Murder, Fire, and Doubt

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The fire does originate on the sofa.

Sandy's body was badly damaged.

The contention that the state has is that the burn pattern on the floor in front of the sofa was caused by an accelerant.

My opinion that it was a deliberately set fire, that it was ISIM.

The accelerant they allege was used was vodka, the vodka that Sandy had been drinking.

My grandma is the one that found my mom's body and she called 911.

Dispatch.

My daughter is all burned up.

Your daughter's what, ma'am?

She's burned up.

Okay, we'll be there shortly, ma'am.

Oh, he was coming over to kill her.

He hated her.

He wanted her gone.

My name is Matt Maloney.

My dad was convicted of killing my mom.

The prosecutor said that he hit her on the head, strangled her, and then set the house on fire.

Do you firmly believe that John Maloney is a murderer?

Based on all the evidence that was presented in this case, yes.

This was a very combustible relationship between John and Sandy.

My dad was a veteran cop on the Green Bay Police Department for 18 years.

He served the community.

He was a liaison officer, a detective, a beat cop.

Everyone in the community turned on my dad.

Everyone just gave up on him.

My name is Sheila Berry.

I investigate and write about crimes.

It took so little time to convict him.

Three hours to pick a jury, eight days for trial, one day to deliberate.

My dad was sentenced to life in prison for killing my mom.

The only problem is there never was a murder.

A question of murder.

Football's Packers are the soul of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

A hard-working blue-collar town that takes pride in its team and its clean-cut image, and generally leaves violence on the field.

But Green Bay's traditional values were rocked to the core in 1999 when a jury found one of the town's own police officers guilty of murder, of strangling his wife and setting her fire.

Jury has reached a verdict.

His name is John Maloney.

His sentence...

Mandatory life imprisonment sentence.

His life.

Mr.

Maloney is remanded to the custody of the sheriff.

Sometimes I still wake up in the middle of the night and realize, look around, and come back to reality that I am in this place, but

I don't belong in here, so.

You did not do this.

No, absolutely not.

Our 48 Hours Mystery begins where most end.

John Maloney already has spent six years in prison protesting his innocence from the start.

His protests might ring a bit hollow where there are not so many troubling questions about this case.

He says the key to understanding what really happened is to understand his wife, Sandy.

I had known Sandy for 20-some years.

I mean, that was somebody that I loved.

You had known her since high school?

Since high school.

We met in high school in Green Bay.

She was a

fun,

beautiful woman.

You know, I married her with the intent of being with her for the rest of my life.

There were three kids, Matt, Sean, and Aaron.

Oldest son Matt says their all-American family began crumbling in the early 90s

when Sandy developed neck pain and along with it, it, a serious addiction to prescription drugs.

If she couldn't get the pills from her doctors, her friends would provide it for her.

I mean, they were no help to her.

She'd go into rehab, but it wasn't really by choice.

My dad would get her signed in there, and then she would just figure out a way to get out before she even got any treatment that she would need.

Things were so bad that if the boys needed a prescription, the local pharmacist would make them take the pill in front of him to to make sure Sandy wouldn't steal it.

Even that didn't work.

So she'd tell me to slip it under my tongue and just keep it under there until we left the place and then I'd spit it out and she'd take it when we left.

You did that?

I did that.

And I mean, you know,

I knew I shouldn't have been doing it, but I was so young.

I can't believe someone would do that, especially your own mom.

It's desperate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Her situation deteriorated, complicated by depression, panic panic disorder, and alcohol.

Started finding vodka bottles all over the house and stuff.

And this prompted some fairly serious arguments, eh?

Well, yes.

Fights.

Yeah.

Loud yelling and screaming, yes.

And, you know,

doors slammed and stuff like that.

I mean, it was, you know, a terrible time.

You never hit her?

No.

You never struck her?

No.

You never abused her physically during these fights at all?

No.

But at Maloney's trial, prosecutors told jurors Sandy had complained about John's violence to, among others, her psychiatrist.

