Sandy Maloney’s Troubled Life Ends at Her Husband’s Hand
(‘Burning Desire,’ Forensic Files)
While watching Burning Desire, I was waiting for Peter Thomas to remind us that “fire doesn’t destroy evidence, it creates new evidence.” But maybe that rule isn’t so important in Sandy Maloney’s murder case.
Her husband, John Maloney, killed her in a fit of anger and tried to burn the house down to cover up his crime. But the evidence didn’t consist of newly created clues — the fire left enough pre-existing things partially intact to reveal what happened at the Green Bay, Wisconsin house.
Investigators found, for example, remnants of tissues stuffed into the cracks of the sofa, presumably to help spread the flames. The biggest smoking gun was what they found on Sandy’s body.
Loyal progeny. Marks on her back and neck and a blunt-force wound definitely didn’t come from the fire.
Prosecutors connected the dots persuasively at the subsequent murder trial, where a jury convicted John.
But the case was never strong enough for three observers: Sandy and John’s sons. One of them, Matt Maloney, appeared on the Forensic Files episode in 2004.
Horrifying discovery. For this post, I looked for the reasons Matt and his younger brothers defended their father and whether John has attracted any other supporters over the years. I also checked on John’s incarceration status.
So let’s get going on the recap of “Burning Desire” along with extra information from internet research:
On February 10, 1998, Lola Cator went to visit her 40-year-old daughter, Sandy Maloney. She found Sandy’s living room filled with soot from a fire and Sandy dead on a couch. “My daughter is all burned up,” Lola told the 911 operator.
A good start. Sandy’s oldest son, Matt Maloney, learned about the tragedy when he came home from school and heard his father, age 41, crying.
It was a sad end to what had begun as a solid relationship. John and Sandy met and dated in Preble High School and then married when they were around 21. John started in the police cadet program in 1979 and later became an arson investigator for the Green Bay police.
It’s not clear whether Sandy worked outside the home, but she and John had three sons to occupy her bandwidth.
Desperate game. By the 1990s, Sandy had developed psychiatric problems and had become addicted to painkillers after a back injury, according to Forensic Files, although 48 Hours said that it was neck pain that drove her to abuse pills.
The depth of Sandy’s addiction wasn’t a secret. After she could no longer obtain medication legally, she would ask her sons to supply her when they were sick — and the pharmacist insisted on supervising the kids while they swallowed the pills.
But Sandy persuaded Matt to hide the pills under his tongue and give them to her later, according to to his interview on the 48 Hours episode ” A Question of Murder.”
At some point, Sandy started drinking heavily too. She liked vodka.
Disapproving mother-in-law. Matt told Forensic Files that her substance abuse was swallowing the family’s budget and that Sandy cut herself off socially. In 1997, she totaled the family car. That’s when John moved out and took Matt, Aaron, and Sean with him.
Lola Cator, however, pointed to John’s temper as at least part of the problem in the marriage. She said that John hated Sandy.
At the time of the fire, Sandy was living alone at the family’s former house on Huth Street.
Medical examiner Greg Schmunk determined that someone who died in a fire would have a higher carbon monoxide level and more soot in her lungs than Sandy did.
Not highly intoxicating. The bruising on her back and neck suggested someone had been applying pressure there. The bruise on the back of her head could have come from an ashtray that was found broken at the crime scene.
Investigators believed Sandy was dead before the fire. And it wasn’t drinking-related. Tests revealed that Sandy had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit — but not enough to cause fatal alcohol poisoning.
A bloodstained shirt belonging to her was found under some other clothes in the laundry room, a good clue because Sandy had only a bra on when her mother found her body. There were no signs of a break-in, and the only two keys to the house belonged to Sandy and John, investigators said. John, however, said he didn’t have a key.
Problematic household. But he did have a motive. The divorce would have meant $450 a month in alimony plus half of all monetary assets for Sandy. Special prosecutor Joe Paulus would later allege that John was tired of paying Sandy’s mortgage and other bills and he was deeply in debt.
Aside from John’s three sons, not many people were feeling particularly protective of him.
“Everyone in the community just turned against my dad,” Matt Maloney told 48 Hours.
According to the Green Bay Press-Gazette, some neighbors found the Maloneys’ household troublesome well before Sandy’s death. Officers were called to the house 16 times over the years, sometimes because Sandy phoned them about a domestic row or a prowler. Other times, folks who lived on Huth Street summoned police because of concerns about what was happening inside the Maloney household.
Co-workers distance themselves. Still, they didn’t expect anything like a homicide. “We thought we had a decent neighborhood, a safe neighborhood because we had the police living just a couple doors away,” one resident told the Press-Gazette.
John’s colleagues at the Green Bay police had to conduct the investigation — and they seemed more concerned about the harm to their reputation than about their co-worker’s predicament.
“The acts of one person shouldn’t be reflective of the other 250 who work down there,” Steve Darm, president of the local police officers’ union, would later tell the Press-Gazette.
‘It’s all bunk.’ John was sometimes uncooperative with police investigating Sandy Maloney’s murder. The department deemed him insubordinate and put him on paid suspension.
