A new trial will begin Monday for a 59-year-old DeKalb County man whose conviction for murdering his wife was thrown out last year.
Prosecutors said Dennis Allaben strangled his wife to death in their bedroom on Jan. 3, 2010, wrapped her body in padded quilting, placed it in the back of his pickup truck and drove the couple's 7- and 8-year-old children more than 500 miles to Virginia.
Allaben, prosecutors said, told the children, “I killed your mother.”
He dropped them with his brother before returning to the metro area and turning himself in to police, saying he didn’t want the children taken into state custody.
Before his 2011 trial, he told police that his wife Maureen Allaben, an effervescent 43-year-old set decorator for BET's "The Mo'Nique Show," was trying to poison or drug him and was stalking him through GPS and computer monitoring.
His claims, however, were not substantiated.
A DeKalb County jury found Dennis Allaben guilty of both malice murder and reckless conduct for the same crime. But in November 2013, the Georgia Supreme Court threw out the conviction, saying that reckless conduct requires the jury to find that the defendant didn’t act with the intent to kill.
“Because we conclude that the guilty verdict on reckless conduct was mutually exclusive of the remaining verdicts, we reverse Allaben’s conviction for malice murder, set aside all the guilty verdicts, and remand the case for further proceedings,” according to the Nov. 25, 2013, opinion.
Allaben will be retried in front of DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Linda Hunter, and jury selection begins at 9 a.m. Monday at the DeKalb County courthouse.
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