Correction

By Gregg Wendorf

Advance News Journal

Call it a major mistake on the part of this befuddled writer, but the frontpage Observations opinion column I published last week titled — “Judge denies spaghetti plate” — wasn’t factual. Turns out, state District Court Judge Noé Gonzalez has yet to deny the amended appeal belonging to convicted murderer and thief, Monica Melissa Patterson, even though I wrote in last week’s column that he had.

I apologize for the inconvenience or confusion that column may have caused anyone. I do my best to not make mistakes, but I have yet to master the art.

Last week, in fact, Wednesday morning, I woke up with this nagging feeling that something wasn’t right. You know how you sometimes get that nagging feeling that makes your neck stiff?

So, I’m sitting in a state District Court last Wednesday, early afternoon, watching the Richard Molina trial unfold, when someone texts me to say, “I don’t think the judge has signed the order yet.” Then they attach a link to the spaghetti opinion column I published on last week’s front page.

If I’m going to get a story wrong, call it a huge screw-up, I prefer to at least have it published on an inside page.

When I get a story, a column wrong, though, with me, it’s usually stuck to the front page. It’s as if the cosmos is trying to make sure that everyone can see my mistake. Right there. Right out in the open. Here is how the lead paragraph to last week’s column read: “That was fast. The trial court, that is, the 370th state District Court, knocking down last Thursday the most recent appeal made by Monica Melissa Palacios Patterson, filed this past May, to help free her from the central Texas prison where she is sentenced to live out her remaining years.”

Turns out, the motion to deny the new amended appeal has indeed been filed with the District Clerk, but the judge has yet to sign it.

I ended last week’s column with: “Kudos to Judge Noé Gonzalez.”

I wanted to compliment the judge for not letting the appeal sit on the back burner for however long he has to rule. I think it’s 90 days, but I need to verify it.

For the back story, you can go to anjournal.com and read last week’s column.

Bottom line: there is nothing new in Patterson’s amended appeal. There is a medical examiner now based in New Zealand, formerly from California, who says that seasoned pathologist Dr. Norma Jean Farley was wrong when she claimed that Patterson’s murder victim, 96-year-old WW II vet Marty Knell, was murdered, as opposed to death from natural causes (cardiac arrest).

The kiwi ME, though, apparently wasn’t willing to sign an affidavit to that effect.

In the new amended appeal, an investigator says that the seasoned Texas Ranger and the experience criminal investigator from the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office used “junk science” to determine that Patterson and her confessed accomplice, Angel Mario Garza, were at Knell’s home during the time he was murdered.

Yet, he, too, has provided no signed affidavit to that effect.

In point of fact, during Patterson’s murder trial in the fall of 2017, the Texas Ranger took approximately three hours showing the jurors how he and the sheriff’s investigator had painstakingly gone over the cell phone tower pings to place Patterson and Garza at the scene of the murder.

There are either two or three guys also listed in the amended appeal who claim that Garza told them that he didn’t do it. One of the guys is a bail bondsmen. People arrested for serious crimes never lie to bail bondsmen. Everyone knows that.

As stated in the motion to deny the appeal, however, that’s only hearsay, because Garza has already confessed to his participation in the 2015 murder as part of his plea agreement. If he now says he didn’t do it, he sure doesn’t want to be hauled before Judge Gonzalez to explain why he lied during sentencing with the plea agreement in hand, in which he admitted to his participation in the murder.

In the amended appeal, there is no new evidence under the sun to contradict the evidence and testimony presented during Patterson’s 2017 capital murder/theft trial that would suggest that A), the woman is not guilty of the crimes for which she was convicted, or B) that she is a wrongly convicted woman based on false information, which has recently come to light.

The injustice in this trial, as I’ve written many times before, is that the victim’s family, particularly his son, has had to wait almost five years since Patterson’s conviction (November 2017), and the Knell Estate still hasn’t made it to probate court, where more than a million dollars in stocks is still tied up in an escrow account (a legal holding account).

Typically, a probate court isn’t going to make a ruling as long as a criminal case is still unsettled, left dangling in some criminal court.

The 13th Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sat on Patterson’s appeal for about two years; and then the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sat on it for about a year after that without even making a ruling; and now it’s back in the trial court for another appellate round, the 370th.

So, yes, I was wrong when I wrote last week that Patterson’s new amended appeal had been denied by Judge Gonzalez, when in fact, it’s still waiting for the judge’s signature.

Mea Culpa.

But I was right when I wrote that this thing has dragged on for far too long. Where is there any justice for the victim and his family when the killer still has her hands on her murder victim’s money, at least in the legal sense?