State authorities came in to help with the investigation.
John claimed he wasn’t inside Sandy’s house the night of the fire. His sons Sean and Aaron would tell 48 Hours that their father was with them, putting together bunk beds for their room at their new home on Menlo Park Road.
Secret tapes. John’s girlfriend, Tracy Hellenbrand, a 28-year-old IRS agent, at first provided an alibi for John, but once police started talking about her as an accessory, she said she was asleep on the night of Sandy’s death, and she didn’t know where John was then.
She agreed to record her conversations with John. At first he denied involvement in Sandy’s death. Later, when police put video recording equipment in Tracy and John’s room at the Lady Luck Hotel in Las Vegas, John admitted he was in the apartment the night of the fire; he had entered via a side door around 3 a.m.
The video from the hotel shows John repeatedly calling Tracy a bitch and looming over her in a menacing way. His ugly side was on full display.
In July 1998, after prosecutors reviewed the tapes, they called for John Maloney’s arrest. When John opened the door to his room at the Continental Hotel in Las Vegas and saw cops, he appeared ready to make a run for it. They sprayed him with mace and then arrested him without further incident.
Completely overpowered. Led by prosecutor Joe Paulus, the authorities laid out a case that the night Sandy died, she and John argued about the terms of their split — and specifically the fact that Sandy was delaying the divorce by not showing up for court dates.
John hit her over the head with an object — possibly a broken ashtray found in the living room — in anger and then panicked. The 6-foot-1-inch-tall John strangled or otherwise suffocated her by pressing on her back and neck face down on the couch and set the fire to hide the evidence, the prosecution contended. John stuffed tissues in the seams of the sofa and staged the scene to look as though a cigarette dropped by accident caused the flames; he might have used vodka as an accelerant.
Matt Maloney defended his father, saying that Sandy often had bruises from falling when she was drunk. Sean said that if anyone was violent in the relationship, it was Sandy, who would sometimes strike out at John in anger.
Sons distraught. Defense lawyer Gerald Boyle contended that Tracy Hillenbrand killed Sandy to eliminate her as a rival. Retired investigator Randy Winkler testified that the fire was the work of an amateur. The flames did, afterall, burn themselves out before they destroyed the evidence.
In his closing argument, Boyle referred to Tracy as a liar, fraud, and scum bag.
It was a daring ploy that didn’t work.
A jury found John guilty of first-degree intentional homicide, arson, and mutilation of a corpse, and he received a life sentence. Courtroom footage showed his two younger sons crying when they heard the verdict.
Shifting story. Gin Maloney, John’s sister, cared for Matt, Sean, and Aaron after John went away, according to Cinemaholic, which reports that the boys are keeping a low profile but have continued to believe in their father’s innocence.
John’s own legal salvos over the years have included the ever-popular ineffective counsel; he said his lawyers should have done more to block the showing of the hotel video.
In 2007, he tried switching up the narrative presented at the trial; he claimed Sandy’s death was an accident rather than a murder.
Bullied into talking? He nabbed the help of innocence advocate Sheila Berry — who also advocated for Steven Avery of Making a Murderer fame and founded the Truth in Justice organization. Berry had worked with the flamboyant Joe Paulus earlier in her career and believed that he enjoyed sensationalizing the Maloney case. (Reporters called Paulus “Hollywood Joe.” It was thought that he was aiming to become a U.S. Attorney with all his theatrics.)
As for the videotaped footage, John would later tell 48 Hours that Tracy browbeat him into saying that he was at Sandy’s house the night of the her death, and it wasn’t true. At some point, John’s supporters claimed that Paulus had manipulated the tapes to make it sound as though John confessed to being in the house.
Truth in Justice also put forth a theory that Sandy was trying to commit suicide the night she died. Sandy, the group suggested, tried to hang herself with a cord found hung up like a noose in the house. After that effort failed, she died from an accidental fire caused by her smoking, Truth in Justice contended.
Staying put. By 2020, John had scored another advocate — his new wife, Kimberly Bostwick. She defended him via a Change.org petition, which reads in part: “A corrupt prosecutor, Joseph Paulus, transformed the sad death of a suicidal alcoholic/addict into media-driven murder and an arson case which turned the justice system upside down.”
So far, Kimberly’s efforts haven’t hit pay dirt. And John won’t be receiving more help from Sheila Berry. She died at the age of 74 in 2021. Truth in Justice no longer maintains a website.
John was turned down for parole 2024.
Today, he resides in the OshKosh Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin. All three of his sons still live in the state.
A little satisfaction. The Department of Corrections says that John is eligible for parole consideration on February 10, 2027.
Although it didn’t ultimately do anything to help John’s case, John did get to see prosecutor Joe Paulus go down in flames, when Paulus pleaded guilty to accepting bribes for fixing cases after an FBI investigation in 2004. Paulus had to serve jail time.
Sandy’s mother, Lola Cator, is 93 years old today. Sadly, she lost another child, Brad Cator, in 2014. Lola has a presence on social media and posted a tribute to her late daughter on Facebook two years ago.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon
