#459 Jason Flom with Melissa Calusinski

Joy is essential and it's also elusive, but now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101, it's a new podcast hosted by me, Hota Kotby. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid uplifting and moving on air chats. Open your free iHeartRadio app search, Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hota Kotby is presented by CVS. My husband is a despot resort with his mistress right now and I'm calling the hotel to confront them both. Wait a minute to go to she's calling the hotel while they're checked in together. Yeah, that's right, Sophia. And it gets worse. It's vacate the vacation week on the okay story time podcast where she caught him buying gifts on Amazon and then taped the 10 page letter inside his luggage before he flew out. So she planted evidence before he even took off? And spoiler, Sophia, two years later, karma hits so hard he's calling his ex-wife in tears saying about his mistress. What a mistake that was. To find out what happened, listen to the okay story time podcast on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Munga Shategeler and I'm back with a new season of my podcast Skyline Drive. This time I talked to scientists, biopunks, chermudgins, blues owners, super seniors and go us top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us. And I get into a bit of trouble along the way. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. Make you look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, how to live forever on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. January 14th 2009 was an unremarkable day at a daycare center in Lincolnshire, Illinois. Until the afternoon when a daycare provider named Melissa Calluzinski called out to her coworkers for help. A 16 month old boy in her care had become unresponsive. 9/1 was called, CPR was performed, but the infant never became consciousness. After two autopsies, a forensic pathologist reported a rear skull fracture and massive bleeding that he believed were caused by blunt force head trauma. And after a 14 hour interrogation, Melissa told investigators what they wanted to hear, which sent her away for 31 years. But this is wrongful conviction. A couple of convictions has always given voice to innocent people in prison and now we're expanding that voice to you. Call us at 833-207-4666 and tell us how these stories make you feel and what you've done to help the cause, even if it's something as simple as telling a friend or sharing on social media. And you might just hear yourself in a future episode. Call us 833-207-4666. [Music] Welcome back to wrongful conviction. I don't even know if I'm ready for this one because this case just hurts my heart. It's an incredible story of a wonderful young woman who has been chewed up and spit out by a system that is, well, unfortunately designed to do just that. And I'm talking about Lisa Kalizinski. Melissa, thanks for being here. I'm happy you're here, but I'm sorry you're here under these circumstances. Thank you for having me. And with Melissa today, Kathleen Zelner. As many of you may know, one of the most accomplished criminal defense appellate attorneys in the country. She's been responsible for dozens of exonerations, including some you've heard about on the show like Ryan Ferguson. Kathleen, I'm so excited that you're here. Thank you. It's a great opportunity. This case is one of the more obvious wrongful convictions we've ever seen. And it involves a false confession, junk science, corrupt practices, lying, compromised witnesses, and it goes downhill from there. This is a 31-year sentence of a young woman who was working in, I think what we could all agree is a noble profession, right? She was a very careful person who was not a murder. And she was almost certainly, is it better to say Kathleen that she was convicted of a crime that never happened? Yes, this is not a murder. This is just a complete botched forensic case. This case is similar to a shaken baby syndrome case in which a child succumbs to various complications that are assigned both a violent cause and an assailant, the most recent caregiver. That's Melissa who never even got close to being in trouble before this incident. But rather let a quiet life growing up in a loving family and a working class suburb of Chicago. I grew up in Carpenter's Hill. I mean, it's just your typical suburban neighborhood. My parents' names are Paul and Cheryl, still live in the same house. I'm the youngest of five. I have two older half-brothers. My middle sister, who's a year older than me and Crystal, mean her kind of did the same thing growing up. She baby sat, I baby sat. We love children. Melissa got the chance to work at the State Care Center. It was called the mini-subibi and Lincoln Shiret, which was a relatively afflwit Chicago suburb, right? I ended up going to the Arlington Heights one for majority of the time that I worked for mini-suvie. When I transferred to the one in Lincoln Shire, my sister was working there. And my nephew was there. He was just a baby. The children made my day. I didn't even care if I had baby puke on me. Yeah, it smelled, but I still loved what I did. How this begins is that there