Runaway Joe: Six-Decade Manhunt for Poison Suspect Who Hid in Ireland
Joseph Maloney allegedly poisoned his wife at a 1967 birthday party in Rochester, NY, then vanished—later resurfacing in Dublin under a false identity.
The man who disappeared twice: Joseph Maloney's six-decade flight from justice
Google News IE — Crime (en) reports on an extract from Runaway Joe, a new book by Pavel Barter based on the acclaimed RTÉ Documentary On One true crime podcast series — a stranger-than-fiction account of a man who reinvented himself across continents and repeatedly slipped the grip of justice.
Rochester, New York, 1967. At his son Joey's fifth birthday party, Joseph Maloney allegedly poisoned his wife, June. The guests included her 23-year-old brother Dale Fisk and his fiancée Gladys MacDiarmid. June's estranged husband had offered to host the party partly in celebration of the engagement.
Joe Maloney — six feet two inches tall, a redhead and a whirlwind of activity — dominated proceedings, tending bar and regaling guests with stories while June gravitated towards a group of nursing colleagues. He served her a screwdriver, orange juice and vodka in a patterned water glass, then later mixed her a Manhattan: whiskey, sweet vermouth and bitters.
After dinner, June and Joe argued briefly out of earshot. Dale overheard a dispute about her car, detail he later recounted in police testimony. June fell quiet and went upstairs; Joe followed; she returned to the living room.
"I don't feel so good," she whispered to her brother.
She looked drowsy, as though she had drunk too much. "The Manhattan was awfully strong," she told Dale. "I couldn't even finish it."
June left at 6pm, two hours after arriving at 190 Eastmoreland Drive in the southern district of Rochester. Minutes into the drive back to her apartment, she pulled over near Strong Memorial Hospital and began to cry.
"What's wrong, Mommy?" asked Joey.
She did not respond. After several minutes she wiped her face, started the engine and drove on.
Escape from hospital, emergence in Dublin
Maloney was subsequently charged in connection with the alleged poisoning of his wife. While awaiting trial in the psychiatric wing of a Rochester hospital, he escaped and vanished.
Years later, a charming stranger calling himself Michael O'Shea surfaced in Dublin. He lived as a country gentleman and worked at the upper reaches of Ireland's film industry. His cover held for years — until a US extradition treaty exposed his true identity.
Arrested in 1985, Maloney escaped justice a second time when his trial collapsed on a technicality. He fled Ireland, leaving investigators on both sides of the Atlantic without a credible lead on his whereabouts.
An archive surfaces in Florida
Decades passed. Then Joey — now 62 — opened a manila envelope at his home in Florida and out spilled the material remnants of his biological father's life before the flight: a birth certificate, a passport, a vaccination certificate, business cards, addresses. Photographs of Joe as a baby, a young man, an adult. Pictures of Joey and his sister Patti-Ann as children, and a portrait of June in her nurse's uniform. A Gulf Travel credit card, its embossed lettering still legible. The registration for Joe's prized 1965 red Ford Mustang.
The archive had reached Joey through a circuitous route. Jim Memmott, a columnist for Rochester newspaper Democrat & Chronicle, had run into lawyer Robert "Chip" Presutti and fallen into conversation. Chip's late father, Thomas Presutti, was a celebrated criminal defence lawyer in Rochester who had acted as Joe Maloney's attorney. When Thomas died, Chip inherited his father's files — including everything Maloney had left behind when he went on the run. Because Chip had never himself represented Maloney and his father was dead, client-attorney privilege no longer applied.
"Chip doesn't want the stuff," Memmott wrote to Gary Craig, another Democrat & Chronicle reporter who had covered Maloney's case decades earlier and returned to it after RTÉ released a podcast series on the case in 2024. "Do you? Or are there members of Maloney's family who would want it? A strange turn in the never-ending saga of Runaway Joe."
From podcast to book
The author, Pavel Barter, was present as Joey thumbed through the envelope's contents across a table in Florida. Barter's interest in the case began after he read a memoir by Gillian Hussey, a judge in Ireland who had dealt directly with Maloney's case. That interest developed into the RTÉ Documentary on One podcast, which drew significant attention when it aired in 2024.
The book Runaway Joe expands on that investigation, tracing a man Barter describes as a remorseless manipulator who reinvented himself with what the text calls "chilling ease" — leaving, in the author's account, devastation across two continents and two separate legal jurisdictions over more than half a century.
Source: Google News IE — Crime (en)