She talked about her husband being verbally abusive and physically abusive.

She indicated that the physical abuse had been going on in the marriage for some time, that she was.

He said Sandy even showed him bruises.

She said John had caused.

Her kids say she'd say anything to get more drugs.

And as for the bruises...

When she was drunk, she'd stumble around and fall into everything.

Police were called to the Maloney home numerous times.

But a 48 hours review found no report that made any reference to John Maloney abusing his wife.

If anyone was fighting, it was my mom hitting my dad.

People can say he was abusing her or whatever, but

in all reality, we're the ones that were there and saw the stuff.

And if anyone swung at anyone, it would be my mom hitting my dad.

None of you ever saw him hit her.

No, he never did.

In 1997, Sandy, drunk, wrecked the family car.

And John had had enough.

He moved out, filed for divorce, and later took the boys with him.

It was a dangerous situation for them to be in.

And I should have done something sooner than what I did.

John's two youngest sons say their dad was with them, putting together together bunk beds.

At the time, police say he was off murdering their mother.

Their support for their father never has wavered.

He's missed almost seven years of our lives now.

He's been in jail or prison since I've been in seventh grade.

I'm in my second year of college now, so he's missed a lot.

But this image of a good man falsely accused got nowhere at trial, largely because of these

undercover videotapes

that reveal a quite different side of John Maloney,

a side the jurors felt they couldn't ignore.

I can't kill anybody.

I didn't kill anybody.

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Make sure your home smells like it.

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Whenever we come to Green Bay, I stop at the mausoleum.

It's just like I have to do this for her.

It's the only way I can get close to her.

In fact, Lola Cater has thought about her daughter Sandy every single day for the last seven years.

This is just something I'll never get over with.

Indeed, how could she?

It was Lola who discovered Sandy's charred body the morning after the fire.

I opened that front door and there was soot all over.

I went right over to the couch and knowing Sandy had been sleeping there and I couldn't even see her.

And so I ran through the house and calling her and

I even ran down in the basement and looked.

And then I came back up

and

she was on the couch.

She was burned.

And from that first instant, she blamed John Maloney.

He hated her.

He hated her.

When firemen and policemen came up, I said,

I knew he would do this.

I hope he's happy.

He hated Sandy, she thinks, for dragging her feet on the divorce.

Because by now, Maloney had a new, much younger girlfriend, a 28-year-old IRS agent named Tracy Helenbrand.

Lola thinks Sandy was getting in the way of their new life.

So you think that he went there with that intention?

I know he went there to kill her.

It was a very ugly case, a very ugly situation.

Special Prosecutor Joe Paulus shared her certainty.

We all know what the truth is here.

Don't get sidetracked.

Just let the truth flourish.

The truth, as Paulus told the jury, was that John Maloney was under stress, deeply in debt, and desperate to get out of this relationship.

He's paying her mortgage.

He's paying her utilities.

He's paying her bills.

He's paying support to her in the family.

He was wound tight.

So Paula said he went to Sandy's that night to be sure she'd be in court the next day.

They argued.

Maloney hit her over the head with a blunt object.

The wound bled onto her shirt.

That man, right there,

stuffed out his wife as though she were a rag doll.

He panicked, Paula said, and strangled Sandy, putting his knee in her back as she lay on the couch.

And was surprised to find a large area of hemorrhage within her lower back.

The medical examiner bolstered the case, concluding Sandy probably had been strangled, saying he'd found trauma to her neck.

The remainder of the injuries were in the front part of the neck.

And again, again, we're dealing with hemorrhage, which is in deep muscle structures.

Finally, the DA told the jury 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.

The fire is essentially after death.

The most damning evidence came from the Lady Luck Hotel in Las Vegas.

Anything but lucky for Maloney.

Five months after Sandy's death, Maloney had flown there for a weekend with girlfriend Tracy.

I don't even know why I even went out there.

I shouldn't have even went out there.

Or why you stay.

Right, right.

I mean, I guess that's one of the foolish things that people do that think they're in love.

