The Killing of Theresa Fusco | Post Mortem

0:06 Welcome to Postmortem.

0:07 I'm your host 48 Hours correspondent Ann Marie Green.

0:11 And today we are discussing the cases of Teresa Fusco and Kelly Morrissey,

0:17 two teenagers, teenage girls who went missing in 1984 in Lynbrook, New York.

0:23 That's a suburb in Long Island.

0:25 Now, after a suspect confessed to Teresa's

0:28 murder and then implicated two other men, seemed like the case was closed.

0:32 But about 19 years later,

0:34 advances in DNA technology overturned their convictions

0:38 and pointed to another unknown suspect.

0:42 Joining me today is 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty.

0:45 Erin, you worked on this case, but over your years of working uh for 48 Hours,

0:51 you've actually covered a number of wrongful conviction cases.

0:54 So have you, Ann Marie, and it is a passion of mine.

0:58 Um this case is yet another reminder

1:01 of the cost of a prosecutor getting it wrong.

1:05 When you convict the wrong suspects,

1:07 not only does that allow the real killer to go free,

1:10 but often puts the family and friends through years of hearings and trials.

1:16 And that's the centerpiece of this story,

1:19 because it's what the family and friends of Teresa,

1:22 Kelly, and another victim, Jackie,

1:24 have gone through in the decades since their disappearances.

1:27 And I should point out since 1984, so over 40 years.

1:32 Absolutely.

1:33 I mean, this is a nightmare for any family, but this process,

1:36 it's like sort of ripping the scab off over and over again.

1:40 And really, you know, they're still waiting for a resolution,

1:42 which we will get to.

1:44 But I want to remind everyone, uh listen,

1:46 if you haven't watched or listened to this episode, The Killing of Teresa Fusco,

1:51 go check it out and then come on back so we can talk about it.

1:55 So, Erin, on June 12th, 1984,

1:58 15-year-old Kelly Morrissey left her home after dinner.

2:01 She's going to meet a friend, and she's last seen at a payphone near

2:06 a Shell gas station in Lynbrook before she disappears.

2:10 After about 5 months, 16-year-old Teresa Fusco goes missing after she

2:17 leaves her job at a local roller rink.

2:20 How unusual was it to have two teenagers

2:23 go missing with just within a few months?

2:27 Ann Marie, this was very unusual.

2:29 What made it even more unusual, these two girls knew each other.

2:33 And back in the '80s, kids went out regularly, and they played late at night.

2:39 It was a completely different world when

2:41 people still thought that bad things didn't happen.

2:45 These cases um that happened so close to each other

2:49 really did shatter the sense of safety in this area.

2:53 I should point out that Lynbrook wasn't a small town.

2:57 It had a population of about 20,000 back in the '80s.

3:02 And it was very close to New York City, but it still was a suburb.

3:06 One of our colleagues who worked on this story

3:09 actually grew up very close to Lynbrook,

3:11 and she told us that Lynbrook felt like a small

3:14 town because everybody went to the same movie theaters,

3:18 ate pizza at the same pizza spots,

3:21 and it did seem like everybody went to this roller rink called Hot Skates.

3:27 And that's where Teresa worked.

3:29 I mean, it kind of reminded me a little bit of where I grew up,

3:32 you know, in the suburbs of Toronto,

3:33 and we had the roller rink that everyone went

3:36 to, and every once in a while they would have DJ night,

3:38 and it would all be, you know, 15, 16, 14-year-olds,

3:43 and everyone felt safe cuz it was just a bunch of kids.

3:46 But, you know, to talk about the case, when Kelly's mother,

3:49 Iris, realizes that Kelly has not returned home, Iris and her husband,

3:55 they call the police, and then the police tell them that because

3:58 Kelly hasn't been missing at least 24 hours, they're not going to take a report.

4:03 Investigators believe she was just a runaway.

4:06 They did not take the case that seriously, and they at that time found no reason

4:12 to think that Kelly was a victim of a crime.

4:15 Kelly was last seen on a payphone.

4:18 And so our thought is, oh well,

4:20 why didn't the police find out who she was talking to?

4:23 Well, data for the payphones back then were not easily tracked.

