The Killing of Theresa Fusco

0:00Music

0:10Kelly Morrissey was a young girl who didn't like to stay home. She liked to hang out with her friends. June 12, 1984, Kelly walks to a payphone near a Shell gas station over on Merrick Road in Lindbrook and meets up with another one of her friends, and they make some phone calls. After that payphone, we don't know where Kelly went. Knowing Kelly, there is no way I believe she ran away. No. And then on November 10, 1984, just five months later, Yes. Teresa Fusco disappears. Yes.

0:53And what is the initial thought? The initial thought is there might be a connection. Theresa worked at a roller rink on Merrick Road in Lindbrook, hot skates. And for her to go to hot skates, she would have to walk in this direction down the street. Did you ever worry about her walking? No, I never really worried about her walking anywhere in the neighborhood.

1:20That evening, she apparently got fired. She's upset, and then she leaves. Wasn't she supposed to go to Lisa Kaplan's house? Yeah, her best friend, yeah. She was going to come to my house after she got off of work and sleepover. So it becomes, like, 9 o 'clock. She's not there. Yep. 9.30, not there. 10 o 'clock, I just thought maybe she went home. Well, the next morning, her mother called, and her mom asked my mom, can you please have Lisa send Teresa home? And my mom said, well, Teresa's not here. Her mom called the police department. We went to all the places we would hang out, and she wasn't anywhere that we searched.

2:07It's just very coincidental. Same neighborhood, same time frame, two girls who knew each other. I'm like, something's not right. Something's just not right. And then 25 days later, there's two boys coming back to hang out here in the woods. They see a body and they run to the deli and ask to call 911. Police show up and they find Teresa Fusco. Teresa had been strangled, beaten and raped. It truly was shattering at 16 to never have lost anybody that you loved in such a horrific way. You just can't get over that. But until there's a connection in the two cases, one's still a missing girl, and now one's a homicide.

3:04John Kogut was brought in by the detectives as a suspect in the murder of Teresa Fusco. And during that time, he confessed to the murder of Teresa. He decided that I had to kill her. And then during that confession, he implicated two of his buddies. And when I saw the three men who were arrested in handcuffs, I thought to myself, who are these people? They're older. Who are they? The theory was always it was three guys. Yeah. And the DNA didn't match any of them. No, it didn't. If they didn't do it, then who did it?

3:45Today we arraigned 63-year-old Richard Belodo for the murder of Teresa Fusco. And I said, okay, here we go again.

4:03Erin Moriarty reports, the killing of Teresa Fusco. First, 15-year-old Kelly Morrissey vanished into the night. On June 12, 1984, she left her home after dinner and never came back. Five months later, it was her friend Teresa Fusco. On November 10, 1984, the 16-year-old left her job at Hot Skates, a popular roller rink, never to be heard from again. 41 years ago, trying to find them was a different job. Police had to look for real footprints, not digital ones. And it was easy to vanish without a trace. Kelly Morrissey and Teresa Fusco were growing up in the suburbs of Long Island. Vicki Papagno lived around the corner from Kelly in Massapequa.

5:04She actually was the first person I ever smoked a cigarette with was Kelly. I was from a divorced family. She was from a divorced family. We connected that way. She was like my sister I never had. When they were in junior high, Kelly's family moved about 10 miles away to Lindbrook. By then, Kelly had made some new friends. One of the first people that she met when she moved to Limbrook was Teresa Fusco. Kelly's mother Iris and her then-fiancé Paul Umstead watched the friendship develop. She was very good friends with Teresa, and so she made friends very easily. She met her friends at malls and in person.

5:51Kids roamed around freely. No one could keep tabs on each other 24-7. It was a different time, and Kelly Morrissey and Teresa Fusco were typical teens for 1984.

6:10Well, let's take them on a little stroll down memory lane. That was the year Ronald Reagan was president. Ghostbusters and Footloose were the breakout hits. Madonna was climbing the charts, and fashion followed. It was the year Steve Jobs introduced something revolutionary. Hello, I am Maggie and Josh. We didn't have cell phones, social media, so we were pen pals. We would get our stationery, and we would just write back and forth, and that's how we communicated. When Vicki was visiting Kelly, she would sometimes hang out with Teresa, who also became her pen pal. Postmark 1982 from Limbrook, New York, from Teresa Fusco.

7:01And it says, Dear Vicki, Hi, what's up? Nothing much here. When are you going to visit Kelly again? When you do, call me, okay? How's all the boys there? They cute? In Lindbrook, by far the best place to meet boys was at Hot Skates, as advertised here in 1984. What are you doing tonight? We would go to Hot Skates Roller Rink. We would go there, roller skate around. How important was Hot Skates in your life? Hot Skates was a big deal to everybody that lived in the area, even outside of the area. We would just go there and hang out with our friends and listen to music. Lisa Kaplan, now Johnson, was Teresa Fusco's closest friend.

