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Chapter 1: What happened to Kelly Morrissey before Teresa Fusco's disappearance?
Kelly 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 10th, 1984, just five months later, Teresa Fusco disappears. Yes. And what is the initial thought? The initial thought is there might be a connection.
Teresa 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. That 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 sleep over. 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. It's just very coincidental.
Same neighborhood, same timeframe, 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.
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Chapter 2: How did Teresa Fusco's life change before her disappearance?
And during that time, he confessed to the murder of Teresa. We 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?
Today we arraigned 63-year-old Richard Bellodo for the murder of Teresa Fusco. And I said, okay, here we go again.
Aaron 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. Vicky Papagno lived around the corner from Kelly in Massapequa. She 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 Limbrook. 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. Kids roamed around freely. No one could keep tabs on each other 24 seven. It was a different time. And Kelly Morrissey and Teresa Fusco were typical teens for 1984.
Well, 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. And 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?
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Chapter 3: What were the initial thoughts about the connection between Kelly and Teresa's cases?
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 had 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. So 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.
Chapter 4: How did investigators find Teresa Fusco's body?
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. Teresa'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. This 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 Linbrook was out looking for her. How big was the search? Everyone and then some. Everybody. 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 it twice. Yeah. I didn't know she was under the pallet. We 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 the body. At 16, it was life shattering.
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Chapter 5: What led to John Kogut becoming a suspect in Teresa's murder?
When her body was found, it was a shock not just to the Limburg community, but I think to all of Nassau County.
Ann Donnelly would grow up to be the Nassau County District Attorney. But before that, she had a childhood a lot like Teresa Fusco's.
I used to hang out at Hot Skates. when I was a kid. I was in college when it happened. 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 the story of losing her two friends, Teresa and Kelly. This one, which includes both of them, Limbrook 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.
I 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 Kogut, a 21-year-old landscaper who told detectives he had dated Kelly for about a week. I've heard the name John Kogut before.
It was early, right when she first started liking him or dating him. Kogut 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. Dennis Halstead was known to investigators back then, says Freddie Goldman.
He had had some minor brushes with police.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did the prosecution face during the trials?
at his second trial in September 2005. The 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 Castellero, 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 Estivo Dennis Shapiro. And 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, Castellero says. He had a 10th grade education and a substance abuse problem that Castellero says police took advantage of. Tells him about his drinking, his drugs, all the stuff that they can use against him. And then, Castellero says, they lied to him. The police told John Kogut that he failed a polygraph.
No, John Kogut passed this polygraph test with flying colors.
And even though Kogut had already told police over and over that he had nothing to do with Teresa Fusco's killing, Castellero says they convinced him he did. They told him he blacked out.
He didn't remember. You know, this is what you did.
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Chapter 7: How did new DNA evidence impact the case against Kogut and his co-defendants?
I wasn't a lawyer.
You represent the office, yeah, but...
for the Nassau County DA's office. Mr. Dillon did what he thought was right when he dismissed against two of them. And I think, you know, they got their apology at that point.
The idea that the district attorney of Nassau County can apologize to these three guys for what they did to them is outrageous.
While the Nassau County authorities say once again they have the killer of Teresa Fusco, Richard Bilodeau is not facing charges in either Kelly Morrissey's or Jackie Martarella's cases. Both remain unsolved, leaving two families in limbo. I mean, you're anticipating something and then it never shows up. She didn't have a bad bone in her body.
She missed out on just living a simple life, you know. You know, I look at women in their 50s now and think, that could be Kelly. I mean, that's how old she would be. When Richard Bilodeau goes on trial for the murder of Teresa Fusco, her father, Thomas, and her once best friend, Lisa, will be back in the courtroom for what they hope will be the last time.
Closures to me is that if this is the individual, then justice will be done. It's just completely over.
41 years is over. Beginning and end. Do you hope, do you think, that it might finally end? be resolved this time around, or do you still have questions? I trust in the DNA this time. I am so hopeful that there will be a conviction and we can finally put this to rest. 41 years afterwards. It's a long time. It's a lifetime.
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 Blood is Thicker, The Ferris Wheel.
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