was a young child there named Benjamin King. What do we know about the pre-existing conditions that now have come to light? October of 2008, Melissa hadn't even started working there. And there was an incident at the day care center. That incident was totally concealed from the parents. It was not written up. The word was put out by management. Nobody was to really talk about it. They were playing a game. And one of the teachers' aides had a plastic bat and was witnessed swinging the bat. And they were throwing this plastic ball. And she accidentally hit Ben in the back of the head. That manifested itself in a really goose egg-sized lump on his head. But when he was taken to his pediatrician, the mother didn't know the circumstances. She just thought he maybe he was a head banger because he had some stomach problems. So he threw himself back on the floor. So the mother had no idea the severity of the blow. So when she took him to a pediatrician, she minimized what happened. And the pediatrician opted not to do a CT scan. But that subdural hematoma, that pre-existing injury was there all those months and tragically resulted in his death from a subsequent incident where he banged his head. Pediatricians regularly monitored the height, weight, and head circumference of infants and toddlers. Before this incident in October 2008, both Ben and his twin sisters head circumferences were in the 50th percentile. However, leading up to the day of Ben's tragic passing, Ben's head rapidly expanded into the 95th percentile by January 14th 2009. Yeah, so January 14th of 2009, Ben's mother brings him to the daycare center, but he has been at home for two days. And he's done some projectile vomiting. He's lethargic, which is a classic sign of a head injury head trauma. She brings him in because she thinks he's feeling better. And so Melissa noticed that he seemed a little tired, but nothing that really stood out to her. I mean, it was just a normal usual day. They were playing most of the day, had snack, then lunch. It was me and Nancy that day, that afternoon, like after nap. So just went to see my sister or my nephew. Significantly, Melissa leaves the room and is probably gone for 20 minutes. The teacher's aide, Nancy Callinger, who was in the room before Melissa came back. She said that he thrown himself back very forcefully and hit his head on the floor before Melissa came back in the room. When she returns, Ben is in his bouncy chair. And she notices that he's not responding to his name. And then just a minute or so later, she notices kind of an orange colored foam coming out of his nose and his mouth. Yeah, when I went over to him, he was just in his chair. I went to go get help immediately when I didn't get a response. So I peeked my head out, left the door open, of course. And my sister came running. Her sister comes in another aid. They render CPR. So Melissa is only back in that room for a couple of minutes. And even the state pathologist testified well by the time he was unresponsive, this injury had to have occurred 30 minutes before or all the way up to three hours. He could not go from being. alert and responsive to this almost comatose condition in the amount of time that Melissa was in the room. So then 911 is called. Of course, we now know that a child can experience potentially up to 72 hours of lucidity after a traumatic event before succumbing to the symptoms that can arise from head trauma. For example, intra-cranial and retinal bleeding as well as brain swelling. And who knows what was going on during the three days leading up to his tragic passing. But if there was another injury in addition to the one reported by Nancy Callinger, it could have been as innocuous as a shortfall that could have caused a reblead of his previous head injury and a slow invisible creep towards unconsciousness. It was just chaos. When we took the kid next door back into the infant room. So the paramedics can do what they do. And I was just following me because it's like, what happened? He never regains consciousness. They take him in and he's pronounced dead. And then an autopsies performed by Dr. Choi. There were two autopsies, right? Which is unusual. Yes. Very. In fact, the cases I've had where there's actually not a murder, there's always two autopsies. So there's the first one where the pathologist decides, well, a cause of death isn't clear. It's undetermined. Then there's police pressure. And then the second one suddenly there's a homicide. And that's what happened in this case. Choi was pressured. Yeah, it's like we didn't like the first conclusion. Go get us a different one. While Dr. Choi was instructed to do a second autopsy, detectives return to the mini-subi daycare to find Melissa. I barely got any sleep. But the next morning I went to work. They were all there. And the way they took me out, I had each detective basically standing side-by-side, super close to me. And then I had one behind me. And I remember detective hide telling me, we need to ask you some more things. And we need you to come with us. But I didn't feel like I had a choice when they were surrounding me. Melissa was eventually taken to Lincoln Sharpe, where she endured 14 hours of interrogation without