7:54We always would try to dress very similar. We would buy the same clothing. We would wear our makeup the same. Did you guys confide in each other? About everything. Literally everything? Literally everything. No one gave safety a second thought. You could walk absolutely anywhere and not be afraid of anything, in the dark, during the day, alone with friends. And that explains why it was business as usual at the Morrissey house a couple of miles away, when 15-year-old Kelly walked out the front door alone after dinner. She said she'd be back by 9.30. It was June 12, 1984. Iris didn't give it a second thought.

8:42She and Paul were raising eight children together. Somebody came in, and I heard somebody in the kitchen and yelled down, I'm home, and okay. You could hear doors opening and closing, kids coming in and out. And I took it, it was Kelly. It wasn't until the next morning when she didn't come down to go to school that I went down there and realized that her bed wasn't made and the clothes were still there, and she hadn't come in. Were you panicking at that point, Iris? Oh yeah, and then we called the police, but they told us that she wasn't missing 24 hours at that point and they really wouldn't take a report.

9:17And those days they waited. Nassau County Detective Freddie Goldman would review both Teresa and Kelly's cases some 25 years later. He's retired now, but he agreed to walk us through the timeline and the evidence from back then. At the time of Kelly's disappearance, he says police found no reason to think there was a crime. It seemed like she was a runaway. There's tons of missing persons cases on a daily basis. Is that how Kelly Morrissey's case was initially handled? Of course, yeah. At 15 years old, she wouldn't know how to do life unless somebody was there to help her. I don't foresee her ever just running away and not talking to anyone, not reaching out to anyone.

10:07So I knew it was serious from day one. Months went by with no sign of Kelly. That had to be so tough. Oh, it was. I mean, everywhere I went, every child from the back looked like Kelly had stopped to look to see if it was Kelly. It was horrible. If Kelly had been written off as a runaway and not a priority, five months later, her case got a second look. It was November 10th. Teresa Fusco never showed up at Lisa's house for their sleepover. I thought maybe she went to somebody else's house. And so I called a few friends and said, you know, did Teresa come over? At that point, I still wasn't overly concerned.

10:58Teresa's parents were divorced. The next morning, her father, Thomas, had a scheduled visit and arrived at his ex's house to pick up his daughter. How soon did you realize that this was a problem? I know my wife and I looked at each other and said, something's not right here. We realized this is out of norm. What do we do now? When did you become really concerned? I became really concerned when she wasn't ready for school on Monday morning. We walked to school every morning. Why wasn't she there? Monday came and went. It would be almost a month before anyone knew what had happened to Teresa.

11:57This is my daughter Teresa. She was my precious little girl. For Teresa Fusco's father Thomas and her brother John, We were happy. it seemed as though the entire town of Lindbrook was out looking for her. How big was the search? Everyone and then some. Everywhere. Nearly a month later, not far from Hot Skates, and near the Long Island Railroad tracks, Teresa's body was discovered. Beaten, raped, and strangled, buried under a pile of leaves and wooden shipping pallets. Thomas and John are still haunted by where she was found. I walked over her twice. Yeah. I didn't know she was under the pallet.

12:47We just walked over the pallet. And I'm glad I didn't find her. That would have killed me. I never heard the word. homicide. So when two homicide detectives arrived at Lisa's house, she didn't yet understand what that meant. And they said, well, we think we found her. My heart started to race. I started to get excited thinking, my God, thank God they found her. And then they told me that they found a body. At 16, it was life-shattering. When her body was found, it was a shock not just to the Limbert community, but I think to all of Nassau County. Ann Donnelly would grow up to be the Nassau County District Attorney.

13:32But before that, she had a childhood a lot like Theresa Fusco's. I used to hang out at hot skates when I was a kid. I was in college when it happened. And it changed the way we saw the world back in the 80s. It changed all that, and not for the better. These are news articles I collected throughout the years on this case. 41 years later, Vicki Pipagno keeps a sad scrapbook. It tells a story of losing her two friends, Teresa and Kelly. This one, which includes both of them, Lindbergh girl missing second from the village. Kelly had been missing for nearly six months when Teresa was found. It's just too coincidental to me.

14:22I feel like whoever committed Teresa could have something to do with Kelly. You have two girls who went missing and then one who was murdered. Yep. I was afraid to be home alone at nighttime. It was frightening. because we had no answers. Investigators on Teresa's case had very little to go on. No footprints, no fingerprints, no murder weapon. Hair samples were taken from Teresa, also a sexual assault swab. But DNA testing had not advanced enough to find out who it belonged to. While looking for links between the two girls, They zeroed in on John Colgott, a 21-year-old landscaper who told detectives he had dated Kelly for about a week.

