School in the 1970s. When John proposed shortly after Sandy's graduation, she accepted with enthusiasm.

John remembers their first seven years of marriage as among the happiest times in his life. Sandy was a sweet and doting wife, one who played hostess at dinner parties but wasn't afraid to go skinny-dipping when they were alone.

Sandy worked as a secretary while John completed a two-year program in criminal justice. He went into police work, looking for excitement and for a job that would have made his parents - who died when he  was a little boy - proud.

In the early 1980s, the couple's life began to deteriorate slowly, he says.

The birth of their first son, Matt, was difficult; the baby spent two days in intensive care with doctors cautioning that he might not survive.

Matt made it through the crisis, but his mother constantly worried about his health.

The couple had two more children. Sandy was a "Kool-Aid mom" who looked after all the kids on the block.

Then, on the morning of a Police Department picnic in the early 1990s, she woke up with a stiff neck.

She went to a chiropractor but, instead of relief, ended up with a disturbing numbness on the right side of her body.

She feared she had multiple sclerosis, and although one specialist after another told her it wasn't so, Sandy didn't believe them. A neurologist prescribed Klonopin, a highly addictive anti-anxiety medication.

Over the next several years, the woman John fell in love with slowly disappeared into prescription drug and alcohol abuse. Her family struggled to get Sandy help.

She was in and out of rehab programs and mental hospitals. She
wrecked one minivan. Then another.

Those closest to her worried that she would kill herself.

John slowly detached from his sisters - even the one who raised him after his parents' deaths - not wanting them to know about Sandy's problems.

He shielded the kids as best he could and warned them never to get in the van with their mother if she was acting strangely. When Sandy started arguing, John agreed with her, whether he shared her views or not. It was the easiest way to keep the situation from escalating.

An unrecognizable body

Sandy's mother, Lola Cator, discovered the body on the morning of Feb. 11, 1998. Cator had driven to Green Bay from her home in Madison that Wednesday morning. Inside, the house was unnaturally dark - darker than a house should be, even on a foggy winter morning, even with the curtains drawn.

"Sandy!" Cator called. No answer.

The living room sofa was a burned-out mess, and partially smoked cigarettes were all around. There was no one in the three bedrooms, no one in the basement. A single window was open, just a crack. Lacking oxygen, the fire had burned itself out. All that remained was the smell of smoke. Everywhere.

Cator walked back toward the living room, confused. Then she saw Sandy's charred body, seemingly melted into what remained of the sofa. She had not even recognized it before.

Across town, John walked out of divorce court, confident he would get custody of his three boys. The only hitch: Sandy had failed to show up again, so nothing could be finalized. John headed for his sister Ginny's house, where she and his girlfriend were waiting to hear the news from court.

John walked in the door and the telephone rang. A detective friend was on the line and said he was coming over.

John turned to his sister: "Either I really (messed) up at work, or Sandy's dead."

Accident or murder?

The first two fire investigators on the scene, Capt. Cecil Bailey of the Green Bay Fire Department and Sheriff Thomas J. Hinz of the Brown County Arson Task Force, determined that the fire was accidental and believed it started with careless cigarette smoking.

A search of the house yielded other potential clues. A kitchen garbage can contained five crumpled suicide notes. An extension cord was tied around a basement ceiling pipe, with one end hanging down. Two VCRs were stacked on a coffee table beneath the dangling cord - nowhere near the television set.

Throughout the basement, investigators used Luminol, a chemical that detects the presence of blood even if it's been cleaned up. The chemical showed blood on the coffee table, on the floor, in the laundry room and in the bathroom. Bloody rags and tissues were found in the trash nearby, and a bloody women's shirt was in the laundry hamper.

The basement shower door revealed even more blood - and in that blood was the fingerprint of Sandy's best friend, Jody Pawlak.

When Sandy's body was examined, there was evidence that she had taken a few breaths of smoke. However, her lungs did not have a fatal level of carbon monoxide, which puzzled investigators. At the time of the autopsy, her blood-alcohol level was 0.25. A more sophisticated blood-alcohol test showed that a few hours before the time of death, which was between 6 and 8 p.m., Sandy's blood-alcohol content was at least 0.36 - nearly four times the level considered evidence of intoxication in adult drivers in Wisconsin.

Nevertheless, Milwaukee County Deputy Chief Medical Examiner John Teggatz - subbing for the Brown County examiner, who was out of town - listed Sandy's cause of death as "probable manual strangulation." Teggatz had found some evidence of bruising around her neck. When he returned, Brown County Medical Examiner Gregory Schmunk agreed.

