Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / The Killing of Theresa Fusco

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The Killing of Theresa Fusco · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: I want you to picture something for a second, just
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an incredibly mundane, everyday object. Imagine a discarded plastic smoothie
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strawkay Like, It's sitting at the bottom of a public
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trash can right outside a cafe. It's covered in whatever
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sticky fruit residue is left over. It's mixed in with
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crumpled you know, coffee stained naptins, maybe some old receipts.
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Speaker 2: Right. Literally just garbage, literally garbage.
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Speaker 1: But imagine that this specific piece of garbage, this single
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cylinder of cheap plastic, actually holds the power to rewrite
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forty years of history.
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Speaker 3: Oh wow.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, Imagine that the invisible biological material left on that
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discarden straw has the capacity to undo massive legal injustices,
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to free innocent people from the shadow of a horrific crime,
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and finally solve this haunting mystery that terrified an entire community.
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Speaker 3: It honestly sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie.
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Speaker 1: It totally does, like detectives reading the past through a
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microscopes or something. But it is actually the reality of
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the criminal justice system. We're looking at today. The case
1:01
files we've been reviewing for this deep dive cover a
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staggering forty year span, starting with the tragic murder of
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a teenager named Teresa Fusco.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's such a heavy, sprawling case, it is.
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Speaker 1: But our mission for this deep dive isn't just to
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recount the timeline of a true crime story. We're going
1:19
to use this specific case to track the evolution of
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the American justice system.
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Speaker 3: Itself, which is fascinating.
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Speaker 1: Right. We're looking at the terrifying pitfalls of human error,
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the devastating consequences of what we now call junk science,
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and we're juxtaposing all of that against the relentless correcting
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power of modern forensic technology. So, uh, okay, let's untack this.
1:41
Speaker 3: It's an incredibly powerful framing, I mean, because this single
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case truly acts as a time chepat rancapsule.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, for forensic science and legal psychology. When you look
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at the initial investigation from nineteen eighty four and then
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you look at the breakthroughs in twenty twenty four and
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twenty twenty five, you're essentially looking at two entirely different
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universes of criminal justice.
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Speaker 1: It really forces us to question how certainty is manufactured
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in the courtroom, doesn't it?
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Speaker 3: Exactly We're going to see how the very definition of
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scientific proof has crastically shifted. What was considered absolute, undeniable
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scientific fact by judges and juries in the mid nineteen
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eighties is now in a lot of cases recognized as
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entirely subjective.
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Speaker 1: Flawed, even dangerous, very dangerous.
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Speaker 3: And conversely, what we can do today with a microscopic
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cellular sample recovered from a trash can. I mean that
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would have looked like pure sorcery to a homicide detective
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in nineteen eighty four.
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Speaker 1: I mean imagine stepping into a time machine and trying
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to explain to a nineteen eighties detective that you're going
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to catch a killer by plugging their victims DNA into
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a computer database of family trees built by people trying
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to find their distant cousins.
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Speaker 3: They would laugh you out of the crease anct.
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Speaker 1: Literally laugh you right out the door. But to understand
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the science and to really grasp the systemic failures that
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allowed innocent men to lose decades of their lives, we
3:00
have to start with the human element.
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Speaker 3: We do.
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Speaker 1: We have to understand the victim, the specific era, and
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this terrifying localized panic that residents called the Linn Brook Triangle.
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So we're going back to November of nineteen eighty four. Okay,
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we're in Linnbrock, New York. This is Nassau County, Long Island,
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about twenty miles east of Manhattan. It's your quintessential middle
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class nineteen eighty suburbs, Brught.
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Speaker 3: Tree Line Street, single family homes.
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Speaker 1: Exactly, kids riding bikes everywhere until the street lights come on.
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And at the center of this story is a sixteen
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year old girl named Teresa Fisco.
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Speaker 2: She was a junior in high school, right, yeah, a junior.
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Speaker 1: Her parents, Thomas and Connie, have recently gone through a divorce,
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which is tough on her, but her dad is still
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very active in her life. She lives mostly with her
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mom and younger brother, and people describe her as friendly, outgoing, responsible.
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It's a normal teen completely, and because she wants some independence,
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she gets a part time job at a place called
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Hot Skates.
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Speaker 3: And you know, the physical setting of Hot Skates is
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actually critical to under standing the social dynamics of this
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whole case. How so well, Hot Skates was a roller
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skating rink on Merrick Road, and in the context of
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nineteen eighties suburban teenage life. A place like that was
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much more than just a business where you rented skates.
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Right before smartphones, before social media, before you could instantly
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message your friends to see what they were doing, physical
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spaces like this were the absolute epiicet of youth culture.
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This was the hub.
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Speaker 1: It was like the nineteen eighties physical equivalent of a
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group chat.
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Speaker 3: That's a perfect way to put it.
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Speaker 1: If you wanted to know the local gossip, if you
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wanted to flirt, or just vent about school or kill
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a Friday night, you went to the.
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Speaker 3: Roller ring exactly. It was where teenagers went to c
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and be seen away from the watchful eyes of their parents.
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Speaker 1: It's such an innocent, vibrant image of youth. Teresa worked
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at the snack bar, serving hot dogs, pouring sodas. But
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there is a very dark, looming shadow over this specific
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suburban hub. Yeah, there is, because just a few months earlier,
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in June of nineteen eighty four, a fifteen year old
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girl named Kelly Morrissey vanished, just vanished. And Kelly wasn't
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just a stranger on the news. She was a friend
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of Teresa's from junior high. They ran in the same
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circles and right around that same time, another local team
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named Jackie Martarella also disappeared, which is.
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Speaker 3: Just the psychological landscape that community completely fractured in the
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summer of nineteen eighty four.
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Speaker 1: I can't even imagine you.
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Speaker 3: Have to put yourself in the mindset of a parent
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or a teenager in that area during that specific cultural moment,
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the nineteen eighties was the era of the stranger danger panic.
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Speaker 1: Right, pictures of missing kids were starting to appear on
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Milk Carton's exactly.
