As a customer and customer, you will find all of them quickly.
Also, on the product market, you will find your next step or your first big enterprise.
“With KaE, the development of the Amazon is also the advantage of the development of the company.”
And that is, before you go to the question. Where the team, like security and compliance, is really worth it. It is much easier to wait for, but it is almost out. That is, there are many startups, friends, and waiting for them. And if it is not, it is still in the right place.
Yet, stop at alfanta.com. Welcome to post-mortem. I'm your host 48 hours correspondent and Marie Creen. And today we are discussing the cases of Theresa Fusco and Kelly Morrissey.
Two teenagers, teenage girls, who went missing in 1984 in Lindbrooke, New York.
That is a suburb in Long Island. Now, after a suspect confessed to Theresa's murder and then implicated to other men, seemed like the case was closed. But about 19 years later, advances in DNA technology, overturned their convictions, and pointed to another unknown suspect.
Joining me today is 48 hours correspondent, Erin Moriarty, Erin. You worked on this case, but over your years of working for 48 hours, you've actually covered a number of wrongful conviction cases. So have you, Emory? And it is a passion of mine.
This case is yet another reminder of the cost of a prosecutor getting it wrong.
When you convict the wrong suspects, not only does that allow the real killer to go free, but often puts a family in front through years of hearings and trials. And that's the centerpiece of this story, because it's what the family and friends of Theresa, Kelly, and another victim, Jackie, have gone through in the decade, since their disappearances.
And I should point out since 1984, so over 40 years. Absolutely. I mean, this is a nightmare for any family, but this process. It's like sort of ripping the scab off over and over again. And really, you know, they're still waiting for a resolution, which we will get to,
but I want to remind everyone, listen, if you haven't watched or listened to this episode, the killing of Theresa Fusco, go check it out and then come on back so we can talk about it. So Erin, on June 12, 1984, 15 year old Kelly Moriarty, left her home after dinner, she's going to meet a friend. And she's last seen at a pay phone near a shell gas station in Lindbrook,
before she disappears after about five months, 16 year old Theresa Fusco goes missing. After she leaves her job at a local roller rink,
“how unusual was it to have two teenagers go missing within a few months?”
Amnery, this was very unusual. What made it even more unusual, these two girls knew each other. And back in the '80s, kids went out regularly and they played late at night. It was a completely different world when people still thought the bad things didn't happen. These cases that happened so close to each other really did shatter the sense of safety in this area.
I should point out that Lindbrook wasn't a small town. It had a population of about 20,000 back in the '80s. And it was very close to New York City, but it still was a suburb. One of our colleagues who worked on this story actually grew up very close to Lindbrook. And she told us that Lindbrook felt like a small town because everybody went to the same movie theaters.
Eight peats at the same peats of spots. And it did seem like everybody went to this roller rink called hot skates. And that's where Theresa worked. I mean, it kind of reminded me a little bit of where I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto. And we had the roller rink that everyone went to.
And every once in a while they would have DJ night. And it would all be 15, 16, 14 year olds and everyone felt safe because it was just a bunch of kids. But to talk about the case, when Kelly's mother, Iris realizes that Kelly has not returned home. Iris and her husband, they call the police. And then the police tell them that because Kelly hasn't been missing for at least 24 hours.
They're not going to take a report. Investigators believes she was just a runaway. They did not take the case out seriously. And they at that time found no reason to think that Kelly was a victim of a crime. Kelly was last seen on a pay phone.
“And so our thought is, well, why didn't the police file out who she was talking to?”
Well, data for the pay phones back then, we're not easily tracked back in 1984.
Of course, there was no social media, digital footprints, right?
No ring cameras, no text messages, no cell phone tower pings that cops could trace.
“All of those things that we now kind of take for granted that helps solve cases.”
And back then, it was boots on the ground. It was knocking on doors. It was word of mouth physically retracing the last steps of a missing person. So, in fact, it wasn't until Teresa Fusco disappears.
That Kelly's case actually gets a second look.
This is nearly six months after Kelly went missing. Teresa's body is discovered near Long Island railroad tracks. She's been beaten. She's been strangled. She's been raped.