Because Sandy was the wife of a Green Bay police officer, local officials were worried about a perceived conflict of interest in their investigation. The Wisconsin Department of Justice took over. Special Agent Gregory J. Eggum determined that the fire was deliberate, a decision the two local investigators ultimately came to accept.

Winnebago County District Attorney Joseph Paulus was named special prosecutor on the case.

John was the prime suspect.

And his girlfriend was the key.

A secret video

Twelve years younger than John, Tracy Hellenbrand was an investigator for the Internal Revenue Service. She carried a badge and a gun.

At first, she provided John with an unshakable alibi, saying he was with her the whole night - except when he went to pick up Matt from an indoor baseball practice. She told authorities she would wear a wire to help prove John's innocence.

But months later, after numerous sessions with investigators, she began to believe he might be guilty. She said she may have taken a nap that night, that John could have left the house while she was asleep.

It was the turning point investigators had been waiting for. With Tracy's cooperation, the police secretly videotaped the couple at an Ashwaubenon hotel and at Tracy's mother's Madison condominium. They coached her on how to question John about Sandy's death.

They got nothing but a lot of heated arguing and emphatic denials from John.

And then, pay dirt.

Tracy had gone to Las Vegas, where she used to live, to get away from publicity surrounding the case. She had invited John to visit, and the Lady Luck Hotel and Casino had agreed to let police set up recording equipment.

As the grainy, black and white videotape of their hotel room begins, Tracy is wearing a long, light-colored tank top and no shorts. John, shirtless and muscular, has on dark shorts. The time is 4:49 a.m.

The John on the videotape is out of control. As Tracy accuses him repeatedly of killing Sandy, he laces his denials with obscenities; at one point, he rushes toward her, muscles tensed.

As 18 hours of tapes roll on, John and Tracy fight almost constantly. But a few details helpful to the prosecution slip out. The most incriminating scene is this one:

                 Tracy

                    "Why didn't you push 911 and run?"

                 John

                    "Oh, why would I?"

                 Tracy

                    "You didn't want to?"

                 John

                    "What would be on the phone then, huh?"

                 Tracy

                    "Your fingerprints."

                 John

                    "Right. And where would the call have come from?"

                 Tracy

                    "Did you go there to do it?"

                 John

                    "No."

                 Tracy

                    "Why did you go there then? . . ."

                 John

                    "To get done with the divorce. To get it over with."

"This guy admitted on videotape that he was in the house that night, and that means he did it," Paulus says. "This whole case was the videotape. . . . If the videotape hadn't gotten in, we may not have charged the case."

Suspicious of girlfriend

From the moment he met Tracy in a hotel bar, Milwaukee defense attorney Gerald Boyle was suspicious. Boyle wanted to talk to John alone. Tracy kept coming back to the table. Did John want some water? Didn't they need her help?

Looking back, John's family says Tracy acted paranoid even before Sandy died. When Tracy and John first became an item, she was leery of being introduced to his friends and sometimes gave phony names. Ostensibly to avoid Sandy, she moved to a house on a dead-end street overlooking the bay and answered the door with her gun if she wasn't expecting visitors.

On the morning of Feb. 11, after John's family found out about Sandy's death, Tracy and John's sister Judy were drinking coffee. As Judy recalls it, Tracy got up from the table and started walking down the hall. Then she turned around and said, "Oh, my God, what if they find my hair there?"

"Tracy, you've never been there," Judy answered. "Why would your hair be there?"

As the investigation progressed, Tracy hired an attorney, even before John did. Boyle found out she kept changing her story about the evening Sandy died. First there was no nap, then one, then two - the last one added to her story after investigators told her the first nap didn't fit the time of the murder.

Tracy agreed to take a lie detector test, but employed deceptive techniques such as pursing her lips, looking away from the polygraph examiner, and changing the cadence of her voice as she answered questions, according to a police report. Later, police discovered she had read a pamphlet about how to fool the machine.

Before Tracy agreed to set up videotaped encounters with John, she demanded - and was granted - immunity from prosecution.

In Boyle's view, the Las Vegas videotape made Tracy look just as bad as John. On the tape, she asks John if he'd planted one of her earrings - raising the question of whether she thought one might be found at the house.

Boyle fought to have the videotape disallowed as evidence, saying it violated John's civil rights. And because Tracy was a law enforcement officer, Boyle argued that she shouldn't have continued having sex with John while assisting the prosecution undercover.

Brown County Circuit Judge Peter Naze ruled against the defense; the jury would watch the tape.

Boyle and his co-counsel, his daughter Bridget, knew John's statements on the videotape would be hard to explain. Their strategy: Convince the jury that Tracy did it. 