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Speaker 3: The idea that a suburban street wasn't inherently safe was
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really becoming a national conversation. And then, in this one
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specific Long Island neighborhood, two girls disappear.
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Speaker 1: And rumors start swirling, oh massively.
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Speaker 3: A local nickname develops in the press and among the residents,
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the linn Brook Triangle.
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Speaker 1: The Lindbrook Triangle.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's this grim play on the Bermuda Trian, suggesting
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a geographic black hole right in their neighborhood where young
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girls just step off the sidewalk and vanish into thin air.
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Speaker 1: The phrase Lindbrook Triangle is just horrifying because it implies
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something supernatural, or at least something completely unstoppable.
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Speaker 3: It strips away the illusion of safety entirely.
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Speaker 1: And that brings us to the night of November tenth,
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nineteen eighty four. Teresa is working her shift at Hot
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Skates for reasons that are still somewhat murky in the
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public record, possibly a minor workplace dispute. She actually gets
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fired that night.
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Speaker 2: She was incredibly upset, very upset.
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Speaker 1: Her time card show she clocks out at nine four
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seven pm. Crying. Witnesses see her leave the rink, presumably
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starting the short, familiar walk home, and she's never seen alive.
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Speaker 2: Again, never makes it through a front door right.
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Speaker 1: Her family reports her missing almost immediately, And looking at
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that timeline, looking at the panic that was already saturating
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that town, I really have to ask how this impacts
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the police work.
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Speaker 3: It's a crucial question.
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Speaker 1: When a community is already gripped by this lind Brook
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Triangle hysteria and then a third girl from the exact
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same social circle vanishes. Does public terror actually make law
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enforcement worse at their jobs? Does it create a feedback
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loop of confirmation bias?
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Speaker 3: I mean, honestly, it profoundly degrades the investigative process. Really, yes,
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when a community is in a state of communal terror,
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the mandate for law enforcement fundamentally shifts. The pressure is
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no longer simply to solve a crime through methodical evidence gathering.
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Speaker 1: What does it become.
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Speaker 3: The mandate becomes an urgent demand to restore a sense
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of existential safety. The public is terrified. The media is
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demanding press conferences, politicians are breathing down the next of
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the police chiefs, and the detectives themselves feel this intense,
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overwhelming heat.
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Speaker 1: Like a pressure cooker.
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Speaker 3: Exactly in a pressure cooker environment like that, the demand
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for quick answers very frequently overrides the demand for accurate answers.
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Speaker 1: That's terrifying.
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Speaker 3: It is investigators develop severe tunnel vision. They desperately need
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to find a monster to slay so they can drag
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that monster in front of the cameras and tell the community,
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you know, you can let your kids walk to school again.
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Speaker 1: Right. They need a win.
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Speaker 3: They need to win desperately. And when you are actively
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hunting for a suspect to fit a narrative of safety,
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you become highly susceptible to accepting flawed evidence, ignoring contradictory facts,
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and pushing suspects well past ethical boundaries.
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Speaker 1: Just because you're convinced you're serving the greater good by
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closing the.
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Speaker 3: Case exactly, you think you're doing the right thing.
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Speaker 1: Wow. So for twenty five agonizing days, there is just silence.
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Flyers are stable to telephone poles, search parties are combing
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the woods, but there's nothing. Until December five, nineteen eighty four. Right,
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a group of teenagers are walking near the Long Island
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railroad tracks, just blocks from the hot skates rink, and
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they stumble upon a horrific scene. Underneath a pile of leaves, dirt,
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and wooden shipping pallets, they find Teresa's body.
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Speaker 3: The autopsy results were grim, and they provide a very
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very specific forensic timeline. The medical examiner determined she had
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been brutally beaten, sexually assaulted, and the ultimate cause of
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death was ligature strangulation, meaning.
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Speaker 1: She was strangled with a cord or rope rather than
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manually with hands.
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Speaker 3: Right. Correct, But crucially for our understand of how this
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case will eventually span four decades, the medical examiner collected
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vaginal swabs during that autopsy.
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Speaker 1: Okay, this is important, very Those.
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Speaker 3: Swabs confirmed the presence of seamen and spermatozoa that biological
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evidence was logged, preserved, and stored away in nineteen eighty four.
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They could do basic blood typing on it, but the
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DNA revolution was still.
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Speaker 1: Years away, so they have the evidence, but not the
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tech to really decode it yet exactly. And finding the
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body so close to the rink, hidden underneath shipping pallettes
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in a way that suggests the killer had time and
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knew the layout of the area, the police operate on
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the assumption that the perpetrator is local, which.
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Speaker 3: Is a reasonable assumption at the time.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, someone who knew Teresa's routine or a least new
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the geography of the real yards. The Nassau County homicide
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squad kicks into high gear. They are interviewing everyone who
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ever set foot in hot skates, right, But it's not
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until the spring of nineteen eighty five that they really
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lock onto their targets. They zero in on three young men,
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John Coget, John Restivo, and Dennis Halstead. Coget worked occasionally
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at a moving company run by Restivo and his brother. Okay,
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and this is where we have to look closely at
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the trap of human error, because the interrogation of John
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Coget is staggering cogit is brought in. He's subjected to
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multiple polygraphic examinations. The detectives helme he failed them. They
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isolate him, and they interrogate him relentlessly for nearly eighteen hours.
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Speaker 3: Eighteen hours of continuous, high stake psychological pressure.
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Speaker 1: How does someone not just break down completely?
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Speaker 3: Well, they do. And to understand how a false confession happens,
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we have to break down the mechanics of an interrogation
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from that era, which was heavily reliant on techniques like
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the read technique.
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Speaker 1: Okay, but great, that down.
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Speaker 3: Sorry. The common everyday assumption is, you know I would
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never confess to a horrific murder.
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Speaker 2: I didn't commit right. Everyone thinks that right.
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Speaker 3: But that assumption ignores the physiological and psychological breakdown that
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occurs during a prolonged coercive interrogation. Imagine the environment a small,
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windowless room. You are exhausted, sleep deprived, terrified.
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Speaker 1: Probably haven't eaten properly exactly.