her parents' or an attorney. But importantly, there were other factors at play that made Melissa more vulnerable to police pressure. I got sexually assaulted back in 2006. And she had acute post-traumatic stress. Her head was covered with a blanket. So she was like super claustrophobic and had PTSD. That condition was so bad that it showed up years later when I just had Dr. Westfall from Yale forensic psychiatrist do a workup of Melissa. And they reported back to me that she had unresolved PTSD. They were tracing back to the sexual assault. Well, she had reported it. And the perpetrator had some connection to the police department. And there were no charges brought against him. In addition, subsequent IQ and verbal testing suggest that Melissa's mental acuity also made her more susceptible to pressure from authority figures. Yeah, she's trapped in the room with these two officers who are incredibly aggressive with her. They've got her wedged into this corner. And the thing I think that's most striking to me in her interrogation that goes on for hours is how many times she denies having done anything. 79, at least 79 that we've counted, right? 79 times she says no, I didn't do it. I know I didn't do anything wrong. And it's just so crazy because they keep pressing, they'll put you in a little room and they'll press and press like the world is crushing you. And you can't get out of it until you tell them what they want to hear. Because for people like me, there is an old right answer. They want their answer. You're listening to wrongful conviction. You can listen to this in all the lava for good podcasts. One week early and add free by subscribing to lava for good plus on Apple podcasts. My husband is currently on vacation with his mistress and I'm confronting them. Tell me, Sophia, how did she even catch them? One Amazon shopping receipt. He accidentally sent her a photo of the kid's Christmas gifts with a delivery to another woman at the bottom. He exposed himself. That's a rookie move. Couples massages, monogrammed bath robes and lingerie. He that motor for so she spent four weeks gathering evidence and taped a 10 page letter inside his luggage before he flew out in his luggage. She came to play. And the second he landed, he blocked her so she called the hotel room directly and got the mistress on the phone. She got the mistress live on the phone. That is a bold move. Let's see if it pays off. Then it gets worse. He took the mistress on the Bahamas honeymoon trip. He had planned with his wife and then the mistress tagged him on Facebook, outing the fare to her entire family. That's like a whole public confession. And spoiler two years later, karma hit some so hardies calling his ex-wife in tears saying about the mistress, what a mistake that was. To find out what happened, listen to the okay story time podcast on the iHAR radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's the Jonas Brothers. This week on the podcast, hey Jonas, we're so excited to be hanging out with Mika Abdullah from the hit show Off Campus. Congratulations on the massive show and that's a success. Got through about episode five. I left the next morning to go meet the guys. Came back was a coolest pickup where we left off and that series have been completed without me. Oh no, that's like the number one rule of watching. It's basically cheating. It's literally cheating. That's crazy. We talk about what it's been like watching the show become such a massive hit. What's next for season two and just how close the Off Campus cast really is. We're genuinely so close. What's the group chat called? If you can say if it's allowed to be set on the on pod, it's a great question. One of them is Off Campus Brazil. Okay, love it. Shout out Brazil. Shout out Brazil. And then the boys have their own group chat called Deem's ****. Our conversation with Mika Abdullah is out now. Go check it out. Listen to hey Jonas in the iHAR radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hota Kotby, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hota Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hota Kotby on the iHAR radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. During Melissa's interrogation, Joy is performing the second autopsy and so the officers keep leaving the interrogation to go and talk to him and that there's other officers present at the autopsy which they should actually never do that because then the pathologist feels extremely pressured. There were no cuts or obvious wounds or serious bruising but after the second autopsy, Dr. Choi ruled Ben's death a homicide. He said that there was intracranial bleeding followed by something that appears to not have been supported by the x-rays that Ben had a skull fracture from Blood Forze Eddron. There's not a fracture that showed up on the clear x-rays and there was bleeding. Dr. Choi, he can't see that fracture on the x-ray but he thinks he can see it visually. The whole history of the prior injury that caused this potential for massive bleeding existed in October and was undetected and then he misses it at autopsy and then gets fixated on what he thought was a skull fracture and that there had to be this tremendous blow to Ben's