Michael Maltese Murder Charge: South Brunswick Police Testify Wednesday

SOUTH BRUNSWICK, NJ — After the state Supreme Court overturned a murder conviction for a man accused of strangling his Monmouth Junction parents to death, South Brunswick police officers testified in court Wednesday that they would have found the buried bodies even if Michael Maltese hadn't confessed.

In 2010, Maltese, 28, was convicted of manslaughter for killing his father and mother on Oct. 8, 2008, after he got into violent argument with his father at their Maple Street home in Monmouth Junction. Maltese lived with his parents. The bodies of Michael J. Maltese, 58, and Kathleen Maltese, 54, were found stacked in a hole in Beech Woods Park, less than two miles from their Maple Street home.

South Brunswick police have long maintained that Maltese confessed and led them to the Beech Woods shallow grave. Maltese and his girlfriend then went on a shopping spree with his parents' credit cards, prosecutors charge.

But in 2015 the N.J. Supreme Court overturned his manslaughter conviction, saying a confession Maltese gave was inadmissible because police secretly recorded one of his conversations to help their investigation.

However, South Brunswick police fought that overruling in court Wednesday, saying that even without Maltese's confession, they would have found the grave site.

Even without Maltese's confession, police would have worked with the FBI and State Police by doing a grid search of the Monmouth Junction area.

"I'm 100 percent convinced we would have found them," South Brunswick Capt. James Ryan testified in court Wednesday, according to NJ.com

Ryan estimated it would have taken police about two weeks to find the corpses.

"There's no doubt in my mind that we would have searched that park," Lt. Louis Andrinopoulos, of State Police's missing persons unit. According to the NJ.com report, he said in murder case after murder case, suspects usually do not hide the bodies more than two to three miles from the murder site.

The next court date for Maltese is Nov. 8. Maltese has a new trial tentatively scheduled for January.

Patch file photo of Beech Woods Park in South Brunswick Township.