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Speaker 3: And you're completely cut off from your family or any
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legal support. The interrogators start with a positive confrontation. They
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don't ask if you did it. They tell you that
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they know you did it. Wow, they present false evidence,
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which by the way, is entirely legal for police to
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do in the United States.
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Speaker 1: Wait, really, they can just lie.
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Speaker 3: They can absolutely lie. They tell you they have your fingerprints,
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or they have witnesses, or in Cookgetz case, that he
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definitively failed the polygraph machine.
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Speaker 1: So they basically construct an alternate reality in that room
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where your guilt is already an established, undeniable fact, and
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you're denys are just seen as uncooperative lying.
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Speaker 3: Precisely, once they've trap you in that reality, they move
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to the next phase, theme development and minimization.
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Speaker 1: What does that mean?
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Speaker 3: They offer you a moral or psychological out. They might say, look,
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we know you didn't plan this. Things just got out
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of hand. You were drunk, she provoked you. It was
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an accident.
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Speaker 1: Ah. They minimize the moral culpability to make confessing seem
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less devastating.
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Speaker 3: Yes, for the innocent suspect who has been in that
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room for twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours. The immediate overwhelming biological
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goal simply becomes, how do I make this stock.
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Speaker 1: Just let me sleep?
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Speaker 3: Exactly. They begin to believe that the only way to
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end the psychological torture to get a drink of water
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to sleep is to give the police what they want.
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Speaker 1: They rationalize it.
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Speaker 3: They rationalize it. They think, I'll just sign whatever piece
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of paper they put in front of me now, so
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I can leave this room. Once I get to a judge,
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or once they check my alibi, or once the real
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evidence comes back from the lab, the system will realize
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it's a mistake.
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Speaker 1: The truth will sort itself out.
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Speaker 3: Yes, they'd trade their long term liberty for short term relief,
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But the tragic reality of the justice system is that
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once you sign a confession, the system rarely, if ever,
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lets you take it back.
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Speaker 1: Wait. I have to stop here, because this is where
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the logic of the courtroom completely baffles me. Yes, after
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nearly eighteen hours, Coget signs a handwritten confession, and the
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source material points out a shilling detail. This was the
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sixth version drafted by a detectives trash. They were literally
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workshopping the narrative. In this sign document, Coget claims that
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he Ristivo and Halstead saw Teresa walking from the rink,
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offered her a ride in Restivo's van, sexually assaulted her,
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and then strangled her with a nylon rope when she
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threatened to tell someone and then they dumped the body
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by the tracks. But if we look at the evidence,
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the confession contained absolutely no unique details that were unknown
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to the police, none at all. There was no mention
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of her missing clothes, which were never found. There was
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no exact description of the specific ligature used. Usually, a
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genuine confession includes a hold back detail, right, yes.
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Speaker 3: A piece of information that only the true killer and
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the medical examiner would know exactly.
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Speaker 1: This confession was essentially just a regurgitation of the police's
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own working theories. Any defense attorney worth their salt would
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tear that confession to shreds. You don't even need advanced
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science to see that as a bad confession.
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Speaker 3: It was incredibly weak.
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Speaker 1: So why didn't the jury see it? How does a
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jury ignore that glaring red flag?
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Speaker 3: The jury ignored the inconsistencies in the confession because the
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prosecution blinded them with the illusion of scientific certainty. Okay,
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the confession didn't stand alone. It was bolstered by what
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we now categorize as junk science based on Koget's coerced narrative.
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The police obtained a warrant and searched genre Stevo's van.
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Inside that van, they vacuumed up debris and found two hairs.
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The prosecution brought a forensic expert into the courtroom who
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testified that under a microscope, those two hairs found in
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the van perfectly match the hair of Teresa Fusco.
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Speaker 1: Let's talk about microscopic hair comparison, because it is infuriated.
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Speaker 3: It really is.
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Speaker 1: It's like trying to identify a specific individual tree in
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a massive million acre forest by looking at a single
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generic brown leaf. You're looking at a hair under a
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microscope and subjectively deciding, Yeah, this looks like her hair.
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Speaker 3: Your analogy is spot on. To understand why it's junk science,
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you have to look at how it's actually performed. Okay,
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an analyst places a hair from the crime scene and
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a hair from the victim or suspect under a comparison microscope.
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They're visually looking at the characteristics of the hair, the
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cuticle pattern on the outside, the pigmentation in the cortex,
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and the thickness of the medulla, which is the innermost core.
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Speaker 1: So they are just eyeballing it.
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Speaker 3: Essentially, yes, and here is the fundamental flaw. Human hair
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is not like a fingerprint. Hair varies wildly from person
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to person. But more importantly, hair varies wildly on the
15:58
head of a single individual.
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Speaker 1: Makes sense.
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Speaker 3: The hair on the back of your neck looks different
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under a microscope than the hair on your crown. Furthermore,
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there are no statistical databases for hair characteristics.
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Speaker 1: So they can't even give a probability.
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Speaker 3: Exactly, when a DNA expert says there's a one in
16:13
a billion chance of a match, there is hard math
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behind it. When a hair analyst in the nineteen eighties
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said it's a match, they were entirely relying on their
16:22
own subjective visual interpretation. There was no mathematical standard.
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Speaker 1: But to a jury in nineteen eighty six, an expert
16:29
in a suit taking the stand, pointing to a blown
16:32
up photograph of a hair and saying these match carries immense,
16:35
almost divine authority.
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Speaker 3: It really does.
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Speaker 1: It gave them permission to dismiss the fact that Kogit's
16:40
confession was a messy six draft disaster because they believed
16:44
they had hard physical proof connecting the victim to the
16:47
van exactly.
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Speaker 3: The illusion of absolute certainty overpowered common sense. But what
16:52
makes the scientific evidence in this specific trial so tragic
16:56
is that the defense didn't just roll over.
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Speaker 1: They fought back.
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Speaker 3: They did. They had their own scientific experts who tried
17:01
to expose the flaws in the prosecution's timeline. The defense
17:05
experts analyze those exact same hairs and pointed to a
17:08
biological phenomenon called post mortem root banding.
