By a unanimous vote of 3-0, the Texas 13th District Court of Appeals has upheld the November 2017 murderand-theft convictions of Monica Melissa Palacios Patterson handed down by a jury in the 370th state District Court following what has been billed Hidalgo County’s longest-lasting murder trial, which lasted five-and-a-half weeks. Not only that, but the court strongly suggested that Patterson has lost her right to keep the hundreds of thousands of dollars she stole from her 96-year-old murder victim, WWII vet and McAllen resident Martin Knell, after suffocating him Jan. 28, 2015 because he had caught on to her scheme to ...