15:14I've heard the name John Colgott before. It was early, right when she first started liking him or dating him. Colgott was asked about Kelly's disappearance. He also was asked about Teresa's killing and denied any knowledge of it. Kogut agreed to come in and take a polygraph test. Four days later, he did, and police told him he failed it. Kogut was interrogated through the night and into the next morning. After nearly 12 hours of questioning, his denials changed. Nassau County Detective Joseph Volpe wrote down what he said Kogut told him, that on the night Teresa went missing, Kogut was with John Restivo and Dennis Halstead in John's van when they saw Teresa walking away from hot skates.

16:10Dennis Halstead was known to investigators back then, says Freddie Goldman. He had had some minor brushes with police. Dennis Halstead had an apartment adjacent to the Shell gas station where Kelly was last seen at that payphone. We were told that Kelly hung out in that apartment frequently. She had the key to his apartment. It sounds like Dennis Halstead was viewed kind of as a bad influence on the younger kids in the area. It would seem, yeah. John Restivo was more of a clean slate. He was a working fellow. Although he was friends with them, he didn't have a background like them. He didn't hang out in Dennis' apartment or that we knew of.

16:54Police took Kogut to the district attorney's office, where he was videotaped. I want to talk to you about the death of Teresa Fusco. He was interviewed by Assistant District Attorney George Peck. He agreed to go on video. Camera rolling. Kogut detailed what happened to Teresa once she got into the van that night. Kogut told investigators that Teresa was raped twice by Dennis Halstead and John Restivo. When she said she was going to tell somebody, they couldn't let that happen. He decided that I had to kill her. And Dennis told her that she had to die. And what did John agree to this to? John didn't say nothing.

17:45And then John Cogut describes how he killed Teresa. And then what happened after you got the rope? I wrapped it around the neck twice, and then I tightened it like this, and then my body went limp. John Cogut would later recant everything he told police. But on that day, Goldman says, investigators were confident they had Teresa Fusco's killer in custody and had the evidence they needed to prove it. But later, on that very same day, another teenage girl went missing.

18:39March 26, 1985. When 19-year-old Jackie Martarella didn't show up to start her shift at Burger King, her older brother Martin knew something was off. She's very prompt. She was very dependable. And for her to not show up, we knew there was something wrong. Most nights, Jackie walked to work from the family home in Oceanside, a town a few miles away from Lindbrook. How would she get there? If she's walking, what was the route she would take to go to Burger King? Pretty much straight down Long Beach Road. Did you ever worry about her walking? Not really, no. Jackie had recently graduated from high school.

19:22She was working part-time and taking accounting classes, saving money to buy a car. How would you describe your sister? Describe her? She was very girly. complete with posters of teen pop stars on her bedroom wall. I remember Leif Garrett, whoever he was. I remember Leif Garrett. There was posters of that. She was into dance. She liked doing that. She liked her clothes, very finicky with her clothes. And now she was missing. So what did you and your father do? I think we called the police, and then they took notes. And then they started looking and then those other two came up and they were, you know, saying, look what's happening here.

20:12So it became, everybody became interested. Nearly a month went by with no sign of Jackie. You know, all the worst thoughts go through your mind when something like that happens. And of course, what happened happened. The worst of the worst. They found her body 26 days later. It wouldn't be a golf course. April 22, 1985. A man looking for golf balls in the high grass off the 17th hole found a naked body. It was Jackie. She was murdered, obviously, and discarded. According to former Nassau County detective Freddie Goldman, Jackie was left the same way Teresa Fusco had been, raped and strangled. Initially, did investigators think, oh my God, these cases all have to be connected?

21:10Yes and no. But with Cogut sitting there, it kind of, you know, it threw a monkey wrench and everything. John Cogut, the man who had confessed to killing Teresa Fusco, was in police custody. How could he be the killer if we had him in custody the same day that she went missing. So obviously it wasn't him. Could it be Holstead or Steve-O? But no. Jackie's homicide was not going to be easy to solve. Her body was so badly decomposed, no DNA swab could be taken. I'm sure it heightened the alertness and awareness of the community because now you know that there's somebody out there that's going after young girls.

21:52Kelly Morrissey was still missing. Police knew she had hung out at Dennis Halstead's apartment, but there was nothing more to tie Halstead or Kogut to her disappearance. Was there any evidence that indicated that they were involved in Kelly's disappearance? No, no. Teresa Fosco's killing was the only case police could pin down. By June 1985, John Kogut, John Restivo, and Dennis Halstead had all been charged with her rape and murder, and all three pleaded not guilty. Kogut went on trial first. Later, Halstead and Restivo were tried together. I remember sitting in the witness box testifying and the district attorney saying, please speak louder.