And police start to look at the possible lakes between the two cases. That is when they zero in on John Cogant. He's a 21-year-old landscapeer detective say that he dated Kelly for about a week or so.
“And in the course of your reporting, I'm curious about whether you learned anything else about him.”
So they questioned him twice.
The first time he denied any involvement or knowledge of either Kelly's disappearance or
Teresa's murder. And then, according to Cogant's former legal team, and I should point out these are not the lawyers who represented him back then, but represented him when he had a retrial. This is what they told us. That police picked up Cogant for a second round of questioning.
They had asked whether he would be willing to take a polygraph and he said, yes, when they picked him up, he told them he had been drinking and smoking marijuana. The officers notified their higher-ups, but they were told to still bring them in for questioning. Now again, what we've been told is that Cogant told police that at the time, a Teresa's disappearance, he said he had nullified and hanging out with his girlfriend drinking beer.
And his girlfriend did corroborate that alibi. She even testified to that. But obviously, like the police must not believe him because they continued to press him. And then after nearly 12 hours of questioning, and 18 hours in police custody, and keep in mind he had been awake almost 30 hours.
That's when he made a video tape confession. He said that on the night that Teresa went missing, he had been with two friends Dennis Holstead and John Rostivo driving in Rostivo's van when they saw Teresa walking home from hot skate. She had gotten fired that night and left early.
Cogant then also said that after she got into the van, he claimed that Rostivo and Holstead raped her, but that he was the one who killed her. He gave stunningly specific details about how we wrapped a rope around her neck. Well, that is what struck me about this confession, the remarkable level of detail until
“you can't help but to think who would make this up?”
I'm going to be honest, it's a pretty convincing interview. And I talked to Paul Casteliera about that.
Now he is the attorney who represented Cogant not the first trial.
But when Cogant was tried a second time, he says that videotape confession was staged. According to Casteliera, Cogant was exhausted and just wanted the interrogation to stop. Casteliera says that Cogant also disavowed that confession within a day once he talked to a lawyer. But as anyone who sees that videotape confession, that confession seemed to be the nail
and his coffin at trial. John Cogant, a dentist, Holstead, and then John Rostivo, their all charged with Teresa's murder, all through them plead not guilty. But then a trial, police also testified that they recovered two hairs belonging to Teresa in Rostivo's van.
And then, of course, they testified about Cogant's details confession. All three men, Cogant, Holstead, and Rostivo, they were all convicted and they were sentenced more than 30 years to life. But then nearly 19 years after Teresa was killed, there was a stunning twist in the case because of advances in DNA technology.
We saw it in the hour. What more can you tell us about how that unfolded? Well, you know, what was interesting and very impressive is that the investigators early on did take a swab after they found Teresa's body. There was no DNA at trials back then, but they took a swab, they couldn't identify it
Initially.
Around 2003, there were more sophisticated testing and it told a very different story.
“In this case, all three men were excluded by those tests and a complete profile of a fourth”
on an identified man was present. This reminded me when I watched it of a case that I worked on for 48 hours.
Well, back was one of the first ones I ever did.
It was about the murder of Angie Dodge. This is an Idaho Falls in 1996. She was an 18 year old. She had just moved into her apartment, her brand new first apartment, and she was killed in the apartment, investigators found DNA at the scene, and then they searched a zero
in on a guy named Christopher Tap. After hours and hours of interrogation, he falsely confesses to being at the scene of the murder. And he spent many, many years in prison.
Eventually, he was released and later, he was fully exonerated.
In the end, the advances in DNA technology, genetic genealogy eventually identified the killer, was a man named Brian Drips, who eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. But it really sort of got me thinking about the way interrogations are conducted. And whether anything has changed. Emory, there's no question that we're seeing more and more cases like this. I mean, it breaks my heart,
because these officers think they have the right person, they pressure them, they confess. And then later on, after these guys have all gone to prison, genetic genealogy or DNA shows that they got the wrong guy.
