Bryan Kohberger Moves to Withdraw His Guilty Plea, Lindsay Clancy Trial: the 911 Call, Luciano Frattolin on Trial in Melina's Death

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it is Thursday, July thirtieth, twenty twenty six. Before we start a word about today's episode, all three of our stories involve the deaths of children, and two of them involve testimony about how those children died. There is also discussion of suicide and of severe mental illness. If that is not something you can sit with this morning, skip this one. We will be here tomorrow. A nine year old girl told her mother she did not want to go on a trip with her father. Her mother listened, her mother said no and canceled it. And that should be the end of the story, because that is the system working exactly the way we tell every parent and every child it is supposed to work. A kid speaks up, an adult believes her, the adult acts. It is not the end of the story. There was a second trip, a shorter one, a compromise, and Molina Fradelen did not come home from it. This week, a jury in upstate New York heard what the man who performed her autopsy found inside her body. Her father is on trial for her murder. He says she was kidnapped. The state says he drowned her in a marsh off the highway and then called nine to one one and kept lying into the next morning. Also today in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Lindsey

1:33 Clancy jury comes back for the hardest evidence in that case, and a judge does something I want to talk about because I think he got it right, and I do not say that about judges very often. And in Boise, one year after Brian Coberger stood in a courtroom and said the word yes to each of four names, he has filed paperwork saying he wants to take it all back. And the family of Kaylee Goncalves has a description of him that is going to stick. That is the show. Let's go Molina Frattelen the trial in Elizabethtown. This is a new case for us, So let me set the whole thing up, because the timeline is the evidence here.

2:15 Molina Frattlen was nine years old, born in twenty sixteen. She lived in Montreal with her mother, Kayleie Galanis, who had sole physical custody. Her parents met in Ethiopia in two thousand and nine, were together about ten years and separated in twenty nineteen. Her father is Luciano Frattolin, a Montreal businessman and the founder of a coffee company called Gambella, A man whose company website before it came down, was mostly about his daughter. He called her the light of his life. In July of twenty twenty five, the two of them took a vacation in the United States. On the night of July nineteenth, around ten in the evening, Fradelen called the Warren County Sheriff's Department and reported that Molina had been kidnapped. The story he told police was this, he pulled over near Lake George off Interstate eighty seven to relieve himself. He stepped away from the car, turned back around, and she was gone. Later, the story grew.

3:11 Later there were multiple cars parked behind him, and he had seen two men grab his daughter by the mouth, drag her into a white van, slide the door shut, and drive off. He said he chased them. He said he lost them. Then he pulled over and called police, and Amber Alert went out across New York and into Canada. Fourteen forest rangers and more than fifty officers went looking for her, and in the early hours of July twentieth, investigators put Fratlein in a police cruiser and drove him up and down Interstate eighty seven for nearly three hours, exit by exit, rest stop by rest stop, asking him to point at the place where his daughter had been taken. That recording was played for the jury last week. On it, he does not recognize anything. Not one exit, not one rest area. Nothing looks familiar to a man who says he watched his child get dragged into a van a few hours earlier. What did look familiar was his phone.

4:08 He consented to a search of it, and one investigator told the jury he had suggested the phones might help. They did. The location history put Molina's phone and her father's phone parked for close to an hour at a trail lot near Exit twenty eight in Taykuonderoga, well north of where he said she vanished. They found her there that morning, in the shallow water of a marsh off the short swing trail. Concealed. Officers later found his muddy clothes and shoes in a garbage bag discarded near the highway, and surveillance footage from earlier that day showed him wearing something different from what he had on when police met him. He was arrested on July twenty first, twenty twenty five. He is charged with second degree murder and concealment of a human corpse. He has pleaded not guilty to both counts and he has been held without bail ever since.

4:55 And I want to be exact about this. He has presumed innocent. This jury has not heard the defense case, and nothing I just described has been tested by a verdict. The trial opened on July twenty third of this year in Essex County Court in Elizabethtown, in front of Judge Tachiana Coffinger and a jury of twelve with three alternates. The judge has told everyone to expect about three weeks. First Assistant District Attorney Carrie Daily is leading for the people. Fradelein is represented by public defenders. The defense has three arguments, and I'm going to lay them out straight because you should hear the actual case and not my version of it. One, it is all circumstantial, nobody saw anything, and the state is asking a jury to convict on phone records and dirty laundry. Two. English is Fradelein's third language, and his lawyers say police misread a frightened father who was struggling to communicate and never seriously investigated the kidnapping. Three. He suffered a head injury years ago. He told investigators that in twenty nineteen a rock hit his head during a raw and he spent five days in a coma, and the defense says that is why his account kept shifting.