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Speaker 1: Okay, we need to deep dive into post mortem root
17:14
banding because this is fascinating, incredibly dark, and it completely
17:18
contradicts the prosecution's entire theory of the crime. What is
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happening at a cellular level here, post mortem.
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Speaker 3: Root banding is a specific decomposition marker.
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Speaker 1: Okay.
17:28
Speaker 3: When a person dies, their blood flow stops, the cellular
17:32
structures at the root of the hair follicle, the part
17:35
embedded in the scalp, begin to break down. This process
17:39
is called autolysis.
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Speaker 1: Acolysis meaning self digestion.
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Speaker 3: Basically, yes, the cells essentially destroy themselves. As the cells decompose,
17:47
a distinct, dark, opaque band forms near the root of
17:51
the hair. It's a biological signature of death. Wow, it
17:54
only happens after a person is deceased. The defense experts
17:58
took the stand and argued that the hair's found in
18:00
Ristillo's van exhibited this post mortem route banding.
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Speaker 1: So the defense is saying, look at the biology. These
18:05
hairs could not have been shed by a living, breathing
18:07
teresipusco struggling in the back of a van.
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Speaker 2: The timeline doesn't work precisely.
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Speaker 3: If the hairs have post mortem root banding, they were
18:15
separated from the scalp after the decomposition process had already begun. Right.
18:19
The defense argued that the hairs must have been transferred
18:22
into the van long after the murder, perhaps transferred inadvertently
18:26
by investigators who had been at the morgue, or transferred
18:29
from contaminated evidence.
18:30
Speaker 1: That makes total sense.
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Speaker 3: They were essentially proving biologically that the hairs were deposited
18:36
after she was dead, which shatters the narrative that she
18:39
was killed inside the van.
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Speaker 1: That is an incredible defense. They're using actual cellular biology
18:45
to disprove a visual guessing game.
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Speaker 3: They were, but you have to remember the.
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Speaker 2: Era nineteen eighty six right in the.
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Speaker 3: Mid nineteen eighties, the courts, the judges, and the juries
18:56
were simply not equipped to adjudicate this kind of highly technical,
19:00
emerging scientific debate.
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Speaker 1: He is too complicated.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, the prosecution offered a narrative that was simple clean
19:06
and fit the tropes of every police show on television.
19:09
The back I confessed, and we found the victim's hair
19:12
in his van.
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Speaker 1: Case closed.
19:13
Speaker 3: The defense's argument, on the other hand, was highly complex,
19:17
requiring the jury to understand cellular autolysis and decomposition markers.
19:21
Speaker 1: And human nature tends to favor the simple story always.
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Speaker 3: Human nature tends to favor the simple, cohesive narrative over
19:28
the complex, messy one. The illusion of certainty won out
19:32
over the nuance of actual.
19:33
Speaker 1: Science, and the result of that psychological preference for a
19:37
simple story is devastating. In nineteen eighty six, John Cogit
19:41
is convicted and sentenced to thirty one and a half
19:43
years to life in prison awful. Later that same year,
19:47
Restivo and Halsteed are tried together. They're convicted and they
19:50
are also handed sentences of over thirty years. Three young
19:54
men sent to maximum security prison for the rest of
19:57
their lives based on a confession squeezed out of an
19:59
exhaust de man and a subjective glance through a microscope.
20:03
They lose eighteen years of their lives. That's nearly two
20:06
decades stolen from them. It is a profound, catastrophic, systemic failure.
20:11
Speaker 3: It's a tragedy on multiple levels. But as we look
20:13
at the timeline, we see a fascinating historical irony. The
20:17
very concept of science, the subjective, flawed interpretation of evidence
20:21
that failed these men so spectacularly in nineteen eighty six,
20:25
was quietly undergoing a revolution in laboratories around the.
20:28
Speaker 1: World, a revolution that would eventually become their salvation, the
20:31
DNA revolution. This brings us to the late nineties and
20:35
early two thousands. While cogit, Restivo and Halstead are sitting
20:39
in tiny concrete cells maintaining their innocence year after year,
20:43
writing letters filing appeals, the outside world is fundamentally changing.
20:48
Speaker 3: It really is.
20:48
Speaker 1: Organizations dedicated to fighting wrongful convictions like Centurion Ministries and
20:53
the Innocence Project get involved in their cases, and forensic
20:56
science makes an absolute quantum leap with the development of
20:59
SDR DNA profiling.
21:01
Speaker 3: This is the massive paradigm shift in criminal justice. We're
21:04
transitioning from subjective evidence a detective's gut feeling during an
21:08
interrogation or a forensic analyst's visual opinion of a hair
21:13
under a microscope, to objective, undeniable, mathematical biological facts.
21:17
Speaker 1: SDR short tandem repeats.
21:19
Speaker 3: Right. Instead of just looking at basic blood types, which
21:22
are shared by millions of people, scientists learned how to
21:25
look at specific, highly variable regions of a person's.
21:28
Speaker 2: Junk DNA okay, junk DNA.
21:30
Speaker 3: These regions contain short sequences of DNA. They repeat over
21:33
and over, and the number of repeats varies dramatically from
21:35
person to person.
21:36
Speaker 1: So it's not just looking at one marker. They're looking
21:39
at multiple locations on the DNA strand.
21:41
Speaker 3: Correct, they look at multiple low sized specific locations on
21:45
the genome. If you measure the repeats at thirteen or
21:48
twenty different low si, the mathematical probability of two random
21:52
people having the exact same number of repeats at every
21:55
single location drops to one in several trillion.
21:58
Speaker 1: Wow.
22:00
Speaker 3: It creates a genetic fingerprint that is virtually unique to
22:03
that individual, excluding identical twins. It is an objective, falsifiable,
22:08
mathematical reality.
22:10
Speaker 1: Armed with this new technology, the legal teams for these
22:13
three men start pushing for DNA testing on the biological
22:16
evidence that had been preserved in evidence lockers since nineteen
22:19
eighty four.
22:20
Speaker 3: The swabs.
