Collecting a $50,000 reward from the state for helping to secure the arrest and conviction of Dickie E. Anderson Jr. for the 1997 murder of Renee Pellegrino is proving to be a challenge for two people who provided information to the police and testified at Anderson’s murder trial.

The convicted killer’s longtime companion, Toni Wilson, and jailhouse informant Arthur Moore attended a hearing Friday before Superior Court Judge Arthur C. Hadden, who eventually will decide whether either applicant gets a portion of the reward or the entire amount.

Hadden said he reviewed the state law and found “very little precedent” for determining how to award such rewards.

Pellegrino’s case went unsolved for years after Waterford Police found her body on Waterford Parkway South on June 25, 1997.

In 1999, Gov. John G. Rowland authorized a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of her killer.

Anderson of New London was charged with her murder in 2010.

He was convicted in 2012 of fatally strangling Pellegrino and sentenced to 60 years in prison.

The state Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 2015, clearing the way for Moore and Wilson, who had first sought the reward money in 2012 but had been told to reapply after Anderson exhausted his appeals.

By the end of Friday’s hearing, it was unclear whether either Wilson or Moore would receive the reward, though both said that cooperating with the state had been costly to their reputations.

Wilson, who had testified at the trial that Anderson broke down and admitted to killing a woman soon after their relationship started in 1998, said people looked at her differently and would not talk to her after seeing the trial-related publicity and learning of her involvement in the case.

She also said that her oldest son blames her for his father’s, Anderson’s, incarceration.

Moore, who at the request of Department of Correction officials and state police had pumped Anderson for information while the two were incarcerated together at the Osborn Correctional Institution, said that while he was cooperating with the investigation, he was in fear for his life “because everybody knows the code for when you snitch out somebody like that.”

Moore’s application came to a grinding halt almost immediately after he entered the courtroom Friday in tan prison scrubs and shackles.

A New Haven-area native with a lengthy criminal record, he is serving a 20-month sentence for violation of probation.

Under questioning by his attorney, Robert J. Vontell, Moore said he would not have testified at Anderson’s trial had he not been offered a reward.

While testifying at the trial, Moore had spoken of being motivated by concern for his sister and other women.

On Friday, Moore eventually brought up the women and mumbled that he also desired to “do the right thing,” but not before both the judge and trial prosecutor, Stephen M. Carney, noted the contradiction.

“My recollection is that his testimony is different than the testimony he was giving at the time of the trial, which now raises a serious issue with the defense,” the judge said.

He continued the hearing on Moore’s application to March 4 and asked the court clerk to notify Anderson’s attorneys.

Hadden asked the attorneys for both applicants to write briefs outlining their cases and submit them by the end of February.

Should Moore received the reward, lawyers from the state attorney general’s office are prepared to seize part or all of it to satisfy his more than $48,000 in unpaid child support and defray the cost of his incarceration.

Wilson didn’t tell anyone for years that the father of her two children had broken down and admitted he had killed a woman who demanded money after they had sex.

But when state police approached her in 2008, after a DNA test linked him to Pellegrino, she told her story.

Wilson said Friday that she did not know about the reward when she spoke to investigators but learned of it after Anderson’s arrest.

Her attorney, Jason Burdick, said Wilson’s level of cooperation would not have changed, regardless of the reward.

“She had the unfortunate luck to be involved, but she’s done everything she could to help get justice for Renee Pellegrino,” Burdick said.

k.florin@theday.com

Twitter: @KFLORIN