After his mother suffered a nervous breakdown, the court remanded him to the custody of the St. A year after his parents divorced, a hit-and-run driver killed his brother, Bobby. Joseph John Maloney Sr., a shoemaker by trade, walked out of his son’s life in 1943, when he was 3 years old. The only thing his real father ever gave him was his name. Maloney thought of Menn as the father he never had. He rejected Maloney’s poem but continued to correspond, providing him with professional advice and personal guidance. Maloney’s formal education had ended in the ninth grade, but Menn recognized raw talent when he saw it. Maloney had garnered the editor’s attention in 1961 through a poem he had submitted to the Star, which then printed verse on its editorial page each day. Maloney owed his freedom to Thorpe Menn, the Star’s literary editor, who had supported his parole and helped him get his job at the newspaper. When he entered prison, Dwight Eisenhower was president when he came out, the Watergate burglary had been committed. He was not from another planet, but he was from another time. Maloney’s prison record listed him as 5-foot-9 and 145 pounds. Given where he’d come from, it’s easy to figure out why.” He was one of those guys who was constantly fidgeting, or his knee was pounding up and down. “There was just something there, and it didn’t fit in with everybody else,” says Horrigan, now an editorial writer for the St. Kevin Horrigan, a cub reporter at the Star in 1973, remembers Maloney as an affable colleague but one who stood apart. Maloney was 19 years old when he committed the crime. Louis confectionery owner during an attempted robbery. At the time of his release, he had served 13 years of a life sentence for killing a South St. Maloney joined the newspaper’s staff after being paroled in 1972. But his rise from convicted murderer to award-winning investigative reporter for the Kansas City Star is a feat unparalleled in the annals of American journalism. By then, most of his running buddies from the joint were long dead, victims, for the most part, of their own malevolent ways. It’s the smoking that eventually killed him. Otherwise, he rolled his own from pouches of Ozark-brand tobacco, manufactured and distributed for free at the Missouri Penitentiary. In prison he preferred Camels, when he could afford them. The brand varied with the decade: L&Ms or, later, Marlboro Lights.
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