22:21
Speaker 1: Right, they test the vaginal slides and swabs that had
22:23
been used during the initial blood typing, and the results
22:26
come back, Cogit, Restivo, and Halstead are all definitively excluded
22:31
as the source.
22:32
Speaker 2: Of the semen definitively excluded.
22:33
Speaker 1: Their DNA is not there. The math says, it is
22:36
not them. You would think that would be the end
22:38
of the story. Boom, the state apologizes, open the cell doors.
22:41
Speaker 3: You'd hope so.
22:41
Speaker 1: But taking that a step further into the psychology of
22:44
the justice system, the prosecution actually pushes back.
22:48
Speaker 2: You do.
22:48
Speaker 1: They argue that maybe the samples tested just didn't capture
22:51
all the genetic contributors. They float the theory that maybe
22:54
there is someone else's DNA mixed in and the lab
22:57
simply missed the defendant's DNA in a complex mixture, Like
23:01
how is that even allowed?
23:02
Speaker 3: This highlights a deeply ingrained, almost pathological phenymenon in wrongful
23:07
conviction cases, which is institutional inertia. Once the justice system
23:12
has secured a conviction, there is an immense inertia that
23:15
vehemently resists overturning it.
23:17
Speaker 2: Ah.
23:18
Speaker 3: The psychological phenomenon of confirmation bias doesn't just affect the
23:22
initial detectives in the heat of the moment. It infects
23:25
the prosecutors and the institution. Decades later, they.
23:28
Speaker 1: Just can't admit they were wrong.
23:29
Speaker 3: Right, the state has built its public reputation, prosecutors have
23:32
built their careers and their entire understanding of the world
23:36
rests on the belief that these men are guilty.
23:37
Speaker 1: So they double down.
23:38
Speaker 3: They double down when new objective science challenges that foundational belief.
23:43
The initial defensive reaction is often to find a reason
23:47
to doubt the science, rather than to admit the conviction
23:50
was a catastrophic error.
23:51
Speaker 1: So they invent highly improbable scenarios like a.
23:54
Speaker 3: Completely invisible mysture of DNA, just to justify keeping them
23:58
in prison.
23:59
Speaker 1: But then in two thousand and three, the defense team
24:02
experience is what I can only describe as a bureaucratic miracle.
24:05
Speaker 3: Oh, this part is incredible.
24:07
Speaker 1: The defense attorneys aren't doing high tech lab work. They're
24:10
digging through dusty, forgotten property records. Think about a nineteen
24:14
eighties evidence room, paper logs, carbon copies, boxes stacked to
24:19
the ceiling, complete chaos, honestly, total chaos, and buried in
24:22
those files, they find a single piece of paper indicating
24:26
that there is an intact completely untested vaginal swab from
24:29
the nineteen eighty four autopsy that had just been sitting
24:32
in cold storage, forgotten for almost twenty years.
24:34
Speaker 3: It is the ultimate bitter irony of this entire saga.
24:38
The key to freedom wasn't just found in the multi
24:40
million dollar advancements of genetic science. The key was found
24:43
in a mundane, disorganized, clerical oversight. A single overlooked piece
24:49
of paper regarding an untested swab ultimately held the power
24:53
to unlock three prison cells.
24:55
Speaker 1: It's like finding a winning lottery ticket buried in the
24:58
pocket of a coat you haven't worn into one years,
25:00
except the prize is your literal freedom.
25:02
Speaker 3: That's exactly what it felt like.
25:04
Speaker 1: They take this pristine, untouched swab and they test it
25:07
using the new str DNA technology because it was never
25:10
handled or tested for blood typing in the eighties. The
25:13
sample is pure and the result is definitive. Undeniably, it
25:18
produces a single, clear, robust profile of an unknown male.
25:22
It is undeniably mathematically not COGD. It's not Rescuvo, it's
25:27
not Halstead.
25:28
Speaker 3: The biological evidence from that pristine swab completely, irrevocably dismantles
25:33
the state's theory of.
25:34
Speaker 2: The crime completely.
25:35
Speaker 3: If the coerce confession drafted by the police were true,
25:38
that all three men actively participated in the gang rape
25:41
in the back of a van, you would expect a complex,
25:43
messy mixture of DNA from multiple contributors because it's three
25:47
guys exactly. Instead, the objective undeniable science says the biological
25:53
material came from a single unknown male. The narrative of
25:57
the confession is scientifically impossible.
26:00
Speaker 1: Imagine sitting with that reality for a second. Imagine you're
26:03
John Kogit or John Restuvo. You're sitting in a tiny
26:05
concrete cell for eighteen years.
26:08
Speaker 3: It's horrifying.
26:09
Speaker 1: You know every single day with absolute certainty that you're innocent.
26:13
You know you weren't in that van. You know you
26:15
didn't touch Teresa Fusco. But the entire world, the entire
26:19
power of the state, the media, perhaps even people you
26:22
used to know, tell you that you're a monster. Yeah,
26:25
and you just have to sit there, watching your youth evaporate,
26:28
waiting for the rest of the world's technology to catch
26:30
up to the truth you have known all along.
26:32
Speaker 3: It's a psychological endurance test that is almost impossible for
26:36
anyone outside of that situation to fathom to be gaslit
26:39
by your entire society for two.
26:41
Speaker 1: Decades, it really is gaslighting.
26:43
Speaker 3: But finally the evidence becomes too overwhelming for the state
26:46
to ignore. In June two thousand and three, their convictions
26:50
are officially.
26:51
Speaker 2: Vacated, Thank goodness.
26:52
Speaker 3: However, the legal battle wasn't instantly over. Cogd actually faced
26:57
a retrial in two thousand and five.
26:59
Speaker 1: Wait, really a retrial, yes, but.
27:02
Speaker 3: This time the playing field was vastly different. In a
27:04
groundbreaking move, his attorney successfully fought to introduce expert testimony
27:09
on the psychology of false confessions. It was the first
27:13
time such testimony was admitted in New York state history.
27:16
Speaker 1: So a jury finally got to hear exactly how an
27:18
eighteen hour interrogation breaks the human mind.