6:06 Those are real arguments and a jury is entitled to weigh them. I will say this much. Several investigators who dealt with him that night testified they had no trouble understanding him, and they described him as calm now this week. On Tuesday, Molina's mother took the stand, and it was the first time Kaylee Galanis has spoken publicly about her daughter's death. She testified that Fradelen had wanted to take Molina to Ethiopia, his native country, for two weeks back in January of twenty twenty five. Molina did not want to go. She told her mother she did not want to go. Galanis testified that her daughter also related things Fradeline had said to her, things Galanis described as troubling and alarming, and Galanis said no, she would not allow the trip. Instead, there was a compromise a shorter trip inside the United States. That is the trip Molina did not come back from. I want to sit on that for a second, because it is the whole reason this one is different usually on this show. I'm telling you that nobody was paying attention to her, That the warning sign sat in a file somewhere while a system full of adults walked past them. That is not what happened here.

7:18 Molina spoke up, her mother heard her, her mother acted, and it still was not enough. There was no agency to call, there was no red flag to raise. A nine year old said she was uncomfortable going somewhere with her own father, and the only tool her mother had was to say no to one trip and yes to a smaller one. Also on Tuesday, jurors heard from the Essex County Corner and from the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy, doctor Michael Sikirka. He told the jury she was found in knee deep marsh water covered in mud. He told them her lungs, her airway, and her stomach were full of mud and plant debris from that marsh. He testified that her lungs were hyper expand and that this was, in his words, a drowning case. I am not going to give you more than that. You do not need more than that, and she deserves better than to be a paragraph of forensic detail. On a podcast on Wednesday, jurors saw photographs of her body. Frattlin looked away.

8:19 He also, according to reporters in the room, spent the session writing on a legal pad. As for why, prosecutors told the jury in their opening that they had found writings of Frattlen's in them. He described Galanis as suffering from a severe mental illness and said he believed Molina was starting to suffer from it too. He wrote about the July trip, He wrote a phrase about ending Molina's suffering, and he wrote about something he called Luziano Frattolin two point zero. There is a financial picture in the file as well. He was a defendant in five civil proceedings in Canada, had been sued over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in unpaid bills tied to the coffee company, and he owed back child support. Look, I am going to be honest with you. I do not know what was in that man's head. And a jury does not have to find a motive to convict. But there is a playbook for this, and the phrase ending her suffering is a page in it. It is the language people reach for when they have decided a child's life is a problem to be managed, and they need a way to say that out loud that does not sound like what it is. Nobody gets to promote himself to version two point zero by subtracting his daughter. The trial continues in Elizabethtown. We expect two more weeks. Molina Frattolin was nine years old. She loved her phone and she used it constantly on that trip, which is how we know so much about her last day. She had a mother who listened to her. She should be ten now. She should be starting her school year in Montreal in about

9:51 a month. Someone has to say her name. Welcome back. We have been with this case since the civil filings in January, through the pre trial fights this spring, and we were with you Monday when it finally started. If you are new, here's the shortest version I can give you that is still fair to everybody. January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, Duxbury, Massachusetts. Lindsey Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse, strangled her three children in the basement of the family home with exercise resistance bands. Cora was five, Dawson was three, Callen was eight months old. She then cut her wrists in her neck and jumped from a second floor window. She survived, paralyzed from the waist down.

10:40 Her children did not. She is charged with three counts of first degree murder and has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, which in Massachusetts is argued as a lack of criminal responsibility. She does not deny doing it. The entire trial is about whether she is legally responsible for it. Her attorney, Kevin Readington, says she was in postpartum psychosis, over medicated on prescriptions from multiple providers, and heard a man's voice telling her to kill her children and then herself. The prosecution says she was lucid, rational and selfish and knew exactly what she was doing. Judge William Sullivan is presiding in Plymouth Superior Court. The jury is twelve women and six men, six of those eighteen being alternates, which tells you what everybody expects. This is a six to eight week trial. Monday was opening statements and the state's first witness was Patrick Clancy, the children's father, Lindsay's ex husband. He is thirty eight. He has remarried.

11:40 He lives in New York now and Monday was the first time he and Lindsay had been in the same room since the day their children died. She shook when he walked in. Tuesday, the court was dark. Yesterday he was back on the stand, and yesterday was the day everybody in that courthouse had been bracing four because yesterday prosecutors were expected to play his nine to one one call. That is the call he made on January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, after he came home with takeout and found the bedroom door locked and blood on the floor and a window open in the cold, and then found his wife on the frozen ground outside, and then after the ambulance came, went down to the basement. Here is the part I want to talk about. Before the trial started, Patrick Clancy went to the judge and asked him to keep that recording and the autopsy photographs of his three children from being copied and distributed by the press. Judge Sullivan granted it. The order says media may not record, display, reproduce, distribute, or otherwise disseminate the call or those photographs. When they play it in that courtroom, the camera goes off. Good.