head. Well, subsequent pathologists have said, "No, no, that's an accessory suture that's not a skull fracture. There wasn't any tremendous blow to his head." Accessory skull sutures are developmental anomalies which typically occur while the soft spots of a young child skull solidified during the first 24 months. So while x-rays are typically a better assessment of fractures or sutures than the naked eye, Dr. Choi chose or was pressured to trust his naked eye instead to assess the source of the intracranial bleeding. There was fresh blood that it come from the old injury. It's very similar to the football player that has the concussion then goes back in and has a slight head tap and suddenly he's dead. You've got an aggravation of the underlying layers of the brain. In this case, there was subarachnoid subgalial bleeding, but it still wasn't massive bleeding and there was also old blood. So that's why Dr. Choi Dr. Choi in the first autopsy, it wasn't clear at all that this was a homicide. There was no reason that a competent person in his position could have or should have made these mistakes. Or again, maybe they weren't mistakes. Maybe he was just cow-towing to the men in blue that were in the room with him, which again, that's outrageous. It's fucking outrageous that they're allowed to like bird dog this situation. Years later, Dr. Choi admitted that he missed the previous injury during the autopsy, which should have served as a compelling explanation for the bleeding, especially in the absence of any exterior injuries. But the result of this faulty forensic exam was then brought into the interrogation room. So it's the classic read technique where you start out, she's denying, denying, denying. Then you tell her, "None of that's true." You've just talked to the pathologist. He had this horrible head injury equivalent to being thrown off a three-story building. She was the one in the room with him when he became unresponsive. It has to be her. And they just keep pounding on her. They were just like, "Let's just cut the BS. Let's cut to it." All of us are exhausted. Why don't you just tell us that we can all go home. I just wanted to get home, tell my parents about them, and go from there, and like, "Okay. They want to hear what they want to hear. Forget what I'm saying." So that's why I said everything they said. I said. I would say 85% of the interrogation is them talking. They believe that she just snapped and threw him down. They tell her exactly what to say. They show her what to do. Like here, take this. They gave her some little teddy bear. Throw that down on the floor really hard. He's facing out and she throws him on the floor. The problem is the injuries in the back of the head. But once they got it, they ran with it. They're couching it in. You haven't done anything really wrong. You'll get to go home. She actually leaves the interrogation and says, "I've got to get home to my puppy and I'm going to warm the car up." I literally thought it was going home to see my puppy. I had my keys with the prestarter. I had my phone in my hand. I was literally thought I was going home to see my family and my dog. But it was crazy when they took everything out of my hand. Neither the false confession nor the hot tops who lined up with reality yet Melissa has not seen the outside since January 15th of 2009. After everything had happened, I do remember being in the back of a police car and saying, "I'm innocent. I did not do this." And I kept telling them and I kept telling them. There is a big mistake. And they were not listening to me at all. I felt like this tiny little mouse because it's like I'm telling everybody, like, there's a big mistake. I did not do this. And it was like a nightmare. She immediately recanted her story. But it doesn't matter. You can't put that genie back in the bottle. So was she able to bond out or was she stuck in jail waiting a trial that was two years away? She never bonded out. She was stuck in jail and the parents had come to me to do the trial, but I was in the middle of Kevin Fox's appeal from his civil rights verdict. And so I recommended a very accomplished criminal defense attorney, Paul Deluca, who had been a prosecutor in Cook County. Has been a defense attorney for years. Has done dozens of death penalty cases and all of that. And then he brought in another attorney who was equally experienced and they became the trial attorneys. So Paul Deluca tried to get the confession tossed out and he brought in Richard Leo and they did my Q testing, verbal testing. They did all the right things and the judge would not let any of that evidence in. Remember this was in 2011. He said that at that point, the case law was not strong enough to justify letting in a false confession expert. So all that workup was done. Her IQ, the problem with the verbal testing, the one thing though that they knew about, but they didn't pursue and Paul's a totally honest person. He's given me an affidavit to this effect. It was the sexual assault and unresolved PTSD. Well, Paul Deluca knew that, but he was focused on Richard Leo and trying to get all of that in. They should have done that. They simply did not know that that combined with her language impairments