When María Muñoz rang her husband’s lover’s doorbell, she had no idea that footage of the resulting altercation would later be used to unmask her killer.
But days later, the 31-year-old woman was dead and video of the confrontation was among the evidence detectives used to put her killer behind bars.
Her husband, Joel Pellot, initially claimed she had overdosed on prescription pills when police found her dead in their Laredo, Texas, home.
But the nurse anesthetist was filmed injecting him with toxic drugs stolen from the hospital where she worked in a bid to avoid a costly divorce.
And the doorbell footage, along with Muñoz’s diary and cell phone recordings, helped expose his unfaithful and abusive behavior.
The confrontation ended with Pellot breaking the windshield of a car, violent behavior that reported to police and jurors who ultimately put him behind bars.
Muñoz’s visit to the house of her husband’s lover finally revealed the motive for killing her.
María had met her husband when she was a young nurse in Puerto Rico, and he was an ambitious medical student 11 years older than her.
María Muñoz, 31, was murdered by her husband after he asked to meet for a ‘heart to heart’
A doorbell camera captured the moment María Muñoz confronted her husband Joel Pellot at the home of his lover Janet Arredondo.
They married in 2011 and made their home in the Texas border town, where she abandoned her career to support her husband.
But in 2020, Maria discovered that her husband was cheating on her when she found a plane ticket for a vacation to Europe that he planned to take with a colleague from her hospital.
Things came to a head on September 19, 2020, the Saturday before her death, when Maria saw Pellot’s car outside her lover Janet Arredondo’s home.
At the door, he allegedly gave Pellot an ultimatum: choose between his mistress or his wife and children.
Arredondo called the police, who in turn called Maria while she was traveling home with her husband, according to the CBS true crime show 48 Hours.
‘Hey, I’m talking to you right now,’ they heard Pellot say as he took the call, ‘Hang up the fucking phone.’
He had smashed the windshield with a punch before he got home and she texted him the next morning to tell him she was hiring a lawyer.
‘We can do this with minimal intervention from a lawyer. “It’s too much money,” he replied.
Hours later, there was a change of tone.
“I’m very sad, it hurts inside,” he emailed her.
‘I want to sit with you to talk, without arguing. From heart to heart.’
Maria was nervous as she prepared for what would be her last meeting.
“I’m just asking if you can pray for me,” she texted her friend Yazmín Martínez on Monday, “tonight we’re going to talk.”
Police received another call in the early hours of Tuesday morning, this time from Pellot, who told them his wife was not breathing and may have taken some prescription pills.
They found him dressed in a surgical gown and performing CPR on his now-dead wife, while the couple’s two young children slept in the next bedroom.
Pellot went to a bathroom cabinet to get the prescription clonazepam he said he had overdosed on, but kept the bottle in his pocket while police attempted to resuscitate his wife.
“Yes, she’s been very depressed,” he told them.
Unfaithful husband Joel Pellot murdered his wife with a lethal drug injection hours in their Laredo home after learning that she was preparing to divorce him.
Janet Arredondo had an affair with Pellot and gave evidence at his trial
The mother-of-two had kept a detailed diary recording her tempestuous marriage.
The couple had made previous attempts at reconciliation, including a vacation trip to Nevada.
Pellot was taken to the police station for questioning, where surveillance cameras captured him crying, screaming and pushing furniture when left alone.
He admitted that the syringes and intravenous equipment found in the house were his but were part of his daily work equipment.
Investigators were also curious about a puncture mark on Maria’s arm, but it was four months before the toxicology results came back and they had little to go on.
Meanwhile, Pellot attended his wife’s funeral where he wept over her coffin.
“What made me angry was that he was near the coffin,” Martínez told 48 Horas.
‘Crying for her, giving her kisses. Why now? You have made her suffer and cry so much and you are doing this now?
But what the detectives did have were María’s diaries.
“Life is so unfair,” she wrote in one entry, “My husband, the man I love so much, is causing me so much pain.”
“I don’t want to be sad anymore, I don’t want my heart to hurt, I don’t want my mind to be torture,” he wrote in another.
Pellot claimed that Maria had overdosed on the tranquilizer clonazepam, but a toxicology report ultimately found nothing in her system.
And they spoke of a continuing hope that their marriage could be saved.
“Lord, this is a lot for me,” he wrote. “All I really want to do is see a change in him.”
Police also found cellphone video recordings that Maria had made, including an angry exchange in her car.
‘What do you want me to do?’ At one point he asked Pellot: “What are the expectations you have about this marriage?”
“If you walk out that door, we’ll get divorced,” he warned her.
“Okay, you got it,” Pellot responded, slamming the car door.
The medical examiner had found drugs in Maria’s body, but the diaries and recordings were enough for her to rule out suicide.
Pellot’s boss at the hospital, anesthesiologist Dr. John Huntsinger, was suspicious of the results and urged police to investigate further.
But four months passed before the toxicology report revealed that there was no clonazepam in Maria’s system.
Instead, there were seven other drugs normally used during surgery, including propofol, which can only be administered by injection.
“I was very surprised to see Propofol,” Dr. Huntsinger said. “His was the highest level I’ve ever seen.”
“I think this was death by Propofol.”
Pellot was taken to the police station for questioning, where surveillance cameras captured him crying, screaming and pushing furniture when he was left alone.
“She loved him and adored him,” said María’s friend Angela Montoya, “she just loved him too much.”
Pellot was dressed in a medical gown and “sweating profusely” when police arrived at the home he had shared with Maria, where they found her dead.
Arredondo had been interviewed by police and admitted that Pellot had routinely brought drugs, including propofol, from the hospital.
He also revealed that Pellot had admitted to injecting his wife on the night of her death.
“He wanted to… just calm her down,” he told them, “so he did it with medication.”
Pellot was arrested and claimed in court that she had been given Narcan, a medication used to reverse an opioid overdose.
“Someone tried to bring her back to life, and it wasn’t the paramedics or the police. It was Joel,” her lawyer Roberto Balli told the court.
“So he didn’t want her dead.” It was a terrible accident.
But the jury took less than an hour to find Pellot guilty of his wife’s murder and he was sentenced to life in prison in March this year.
Prosecutor Marisela Jacamán said that the most important witness in the trial was María herself through the diaries that showed that she had overcome her husband.
“I’ve heard about emotional abuse, I’ve seen it, I’ve dealt with it, but I never realized how prevalent it is even in our lives, where you can relate to some of the things that Maria was experiencing,” she explained. .
‘And she was a great mother, she was just an amazing person.
‘And that energy? We’re sorry.”
“She loved him and adored him,” said Angela Montoya, Maria’s friend.
“She just loved him too much.”