Did Alan Lee swear that the testimony you are about to give is truth?

What he did not know was that his love had had a change of heart.

I was the girlfriend of a man

who may have committed murder.

Tracy secretly now was working with prosecutors who still were looking for concrete evidence against Maloney.

The hotel room was wired.

A video camera was hidden in a clock radio.

Cops watched closely from next door.

Tracy's job, get him to confess.

the person.

No, I didn't kill anybody.

Over and over again, for hours, she asked him, did you kill Sandy?

Did you?

Did you?

I didn't f ⁇ ing kill her, bitch.

You just lit her on fire.

I didn't f ⁇ ing light her on fire, and I didn't kill her, bitch, because I wouldn't.

But John Maloney kept denying he had killed his wife.

Then, finally, he appears to incriminate himself.

He admits he was at Sandy's house the night she died.

What triggered you go there that night?

Did you go there to do it?

No.

What did you go there for?

Because Dunlap's divorce.

It is done work.

Okay.

That videotape showed a man confessing to the crimes that he committed.

Prosecutors had heard enough.

They arrested Maloney that same day.

Tracy says at one point, did you go there to do it?

No,

you say.

And she says, well, what did you go there for, Sy, from you?

To get done with the divorce.

To get it done with.

To get done with the divorce, to get it done with.

Now, how else can you interpret that except that you were there?

I guess, yeah, technically you could look at that and say, well, yeah, you must have been there then if you said that.

But why would you say that?

Why wouldn't you say, hey,

I wasn't there?

I had numerous times.

And it wasn't registering with her.

And some of that was being said to get her to shut up.

Have you ever had a conversation with somebody that doesn't let something go and you just say, well, okay, yeah, yeah, you're right.

Whatever you say.

That's the context for this?

Right.

But the tape also shows a man with an uncontrollable temper.

You motherfucker.

I mean, I'm not proud of being that angry.

Well, you look at that tape and you could see how a jury might have said, whoa, you know, I guess maybe he could have killed somebody.

Look at him.

Do you think those tapes are largely the reason you were convicted?

Well, a part,

a part of it, yeah.

Be seated, please.

The trial lasted eight days.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'll read the verdicts.

The verdict was read to a packed courtroom, which included John's young sons.

We, the jury, find the defendant, John R.

Maloney, guilty of first-degree intentional homicide.

I'm going to ask you to remove the children, please.

They took us in a back elevator and I just fell on the floor and started crying my eyes out and I can remember saying what are we going to do now.

Appeals can take years.

But then someone who had never even met John Maloney took up his cause.

I probably reviewed at least 20,000 pieces of paper, 20,000 documents.

Her name is Sheila Berry, part-time novelist, part-time investigator, part-time head of Truth in Justice, a non-profit group that tries to help people it feels are wrongly imprisoned.

It began right away with questions about the toxicology report.

The testing that should have been done wasn't done.

After consulting with more than a dozen forensic experts, Barry now is convinced not only that Maloney is innocent, but that Sandy Maloney was not murdered.

That, in fact, there was no crime.

That she was not strangled to death.

No.

No one that you have talked to, no one that none of your experts who's looked at this

has had even any doubt about that.

That's correct.

So, how did Sandy die?

Sheila Berry says the explanation is right there in the evidence, but it's evidence the jury never saw.

Behind his back, courthouse reporters dubbed District Attorney Joe Paulus Hollywood Joe

for his love of the camera.

We're going to keep fighting for justice.

And for his dramatic courtroom theatrics.

Sorry, dude.

I didn't mean for this to happen.

Okay.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

If that's a justification, if that's provocation to kill somebody,

then there are going to be a lot of dead people in this community.

You want to know how they get that soil?

He'd get right up there, and he would act things out.

His eyes are very dramatic, and he knows how to use them.

Sheila Berry worked for Joe Paulus back in 1990.

Any attorney would be happy to have those skills because they can skate you across a lot of thin ice.

But thin ice was the last thing Paulus had to worry about in 1998.