12:49 That was the right call, and it was not an obvious one, because there is a real public interest in an open courtroom, and I am usually the first person to say so. But there is no version of the public interest that requires the worst ninety seconds of a father's life to be turned into a clip. The jury needs to hear it. Twelve people who will decide this case need to hear his voice on that call and judge it for themselves. Nobody scrolling at a bus stop needs it. That is not transparency, that is content, and those are two different things, and courts confuse them constantly. This one did not. Now The strategy here is genuinely strange, and it is worth understanding. Patrick Clancy is on both sides witness lists. The prosecution called him first and then spent Monday getting pushedback from him. He has said publicly that he was not married to a monster, that he was married to someone who got sick. He corrected the prosecutors framing more than once. He told the jury he never saw Lindsay harm the children, and that her intrusive thoughts frightened her more than they frightened him. He did not give the defense everything either. He acknowledged she did not always take her prescriptions. He described the spiral, losing weight, not sleeping, telling him in December that she was suicidal, and having thoughts about the children. He described her checking herself into a psychiatric hospital on New Year's Eve and checking herself back out five days later without telling him so she could be there for Cora's fifth birthday. And then he described January twenty fourth, which he called a

14:20 normal day, one of her best days. Photos going back and forth, Dawson dressing himself for the first time, Cora at the doctor, snow in the yard, a text about getting takeout, be right back. Jurors are also expected to walk through that house at some point in this trial. I do not know how this one comes out, and I am not going to pretend I do. What I will tell you is that the argument in that courtroom is not really about whether a mother killed her children. It is about how many doors she knocked on first, what was on the other side of them, and whether that changes what she owes. Thirteen prescriptions in four months from multiple prescribers is not a defense by itself, but it is a question and somebody should have to answer it, whether or not this jury ever gets around to asking.

15:08 Cora Clancy was five years old and she loved princesses. Dawson Clancy was three and he was obsessed with paw patrol. Callen Clancy was eight months old and his father described him as a happy baby. Someone has to say their name, welcome back, last story, and this one made me put my coffee down. On November thirteenth, twenty twenty two, four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in an off campus house in Moscow, Idaho. Madison Mogan twenty one, Kaylee Gunkov's twenty one, Zonikernodle twenty Ethan Chapin twenty Brian Koberger, a criminology doctoral student at Washington State, was arrested six weeks later in penns Sylvania for nine hundred and sixty two days. He said he was innocent. Then, weeks before trial, his own lawyers went to prosecutors and asked for a deal.

16:09 Plead guilty to all five counts and the death penalty comes off the table. On July second, twenty twenty five, Judge Stephen Hippler asked him, one name at a time, whether he had killed each of those four people four times. He said yes. Then the judge asked him whether he was pleading guilty because he was guilty, and he said yes to that too. On July twenty third, twenty twenty five, he sat silent while the family spoke, and he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus ten years. As part of the deal, he waived his right to appeal. On Monday of this week, Brian Cooberger filed a petition for post conviction relief in Ada County District Court, handwritten representing himself. He wants the plea thrown out and he wants a trial. Now Here is the legal part, because most of the coverage is skipping it. Waiving your appeal rights is not the same as waiving everything. Post conviction relief is a separate civil proceeding, and it exists precisely so that somebody who is railroaded into a plea has a door left open. In Idaho, the standard for undoing a plea is manifest injustice. That is a high bar.

17:19 These petitions get filed constantly and they almost never work. Prosecutors have thirty days to respond and then the court hears argument. So what is his claim? It is ineffective assistance of counsel. He says his own lawyers, the ones who saved his life, did this to him. He claims they did not disclose evidence that would have helped him, and he specifically points to what he calls unknown hair found in Ethan Chapin's hands. He claims they told him the plea did not have to be truthful. He claims they induced him with promises about prison privileges, contact visits, freedom of movement, a job, and he claims they lied to him about what a life sentence and what death row and eye DAHO would actually look like. He also gave a statement to The New York Times, Time to the anniversary and to a Netflix documentary that premiered yesterday, in which he called the States case a work of fiction, said justice was not served, and wrote that his actual innocence is his truth. He says he welcomes the state seeking the death penalty. Again, let me be fair for one paragraph, because I owe you that if a defense lawyer genuinely sat on exculpatory evidence, or genuinely told a client that a guilty plea does not have to be true.

