Former day care worker Melissa Calusinski has served 16 years of a 31-year prison sentence for a crime she says she didn't commit – a murder that probably never happened .
She was convicted in 2011 at the age of 25 of murdering 16-month-old Benjamin Kingon, whom she cared for at an Illinois day care center. Over the years, his appeals have failed, but as “48 Hours” reports, airing Saturday, January 18 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+, he has now taken his fight out of the court system. Lee and directly to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.
It's a case that “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty has been reporting on for more than a decade, and Moriarty's latest report, “The case against Melissa exposed,” Features new interviews and never-before-reported information.
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The story began on January 14, 2009, when Calusinski, then 22, was working as a teacher's aide at Minnie Subie Day Care in Lincolnshire, a suburb of Chicago. That afternoon, Calusinski was alone in class with Ben and other children when she noticed he was unresponsive and foaming at the mouth. A call was made to 911. Ben was taken to the hospital, but was pronounced dead an hour later.
During an autopsy, the pathologist, Dr. Yupil Choi, told a detective that he had observed fractures in Ben's skull, extensive bleeding inside his head, and that the injury had been caused by strong force by another person just hours before Ben's death. Was installed using. And yet, according to the autopsy report, there were no cuts or serious wounds on the exterior of Ben's body. When the police brought Calusinski in for questioning, he denied having anything to do with Ben more than 60 times. But after nine long hours, under duress and without a lawyer, he confessed to throwing the child on the ground.
“The only way for me to get out was a confession, a false confession,” Calusinski told “48 Hours.”
test and after
During his trial in Lake County, Illinois in November 2011, prosecutors argued that Ben was a perfectly healthy baby, which led to his death. Choi testified about what he said was a skull fracture – and that he believed the injury was recent and similar to being thrown to the floor by someone. Dr. Manny Montez, another pathologist brought in by the state to consult on the autopsy, testified that he examined the child's body and felt the skull fractures with his bare hands.
Calusinski's trial attorney, Paul De Luca, tells Moriarty that he had little to contend with the alleged skull fracture because before the trial, prosecutors had given him a disc that contained dark, unreadable X-rays. Nevertheless, De Luca argued that Calusinski was not guilty and that his confession was coerced. He and defense experts pointed to Ben's previous injury. This was addressed at the day care three months before Ben's death and before Calusinski began working there.
It was reported that Ben also had a habit of throwing himself back and hitting his head. The defense argued that the habit aggravated an old injury and contributed to his death. The jury ultimately rejected that argument, but Calusinski remained determined to prove his innocence, and in 2012, a year after his conviction, at the insistence of then-newly elected Lake County Coroner Dr. Thomas Rudd, the autopsy evidence was reviewed. Agreed to do. Give it to Luca.
In slides of the child's brain, Rudd recognized what he said was evidence of old injury—evidence that Choi, the pathologist who performed the autopsy, had missed. Like the defense experts at the trial, Rudd and another renowned pathologist whom he consulted believed that Ben's head-butting had aggravated an old injury. Nancy Kallinger, a day care worker, told police that she had seen Ben throw himself back twice on the day he died.
Rudd told “48 Hours” in 2014, “Excess fluid from the recent injury … pushes the brain down and cuts off the respiratory system. That's what caused the child's death. It was an old injury. The old injury was too big.” ,
Nevertheless, prosecutors persisted with their case. And even though Choi admitted in a sworn statement that he had missed the fact that Ben had suffered an old injury, he said he would not have changed his testimony at trial.
Then, in 2015, Rudd's staff found clear X-rays of Benn on the coroner's office computer that would overturn the case. Rudd and other defense experts said clear X-rays showed Benn's skull was not fractured. Rudd eventually changed the manner of death on Ben's death certificate from homicide to undetermined.
By this point, defense attorney Kathleen Zellner, who had made a career of getting wrongfully convicted people out of prison, had taken over Calusinski's case. Zellner fought to get Calusinski's case back before a judge and in 2016, Calusinski was granted an evidentiary hearing so that Zellner could present what he argued was new evidence before Judge Daniel Shanes, the same judge in Lake. The county judge who presided over Calusinski's trial. Zellner argued at that hearing that if the defense had had access to clear X-rays at the time of the trial, the verdict would have been different.
Zellner told Moriarty, “The skull fracture became really important in the trial because the prosecutors mentioned it 32 times.” “This was the key point in the state's case to convince the jury that this was a murder.”