Tracy wanted John convicted to remove suspicion from herself. As he had with Sandy, he said what Tracy wanted to hear, she rewarded him with sexual favors.

As the trial progressed, Tracy didn't give straight answers to several questions - not even those posed by the prosecution.

The first day of her testimony, she wore a sweater and pearls, with perfect makeup. The next day, her clothes were a wrinkled mess and there were dark circles under her eyes. The jury never heard why: In the middle of the night, Tracy had tried to leave town, and the police had put out an all-points bulletin for her. The Boyles chose not to bring it up, fearing it could backfire if she painted herself as a victim.

Tracy declined to be interviewed for this article.

A different scenario

John did not testify in the eight-day trial, which ended Feb. 17, 1999 - almost a year to the day after Sandy's death.

The jury was out for 12 hours. With every passing minute, Bridget Boyle became more convinced their client would go free. When she heard the verdict, she wept.

The judge ordered Matt, Aaron and Sean - all sobbing - ushered from the courtroom. Their father would be sentenced to life in prison, with his first chance for parole in 2024.

Within months, Truth in Justice, a Virginia-based group that tries to free prisoners it believes were wrongly convicted, embraced John's case. Sheila Berry, a leader of the group, is a former victim-witness coordinator for Winnebago County and a cousin of Paulus' ex-wife. Paulus, the district attorney, fired Berry after the two locked horns over a rape case in the early 1990s. At the time, Paulus was a rising star who aspired to be U.S. attorney. Local media nicknamed him "Hollywood Joe."

Today, Paulus is the subject of an FBI investigation that centers on drunken-driving defendants who have said they paid to get plea bargains and shorter sentences. Two Winnebago County judgesalso have asked the state Office of Lawyer Regulation to look into the accusations.

Paulus has denied wrongdoing in the drunken-driving cases, and he dismisses questions about his prosecution of John Maloney.

"This was a homicide," he says. "She received a blow to the head, she was strangled and set on fire. To say it's an accident, that's not only preposterous, that's laughable to me."

But to Truth in Justice - and to Maloney's family - what's preposterous is that the trial unfolded with no mention of the scene in Sandy's basement.

Berry and others paint this picture:

Sandy Maloney was distraught that night. She had been drinking vodka. She wrote draft after draft of a suicide note, all similar to this one: "Dear John, I hate you. But I really loved you. I am sorry. I am sorry. Take care of the kids. Love, Sandy."

Then the 40-year-old mother went to the basement, tossed the electrical cord over the ceiling pipe and tied a crude noose. She stacked the two VCRs on the coffee table, stepped on top of them  and prepared to hang herself. But the noose didn't hold and Sandy crashed to the ground, smashing her head on the table.

As the theory goes, that's how her best friend, Pawlak, found her. That's also how she got bruises around the neck.

Pawlak, who had a key to the house and periodically came over to check on Sandy, helped her to a basement bathroom to clean up. They threw Sandy's bloody shirt in the hamper and wiped up blood from the table and floor with rags and tissues. Pawlak guided Sandy upstairs to the couch and covered her with a blanket. Then she left her friend on the couch with her cigarettes.

Sandy's blood-alcohol level was potentially lethal, according toJames D. Dibdin, a California forensic pathologist hired by Truth in Justice. He theorized that Sandy was in an irreversible, alcohol-induced coma for five to seven hours before she died. As the fire came to life, her breathing was shallow. She died from a combination of blood-alcohol poisoning and carbon monoxide poisoning.

To bolster its argument further, Truth in Justice worked with eight arson investigators from across the country, who review facts about the fire. They all considered it accidental.

Neither this theory nor any of the evidence supporting it ever made it into court.

Prosecutors said the basement scene was irrelevant. The test with Luminol couldn't determine when the blood was cleaned up - it could have been months or years before Feb. 10. Forensics couldn't prove whether Pawlak's fingerprint was left behind on the day of Sandy's death or at some other time. When police interviewed Pawlak, she said she wasn't at the home that day. They never asked her about the blood in the basement or her fingerprint. She declined to be interviewed for this article.

As for Boyle: "If I would have tried to call this an accident, it would have been malpractice," he says. "I didn't have anybody who said it was an accident, and I didn't have any basis for it being an accident."

Boyle went to his own experts to review the evidence. They could find no fault with the findings that ruled out accidental death. Further, Pawlak, who was under no obligation to meet with Boyle's investigators, refused to talk. He had no way of knowing what she might say if called to the stand. It also bothered Boyle that the ceiling pipe in the basement wasn't bent, as he believed it would have been if Sandy had tried to hang herself.