Assistant DA Mike Balska says the ambitious prosecutor's career was on a fast track.

His goal was to become the U.S.

Attorney in Wisconsin, one of the U.S.

attorneys.

The Maloney case would probably be a good vehicle for that.

The court and the sentence of the law that chewed John R.

Maloney are sentenced to life imprisonment.

After the guilty verdict, Paulus praised the investigators, the jury, and, backhandedly, himself.

I think that ultimately the jury paid heed to what I talked to them about in my closing argument, and that is, we all know what the truth is here.

Don't get sidetracked, just let the truth flourish so that we can get to the right verdict.

Over the next few years, Paulus missed few opportunities to wax idealistic about truth and justice.

It's always unfortunate to have to bring charges against a member of law enforcement, but you know, they're like any other citizen, and if there are charges to be brought, we have to do it.

Truer words were never spoken.

As both the people around Green Bay and Joe Paulus were about to find out.

Quietly, in March of 2002, the FBI began investigating Paulus for corruption, looking into charges that the prosecutor was taking bribes to fix cases.

Soon, the story leaked to the press.

Obviously, this is nothing more than allegation, innuendo, and rumor.

Prompting a torrent of righteous indignation.

I did nothing wrong.

There was no impropriety here.

All of this is a big fat lie.

If there is an investigation out there, at the end of the day, absolutely nothing will come of it.

News of the FBI inquiry came as no shock to Sheila Berry,

who'd had a run-in with Paulus years earlier when he was her boss.

It involved allegations that a star witness had lied.

You told him this?

Oh, yes, I did.

And he said, if you tell, I'll deny it and no one will believe you.

Wow.

So I told.

I told the judge.

Not only did Paulus manage to keep this all quiet and stay out of trouble.

He was Teflon Joe.

He fired Sheila Berry.

Several people in law enforcement urged me to leave the state.

Said, he hates you.

He is afraid of you.

He is going to set you up on false criminal charges.

Were you afraid of him?

I knew he could do it.

But in April of 2004, Joe Paulus's world of influence and power came tumbling down.

He was charged with bribery and income tax evasion.

Within weeks, he'd cut a deal, pleading guilty to accepting $48,000 to fix 22 cases, six of them criminal.

I am sorry.

This time, Hollywood Joe let his attorney do the talking.

I deeply regret the cloud which I have placed upon the everyday good work of public officials who honestly strive to carry out their duties and responsibility.

The Paulus bribery investigation covered from June 98 to June 2000, the very time period in which John Maloney was arrested, tried, and convicted, which leads to the big question, did the corrupt district attorney act improperly in the Maloney case as well?

He had to have known that there were big question marks on whether this was even a murder or a homicide.

This was Joe's private office.

Barry says, despite their history, she has no axe to grind with Paulus.

She just knows the man.

Here you've got a prosecutor on the one hand is taking money to fix cases, and they are little cases.

So what does he do to distract attention?

and pump up this image he has of being the big crime fighter, the big justice guy.

He goes after high-profile cases.

They attracted him like a moth to a flame.

And you think that's why he went after John Malone?

Absolutely.

Anything with Joe Paulus wouldn't surprise me, wouldn't shock me.

In one of two ongoing investigations, Assistant DA Mike Balskas is collecting boxes of documents, examining more than 100 of Paulus's past cases.

Here's a person who, if he's going to cheat, you know, dismissing cases, he's probably going to cheat when he's prosecuting cases.

On videotape, Mr.

Maloney made claims.

Voskas wonders if a zeal to get John Maloney might have led to manipulating evidence.

Consider those key videotapes.

Paula sent the hours of tapes to a private outside company, supposedly to cut them down for time,

not to alter content

what then to make of the initial $27,000 editing bill or of this note from prosecutor Paulus to the editor I have replaced modified or added new excerpts to be included in the tape

and this editor's note some of your clips are so short one and a half seconds in duration that they may seem choppy no because you're delusional Yeah, go, go, go, go, run, run in these ways.