“What I am finding, I think you are too, that many more of these interrogations are being video-taped or at least audio-taped.”
And best practices include not interrogating someone for hours and hours. So I think it is better, but I don't think it's fixed yet. Welcome back. Well, in 2003, the Nassau County District Attorney, Dennis Dillon decided to retry John Cogat, Dennis Halcid, and John Rusevo for the murder of Teresa Fusco. A starting with Cogat, who pleaded not guilty again.
And this time, Cogat decided to take his chances with a bench trial, which means there's no jury. It's a single judge that is going to decide his fate. But now, as we've been talking, there is new evidence that shows that the DNA did not match him. Or any of the other men, which means that the prosecution needs a different strategy. What's their strategy in the retry?
So the prosecution had to explain away that unknown DNA by saying, "Well, then Teresa must have had consensual sex with someone before she was attacked and killed." Remember, she was 16 years of age, and family and friends all told us that they were horrified when prosecutors rewrote this narrative about Teresa.
According to her best friend, Teresa had always won away until marriage, to have sex,
and she wasn't sexually active. But prosecutors said, "Well, investigators had tested so many men in the area without finding a match." So the DNA just simply can't be relevant. We would find that person if it was. And they said, "It doesn't matter what the DNA says.
We have John Cogat confessing." According to prosecutors, that was the most important evidence, even more important than the DNA.
“So then, what's the approach for Cogat's defense attorney?”
You know, he has to try to convince a judge to completely ignore this very detailed confession. And that is very hard to do as we know. But Paul Cassalero, who represented Cogat during the retrial, he was able to kind of pull apart the prosecution's argument bit by bit. For one thing, he says that that tape confession was like a play, it was theater.
One detective was off camera monitoring him. And when Cogat, you actually see this, when Cogat can't even remember the last name of one of the, you know, co-defense, the officer gives it to him. Cassalero says that police lied to him about the polygraph,
Brought in an expert who said, in fact, that he did pass the polygraph.
And then there was the issue, if you remember, those two hares that the Cogat said,
“that they had found on the floor of John Receivo's van, that sounded terrible.”
I mean, how would her hair end up in the van? Right. Cassalero argued that there was testing that revealed that those hares displayed, this certain decomposition that is only present when the hares are attached to a person who's dead. And so he argued that he believed that the police took the hares, this is awful to hear,
from the medical examiner's office, from the autopsy, and then put them in the car. Prosecutors, of course, denied that the hares were planted. But when you read the judge's decision, he was persuaded by the defense. What's more, the judge found the confession not credible. So in the end, Cogat's gamble paid off by having just a judge, a not a jury,
because the judge found him not guilty of murder.
And eight days later, the D.A. dismissed the charges against Restevo and Holstead, and they were never
retried a second time. All three men initially sued, Nassau County, and police officials. They lost, and then John Restevo and Dennis Holstead, they pursue another civil trial against Nassau County and police officials without John Cogat, and they are awarded $18 million each, essentially a million dollars for each year that they spend behind bars. But Cogat receives nothing. Why did he receive nothing at all? Well, Emory, we can't absolutely say, but defense attorney
Paul Castelliro believes that it was that confession that stopped him from getting money, but there's nothing in the record. I should point out that Cogat didn't go completely empty handed. He did receive some money from a state fund, but it was much smaller than what his codependence got, Holstead and Restevo. I mean, I sort of understand because kind of on one side,
“perhaps none of this would have happened to all three of them if he did not confess, right?”
But then kind of on the flip side is he is the one that had to endure all of these hours of this interrogation, not to mention spending all those years nearly two decades behind bars for crime. He didn't commit. I'm glad he got a little something. Do we know how all three men are doing today? We wanted to interview all three. All three did decline. Restevo, according to Castelliro, when he was convicted and went to prison initially had stayed in touch with the girl he went to
high school with and she stayed a friend and when he got out of prison he she was in Florida. He went there and from what I heard he stayed there. But according to Barry Sheku co-founded the Innocence Project in New York told me that to this day, Restevo still fears that the police could come back
and arrest them. Think about that. Yeah. 40 years afterwards, you never really get your life back.