4:28 Um back in 1984, of course,

4:31 there was no social media, digital footprints, Right.

4:35 no ring cameras, no text messages,

4:38 no cell phone tower pings that cops could trace.

4:43 All of those things that we now kind of take for granted that help solve cases.

4:48 Mhm.

4:49 Back then, it was boots on the ground.

4:52 It was knocking on doors.

4:54 It was word of mouth.

4:56 Physically retracing the last steps of a missing person.

5:00 So, in in fact, it wasn't until Teresa Fusco

5:03 disappears that Kelly's case actually gets a second look.

5:08 This is nearly 6 months after Kelly went missing.

5:10 Teresa's body is discovered near Long Island railroad tracks.

5:15 Uh she's been beaten.

5:17 She's been strangled.

5:18 She's been raped.

5:20 And police start to look at the possible links between the two cases.

5:24 That is when they zero in on John Kogut.

5:29 Uh he's a 21-year-old landscaper.

5:31 Detectives say that he dated Kelly for about a week or so.

5:35 And in the course of your reporting,

5:37 I'm curious about whether you learned anything else about him.

5:42 So, they question him twice.

5:44 The first time he denied any involvement or knowledge

5:48 of of either Kelly's disappearance or Teresa's murder.

5:52 And then, according to Kogut's former legal team,

5:55 and I should point out these are not the lawyers who represented him back then,

6:00 but represented him when he had a retrial.

6:03 This is what they told us,

6:05 that police picked up Kogut for a second round of questioning.

6:09 Uh they had asked whether he would be

6:11 willing to take a polygraph, and he said yes.

6:14 When they picked him up,

6:15 he told them he had been drinking and smoking marijuana.

6:19 The officers notified their higher-ups,

6:22 but they were told to still bring him in for questioning.

6:26 Now, again, what we've been told is that Kogut

6:28 told police that at the time of Teresa's disappearance,

6:32 he he said he had an alibi.

6:34 He had been hanging out with his girlfriend drinking beer.

6:37 And his girlfriend did corroborate that alibi.

6:41 She even testified to that.

6:44 But obviously, like the police must not have

6:47 believed him because they continued to press him.

6:51 And then, after nearly 12 hours of questioning and 18 hours in police custody,

6:58 and keep in mind he had been awake almost 30 hours,

7:02 that's when he made a videotape confession.

7:05 He said that on the night that Teresa went missing,

7:08 he had been with two friends, Dennis Halstead and John Restivo,

7:13 driving in Restivo's van when they saw Teresa walking home from Hot Skates.

7:18 She had gotten fired that night and left early.

7:21 Kogut then also said that after she got into the van,

7:26 he he claimed that Restivo and Halstead raped her.

7:30 But that he was the one who killed her.

7:32 He gave stunningly specific details about how he wrapped a rope around her neck.

7:38 Well, that is what struck me about this confession,

7:42 the remarkable level of detail.

7:45 And so you can't help to but to think, who would make this up?

7:48 I'm going to be honest, it's a pretty convincing interview.

7:52 Um and I talked to Paul Castellano about that.

7:55 Now, he is the attorney who represented Kogut,

7:59 not the first trial, but when Kogut was tried a second time.

8:04 He says that videotape confession was staged.

8:08 According to Castellano,

8:10 Kogut was exhausted and just wanted the interrogation to stop.

8:16 Castellano says that Kogut also disavowed that confession

8:19 within a day once he talked to a lawyer.

8:22 Mhm.

8:22 But as anyone who sees that videotape confession,

8:27 that confession seemed to be the nail in his coffin at trial.

8:32 John Kogut, uh Dennis Halstead, and then John Restivo,

8:36 they're all charged with Teresa's murder.

8:38 All three of them plead not guilty, but then at trial,

8:41 police also testified that they recovered two

8:44 hairs belonging to Teresa in Restivo's van.

8:48 And then, of course, they testify about Kogut's detailed confession.

8:52 All three men, uh Kogut, Halstead, and Restivo, they were all convicted,

8:57 and they were sentenced to more than 30 years to life.

9:02 But then, nearly 19 years after Teresa was killed,

9:06 there was a stunning twist in the case because of advances in DNA technology.

