True Crime with Aphrodite Jones TV - John Maloney online -
A veteran cop. A beautiful IRS agent. And a women living on the edge bound together with the mystery of a fiery death. Was it an accident or cold blooded murder? True Crime with Aphrodite Jones s3e9: Burning Passions, CI 2013
Eight months later Sandy is dead ... He [John] sees police coming to his door. ibid.
Evidence the jury never got to see ... A botched attempt at suicide. ibid.
The case against John Maloney began in error, was compounded by fraud, and brought to fruition by collusion and deceit.
Milwaukee Assistant ME John Teggatz, who was given a deceased, badly burned body with no context, no medical or social history, mistook tardieu spots for petechiae. Tardieu spots are small blood spots formed after death by lividity, that is, the body’s position upon death. Petechiae are caused when small blood vessels are ruptured due to force such as strangulation. There were no other indications of strangulation, so Dr Teggatz’s opinion was tentative: ‘Probable manual strangulation.’ But that was enough for Wis Dept of Justice criminal investigators, Kim Skorlinski and Greg Eggum.
If it was murder, the fire had to be arson. After digging through the debris for 12 days, there was still no evidence of a set fire – so agent Eggum invented it. He portrayed ‘run marks’ from burning, melting sofa cushion fill as ‘pour patterns’ from using a liquid accelerant to set the fire. (An accelerant is a substance, usually liquid, that makes a fire burn faster.) To back up his claim, agent Eggum reported conducting an undocumented burn test in which he set fire to a piece of the polyurethane foam cushion. He said the foam held a flame but did not ‘run’. That’s like saying that the sun rose, but it came up in the west, a blatant misstatement of scientific fact. Agent Eggum bet that jurors wouldn’t get it, and they didn’t.
Agent Eggum was not deterred when the crime lab could find no trace of the petroleum-based products normally used to start fire – gasoline, kerosene, lighter fluid, charcoal lighter and the like. There were so many empty vodka bottles littering Sandy’s home that it was an easy substitute. Agent Eggum could be fairly sure most people wouldn’t realize that 80-proof vodka is 60% water, and works better to put out a fire than to start one. But just in case, at trial he testified to another undocumented burn test. He said he lit 80-proof vodka, and that it burned ‘very hot and very fast’. He was right. The jurors didn’t catch it.
Independent experts have reviewed this case, pro bono, and agree that there was no murder, no arson. But none of the real evidence has been heard by any court.
A 2005 CBS 48 Hours segment by reporter Susan Spencer took a closer look at the scientific foundation for the state’s claim that the Maloney fire was arson – a claim the state has vigorously refused to re-examine. John Maloney online article