Patterson Innocent of murder?
The 54-year-old daughter of a prominent local political family, Monica Melissa Palacios Patterson, signed a petition Dec. 21 at the central Texas-area women’s prison where she is currently housed for life with no chance of parole after she was convicted of capital murder in November 2017. The petition asks the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to once again consider her felony conviction because she is innocent, according to her new attorney.
Say what?
Didn’t the lower/trial court already deny her motion for a new trial? Yes.
Yes.
Didn’t the Thirteenth Court of Appeals (three judges) already deny her appeal?
Yes.
Didn’t the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals refuse to even look at her appeal? Yes.
Yes. So what’s the point of
So what’s the point of her new appeal?
Well, basically, her attorneys didn’t do their job during the trial, according to Patterson’s new motion. For example, there were times when they should have called their own expert witnesses, but did not.
That’s because there were none around who could refute the testimony and evidence coming from the prosecution.
Plus, says her new attorney, Cynthia Orr, Patterson’s murder victim, 96-year-old McAllen resident and WW II veteran Martin Knell, died of natural causes.
Meaning, the plastic bag pulled down over his head while he was being forcibly held in his chair had nothing whatsoever to do with his demise nearly seven years ago?
The broken ribs that showed up during the autopsy, the bruises on his chest and back where it was pressed into the chair while he was being murdered? Au natural.
Murder accomplice recants
If Patterson’s murder accomplice, Angel Mario Garza, has recanted the voluntary confession given the night of his arrest in August 2015 — as pointed out in her new appeal motion (writ of habeas corpus) — Patterson’s innocence sure has more mountains to climb.
Even then, Garza pled guilty as part of a plea deal, and part of that deal includes his waiving the right to an appeal, so who cares if he has recanted his confession? Plus, what murderer wouldn’t recant a murder confession if he or she thought it might buy them some time out of prison? Garza was sentenced to 45 years and must serve at least half of his sentence before becoming eligible for parole, so no doubt he’s looking for some mojo.
First, he helped Patterson murder Knell for a promise of money (renumeration), but now he says he was just making the whole thing up.
Which, of course, any of us would do when accused of a murder accusation.
“Did you kill the victim.”
“Yes. Why not? Got nothing better to do.”
And then you lay out a timeline and facts later supported by science such as cellphone pings off of towers, date and time stamped, tied to individual phones belonging to Patterson and Garza. Pure coincidence.
Garza just made up the details in his confession, in line with the testimony coming from Knell’s caretaker, and it all luckily fell into place.
Melissa is innocent. Have to keep that in mind. She was set up. She was framed. But God help us – this poor woman doesn’t belong in prison.
No, that’s exactly where she belongs, with no chance of parole.
According to Garza’s confession, he held the old man in his kitchen chair while Patterson smothered him to death with a plastic trash bag taken from the Comfort House, no less.
Patterson also got prison time for stealing the nonprofit blind where she worked as administrator — the Comfort House — 75 years in prison. Plus, she got prison time for stealing from the Knell estate, plus she got prison time for failing her duties as a nonprofit fiduciary.
She stripped its investment account clean, opened a secret bank account about which her board knew nothing, forged board minutes to open it, spent nonprofit money like it was going out of style to the point Comfort House was insolvent at the time of Patterson’s arrest, but she’s an innocent pawn in all of this and deserving of her freedom?
For all of these crimes, of course, according to her new motion on file at the Hidalgo County District Clerk’s Office, Melissa Patterson was the victim of poor legal representation, a dysfunctional jury, testimony from the medical examiner run amok. In other words, Patterson should be freed or at least be the beneficiary of a new trial.
The attorney now representing Patterson, Cynthia Orr, is either being paid for her work by Patterson, or the Innocence Project of Texas, with which Orr is associated, and which tries to get justice for people wrongly sentenced.
If Patterson is paying for the legal representation, there are still hundreds of thousands of dollars still missing from the accounts of her victims — the Knell Estate and Comfort House — so there’s money to be had. If, in fact, the do-good Texas Innocence Project isn’t funding the cost of this new attempt to gain freedom.
What’s odd is, I’m sure there are plenty of innocent people incarcerated. How many, who knows. I know one thing, though, after sitting through her murder trial and sentencing, which lasted approximately six weeks, there are innocent people locked up, but Melissa Patterson isn’t one of them.