9:12 We saw it in the hour.

9:13 What more can you tell us about how that unfolded?

9:16 Well, you know, what was interesting

9:18 and very impressive is that the investigators

9:21 early on did take a swab um after they found Teresa's body.

9:26 There was no DNA at trials back then, but they took a swab.

9:30 They couldn't identify it initially.

9:33 Around 2003, there were more sophisticated testing,

9:38 and it told a very different story.

9:41 In this case, all three men were excluded by those tests,

9:45 and a complete profile of a fourth unidentified man was present.

9:51 So, as you can imagine, John Kogut, John Restivo,

9:55 and Dennis Halstead's convictions were all overturned at that point.

10:00 This reminded me when I watched it of a case

10:02 that I worked on for 48 hours a while back.

10:05 It was one of the first ones I ever did.

10:08 It was about the murder of Angie Dodge.

10:10 This is in Idaho Falls in 1996.

10:12 She was an 18-year-old.

10:13 She just moved into her apartment, her brand new first apartment,

10:16 and she was killed in the apartment.

10:19 Investigators found DNA at the scene,

10:21 and then they started to zero in on a guy named Christopher Tapp.

10:25 After hours and hours of interrogation,

10:29 he falsely confesses to being at the scene of the murder.

10:34 And he spent many, many years in prison.

10:36 Eventually, he was released, and later he was fully exonerated.

10:41 And in the end, the advances in DNA technology,

10:44 genetic genealogy, eventually identified the killer.

10:48 It was a man named Brian Tapp,

10:49 who eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

10:53 But it really sort of got me

10:55 thinking about the way interrogations are conducted.

11:01 And whether anything has changed.

11:05 Ann Marie, there's no question that we're seeing more and more cases like this.

11:10 I mean, it breaks my heart because Yeah.

11:12 these officers think they have the right person,

11:15 they pressure them, they confess,

11:17 and then later on, after these guys have all gone to prison,

11:21 genetic genealogy or DNA Mhm.

11:25 shows that they got the wrong guy.

11:28 What I am finding, I think you are, too, that many more of these interrogations

11:33 are being videotaped or at least audiotaped.

11:37 And best practices um include not interrogating someone for hours and hours.

11:45 Um so, I think it is better, [music] but I don't think it's fixed yet.

11:54 Welcome back.

11:55 Well, in 2003, the Nassau County District Attorney,

11:58 Denis Dillon, decided to retry John Kogut,

12:03 Dennis Halstead, and John Restivo for the murder of Teresa Fusco.

12:08 And starting with Kogut, who pleaded not guilty again.

12:11 And this time, Kogut decided to take his chances with a bench trial,

12:16 which means there's no jury,

12:18 it's a single judge that is going to decide his fate.

12:22 But now, as we've been talking, there is new evidence that shows that the DNA

12:26 did not match him or any of the other men,

12:30 which means that the prosecution needs a different strategy.

12:34 What's their strategy in the retrial?

12:36 So, the prosecution had to explain away that unknown DNA by saying, "Well,

12:43 then Teresa must have had consensual sex

12:47 with someone before she was attacked and killed." Remember,

12:51 she was 16 years of age, and family and friends told us that they

12:55 were horrified when prosecutors rewrote this narrative about Teresa.

13:02 Um according to her best friend,

13:04 Teresa had always wanted to wait until marriage to have sex,

13:08 and she wasn't sexually active.

13:11 But prosecutors said, "Well,

13:13 uh investigators had tested so many men in the area without finding a match,

13:19 so the DNA just simply can't be relevant.

13:23 We would find that person if it was." Um and they said,

13:29 "It doesn't matter what the DNA says.

13:31 We have John Kogut confessing." According to prosecutors,

13:36 that was the most important evidence, even more important than the DNA.

13:41 So then, what's the approach for Kogut's defense attorney?

13:45 You know, he has to try to convince

13:47 a judge to completely ignore this very detailed confession.

13:51 And that is very hard to do, as we know.

13:54 Uh but Paul Casselliero, who represented Kogut during the retrial,

13:59 he was able to kind of pull apart the prosecution's argument bit by bit.

14:05 Uh for one thing, he says that that tape confession was like a play.