22:49Lisa Johnson was just 18 and a star witness. And here I am, you know, sitting there, very meek and timid, and in a room full of strangers testifying about my friend who was killed. It was difficult. It still is difficult. John Cogut offered an alibi, and according to a New Yorker magazine investigation, the van police said was used in Teresa's abduction was actually out of commission and up on cinder blocks the day Teresa went missing. But two hairs belonging to Teresa that police say they recovered from the floor of Restivo's van were too powerful to ignore and Kogut's detailed confession trumped everything.

23:43I wrapped it around the neck. By February of 1987, Cogut, Halstead and Restivo had been convicted of the rape and murder of Teresa Fusco and sentenced to more than 30 years to life.

24:04It had by then been two long years for Teresa's dad. He and the rest of her family tried to move on. We thought, believing me, that there was time for closure. We had gone to parents that murdered children. We had support, and they were looking for support, and we were looking for support and closure. But there was no closure. What prosecutors had insisted was an airtight case against the three men was going to blow up spectacularly. In 2003, nearly 19 years after Teresa was killed, more sophisticated DNA testing became available. It told a different story. John Kogut, John Restivo, and Dennis Halstead's convictions were all overturned.

24:57Just six hours ago, after 17 years in prison, the murder-rape convictions of three Long Island men were overturned following stunning new DNA evidence. And new testing not only ruled out Kogut, Halstead and Restivo, it pointed to someone else entirely, another unknown male. Everything Teresa Fusco's family and friends thought they knew about her killing and her killer was changing. Wait a second. There was investigations. We trusted the detectives. We trusted the police to do the right thing. How could they do this to us?

25:46Hi, my name is Lloyd Lockridge, and I'm the host of a new podcast from Odyssey called Family Lore. In this podcast, I'm going to have people on to tell unusual and sometimes far-fetched stories about their families. I've heard my whole life that she invented the margarita. And then we're going to investigate those stories and find out how much of it is true. He gets a patent one month before the Wright Brothers. Oh my God. Please follow and listen to Family Lore, an Odyssey podcast available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

26:23After almost 18 years, John Kogut, John Restivo, and Dennis Halstead were out of prison and in the arms of their families. I waited for this for 18 years, and I'm just, I'm sorry, I'm just really, I just can't believe it's happening. But their legal problems were not over. Nassau County District Attorney Dennis Dillon had decided to retry all three for the murder of Teresa Fusco, starting with John Kogut, who again pleaded not guilty. There was still his videotaped confession, and that became the centerpiece of the case against Kogut at his second trial in September 2005. He decided that I had to kill him.

27:15The confession, the prosecution argued, was more important than all other evidence, even the new DNA. When I saw the video, I go, whoa, it looks like it's legit. But Kogut's defense attorney, Paul Castellaro, says the video is misleading. As damaging as Kogut's statements sound, he says it's what you don't see on camera that matters. Part of it is, you know, it's staged. There is a detective. Sitting off camera, watching it and monitoring it and making sure it goes right. It's like a play. Here, Kogut struggles with names. Teresa Fusco. Teresa Fusco. Even his alleged accomplice's name. John Esteveo, Dennis Shapiro.

28:07And then asks for help. What's his last name? Well, are you talking to Detective Volpe, who's also in the room? That kind of shows it was coerced. Kogut was an easy target, Castelliero says. He had a 10th grade education and a substance abuse problem that Castelliero says police took advantage of. Tells him about his drinking, his drugs, all the stuff that they can use against him. And then, Castelliero says, they lied to him. The police told John Cogut that he failed a polygraph. No, John Cogut passed this polygraph test with flying colors. And even though Cogut had already told police over and over that he had nothing to do with Teresa Fusco's killing, Castellaro says they convinced him he did.

29:02They told him he blacked out. He didn't remember. You know, this is what you did. This is where you took her. I didn't even remember the next morning. I didn't remember what had happened next. Well, you remember it now, don't you? Yeah, it is. By the time this video was recorded, Kogut had been in custody for 18 hours, interrogated for nearly 12 of them, and awake for almost 30. At some point in time, you know, you want out, you give in. But the confession wasn't the only thing prosecutors would have to defend. They had to contend with the new DNA evidence pointing to an unknown male. So prosecutors suggested that Teresa must have been with someone else right before she was abducted by Kogut, Paulstedt and Restivo.

29:55Then all of a sudden she had a consensual sexual encounter. That's what they said. But investigators were never able to identify anyone who had been sexually involved with Teresa. and Teresa's best friend Lisa had to take the stand again at this trial to talk about it. And I mean, this is a tough question to ask and I want to ask it properly, but as far as you know, was Teresa even sexually active? Absolutely not. And we spoke about that. And that's not something that she was going to do before she was married. Lisa, once their star witness, was this time around undercutting their case. They went against their own witnesses and, in fact, argued that she went from being a virgin to being someone who had a quickie in a skating rink where she worked.