27:22
Speaker 3: Exactly they had. An expert explained the retechnique, the sleep deprivation,
27:26
the minimization tactics. The judge, presiding over a bench trial
27:30
acquitted coked, citing the glaring, unresolvable contradictions between his coerced
27:35
factually incorrect confession and the undeniable objective forensic evidence and.
27:39
Speaker 1: The other two.
27:40
Speaker 3: Shortly after that acquittal, the charges against Resvo and Halsted
27:43
were officially dropped. They were finally free.
27:45
Speaker 1: Men, and they sued, didn't they They did.
27:48
Speaker 3: They later pursued civil rights lawsuits and received massive settlements
27:51
eighteen million dollars each from Nassau County. But let's be clear,
27:55
no amount of municipal money buys back almost twenty years
27:57
of your life.
27:58
Speaker 1: No, it doesn't. You can't buy back the weddings, you missed,
28:01
the funerals, you couldn't attend, the basic freedom of walking
28:05
at your front door. And while these three men are
28:07
finally exonerated, we are left with a new, terrifying reality.
28:11
The real killer, Teresa Fosco's actual killer, is still out there.
28:16
The case is completely cold again. They have a pristine
28:19
digitized DNA profile of the killer from that two thousand
28:22
and three swab, but when they run it through the
28:24
criminal databases, it doesn't match anyone.
28:26
Speaker 3: A ghost.
28:27
Speaker 1: The unknown male is essentially a ghost in the machine,
28:31
And for two more decades, that DNA profile just sits
28:34
on a server, waiting for the next monumental leap in science,
28:38
which brings us to the advent of forensic genetic genealogy.
28:41
Speaker 3: The technological leap from str profiling to forensic genetic genealogy
28:45
is just as profound, if not more so, than the
28:48
leap from basic blood typing to str profiling.
28:51
Speaker 1: Really that big of a jump, oh?
28:52
Speaker 3: Absolutely? For years, law enforcement relied on COTIS, the national
28:56
DNA database maintained by the FBI. But CODIS has a
28:59
massive line spot.
29:00
Speaker 1: What's the blind spot?
29:01
Speaker 3: It only works if the perpetrator has a prior criminal
29:03
record and their DNA was forcibly collected and entered into
29:07
the system. If the killer is someone who has never
29:10
been arrested for a felony, COTIS is completely useless. The
29:13
profile to sit there unmatched forever.
29:15
Speaker 1: Enter the twenty tens and twenty twenties and the rise
29:18
of consumer DNA databases. This is the era of twenty
29:21
three enemy ancestry DNA and specifically ged match. This is
29:26
the exact same technology that famously brought down the Golden
29:29
State Killer, and now the Nassau County DA's Cold Case
29:32
Homicide Unit, teaming up with the FBI and private investigative
29:36
labs like authorm Labs, applies this exact technique to the
29:40
FUSCO case.
29:41
Speaker 3: The mechanics of this hybrid approach are brilliant, and they
29:44
require a fascinating blend of high tech biology and old
29:47
school genealogical research.
29:48
Speaker 1: Explain how it works.
29:50
Speaker 3: They take the unknown killer's DNA profile extracted from the
29:53
nineteen eighty four crime scene evidence, and they upload a
29:56
digitized version of it to specific consumer genealogy databases that
29:59
allow law enforcement searches. Okay, the system isn't looking for
30:02
an exact match, it's looking for partial matches. It measures
30:06
shared DNA in units called cent morgans.
30:08
Speaker 1: Centa Morgan's okay, Right.
30:09
Speaker 3: If the system finds a user who shares, say, one
30:13
or two percent of their DNA with the killer's profile,
30:17
it flags that user as a distant relative, perhaps a
30:20
third cousin.
30:21
Speaker 1: Right, So they aren't finding the killer directly. They're finding
30:23
the killer's third cousin twice removed, who voluntarily spin in
30:27
a tube to find out where their ancestors came from exactly.
30:30
Speaker 3: And once they have that distant cousin, the biology stops
30:33
and the historical research begins.
30:35
Speaker 1: The paper trail.
30:36
Speaker 3: Yes, expert genealogists build massive, complex family trees backward for
30:41
those distant cousins. They scour digitized census records birth certificates,
30:46
marriage licenses, obituaries, and military drafts, trying to find common
30:51
ancestors from generations ago, maybe great great grandparents from the
30:54
eighteen hundreds.
30:55
Speaker 1: Wow, that is painstaking work, it really is.
30:58
Speaker 3: Once they identify those common ancestors, they flip the process
31:01
and build the tree forward. They trace every branch, every marriage,
31:04
every child, tracking the lineage down to the present day.
31:07
Speaker 1: So they're narrowing it down.
31:09
Speaker 3: Essentially, they're creating a massive web of hundreds of people,
31:13
and they are looking for a male in that specific
31:16
family tree who fits the demographic and geographic profile of
31:20
the killer. In nineteen eighty four.
31:22
Speaker 1: And in twenty twenty four, this incredibly intricate, painstaking process
31:27
leads investigators to a specific name, Richard Bilodeau. Yes, let's
31:33
look at this guy's profile, because it is chilling in
31:35
its sheer banality. In November of nineteen eighty four, Richard
31:38
Beldo was twenty three years old. He was living with
31:42
his grandparents at sixteen Treadwell Avenue in Linbrook, and that
31:45
address is exactly one mile away from the hot skates
31:48
rink and one mile away from Teresa Fusco's house.
31:51
Speaker 3: It perfectly aligns with the initial common sense theory from
31:54
nineteen eighty four that the killer was local, that he
31:56
was part of the neighborhood fabric, that he knew the
31:58
area well enough to hide a body near the real tracks.
32:00
Speaker 1: But Bilado never pinged on the police radar back then.
32:03
Speaker 3: No, he didn't. He had no criminal record, he wasn't
32:05
part of the suspect pool, and for the next forty
32:07
years he lived a completely quiet, low profile life.
32:10
Speaker 1: Just totally under the radar.