14:09 It was theater.

14:11 Uh one detective was off camera monitoring him.

14:15 And when Kogut, you actually see this, when Kogut can't

14:18 even remember the last name of one of the, you know,

14:22 co-defendants, the officer gives it to him.

14:25 Um Casselliero says that police lied to him about

14:31 the polygraph and brought in an expert who said,

14:34 in fact, that he did pass the polygraph.

14:37 And then there was the issue, if you remember,

14:39 those two hairs that the cops said that they

14:43 had found on the floor of John Restivo's van.

14:46 That sounded terrible.

14:48 I mean, how would her hair end up in the van?

14:51 Right.

14:51 Well, Casselliero argued that there was testing

14:55 that revealed that those hairs displayed this certain

14:59 decomposition that is only present when the hairs

15:04 are attached to a person who's dead.

15:07 And so, he argued that he believed that the police took the hairs,

15:12 and this is awful to hear, Mhm.

15:14 medical examiner's office, from the autopsy, and then put them in the car.

15:21 Prosecutors, of course, denied that the hairs were planted,

15:25 but when you read the judge's decision, he was persuaded by the defense.

15:30 Huh.

15:31 What's more, the judge found the confession not credible.

15:35 So, in the end, Kogut's gamble paid off by having just a judge and not a jury,

15:43 because the judge found him not guilty of murder.

15:47 And 8 days later, the DA dismissed the charges against Restivo and Halstead,

15:53 and they were never retried a second time.

15:57 All three men initially sued Nassau County and police officials.

16:01 They lost.

16:03 And then John Restivo and Dennis Halstead,

16:05 they pursue another a civil trial against

16:09 Nassau County and police officials without John Kogut.

16:13 And they are awarded $18 million each.

16:17 Essentially, a million dollars for each year that they spend behind bars,

16:22 but Kogut receives nothing.

16:26 Why did he receive nothing at all?

16:30 Well, Ann Marie, we can't absolutely say,

16:33 but defense attorney Paul Casselliero believes that it

16:37 was that confession that stopped him from getting money.

16:41 But there's nothing in the record.

16:43 I should point out that Kogut didn't go completely empty-handed.

16:48 He did receive some money from a state fund,

16:51 but it was a much smaller than what his co-defendants got, Halstead and Restivo.

17:00 I mean, I sort of understand because kind of on one side,

17:03 perhaps none of this would have happened to all

17:05 three of them if he did not confess, right?

17:08 But then, kind of on the flip side is he is

17:10 the one that had to endure all of these hours of this interrogation,

17:16 not to mention spending all those years, nearly two decades,

17:19 behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.

17:21 I'm glad he got a little something.

17:23 Do we know how all three men are doing today?

17:27 We wanted to interview all three.

17:30 All three did decline.

17:32 Restivo, according to Casselliero,

17:35 when he was convicted and went to prison initially,

17:38 had stayed in touch with a girl he went

17:41 to high school with, and she stayed a friend.

17:44 And when he got out of prison, she was in Florida,

17:47 and he went there, and from what I heard, he stayed there.

17:51 But according to Barry Scheck, who co-founded the Innocence Project in New York,

17:57 um told me that to this day,

18:01 Restivo still fears that the police could come back and arrest him.

18:05 Think about that.

18:06 Wow.

18:06 Yeah.

18:07 40 years afterwards, you never really get your life back.

18:11 On October 15th, 2025,

18:13 this is nearly 41 years after Teresa Fusco was killed, Nassau County DA,

18:19 Anne Donnelly, announces that they have indicted her killer,

18:23 thanks to the advances in genetic genealogy.

18:26 And that unidentified DNA sample that was found was matched to a 63-year-old.

18:32 His name is Richard Billa Dew, I think.

18:36 Is it Billa Dew or Billa Doe?

18:37 Because It's It's written Billa Doe if you're a French speaker.

18:41 Anyone who watches the hour will know that I

18:44 changed my pronunciation because everyone gave us different pronunciations.

18:49 Right.

18:49 The prosecutors told me it was Billa Doe.

18:53 Okay.

18:54 Uh but when I interviewed the defense attorneys, they said it is Billa Dew,

18:58 and the defense attorneys say that's how he pronounces it.