I'm not going to hurt you.

I love you.

In this case, I think a dark side of John Maloney was revealed quite a bit.

Paulus's co-prosecutor, Vince Biskupik, I'm asking, was there any editing done that could be considered doctored?

Not from my knowledge.

Taking words out of context, moving things around, whatever.

As far as you know, nothing like that was done.

Right, to my knowledge.

Maloney probably was hurt more by his actions on the tape than by his words.

But still, Valskas wonders to what lengths Joe Paulus went.

We, the jury, find the defendant John R.

Maloney guilty to win this case.

You honestly think that he would intentionally ignore exculpatory evidence, doctor videotapes, just for that?

Yeah.

I mean, it's just simply mind-boggling.

It seems incredible.

Do you think, based on what you know now, that John Maloney got a fair trial?

I would say that

did he get a fair trial?

No.

I don't know if John Maloney did it or not,

but I think it's pretty clear that not all the evidence was presented to the jury.

Evidence like this.

An extension cord hanging down from a conduit pipe.

And then it had a noose on the opposite end.

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Are you aware of how Steve McQueen escaped death at the hands of the Manson family?

What about the real-life brutal murder that inspired David Lynch's Twin Peaks?

These stories and more are told in the Hollywood Land podcast, where true crime and tinseltown collide.

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Not only does Sheila Berry believe John Maloney did not kill his wife, I concluded that there was no crime.

She's convinced that Sandy caused her own death.

So how long did the Maloney's live here?

About 19 years.

So pretty much their whole marriage.

Right.

The evidence, she says, was right here in the basement of the Maloney house, where police recorded a bizarre scene.

Two VCRs atop a coffee table and from the ceiling.

What appeared to be a ligature hanging from a conduit pipe right down in front of the coffee table.

The autopsy showed that Sandy was very drunk that night.

And Sheila thinks she tried to hang herself with the electrical cord.

She made a suicide attempt, at least enough of a gesture to jump off that coffee table and hit her back of her head.

Then, Sheila's theory goes, Sandy tried to clean up in the basement shower.

And head wounds bleed like crazy.

Makes a mess.

Makes a mess.

But ultimately, she ended up on the first floor where she collapsed onto the couch, drunk and unconscious, cigarette in hand.

And it was that lit cigarette, Sheila believes, that caused the fire.

There certainly was a big death wish going on, but she did want to die.

Sheila's case is bolstered by what police found upstairs.

There were quite a few suicide notes.

found in the trash on the first floor.

Apparent suicide notes was how the police labeled them on the evidence list.

Five in all, essentially the same.

John, how could you throw everything away?

Take care of the kids.

I'm done fighting.

It was the day before the final divorce hearing.

She had already lost custody of her kids.

She could only see them in a public place, supervised visitation.

So I think she just felt she didn't have anything left.

But the jury heard nothing about these notes and nothing either about her possible suicide attempt.

That man right there stuffed out his wife.

Did the lead prosecutor, Joe Paulis, intentionally ignore the evidence because it might favor John Maloney?

Assistant DA Mike Balskas thinks it's possible.

They thought John Maloney did it, so they focused on him.

The problem with that is you sort of put blinders on, you ignore other evidence.

Vince Biskupik, who was on Joe Paulis' prosecution team, says the suicide theory is a fantasy.

And the actual murder, you believe, happened upstairs.

Right.

Where did the head wound take place?

Well, it could take place a number of areas, either right in front of the couch, on the couch.

And here's a head wound that supposedly bled a lot.

But why is there no blood upstairs?

Well, you know, a fire takes place, things happen.

What was the main thing that was found down here that was of interest?

But Sheila says, of course, there was no blood upstairs.

Sandy cut her head in the basement.

Where blood was found.

Her blood.

There was a sink here.

They found a lot of blood spatter in here.

And none of this is visible to the naked eye.

Right.

And somebody had cleaned up.

State investigators used a chemical spray called Luminol, which illuminates blood traces even after a cleanup.