32:12
Speaker 3: Completely. By twenty twenty four, he's in his sixties, living
32:16
in Center Morrish's farther out in Suffolk County, working the
32:19
night shift, stocking shelves at a local Walmart. He is
32:23
the very definition of a predator hiding in playing sight.
32:26
Speaker 1: It's terrifying. A guy who allegedly committed this horrific, brutal
32:30
crime just blends back into society, drives the speed limit,
32:35
pays his taxes, and stock shelves for decades.
32:38
Speaker 3: It's deeply unsettled, but.
32:39
Speaker 1: The genealogy just points them in his direction. Right. It's
32:42
it's a lead, not evidence. It's not enough for an
32:44
arrest warrant erect. They need a direct biological match. They
32:48
need to prove that the DNA in the sixty three
32:50
year old Richard Bilodeau's body perfectly matts is the DNA
32:54
left on Teresa Fusco in nineteen eighty four. So the
32:57
police set up a covert sting. They put him under surveillance,
32:59
and we're back to the image I asked you to
33:01
picture at the very beginning of this deep dive.
33:03
Speaker 3: The surveillance operation culminates in a moment of completely mundane routine.
33:08
Investigators follow Beuladot to a cafe. He vis a smoothie.
33:11
Smooth Yeah, he drinks it, and when he's finished, he
33:14
tosses the plastic cup and the straw into a public
33:18
trash can.
33:18
Speaker 2: Yeah.
33:19
Speaker 3: Legally, once you discard an item in a public receptacle,
33:22
you abandon your expectation of privacy.
33:24
Speaker 2: It's fair game, it's fair game.
33:26
Speaker 3: The moment he walks away, investigators move in and retrieve
33:29
that trash. They take the discarded straw back to the
33:32
forensic lab. They extract the DNA from the epithelial cells
33:36
the saliva left on the plastic and it is a match.
33:39
Speaker 1: The DNA extracted from the twenty twenty four Smoothie straw
33:42
is a virtual certainty match to the pristine Seman profile
33:45
recovered from the nineteen eighty four crime scene direct It
33:48
a man allegedly commits a brutal murder in the era
33:50
of cassette tapes, rotary phones, and microscopic hair comparisons, and
33:55
he is undone forty years later by a piece of
33:57
single use plastic and a computer data of family trees.
34:01
It's just incredibly surreal.
34:03
Speaker 3: It perfectly illustrates the power of the hybrid approach. Yeah,
34:06
you use the cutting edge wide net technology of genetic
34:09
genealogy to narrow your suspect pool from hundreds of millions
34:13
of people down to one specific individual, and then you
34:16
use traditional direct str DNA sampling the discarded straw to
34:22
lock in the absolute, legally binding match required for prosecution.
34:26
Speaker 1: So, armed with this irrefutable genetic link, on October fourteenth,
34:31
twenty twenty five, police arrest Richard Bilodeau. Finally, he's indicted
34:37
on two counts of second degree murder, and when detectives
34:40
confront him with the evidence, he reportedly says something that
34:42
made all the hair on my arms stand up.
34:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, this quote is wild.
34:46
Speaker 1: He doesn't immediately confess. Instead, he says people got away
34:49
with murder back then. Now, looking at that from a
34:51
psychological perspective of what's your read on this? Does that
34:54
quote sound like a veiled confession of guilt or is
34:56
it just a cynical, detached observation of how broken the
34:59
nine teen eighties justice system was.
35:02
Speaker 3: That specific phrase is going to be intensely debated during
35:05
the trial. From a psychological perspective, it's a fascinating statement
35:08
because it lacks any direct ownership.
35:10
Speaker 1: Right, he says people, not I exactly.
35:13
Speaker 3: He doesn't say I got away with him for forty years.
35:16
It's framed as a generalized societal observation. However, in the
35:21
context of an interrogation, when you are abruptly confronted with
35:24
the definitive DNA match tying you to a forty year
35:27
old murder, prosecutors will absolutely frame it as a statement
35:31
of consciousness of guilt.
35:32
Speaker 1: They'll say it was a slip.
35:34
Speaker 3: Right, They'll argue it's the spontaneous statement of a man
35:36
who thought he had successfully beaten the clock, expressing his
35:40
shock that the past had finally caught up to him.
35:43
He was relying on the technological limitations of nineteen eighty
35:46
four to protect him forever.
35:48
Speaker 1: It is a chilling detail, and it brings us to
35:51
the present day. May twenty twenty six and the long
35:54
complicated arc of justice. Richard billdeou has pleaded not guilty.
35:59
His attorney Dan Rusthe so maintains his client's innocence, suggesting
36:02
there are alternative explanations for the DNA But as of
36:06
April twenty twenty six, a judge has rejected the defense's
36:09
initial challenges to the DNA evidence, meaning the genetic genealogy
36:12
and the smoothie straw match are officially cleared for trial.
36:15
Bilideau is sitting in a jail cell right now awaiting
36:18
his day in court.
36:19
Speaker 3: As we look toward this impending trial, we have to
36:22
analyze the incredibly unique, almost paradoxical challenge the prosecutors face.
36:28
Speaker 1: Okay, what do you mean.
36:29
Speaker 3: On one hand, they have the ultimate trump card, a definitive,
36:34
virtually certain DNA match directly kalking the defendant to the
36:38
victim's body. It's the gold standard of evidence.
36:41
Speaker 1: You can't argue with the math.
36:42
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, the defense attorney's strategy is
36:45
practically written for them in the historical record. The defense
36:49
will absolutely point to the wreckage of the DA's own
36:52
office from the nineteen eighties.
36:53
Speaker 1: Oh, without a doubt, the defense is going to stand
36:55
up in front of a jury and say, ladies and gentlemen,
36:58
forty years ago, the very authorities sitting at that prosecution
37:02
table stood in this very room and promised the different jury,
37:05
with absolute scientific certainty, that three other men committed this
37:09
crime exactly. They had a signed confession, they had physical
37:13
hair evidence, they swore under oath, they had the right guys,
37:16
and they were catastrophically wrong. They stole twenty years from
37:19
innocent men. Why should you believe their absolute certainty today?