19:02 Okay.

19:03 And so, I'm going with Billa Dew.

19:05 But you do hear me in the hour pronounce it Billa Doe, Billa Dew.

19:09 Well, I mean, do we know anything about this person?

19:12 How he could have, you know, crossed paths with Teresa?

19:15 Just anything.

19:16 Uh we don't know a lot.

19:18 Remember, Ann Marie, this is pretrial.

19:21 Nobody's sharing a lot.

19:23 The prosecutors wouldn't reveal or couldn't reveal um whether there was

19:29 any evidence that Billa Dew and Teresa Fusco knew each other.

19:35 None of her friends had ever heard the name.

19:38 Even his own defense attorneys don't know much about him.

19:41 They said he does like online gambling.

19:44 What we do know from prosecutors is that the FBI matched the unknown DNA sample,

19:50 the one that had always existed to Belladieu in 2024.

19:56 They were able to confirm his DNA was a match after they

20:00 obtained a discarded straw from a Slurpee cup that was connected to Belladieu.

20:07 At the time of Belladieu's arrest,

20:10 he had been working at a Walmart and he was stocking shelves,

20:13 but at the time of Teresa's killing, he was 23,

20:18 older than what she was, and living close by to her in Lynbrook.

20:23 Um Belladieu has pleaded not guilty.

20:27 And if he doesn't take a plea deal and he does go to trial,

20:32 then we're going to learn a lot more because the prosecution

20:36 has get this, 150 boxes of electronic discovery to go through.

20:42 And then what about Kelly Morrissey?

20:44 I mean, is there any kind of update

20:47 or advance for her case and her disappearance?

20:49 Anything?

20:50 No.

20:51 Um we had mentioned at the beginning of this podcast

20:54 that Kelly Morrissey's initially had been viewed as a runaway.

21:00 Um and now, according to retired detective Freddy Goldman,

21:07 it is now viewed as a homicide.

21:10 And he said that officials do believe the cases might be connected,

21:15 but we know that Belladieu has not been charged in Kelly's case.

21:20 And in the hour we also learn about another victim.

21:23 She's a 19-year-old.

21:25 Uh her name is Jackie Martarella.

21:27 She goes missing in March of 1985 in Nassau County.

21:31 Her body is found.

21:33 She has been raped.

21:35 She's been strangled just like Teresa Fusco.

21:38 Are investigators looking at Belladieu in connection with Jackie's case?

21:43 Belladieu has not been charged in the case of Jackie Martarella,

21:48 but according to what we heard from Freddy Goldman,

21:52 back then and even to this day, they had another suspect in mind.

21:57 Uh they brought him in for questioning and he moved

22:00 to the south of France and that seemed to end the investigation.

22:07 You know, one of the things you mentioned at sort of the top of this is

22:12 that this really underscores the kind

22:14 of prolonged and protracted pain that families feel.

22:20 Teresa's family thought they had some sort of resolution and then

22:24 nearly two decades later that all blows up for them.

22:28 What really struck me was talking to Teresa's friend Lisa.

22:32 Um she told me just how involved she had to be in this case.

22:38 Keep in mind, so she testifies at Coget's original trial.

22:43 She has to testify at Recivo and Halstead's original trial.

22:47 There were other hearings that she said she also had to uh testify.

22:53 Then Coget is retried and she's probably going

22:57 to have to testify again if Belladieu goes to trial.

23:01 It's never-ending.

23:03 That's what Teresa's father told us.

23:05 That's what Teresa's brother told us.

23:08 The idea that her murder has never been resolved.

23:12 It just It just makes everything so much tougher for this family.

23:16 Yeah.

23:17 I mean, I don't think you ever really move

23:19 on, but but you do sort of figure out ways to cope,

23:22 but how can you cope without a resolution?

23:25 I know that Kelly Morrissey's family talked us because they're

23:28 hoping if somebody knows something and they see this story,

23:34 maybe maybe they'll come forward.

23:37 It's 40 years.

23:38 It's time.

23:40 Erin, thank you so much.

23:42 Talk to you soon, Amory.

23:43 Of course.

23:44 Um if you like this episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcast or Spotify.