was just fatal to her that day, being in that room in that corner with these people. So despite the science of false confession, as well as House susceptible Melissa was to police pressure, her false statement was admitted and the defense rebuttal evidence and the expert himself Richard Leo were denied. Additionally, before her November 2011 trial, Melissa's defense was provided with a digital image of Ben Skull X-ray. But you know how a file could be saved in a different format, which can affect the quality of the content? Well, this image was so compressed that it simply wasn't legible, leaving the defense experts at a big disadvantage. Dr. Shaku Tees testified about both the unreadable images as well as Dr. Choi's Shady work. Dr. Choi didn't take samples of the Skull fracture. He didn't do the slides that he should have done. So Dr. Tees, she was saying there was no definite proof of the fracture and the X-rays were totally unreadable and she thought it could have been a suture because Ben was only 16 months old. So his skull was still in that formative, you know, where you have the little soft spot. The skull is more vulnerable. So anyway, Tees said this could be an accessory suture that's part of the final skull formation and that Choi had just mistaken it for a fracture. Then Paul de Luca brought in Dr. Leitzma, who's a renowned pediatric physician in Chicago and he tried to convince the jury this was a reblead of the prior injury. The defense also called the other teachers aid Nancy Kallinger. She claimed that she'd taken him to the changing table and he didn't need his diaper changed and that she set him down on the floor and she claimed that he, the Melissa's not in the room, that he threw himself back really forcefully. Which directly supports the reblead theory. Then the state presented an allergic forensic pathologist named Manny Montes who said that he had felt the fracture with his own hands. Which according to the recently resurfaced raw digital images of Ben Skull appears to have been a total fabrication. Totalize. Yes. So what happened was the state sprung Dr. Montes on the defense in rebuttal and it was very unfortunate they didn't have a counter to Montes but he gave this Academy Award performance and his credentials he was never board certified but he's the guy that comes in and he's felt the skull and he's manipulated it and tells the jury, oh my god, there's this through and through fracture that was a tremendous blow. So that's the last thing the jury hears. Prosecutors mentioned the skull fracture more than 30 times. So they knew they had something that couldn't be beat right. They probably had a meeting in the back room somewhere and said hey just keep go after skull fracture. Just keep hitting that point. Right. And you could probably see the reaction in real time. The jurors just probably wanted to throw up thinking about this terribly violent act. So at the end of the day you've got late people on the jury. There's competing medical experts. It's almost like a toss up and if it's a toss up they're going to default to well. It's easier to reconcile the idea that something horrible was done by a bad person as opposed to the idea that a baby could have just died. Because if that's true then your baby could just die. I've done a lot of medical malpractice with parents who've lost a child. I think when parents lose a child they tend to blame themselves. I think the mother who may well have had a malpractice suit against the pediatrician who didn't do the CT scan in her mind probably blamed herself to some extent. Although it was the pediatrician's fault. So as you're saying one thing that alleviates some of that guilt is to have a clear bad guy, a person you can blame this on. Like this didn't have anything to do with October. This had to do with this young woman and her vial temper. It was just heartbreaking with me in that how these people lied to them to make it look like something when it isn't. I've put an innocent person away 31 years. My heart literally went up to my mouth. My husband is currently on a vacation with his mistress and I'm confronting them. Tell me Sophia how did she even catch them? He exposed himself. Couples massages, monogrammed bath robes and lingerie he met motor for. So she spent four weeks gathering evidence and taped a 10 page letter inside his luggage before he flew out. In his luggage she came to play. second he landed, he blocked her. So she called the hotel room directly and got the mistress on the phone. "Oh, she got the mistress live on the phone. That is a bold move. Let's see if it pays off." That it gets worse. He had planned with his wife. And then the mistress tagged him on Facebook, outing the fare to her entire family. "That's like a whole public confession." And spoiler two years later, karma hit some solo hardies calling his ex-wife in tears, saying about the mistress, "What a mistake that was." To find out what happened, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the I-HAR Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Congratulations on the massive show and massive success. Came back was a cool, let's pick up where we left off. And that series have been completed without me. Oh