In this case, Luminol detected blood in several parts of the basement, including the bathroom and shower.

48 Hours compared an official Luminol photo with a crime scene photo and came up with this result.

You have blood spatter on the wall, on the floor.

And there were several blood spots on the glass, a bare footprint.

There was also some on the shower head.

Blood evidence also was found in the laundry room, on towels, on Sandy's shirt, and in another bloody footprint.

Well, they combed this place looking for any DNA DNA link, any trace of John Maloney here, and they couldn't find it.

The only basement evidence prosecutors seemed to care about was Sandy's bloody shirt, which they say John Maloney took downstairs to the laundry after killing her upstairs.

There's two bloody footprints that are reflected in the police report.

None of that struck you guys as having any possible relationship to what had happened.

Other than him maybe covering up the scene at the end, panicking, walking downstairs to try and get rid of that

shirt.

But if Sandy wasn't murdered, then how did she die?

Sheila Berry's medical experts say it was alcohol poisoning, pure and simple.

She drank herself to death.

Once you get into the scientific evidence, you can't reach any other conclusion.

As for the fire, Joe Paulus argued at trial that John Maloney said it to cover up his crime.

That man right there burned her body to hide the crime.

Sheila Berry's own arson experts, including James Munger, insist Maloney did nothing of the sort and call the prosecution's theory nonsense.

There is no question that the investigation conducted by the state

is junk science.

The state speculated that Sandy's own vodka may have been used to get the fire going and pointed to the burn burn pattern in front of the couch as proof.

It has no sound scientific basis whatsoever.

To demonstrate for us why he doesn't buy that, Munger set a couch similar to Maloney's on fire.

The burn patterns that we have here are caused by the burning and dripping polyurethane foam, not by a an accelerant.

Almost immediately, the cushions melt and it's the melting foam, not any accelerant, that causes the telltale burn pattern.

There is absolutely no question in my mind, John Maloney is an innocent man.

So why didn't John Maloney's own lawyer, prominent defense attorney Jerry Boyle, make these arguments?

To have gone before a jury and said this was an accident, I think would have been malpractice and I would have been sanctioned by an appellate or Supreme Court.

And she was murdered.

Boyle dismissed the apparent suicide notes and the basement evidence and instead came up with a third explanation.

That yes, Sandy was murdered, not by John Maloney, but by his girlfriend Tracy, the same woman who set him up in that Las Vegas hotel room.

Tracy Hellenbrand is an indefatigable liar

and she is a killer.

Nobody to this day has shown me any evidence whatsoever that it was an accident.

But Maloney remembers things quite differently.

And did you tell your lawyer, hey, I think this was an accident?

Numerous times.

And whenever you talk to Jerry Boyle about that, and you talk to him and he doesn't want to hear something you're saying, he blows up and left the room.

I'm the captain of the ship and we're going to do it this way.

So why didn't you fire him?

If you thought he was doing such a terrible job.

Why didn't I fire him?

Because I didn't have another $100,000 to pull out of mid-air to pay another attorney.

In a report rejecting a complaint the Maloney family filed against Boyle, Wisconsin state officials called his defense strategy reasonable.

I could never have proven that that was not a murder.

So the defense attorney in this case ends up battling his own client.

The prosecutor ends up going to prison, leaving behind one more bizarre twist.

And one of the strangest things about the

Maloney case was that one of the last acts that Joe Paulus did as district attorney

was to try to get that file out of the district attorney's office.

What do you mean?

He ordered someone to basically get rid of the file.

Voska says the file was transferred from office to office and most of it never has been found.

So you have no idea how much of the original file you still have.

We have very little of the original file.

It'd probably be impossible to to try them again.

All the controversy, ironically, has given John Maloney another chance.

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Time drags on and on in here.

You do what you have to do to get along and to

survive.

For John Maloney, that means work as a prison custodian.

It's a menial job.

It pays only about a quarter an hour, but he says it keeps him from dwelling on the days, months, and now years he's been away from his three sons.

