True Crime with Rachel Shannon
She Was the Key Witness to her OWN MURDER Trial?! The Devastating Case of Maria Munoz
21 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What tragic events led to the death of Maria Munoz?
There are some people in this world who just have an absolute heart of gold. People who have so much to give and ask for so little in return. Those people who you feel lucky to even be around because you know that they would do anything for you. But sometimes these are the people who get taken advantage of by the most selfish, narcissistic, or outright evil people.
People who will just use that love that the other person has to offer and take so, so much until there's nothing left to give. That is what happened to Maria Munoz. She was the light in the lives of so many people who knew her until one man came in and much like a life-sucking leech, he took everything Maria had until it was too late for her to get out.
This is the tragic, devastating story of Maria Munoz. Maria Munoz was originally from Puerto Rico and she was known as being a kind soul with the biggest heart. She had the brightest smile and she was someone that anyone could rely on for love and support.
While still living in Puerto Rico, she worked as a nurse and it was at her job as a nurse where she met a man named Joel Peyote who was 11 years older than her. He was a nursing student at the time and when Maria met Joel, he was very family-oriented. He was intelligent and a hard worker. Those are qualities that made Maria fall in love with Joel.
The two went on to start dating and by 2011, they were married. Shortly after marrying, the couple moved to Laredo, Texas. There, Joel got a job as a certified registered nurse anesthetist, or CRNA. A CRNA helps provide certain drugs that are used to help patients with pain or staying asleep during surgery.
They help with administering these meds and monitoring the patient before, during, and after surgical procedures. This was a dream job for Joel. He loved his work and was absolutely dedicated to being the best nurse possible. After getting married, the couple went on to have two sons.
At the time of her death, 31-year-old Maria was the mother to five-year-old Alejandro and her almost two-year-old Valentino. After having her sons, Maria decided to stay at home full-time to be a stay-at-home mom. Maria was known to absolutely adore her two little boys, always taking them to the park to play and reading to them before bed every night. she was an absolutely dedicated mother.
While being a stay-at-home mom, Maria picked up piano as a hobby. But as much as she loved being a stay-at-home mother, she did always have plans of going back to school and resuming her career as a nurse. Things seemed to be going quite well in the relationship for quite some time.
Joel was constantly posting photos of his wife and kids, always bragging to his friends and coworkers about how amazing his wife and kids were. But of course, behind closed doors, things between Maria and Joel were taking a turn for the worst. It was around 2018, right after Maria gave birth to her second son Valentino, when people around Joel started to notice that he was changing.
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Chapter 2: How did Maria's relationship with Joel Peyote evolve over time?
That is just insane. By the next morning, Sunday, September 20th, Maria sent Joel a text saying that she was going to hire a lawyer to figure things out. But Joel replied saying that they needed to do this without lawyers intervening because getting a lawyer involved would cost too much money. But just a few hours after that text exchange, it seemed that Joel had a little bit of a change in heart.
Joel sent Maria an email which said, I am so sad I am hurting inside. I want to sit down with you to talk without arguing, a heart to heart. She messaged him back and they ultimately agreed to meet up at about 5 p.m. the following night, Monday, September 21st. Of course, Maria was nervous for this meeting. She didn't know what was going to happen.
Would Joel agree to change and would he stay for the children or was he completely done with the relationship? Before Joel arrived, Maria sent a message to her friend, Yasmin, which said, I just ask if you can pray for me. Tonight, we are going to talk. Yasmin responded saying that she would pray for her. However, whatever prayers Yasmin said for Maria would unfortunately not be answered.
In the early morning hours of September 22, 2020, 911 received a call from Joel Peyot, who was at home with Maria. He reported that his wife had taken some prescription pills and was not breathing.
By the time police arrived to their home at around 1.40am, police entered and immediately saw Joel at the top of the stairs near the main bedroom, still wearing a set of teal surgical scrubs, performing CPR on his wife as their two sons slept in the rooms nearby. As soon as first responders arrived, they took over CPR.
As other first responders worked tirelessly to try and save Maria's life, another officer asked Joel about what pills she had apparently taken. Immediately, Joel went into a nearby bathroom and then went through the medicine cabinet and grabbed a bottle. He hands it to the officers and they see that it's a prescription for clonazepam.
Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine drug used to help acute episodes of anxiety, panic attacks, and it can also be used to help treat epilepsy. For those of you who don't know, benzos slow the nervous system and can help calm you down, but they are known to be highly addictive, therefore they are highly regulated.
On that bottle, the officer noticed that the pills had actually been prescribed to Joel, not Maria. Something else that stood out to officers was that the pill bottle was placed back in the medicine cabinet. Usually, when someone overdoses by taking pills, the pill bottle will still be out next to them.
Yet, for some reason, apparently Maria had taken these pills and then put them back in the bathroom cabinet where they belonged. If Maria had taken those pills on her own, why would she have put them back? That is not normally something that someone would do if they were going to take pills to end their own life. But despite that, Joel told the officers that Maria had been struggling lately.
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Chapter 3: What signs indicated Joel Peyote was unfaithful to Maria?
I don't want to be sad anymore. I don't want my heart to hurt. I don't want my mind to be in torture.'" She also spoke about how she still had hopes for her marriage, saying that she wanted her marriage to be safe and she wanted her family to stay together. She wrote, Lord, this is a lot for me. All I really want to do is see change in him.
There is another longer excerpt from Maria's journal saying, quote, My heart says one thing, my mind says something else. I am in this constant battle, tug of war. I want it to stop, but they won't. They keep me sad, and those are my tears. My future is foggy and unclear. My past haunts me. My present is confusing. Lord, hear me cry. See my tears. Feel my pain. Bring me laughter. Bring me peace.
Bring me happiness again. I don't want to be sad anymore. I don't want my heart to hurt. I don't want my mind to be in torture. Please, I beg you, oh Lord. Just a few weeks before her death, Maria wrote in another entry, quote, So much pain, so much heartache that I have endured throughout these two years and nothing has changed. They keep getting worse.
Honestly, don't know what's going to happen. As time progresses, I lose sight of us returning as a family. My kids are already hurting. God, please help me. I don't want to hurt anymore. Please, I beg you, make my situation change. I can't anymore, I swear." These are clearly words from a woman who is in pain, dealing with the constant torment of what her husband is putting her through.
Her life is falling apart right before her eyes and there isn't anything she can do about it. I totally understand. This was an outlet for her. A very healthy way of expressing herself. And for some, that may be a clear sign that she was depressed and maybe she did want everything to end. But just one day before her death, she wrote in her journal about wanting to move forward.
She finally seemed to be grappling with things and felt like things were looking up. On one page, she wrote, What's next? New beginnings. Where are you? In search for my happiness. A better tomorrow. This shows that she was starting to pick her head back up. That she knew she could get through this. She could get her life back together. and become the best version of herself for her boys.
So, based on what her friends had said about her, her mental health, and her relationship, the medical examiner and investigators pretty much ruled out a suicide. They did not think that she took her own life. But of course, to pin down exactly what happened, they would need to look further. After about four months of investigation, the medical examiner finally got the toxicology reports back.
it was determined that Maria had actually no trace of clonazepam in her system. Again, that sort of made sense because when Joel went to show police the bottle of the pills that she had apparently taken, he grabbed it from the medicine cabinet as if it had been there the entire time. What they did find in her system, though, was concerning.
They found a mix of seven drugs in Maria's system, including morphine, Demerol, Versed, Propofol, Ketamine, Lidocaine, and Narcan. For those of you who don't know, morphine, Demerol, and Versed and Lidocaine are all medications used for pain management and can be administered via IV for anesthesia and pain control. Most of these medications also cause sleepiness and relaxation when administered.
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Chapter 4: How did Maria discover Joel's infidelity and what was her reaction?
Normal people cannot get their hands on most of these drugs. Even most nurses and other medical professionals will never be around these drugs, especially propofol and ketamine in particular, unless they are specifically working with anesthesiology. The drug propofol being in Maria's system is what shocked investigators the most.
And again, as I will remind you, this is exactly what Joel does for a living. He is a nurse anesthetist, so he would have access to propofol. Based on that toxicology screen, there was one doctor who saw it who actually worked with Joel and worked with propofol with Joel. When he saw how much was in Maria's system, he said that that was the most that he has ever seen in someone's system.
