The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the murder conviction of a DeKalb County man who killed his wife and then drove her body to Virginia and back before turning himself in.
This marked the third time the state high court heard an appeal from Dennis Allaben, who killed his wife in their bedroom on Jan. 3, 2010. In Allaben’s first two appeals, the court overturned his murder convictions, but he was retried in 2016 and convicted once again.
His wife was 43-year-old Maureen Allaben, a well-known food stylist in the metro area. She prepared food for display in advertising photos and commercials, calling herself “the Mistress of Deception.” At the time of her death, she was the set decorator of “The Mo’Nique Show” on BET.
After killing his wife, Dennis Allaben wrapped her corpse in a blue moving blanket, securing it with tape, and put her body in the bed of his pickup truck. He then drove his young son and daughter to his brother’s house in Chesterfield, Virginia, and told his sister-in-law what he had done.
Allaben left his children with his sister-in-law and then drove back back to Georgia to the home of a friend who lived in Jonesboro. After talking to Allaben for about two hours, that man persuaded Allaben to turn himself in to a neighbor who was a city of Morrow police officer. Police then found Maureen Allaben’s body weighted down in the bed of the pickup.
A subsequent autopsy of Maureen Allaben found the cause of death to be strangulation, likely by means of a sleeper-hold. It would have taken a couple of minutes for Dennis Allaben to choke his wife to the point she lost consciousness and a few more minutes before she died, the medical examiner said.
Why Allaben drove more than 1,000 miles with his wife’s corpse remains unclear. But on the way to Virginia he told his children he had stuffed a rag in their mother’s mouth because she wouldn’t keep quiet, according to court records. “Daddy killed Mommy, but it was an accident,” he said.
But during the autopsy, the medical examiner found no signs of a struggle and no evidence to suggest a rag had been stuffed in Maureen Allaben’s throat, the court’s opinion said.
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