My kids aren't getting any younger, and you know, that's the most difficult part of all being here.

Is missing them.

Yes.

After the Joe Paulus corruption scandal and questions raised by Sheila Berry and local reporters, the state ordered a review of the Maloney case.

Respected attorney Stephen Meyer conducted the year-long investigation, and he's about to release his conclusions on the internet.

Talk about waiting for the verdict all over again.

Oh, man.

Yeah, no, we're just sitting there holding our breath.

John Maloney's two youngest sons and other relatives wait for news at his sister Ginny's house.

They didn't post nothing yet.

We don't have nothing.

When it finally appears, it's 23 pages long.

They scroll through it quickly.

Too quickly.

That's not his conclusion.

They've misread the bottom line.

This is a CBS Find News special report.

The report's author lays it out at a news conference later that morning.

Sandra Maloney was manually strangled.

There's no question in my mind, but you can't get away away from that.

That's the bottom line here.

A direct contradiction of Sheila Berry's theory and devastating news for the family.

It's unbelievable that this could have happened.

I mean, my God, what do they need?

Sandy to come back and tell them she wasn't killed?

They wouldn't believe that either.

I am not rendering an opinion.

on the perpetrator of the offense.

Meyer emphasized that he wasn't charged with deciding if Maloney was guilty or innocent, but only with determining if this death really was a murder

or just an accident.

On that score, he said, 79 autopsy pictures, which Sheila Berry's experts didn't have, led him to only one conclusion.

It wasn't an accident.

And I think the sooner everybody puts that to rest, the better off this case will proceed.

Only manual strangulation, he said, could have caused the deep injuries to her neck.

They could not have been caused by a flimsy electrical cord fashioned into a noose.

I don't think he's qualified, no matter how many years he's practiced law, to interpret tissue slides.

Sheila Berry is unmoved.

She says Stephen Meyer made a big mistake in not having an outside medical expert review the autopsy pictures.

Well, he's standing there with the medical examiner who presumably did know how to read them.

Well yeah but he's the guy who made that call in the first place.

This is a homicide death.

Give it to somebody with nobody independent.

Is there anything in this report at all that makes you have a second thought as to whether or not John Maloney did this?

No.

That may be, but the report certainly won't help his cause should he ever get a new trial.

Still, Sheila Berry and the Maloney family remain convinced there's been a major injustice.

This is a collect call from an inmate at the Johns Caroline.

They picked on the wrong family when they picked on us.

Well, it's not over.

I don't give a care.

Someone lost in all of this, John Maloney's sons.

I'm going to ask you to remove the children.

I just can't believe that something so wrong can happen over and over again.

The Maloney family is not giving up on my dad.

We love him and we know the truth.

I believe in my dad, and I will fight until he is free by my side.

If there's any way that I thought my dad killed my mom, I would have nothing to do with this case.

Right now, I would not see my dad, I wouldn't talk to him at all.

Why would we cover up for that?

They're your biggest champions.

Yes, they are.

No question about it.

And I'm very proud of all of them.

For both John Maloney and former prosecutor Joe Paulus, much has happened since we first broadcast this remarkable story.

State officials filed new misconduct charges against Paulus.

Please be seated.

And in the interest of justice, the Wisconsin Supreme Court invited John Maloney's lawyers to present new arguments concerning Paulus's conduct and those questions raised by the original 48 Hours broadcast.

First, was the fire an accident?

There is a real issue as to cause of death and whether or not there was an arson.

And second, did the editing of the police tapes distort the truth?

The cameras aren't here just because John Maloney's in jail.

They're here because the special prosecutor's in jail because he corrupted the judicial system at the very same time that he was prosecuting John Maloney.

But in the end, those arguments weren't persuasive enough.

The court denied Maloney a new trial, ruling that he had failed to present sufficient evidence.

John Maloney vows he never will give up.

Joe Paulus served more than six years in prison for taking bribes to influence cases and for evading taxes on those bribes.

He was released in 2010, and his license to practice law in Wisconsin was revoked.

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