A mother who was a murder victim literally became the star witness in the trial of her husband accused of murder in Texas because of her diary.
Maria Munoz, 31, was left behind by her partner Joel Pellot, who abandoned her and their two young children. Some time after she left, he wrote to her again and said he wanted to talk to her.
However, when he returned home, he claimed to have found her lifeless. According to the lawsuit, Joel Pellot, a nurse, injected her with poisonous drugs he had stolen from the hospital where he worked to avoid a costly divorce.
The 31-year-old's diary and cell phone records helped investigators uncover her husband's abuse.
The woman's marital history was literally reconstructed by the police.
Separation and infidelity
The day before her death, the Texas resident wrote. “What do I want? #1 Forward!!!” can be read in his writings published by Web.
Maria met her husband when she was a young nurse in Puerto Rico. He was an ambitious medical student, 11 years her senior.
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They married in 2011 and settled in Texas, where she gave up her career to support her husband.
But in 2020, Maria discovered a plane ticket for a vacation to Europe with a colleague from the hospital. He cheated on her.
Things came to a head on September 19, the Saturday before his death, when Maria saw her husband's car in front of the home of his lover Janet Arredondo.
The mistress called the police, who in turn called Maria as she was on the way home with her husband.
“Put the damn phone down,” her husband told his wife, words that police heard and recorded. In anger, he even smashed the windshield before he got home.
The next day, she texted him to tell him she was hiring a lawyer.
“That’s too much money,” he replied, but a few hours later the tone changed.
Last meeting
“I’m so sad, it hurts me inside,” he wrote to her via email. “I want to sit down with you and talk without arguing.”
Maria was nervous as she prepared for this final meeting. She was texting her friend Jazmin Martinez.
“I just ask you to pray for me. We’ll talk tonight.”
Early Tuesday morning, police received a call from her husband saying Maria Munoz had been found unconscious. He claimed she wasn't breathing and may have taken prescription medication.
Emergency services found the man wearing surgical scrubs and performing CPR on his now deceased wife.
Maria Munoz | Facebook
The couple's two young sons slept in the next room. While emergency services attended to her, the partner went into the bathroom to empty a bottle of the prescription drug clonazepam.
“Yeah, she was super depressed,” he told police.
Pellot was taken to the police station for questioning, where surveillance cameras caught him crying, screaming and pushing furniture as he was left alone.
He admitted that the syringes and intravenous devices found in the house belonged to him but were part of his daily work equipment.
Investigators also had questions about a puncture site on Maria's arm, but it took four months to get toxicology results. It was not clonazepam, but propofol.
The husband attended his wife's funeral and cried over her coffin. Despite this order, investigators had Maria's diaries and her phone.
Excerpt from the newspaper
“Life is so unfair. My husband, the man I love so much, hurts me so much. I don’t want to be sad anymore, I don’t want my heart to hurt, I don’t want my mind to be tormented,” she wrote.
She also wrote about wanting to save her marriage and hoping things would change. “Lord, this means a lot to me. All I really want is to see a change in him.”
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Police also found video footage on Maria's cell phone, including an angry exchange in her car.
“What should I do?” she asked her partner. What do you expect from this wedding? “If you walk through that door, we will get a divorce,” she warned him.
Then he got out of the car, said “very good” and slammed the door.
Based on the documents and records, the police were able to rule out suicide as the cause of death.
The man's mistress also revealed to investigators that he admitted to giving his wife an injection on the night of her death.
“He just wanted to calm her down,” she told them, “so he did it with medication.”
Pellot was arrested and claimed in court that he administered Narcan, a drug used to treat an opioid overdose.
Maria Muñoz's husband called 911 and said she was unresponsive. He began performing CPR. Paramedics and police soon arrived and jumped in to help.
She was pronounced dead almost three hours later. Faced with questions, authorities turned to her diaries in search of answers. pic.twitter.com/pfMrp51BB1
— 48 Hours (@48hours) December 17, 2023
“Someone tried to bring her back to life and it wasn't the paramedics, it wasn't the police. It was Joel,” his lawyer Roberto Balli told the court.
However, the jury took less than an hour to find Pellot guilty of his wife's murder and he was sentenced to life in prison in March this year.
Prosecutor Marisela Jacaman said the key witness in the trial was Maria herself, with diaries showing she had gotten over her husband.
“And she was a great mother, she was just an amazing person. She loved him and she adored him,” said Maria’s friend Angela Montoya. “She loved him too much.”