She was rightly convicted. The evidence against her is overwhelming as laid out in two cable shows — Discover ID’s Diabolical and Oxygen’s Snapped. The case is also covered in the true-crime book I wrote, “Murder for the Love of Money.”
If anyone reads that book, watches those two cable shows, which you can find online, and then considers all of the evidence presented at trial, reads about the way Patterson went about manipulating people, including the nonprofit board which was charged with overseeing her work at the Comfort House, there is no reasonable doubt found. None whatsoever. She killed Knell to steal his million-dollar estate. Case closed.
That’s why her all-star defense team — comprised of Rick Salinas, O. Rene Flores, Calixtro Villarreal, and Fernando Mancias — couldn’t call any defense witness to the stand to help establish reasonable doubt in the mind of the jurors. There was none to be had. That’s why Patterson’s sole defense was spending as much time as possible discrediting witnesses called by the prosecution.
That nonprofit board, by the way, included Dori Contreras who is now chief justice of the Thirteenth Court of Appeals, although she didn’t rule on the Patterson appeal. There were a lot of people on that board who let her get away with murder by not demanding to see the nonprofit’s financials for more than a year, as Patterson went about stealing the place blind, while also stealing from her murder victim.
Except for a handful of board members, the entire Comfort House Board of Directors was lax in its oversight. The fact that the board included an appellate court chief justice is even harder to comprehend. Not only that, but when a small handful of people on the board settled with Patterson for approximately $70,000 at the office of a lo cal attorney, they didn’t let the entire board in on the settlement. Didn’t let the entire board know that they were letting an in-house thief go free, agreeing to not call the cops. Agreeing to keep the matter confidential. How does that work?
You stole from this nonprofit, but we’re going to let you walk away just the same.
The real tragedy here, besides the victim, is Marty Knell’s Estate, which still sits in probate limbo. There was a hearing scheduled for Jan. 11 in the county’s probate court, but this will undoubtedly be postponed now that a new criminal appeal has been filed.
That’s why more than four years after the Patterson trial ended in November 2017, Knell’s son, Mark, still has no access to what’s left of his dad’s estate. Patterson took a lot of Knell money, but there is still some in escrow. It’s just that no one can get at it.
Before the civil process could be played out, or so the argument went, the criminal case must be closed. After three years, and her appeal moving through two courts, her appeal for a new trial seemed final — denied.
Now, the new legal trick is to file a new appeal, claiming new evidence, new witnesses, and fault the legal performance of Patterson’s former four all-star attorneys.
By the way, whoever is paying the attorney, Orr, is also paying San Antonio-based PIs to scour the RGV for the prosecution’s lead witness, Knell’s caretaker, who was at the scene when the murder went down, and who later reported the homicide to the Texas Rangers. They’re also reportedly reaching out to jurors, trying to have a one-on-one discussion with them, looking for juror wrongdoing during the trial.
Who’s to say that this thing can’t go on forever? It’s like, “The song that never ends, it just goes on and on, my friends.”
If the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals again refuses to look at Patterson’s case, what’s to say that Patterson’s new motion can’t then be filed with the Thirteenth or even the trial court where it can collect dust?
In Patterson’s new motion, new witnesses are mentioned as having relevant information about Knell’s death, which is described as “natural.”
Where were they back in 2016 and 2017 when the case was getting ready to go to trial? Where were they during the trial?
This case shows how broken our justice system really is. If a convicted woman, with a compliant attorney or two, can continue manipulating the system with a new appeal every few years, it could go on forever.
The facts are, the Texas Rangers have the record of Patterson’s cell phone calls placing her at the scene of the crime when Knell was smothered to death. They have her accomplice’s confession even if he now wants to retract it. They have a paper trail of how Patterson stole Comfort House money, stole from her victim, and got him to turn over his entire estate to her within a span of only several months by convincing him that she was his protector and his son, Mark Knell, was really the villain.
The prosecution has a direct paper trail of her funneling his money into her account the day of his murder. Or the day after. The old man is gone, let’s go spend-city.
So the murder victim in this case, already suffering from mild dementia, laid down with a viper and got bitten in the process.
Now, some people want her released.
If there is justice out there in the world, the Knell family sure isn’t seeing any.
Jan’s note: This is the very definition of insanity: do the same thing over and over expecting a different result. What a fluster cluck.