But at the evidentiary hearing, prosecutors argued that there was no new evidence in the case and that the discs provided to the defense before the trial contained software to enhance X-rays and that De Luca had not done enough to brighten them. Did. But De Luca testified that he could not open the software, and Zellner, with the help of an imaging expert, argued that no matter what De Luca did, the X-rays he was given were modified. And there were substandard ones that were found on the coroner's office computer.
At the evidentiary hearing, Zellner also called Paul Forman, the deputy coroner during Ben's autopsy, to the stand. Forman disputed the testimony of pathologist Montez, who testified during Calusinski's trial that he felt a fracture in Ben's skull. But Forman, who said he was there when Montez came to the coroner's office, testified that Montez never physically examined Ben's body or touched the child's skull.
Dr. Robert Zimmerman, a renowned pediatric neuroradiologist, also took the stand for the defense at the evidentiary hearing and he also questioned Montez's testimony. Zimmerman testified that if there had been a skull fracture, it would have been visible on clear X-rays. According to him it was not so.
Nevertheless, prosecutors stood by their trial witnesses, Montez and Choi, who said they saw and felt skull fractures. Neither doctor responded to “48 Hours”’s recent requests for comment. At the conclusion of the evidentiary hearing, Judge Shanes ruled against Calusinski and refused to grant him a new trial. In his decision, Shanes said that he did not find Forman's testimony regarding Montez credible, and that he agreed that De Luca could have brightened the X-rays and made them readable. An appeals court affirmed that decision.
“I don't understand,” Calusinski told Moriarty through tears.
Then, in 2022, a development occurred that gave hope to Calusinski and his defense. The new state's attorney in Lake County, Eric Rhinehart, has taken over. Zellner says Rinehart sought more information about the discrepancy in the X-rays, so he recommended she retain Garrett Discovery, a digital forensics company.
On this week's “48 Hours,” Garrett Discovery's Andrew Garrett and Brian Bowman tell Moriarty about their findings. In a report, they concluded that someone had manipulated the X-rays using software tools used to view X-rays and “which resulted in black washed out images that were unreadable.”
“I can't think of an innocent explanation,” Garrett told Moriarty.
Garrett and Bowman presented their findings to Rinehart at the November 2022 meeting, which also included Zellner and De Luca.
“Eric was just angry,” Zellner told “48 Hours.” “He was saying, whoever did this manipulation needs to be held accountable.”
De Luca said, “I thought he was going to do something about it.”
But according to Zellner and De Luca, nothing happened after that meeting. By April 2024, Zellner decided to file a clemency petition, asking that Pritzker exonerate Calusinski or release him for time served.
“I believe this is his best chance for freedom,” Zellner told Moriarty.
Melissa Calusinski's fight for clemency
A hearing before the Governor's Prisoner Review Board was scheduled for July 2024. But a few days before that hearing, in a twist that Zellner says she didn't see coming, Rinehart met with an attorney for Ben's family and then wrote a letter to the board saying her office “Strongly opposes Melissa's clemency petition.”
Rinehart would not grant an on-camera interview with “48 Hours” or speak on the record, but in that letter to the board she wrote that there is no new evidence in the case — and Calusinski's petition for clemency does not establish innocence. .
On July 9, 2024, Zellner went before the Prisoner Review Board to make her case for Calusinski's freedom. He was joined by De Luca, computer forensics experts Andrew Garrett and Brian Bowman, and Katherine Thomas, a Yale psychologist who evaluated Calusinski and found him particularly susceptible to giving false confessions.
Thomas told the board that he and his colleague, psychiatrist Alexander Westphal, had diagnosed Kalusinski with borderline intellectual functioning. Calusinski scored at a 4.8 grade level in sentence comprehension. He also diagnosed Ben with post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the rape he suffered approximately two and a half years before her death. But not everyone at the clemency hearing was in support of Kalusinski's release. Two Lake County assistant state's attorneys, one of whom prosecuted Calusinski, spoke in opposition, as well as the parents of Ben Kingon, who said they were convinced that Calusinski was guilty.
getty
After the hearing, it was up to the prisoner review board to make a confidential recommendation to Pritzker as to whether Calusinski should be released, and “48 Hours” has learned that recommendation was just made. There is no time limit for the Governor to serve.
When Moriarty asked Calusinski what she would say to the governor if given the chance, she replied, “I would say, 'Just please, look at my case…I didn't do it.'”
Moriarty's report includes new interviews conducted with Calusinski, his family, his lawyers, computer forensics experts and a false confessions expert who analyzed the case. Moriarty also interviewed two former employees of the day care who had never spoken about it before.