Based on this, this doctor strongly believed that her cause of death was the result of propofol specifically, because again, He would know how much you need to give to calm someone down or to overdose them. And if you remember from earlier, there was that tiny mark on Maria's arm that indicated that she most likely was injected with something.
We also saw that there was a syringe found in the home. Put two and two together and the picture becomes clear. it appears that Joel most likely gave Maria that propofol via injection. Throughout all of this, Palais did actually find and get a hold of Janet, the other woman who Joel was seeing while being married to Maria, the woman who he was living with just before Maria's death.
Of course, she was shocked to find out that Joel's soon-to-be wife was dead, but she did not think that Joel actually murdered Maria. In her police interview, she told officers that he did often bring home drugs from work and kept them in the medical bag in their home. Things like ketamine, propofol, versed, and morphine.
She also told police about what Joel told her about the night that Maria died. She said that Joel told her that he went over to Maria's house that night to have a heart to heart about their relationship. She said that Maria started freaking out and actually told Joel that she needed help calming down. So Joel helped her calm down by giving her some medication.
Most likely, he would have injected her with propofol. Then he told her that he did get rid of the medical equipment he used to inject her with the meds so that police wouldn't find out. But again, Janet said that Maria asked for this injection and she did not believe that Joel would have purposely killed Maria.
However, by this point again, investigators knew that she had a mix of several other sedatives in her system. Things that were not prescribed to her, nor would she have access to. If propofol was the only thing in her system, then it would be easier to believe that this was a horrible accident. But it wasn't.
So, based on the toxicology screening, investigators believed that Joel actually slipped her several other sedatives into her coffee, which she would have drank right up because she loved coffee. It's thought that those sedatives would have been enough for her to pass out and fall asleep.
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Chapter 5: What were Maria's mental health struggles following her husband's betrayal?
And then once she was asleep, that is probably when Joel would have injected her with a lethal dose of propofol. It was the belief of investigators that Joel then waited long enough to call 911 until he was confident that she was dead. He wanted to make sure that they wouldn't be able to bring her back.
So after interviewing Joel and finding his behaviors after his wife's death to be very bizarre, after talking to friends and family of Maria's, and after getting that toxicology report back along with all of the other evidence that we've discussed up to this point, police believed that they had enough to arrest Joel for the murder of his wife, as well as for charges of tampering with evidence.
It wasn't until two years after Maria's death in March of 2023 that Joel finally went to trial for his wife's murder. The prosecution argued that Joel wanted his wife dead because she was getting in the way of his new relationship with this new woman.
We can see through their many fights and negative interactions that Joel was a cheater with no remorse or care in the world while Maria tried to fight tooth and nail to save her family. We saw in those emails how Joel didn't want to get lawyers involved because he didn't want to spend the money. Divorce is a very, very expensive process.
And given that Maria was a stay-at-home mother, if they did get divorced, there was a very high likelihood that he would be paying her alimony and or child support. They said that he had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to murder his wife. The prosecution highlighted the medical examiner's ruling that determined that Maria was not suicidal.
Again, they determined this based on her recent journal entries as well as from statements from friends and family. They said that Joel had access to drugs at his work and he knew how to use them given that he was a nurse anesthetist. They also had Janet, Joel's now ex-girlfriend, testify at the trial as well.
In her testimony, she talked about how Joel admitted that he injected Maria, but not to kill her. He just wanted to calm her down. She talked about how he often brought various drugs home from work, so it was common for him to have access to these drugs and IVs to administer them. Also, if Maria was the one who took all those drugs on her own, where were the drugs?
Why weren't they by her body when she was found? Again, normally when someone takes their own life via overdose, you will find those pills right next to the person's body because chances are they're not going to take the pills and then calmly get up and put them away before going back and lying on the floor waiting for the pills to kick in. That just doesn't happen.
You're going to take the pills and just lay there. They're all next to you because you don't care what happens afterwards because you're trying to take your own life. You don't feel the need to put those pills nicely away in the cabinet after taking them. And if we want to say that Joel came in and cleaned them up after finding her, why did he do that?
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