On October 15th, 2025, this is nearly 41 years after Teresa Fusco's killed. Nassau County, a DA, and Donnelly Announces that they have indicted her killer. Thanks to the Invences in genetic genealogy and that unidentified DNA sample that was found was matched to a 63 year old. His name is Richard, Billidoo, I think. Is it Billidoo or Billidoo? Because it's it's right in Billidoo if you're a French speaker. Anybody who watches the hour will know that
I changed my pronunciation because everyone gave us different pronunciation. The prosecutors told me it was Billidoo. But when I interviewed the defense attorneys, they said it is Billidoo. And the
“defense attorneys say that's how he pronounces it. And so I'm going with Billidoo. But you do hear”
me in the hour, pronounce it at Billidoo. Well, I mean, do we know anything about this person, how he could have crossed past with Teresa, just anything? We don't know a lot. Remember, Amri, this is pre-trial. Nobody's sharing a lot. The prosecutors wouldn't reveal or couldn't reveal whether there was any evidence that Billidoo and Teresa Faskov knew each other. None of her friends
Had ever heard the name, even his own defense attorneys don't know much about...
like online gambling. What we do know from prosecutors is that the FBI matched the unknown DNA sample,
“the one that had always existed to Billidoo in 2024. They were able to confirm his DNA was a match”
after they obtained a discarded straw from a slurpy cup that was connected to Billidoo. At the time Billidoo's rest, he had been working at a Walmart and he was stalking shelves, but at the time of Teresa's killing, he was 23 older than what she was and living close by to her in Lindbrock. Billidoo has pleaded knock guilty and if he doesn't take a plea deal and he does go to trial,
then we're going to learn a lot more because the prosecution has get this 150 boxes of electronic
discovery to go through. And then what about Kelly Morsey? I mean, is there any kind of
“update or advance for her pace and her disappearance? Anything? No. We had mentioned at the”
beginning of this podcast that Kelly Morsey's initially had been viewed as a runaway. And now, according to retired detective Freddy Goldman, it is now viewed as a homicide and he said that officials do believe the cases might be connected, but we know that Billidoo has not been charged in Kelly's case. And in the hour, we also learned about another victim. She's a 19-year-old her name is Jackie Marterella. She goes missing in March of 1985 in Nassau County. Her body is found.
She has been raped. She's been strangled just like Teresa Fusco, our investigators looking at Billidoo in connection with Jackie's case. Billidoo has not been charged in the case of Jackie Marterella, but according to what we heard from Freddy Goldman back then and even to this day, they had another suspect in mind. They brought him in for questioning and he moved to the south of France and that seemed to end the investigation. You know, one of the things you mentioned at
sort of the top of this is that this really underscores the kind of prolonged and protracted pain that families feel Teresa's family thought they had some sort of resolution and then nearly two decades later that all blows up for them. What really struck me was talking to Teresa's friend, Lisa. She told me just how involved she had to be in this case. Keep in mind, so she testifies at Cougat's original trial. She has to testify at Restevo in Holstead's original trial.
There were other hearings that she said she also had to testify. Then Cougat is re-tried and she's
“probably going to have to testify again if Billa do goes to trial. It's never ending. That's what”
Teresa's father told us. That's what Teresa's brother told us. The idea that her murder has never
been resolved. It just, it just makes everything so much tougher for this family. Yeah, I mean, I don't think you ever really move on, but you do sort of figure out ways to cope, but how can you cope without a resolution? I know that Kelly Morrissey's family talked us because they're hoping if somebody knows something and they see this story maybe, maybe they'll come forward, it's 40 years, it's time. Aaron, thank you so much. Talk to you soon, Emory. Of course. If you
like this episode, please write and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. When beloved family patriarch Gary Ferris went missing, his family looked everywhere on their property until they came across something horrifying. It's a homicide. Absolutely. The blame game in this family went round and round. This is bloodesticker, the Ferris wheel. I would don't see how anyone can look at this story and think they were happy. Binge the full series, bloodesticker, the Ferris wheel,
on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.