The Boyles took the case before the state Court of Appeals but lost in September 2000. The state Supreme Court then declined to hear their argument. The defense attorneys next planned to take the appeal to the federal court. They never got there; they were fired in early 2001, and Milwaukee attorney Lew Wasserman took over.

This spring, Maloney filed grievances with the Office of Lawyer Regulation, alleging misconduct by Gerald Boyle. The grievances are pending.

"This is the most bizarre case I've ever seen in 23 years of practice," Wasserman says.

He plans to go back to court to argue that John didn't get a fair trial because of the quality of his defense.

Wasserman argues that the Boyles brought in only one expert witness, former Green Bay police arson investigator Randy Winkler, and he was a poor choice. Winkler testified that the arsonist was an amateur.

Someone who twisted pieces of Kleenex and stuck them in the couch to make it burn faster, but then didn't light all of them. Someone who didn't know how much oxygen a fire needs, and so didn't open enough windows. In short, as the Boyles concluded, someone like Tracy - not John, the arson investigator.

But on cross-examination, Winkler said he had been forced to retire from the Police Department because of psychological problems and that he held a grudge. The prosecution implied he would lie because of it.

Further, buried in police reports is a statement from Winkler in which he said he thought John was guilty.

What's more, Winkler compared John to serial killers Charles Manson and Ted Bundy.

"Why would the defense use this man as an expert?" Wasserman says. "It makes no sense."

Gerald Boyle maintains that Winkler is a well-respected arson expert despite his problems.

"Everybody thought John Maloney did it," he says. "I convinced him John Maloney was not guilty. I wanted one thing out of Winkler: that the fire was not properly vented and a sophisticated arsonist would have made sure it was."

Wasserman has another complaint: About the time of the Maloney case, Boyle was dealing with the aftermath of a highly publicized sexual harassment case involving a fired Miller Brewing Co. worker - the so-called Seinfeld case.

A jury awarded Jerold Mackenzie about $25 million, a verdict that was ultimately overturned.

Before the jury verdict, Boyle and Mackenzie arranged a line of credit from venture capitalist and sports agent Joe Sweeney.

When the big-money verdict was overturned, Mackenzie went bankrupt and Boyle had to repay about $300,000.

According to Wasserman, such financial concerns were a reason Boyle, who was paid $140,000 by the Maloneys, didn't bring in any experts who supported the accident theory. (Winkler helped the defense for free.)

Boyle believes John's best chance at vindication was to take the argument against the videotape and Tracy's role in it to federal court. But Boyle was fired before that appeal could be made, and now the legal time limit has expired.

"A horrible, horrible injustice has been done to John Maloney," said Boyle, who still professes his former client's innocence.

Wishes he could go back

John is incarcerated at the Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, where he makes 18 cents an hour as a "swamper" - mopping floors, cleaning toilets, doing laundry and handing out clean sheets to the other prisoners. He says he wishes he could go back to the trial and explain that videotape to the jury. He would tell them he and Tracy had talked almost non-stop about Sandy. That they were tossing out theories of the crime, not facts.

That they were discussing different days when he'd gone to his wife's house, not the day of her death.

Most of all, though, he wishes he could tell the jurors that he knows what it's like to grow up without a mother, and that no matter how troubled Sandy was, he never would have taken her away from their sons.

His sister Ginny is raising the boys now.

She's also working constantly to free her brother, whether it's nagging lawyers, holding bake sales to pay them, writing to politicians or helping Matt with the family's Web site.

Ginny is the one who takes the boys to the prison to visit their father - and to the mausoleum to see their mother. On a shelf behind glass, Sandy's urn is a gold box with a raised rose on the front.

"She knows what happened," Ginny says. "All I can say is, help us out, Sandy."
 
 
 

John Maloney is shown with his wife, Sandy, and their children (from left) Aaron, Matt, Sean.	John Maloney, a Green Bay Police veteran convicted of killing his wife, is serving a life sentence at Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun.
Ginny Maloney has been taking care of nephews (left to right) Sean, 15, Aaron, 14, Matt, 17, while their father serves a life sentense for the death of their mother. Their aunt takes the boys to the prison to visit their father and to the mausoleum to see their mother.	An electrical cord hangs from a ceiling pipe in Sandy Maloneys basement. Near the dangling cord are two VCR's stacked on a coffee table. One theory not explored at the homicide trial of her husband was that Sandy Maloney May have attempted suicide by standing atop the VCR's and trying to hang herself with the cord.	Tracy Hellenbrand, then-girlfriend of John Maloney, the former police detective convicted of murdering his estranged wife, testifies in 1999 about statements she says Maloney made to her.