no, that's like the number one rule of watching some, it's literally cheating, that's crazy. What's next for season two? And just how close the Off Campus cast really is? If you can say, if it's allowed to be said on the on-pot, it's a great question. Okay, love it. Shout out Brazil. And then the boys have their own group chat called Deem's. Go check it out. Listen to Hey Jonas in the I Heart Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support and useful tools to help maximize joy. Listen to Joy 101 with Hota Kotby on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When I went to Dwight, it was scary a little bit and it was weird. I was with roommates with people I did not know. But then eventually the women that I met, they made it easier and we kind of stuck together and they kind of stuck up for me too. It wasn't as bad as what I thought it was because I know that I'm not a troublemaker and I don't cause problems. So by me staying quiet and kind of staying to myself, which I did in the county, I did here as well. So I was cautious at everything I was doing. It made things easier. And I just remember Paul telling me that this is not over. Like you're not going to do 31 years. It's just the number. Don't stress out about this. And then when they told me that Kathleen, when I got Kathleen's down there, I just kind of knew. I just had to kind of suck it up. My emotions and satisfied to be strong. So our first involvement is in doing the direct appeal and we go to the second district which is very conservative, but we've got no rebuttal to the confession because all of the evidence has been blocked by the trial judge. And Illinois is still contemplating whether false confession expert should be allowed to testify. And the first time that Illinois allows that is is in federal court, the seventh circuit and a northern district. So the state courts are lagging behind. So the court just pretty much does a knee jerk sort of opinion, no, the proofs there beyond a reasonable doubt. And I think we'd already started the really re investigating finding out the history of the injury, talking to Dr. Nancy Jones, who was a renowned pathologist. She's now deceased almost always for the state. And she's the one who thought it was an excess researcher. We got Dr. Choi to recan his testimony. And Dr. Choi retired. I'm not even sure if he's still alive, but I had other cases with him. Things where he just made mistakes. We approached him and said, my God, there's an underlying injury here that you missed on autopsy. So he agreed. Yeah, there was. Gave an affidavit. But he was always pressured by the state. They went back and had him modify and say, well, I missed it, but it wasn't important. He just capitulated when pressure was put on him. But anyway, Dr. Rudd then stepped in, discovered the tiff image. So when Paul Deluca was representing Melissa, he was given these unreadable JPEG images of the skull. I was practically like a black outline of the head. There's no possible way you could have detected whether there was a fracture there. That's why the state then brought in and sandbagged him with Dr. Montez. That was very thought out. So Dr. Rudd discovered that on the corner's computer, other than the JPEG images, there were these completely clear tiff images. And the tiff images showed this beautiful picture of Ben's skull. And there was no fracture. Then we got a forensic computer expert. We got the metadata. And you could see that someone had manipulated the images of the skull. The tiff images are the uncompressed raw digital images of Ben's skull, which were vital to exposing Dr. Choice's faulty opinion, but were not made available to the defensive trial. Since then, a forensic computer expert has proven that someone had to have exported the crystal clear tiff images as JPEGs opened them in a new program and saved them at an even lower bit rate, rendering them useless to another pathologist who with them could have shown that there was no through and through fracture, but rather that there were accessory sutures as well as a reblead of a previous injury. They knew they pressured the pathologist. I mean, it was so extreme when Dr. Rudd came along years later, Dr. Choi changed the death certificate to say it wasn't a homicide. So the death certificate now does not say it was a homicide. It says it was undetermined. That's one fucking real, like she's in prison for something that was not a homicide. So with all of that, we came back to Lake County to the trial judge. The judge did everything to try to ignore the new images that we discovered. He accused our computer expert of manipulating the data. Nancy Jones became critically ill with cancer. She died about a month after the hearing. She was too ill to come in and testify. So we brought in Dr. Zimmerman and he was head of a national trauma abuse council in the United States, probably the leading expert in the country, radiologist, in detecting skull fractures that were the result of an intentional act. He testified there wasn't a skull fracture. There would never be a skull fracture. The tip images were clear. There was no skull fracture and that the confession of the thing with the little teddy bear being thrown down