Chilling moment cheating anesthetist husband Joel Pellot calls 911 saying he had found his wife Maria Munoz unresponsive despite killing her himself with a lethal cocktail of drugs
The 911 call from Maria Munoz's cheating husband moments after he injected her with a fatal dose of poison sheds new light on the mother of two's 2020 death.
During the call, Joel Pellot tells the operator that he noticed his wife was unresponsive and that he thought she had taken pills. He also says he administered CPR.
Pellot's voice cuts the line as he asks, “Is anyone coming?”
When Officer Gregorio De La Cruz arrived on the scene, he found Pellot kneeling over his unconscious wife's body while performing CPR. The officer stepped back as Pellow, a nurse anesthesiologist, apparently urgently tried to resuscitate his wife.
De La Cruz told CBS's 48 Hours that when he offered to help Pellot, the father of two suddenly stopped giving compressions while they waited for paramedics to arrive at the home in Laredo, Texas.
Cheating husband Joel Pellot killed his wife with a lethal injection of drugs in their Laredo home for hours after learning she was preparing to divorce him
The couple had made previous attempts at reconciliation, including a vacation to Nevada
The police bodycam footage shows the moment a police officer arrived at the house where they were met by Pellot, who was already sweating profusely through his work clothes.
De La Cruz told the show that Pellot immediately acted suspiciously. The officer also said that when he asked Pellot to show him the pill bottle containing the medication his wife had taken, he went to their medicine cabinet.
In overdose deaths, drugs are typically found close to the body. During the video, Pellot can be seen taking the pills, clonazepam, from a table and putting them in his pocket. De La Cruz noted that this was also suspicious.
The officer began to suspect that Pellot was under the influence of something. During their search, officers also found a needle catheter.
The nurse was found guilty of injecting a poison into his wife.
Other items found included scrubs, gloves and syringes.
When Pellott was taken into custody, his strange behavior continued. While alone in the interrogation room, he moved the furniture, cried and screamed, to the extent that he frightened people who were nearby.
Maria Munoz, 31, was killed by her husband after he begged to meet for a 'heart to heart'
The mother-of-two had kept a detailed diary documenting her tempestuous marriage
During the interview, the killer explained that he was separated from his wife and living with his girlfriend. He went to his former home to discuss his marriage to Munoz.
He claimed she took the fatal overdose after he left.
In her diary entries, Munoz wrote that she was heartbroken when Pellot left their home in Laredo, leaving her to care for their two young sons.
Maria's diary and cellphone recordings helped investigators uncover her husband's abuse and track her journey through grief to recovery and renewed faith in the future.
'What is it that I want?' she wrote the day before she died, “#1 Move Forward!!”
Munoz had met her husband when she was a young nurse in Puerto Rico and he was an ambitious medical student eleven years her senior.
They married in 2011 and settled in the Texas border town, where she gave up her career to support her husband.
But in 2020, Munoz discovered her husband was cheating on her when she found a plane ticket for a European vacation he was planning to take with a colleague from his hospital.
Things came to a head on September 19, the Saturday before her death, when Munoz spotted his car outside the home of his lover Janet Arredondo.
Arredondo called the police, who in turn called Munoz while she was traveling home with her husband.
“Hey, I'm fucking talking to you right now,” they heard Pellot say to her when she answered, “Hang up the damn phone.”
He smashed the windshield before they got home, and she texted him the next morning to tell him she was hiring a lawyer.
“We can do this with minimal attorney involvement. It's too much money,” he shot back.
Hours later there was a change in tone.
“I'm so sad I'm hurting inside,” he emailed her.
'I want to sit down with you and talk, without arguing. From heart to heart.'
Maria was nervous as she prepared for what would be their final meeting.
“I'm just asking if you can pray for me,” she sent a message to her friend Yazmin Martnez on Monday, “we'll talk tonight.”