37:23
Speaker 3: It creates a profound legal tightrope. The prosecutors have to
37:28
prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt using decades old biological evidence,
37:32
while simultaneously tiptoeing around the fact that the original investigation
37:36
by their own department was a masterclass in confirmation, bias, coercion,
37:41
and junk science.
37:42
Speaker 1: That's a really tough spot for the prosecutors.
37:45
Speaker 3: It is they have to convince a modern jury that
37:47
the science of twenty twenty six is truly objective and infallible,
37:51
even though the system loudly claimed the science of nineteen
37:54
eighty six was infallible too. They have to explain falsifiability,
37:58
the fact that DNA math can be tested and proven
38:01
unlike subjective hair analysis.
38:03
Speaker 1: And while the legal battles and the science are fascinating
38:06
to analyze, we absolutely cannot lose sight of the profound
38:09
emotional toll this entire, sprawling odyssey has taken. Absolutely Think
38:13
about Thomas Fusco, Teresa's father. He was present at Beldo's arraignment.
38:17
He was carrying a photograph of his daughter in his pocket,
38:19
just like he has every day for forty years. He
38:22
told reporters, I loved her and I miss her. She
38:24
lives in my heart.
38:25
Speaker 3: It's heartbreaking.
38:26
Speaker 1: Imagine the psychological whiplash this family has endured, the concept
38:30
of ambiguous loss, the initial horror of the murder, the
38:34
false closure of the nineteen eighty six convictions where they
38:37
were told justice was served, the reopening of the wound
38:40
when those convictions were overturned and they realized the real
38:43
killer was.
38:43
Speaker 3: Free and now a brand new suspect. Forty years later.
38:48
Speaker 1: Teresa's mother, Connie, passed away in twenty nineteen. She endured
38:52
all the pain, but never lived to see this new arrest.
38:55
Speaker 3: The collateral damage of a botched investigation is immense, and
38:58
it's multi generational. Yeah, it's the victim's family in during
39:02
decades of false narratives and broken promises. It's the deep
39:05
trauma of the exoneries Cogut, Restuvou, and Halsted, who lost
39:10
the prime years of their lives locked in cages for
39:12
something they didn't do. And it's the reopened wounds for
39:15
the entire Linbrook community who are suddenly forced to re
39:18
examine a nightmare they thought was buried and solved in
39:20
the nineteen eighties.
39:21
Speaker 1: Nasau County District Attorney Anti Donnelly said it well when
39:24
she stated that the past is never forgotten and they
39:27
will never stop fighting for victims. But the stark reality
39:30
is that justice delayed by forty years. Justice that requires
39:34
innocent men to suffer first is a very complicated, fractured
39:38
kind of justice.
39:39
Speaker 3: It really is. The source material notes that the Innocence
39:42
Project has exonerated over three hundred people nationwide using DNA evidence,
39:47
and many of those are from the pre DNA era,
39:49
exactly like this case. So looking at the totality of
39:52
this story, what is the ultimate takeaway about our justice system?
39:55
Speaker 1: Good question? What do you think the main takeaway is.
39:58
Speaker 3: I think the ultimate takeaway is a so bring recognition
40:01
of the system's dual nature. The American justice system is
40:04
capable of staggering life destroying errors. It is deeply susceptible
40:08
to communal panic, psychological coercion, and the hubris of junk science.
40:13
It can blindly steal decades from innocent lives because it
40:16
prioritizes closure over truth. But simultaneously it possesses a remarkable
40:22
technological resilience. It has the capacity to eventually correct itself.
40:26
Speaker 1: The arc is incredibly long.
40:28
Speaker 3: The arc is long, and the human cost is tragically high.
40:32
But eventually, the objective, falsifiable truth of science has the
40:37
power to pierce through the subjective failures of human intuition
40:40
and bias.
40:41
Speaker 1: Science did what human intuition could not. It pointed objectively
40:44
toward the truth.
40:45
Speaker 3: Precisely, we have.
40:46
Speaker 1: Covered a massive journey today. We started at a bustling
40:50
neonlt Roller rink in nineteen eighty four. We walked through
40:54
the incredibly dark corridors of eighteen hour interrogations and the
40:57
psychology of coerced confessions. We looked at the tragic arrogance
41:01
of microscopic hair comparisons and the ignored biology of root banding.
41:06
It's a lot of history, and then we saw the
41:07
light breakthrough with the mathematical certainty of str DNA testing
41:12
and the almost science fiction reality of tracking a killer
41:15
through their distant cousins family tree. It's a story of
41:18
how the facts of nineteen eighty six put innocent men
41:21
in maximum security prison, and how the facts of twenty
41:24
twenty six are putting a new, previously unknown man on trial.
41:28
Speaker 3: It's a powerful reminder for all of us, no matter
41:30
what field we're in or what information we're consuming, to
41:33
maintain a healthy skepticism. For sure, it challenges us to
41:36
critically evaluate what is presented to us as absolute certainty, because,
41:41
as we've seen, the definition of certainty is always evolving.
41:44
Speaker 1: And as we wrap up this deep dive, I want
41:46
to leave you with a final lingering thought, something for
41:49
you to chew on long after you finished listening. Okay,
41:52
we've spent this time marveling at how unimaginably far forensic
41:55
science has advanced in just forty years. We went from
41:58
a detective squint at a generic hare through a microscope
42:02
to a laboratory extracting an entire genetic family tree from
42:06
the invisible saliva left on a piece of plastic trash.
42:09
Speaker 3: The technological leap is just staggering.
42:11
Speaker 1: It really is. So I want you to think about today.
42:13
Think about the physical world you move through right now.
42:16
What invisible traces are you leaving behind at this exact moment,
42:20
on your coffee cup, on your keyboard, in the very
42:23
air you exhale that the technology of forty years from now,
42:26
the technology of twenty sixty six, will be able to
42:29
read and decode.
42:30
Speaker 3: Wow.
42:30
Speaker 1: If the evolution of science continues at this accelerating pace
42:33
in the future, will the very concept of an unsolved
42:37
mystery even exist? Thank you so much for joining us
42:39
on this steep dive. Take care,