on his face did not match the physical evidence, did not match. Well, the judge just thought he had a better understanding of the medicine and the radiology and then Dr. Zimmerman. So he just wasn't going to consider his testimony. So back we go to the appellate court. Now the judge couldn't get around the fact that Melissa had confessed and then she thought it was a battle of the experts. They affirmed it. So then we come back again. New states attorney takes over. He indicates he wants to meet with us that they have serious questions about Melissa's conviction based on the computer evidence we presented. I hire Saul Casson who looks at the confession. Of course, Saul Casson is one of the foremost experts in the world on false confessions. Saul Casson had tracked the case for years. So he thought it was appalling. And then I hired the forensic psychiatrist from Yale. And we just started over. So the state recommended a computer forensic company and said they would be very comfortable with their findings. I had all the computer analysis redone. They concluded my expert was spot on that the images had been manipulated and they went even further and said they had been intentionally manipulated. That my expert no way had altered any data and they completely supported him. The experts from Yale have determined that the sexual assault should have been a major part of the trial. They've given me all of that information. And then of course I have Nancy Jones, F.A. David, and I have an additional pathologist who's looked at, said, "This was not a murder. This was a child who had a severe head injury in October. That's why his head circumference increased so dramatically. This was not a murder." So in looking at it, we don't feel we'll get relief from the trial judge. It's the same trial judge. We have an action pending in federal court, but it's backlogged horribly. So we're going to go to Governor Pritzker with a clemency petition. I think that's our best avenue at this point. The good news is you have one of the best governors, and I believe that he will give this the attention it deserves. There's only one conclusion you can draw. I mean, this entire case has collapsed like a house of cards. It's, it's, there's nothing there. It's insane. So is there a call to action? I would encourage everyone to read our petition. I will post it on our website, KathleenTZellner.com. They'll be contact information in there for Governor Pritzker. If people feel persuaded by it and feel there's been a miscarriage of justice, I would strongly encourage them to write directly to him. I think it would be enormously helpful. Great. We will put links in the episode description. And with that, we're going to turn to close the arguments, my favorite part of every episode, which is where I have the honor to thank each of you for joining us here on the show. And then I'm going to kick back in my chair, turn my microphone off, leave my headphones on, close my eyes, and just listen to anything else you want to share with me and our wonderful audience. So I would say to the audience that the way I imagine and think about this case is I feel as if I'm fighting for my daughter's life. He's about the same age as Melissa. I believe in the history of the cases I've had. I've had 23 wrongful convictions resolved. But this is probably the worst one and it's hard to measure things. But I think it's because Melissa is probably one of the best people I've ever met in my life. She is a purely good person. And I think anyone that looks at this case should be outraged by the manipulation of the evidence to convict this poor young girl of the murder of a child and the damage that's been done to her mentally having to cope with this is indescribable. And so it doesn't matter what I have to do, it does not matter how long this battle takes. We are not going to stop this battle. We are going to keep pounding on the doors of justice until someone opens them. If people are out there that no of my case there's still time to do support letters on my behalf and basically just pray for me and my family and the other family as well with the supporters that I hear from. It gives me strength and it helps me to stay strong. So just hearing from people through my family and then telling me and others is just very helpful. The support is just very uplifting for me. I just hope and pray that everything goes well and I thank everybody so so much from the bottom of my heart of hearing this and hearing my story and saying that I am innocent and they strongly convict me and I just I'm just grateful for people that reach out. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to Ronfell Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good Podcasts one week early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Campler Kevin Wartis and Jeff Clyburn. The music in this production was supplied by three time Oscar nominated composer Jay Ralf. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Ronfell Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at its Jason Flam. Ronfell Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and Association with Signal Company number one. 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