18:31 That would be serious misconduct and it would matter. And the point of a post conviction petition is that a court, not a podcast host, gets to look at it. He is entitled to file this. The process exists for a reason, and Idaho's Attorney General has said his office stands ready to do whatever is necessary. Now let me tell you what I actually think. He asked for this deal, not the state, not the families, him through his lawyers, weeks before a jury was going to be picked. He got's the exact thing he wanted, which was to keep breathing. He stood in a courtroom with the whole country watching, and he was asked, individually, name by name, whether he killed those four people. And he did not hesitate, and he did not qualify, and he did not say a word about broken promises or hidden hair. He said yes.

19:20 Then he sat through his sentencing and declined to speak. He was silent for the families, and he is loud for the New York Times, And that tells you everything about who the audience was all along. The Gonkalvs family put out a statement on Monday, and they said it better than I am going to They called him the mosquito. You just can't seem to swat. They said he received exactly what he asked for, a deal that spared his life, that he chose not to leave the facts to a jury, and that he never cried foul about two years of discovery he and his lawyers had reviewed, and then they said the part that land's hardest. He wants another chance to roll the dice. They are not afraid of it either.

20:01 Kayley's mother, Christy Gouncalvez, said this week that the family was not shocked, that they believe fully in the evidence, and that if there is a trial this time, they expect a conviction and a death sentence. They wanted that trial in the first place, they were furious when they did not get it. An Idaho trial attorney watching this said he expects the judge to deny it and that this looks like the opening move toward a longer appellate path. He also called it self aggrandizing and cruel. I would go further. This filing drags four families back onto the front page in the same week they are trying to get through an anniversary. That is not a side effect. That is the product. Here is the thing about a guilty plea. It is not a mood. It is not a first draft. You do not get to use it as a shield when the needle is on the table and then throw it away a year later because you have decided you would rather be a mystery than a murderer.

20:58 He wanted certain certainty is what he bought, and the price of it was the trial. He now says he is owed. That is not a miscarriage of justice. That is a receipt. Madison Mogan, Kaylee Guncalves, Xana kernodle Ethan Chapin. Four people who were twenty and twenty one years old and are still a year after the man who killed them. Stop pretending being used as a stage. Someone has to say their name. That is daily Crime and Justice for Thursday, July thirtieth, twenty twenty six. In Elizabethtown, New York, the murder trial of Luciano Fradelein continues with about two weeks of testimony still to come. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Lindsay Clancy Jerry has now heard from the father of Cora Dawson and callan and there are six or seven weeks of this left and in Boise, prosecutors have thirty days to answer Brian Coberger's petition and we will be following it.

21:56 If this episode was worth your time, send it to one person. That is the entire marketing department of this show and it works. Tell a friend, and if you are listening on Spotify, drop a comment, because I want to hear you on this one. Brian Koberger traded a trial for his life and now he wants the trial back. Should a defendant who pleads guilty specifically to escape the death penalty ever be allowed to withdraw that plea? Is that the system correcting itself? Or is that a man gaming a system that already gave him a gift? Tell me, I read them. I'm Garrett Fisher, Malina Fradelen Cora Dawson and Kellen Clancy, Madison Mogan, Kaylee Guncalves Zonakernodle and Ethan Chapin.

22:41 Do better. This is Daily Crime Injustice. Reporting in this episode is drawn from Court TV, the Canadian Press and CBC News Ten Albany, The Press, Republican, WCAX Global News, The Boston Globe. CBS Boston, NBC E Boston, WBUR, Axio's Boston, The Plymouth County District Attorney's Office, The Associated Press, CNN, NBC News, CBS News, Box News, KTVB, The New York Times, As reported by other outlets and The Daily Mail, Luciano Frattolian has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. Lindsey Clancy has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and is presumed innocent. No verdict has been returned in either trial.

23:29 Some outlets list mister Fradelein's age as forty five and others as forty six. The claim that prosecutors have alleged a specific motive of avoiding child support appears in tabloid coverage. The record we have reviewed reflects an unpaid child support obligation and civil debt, but that framing was not part of the prosecution stated opening. A figure of thirteen hours for one police interview appears in a single outlet, and we have not corroborated it, so we have described it only as an interview lasting many hours. Testimony described here as occurring Wednesday was in progress at the time of recording and may have moved in prior episodes, we refer to Dawson Clancy's age inconsistently. Dawson was three years old, Cora was five, Callen was eight months old, a correction we made on air yesterday. Brian Coberger's petition for post conviction relief contains allegations against his former defense attorneys that have not been tested, answered, or ruled on by any court.

24:25 His guilty plea and sentence currently stand. If you are struggling, the Suicide in Crisis Lifeline is available in the United States by calling or texting nine eight eight. For concerns about a child's safety, the Child Health National Child Abuse Hotline is one eight hundred four to two two four four five three. For postpartum mental health support, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is one eight three three nine four three five seven four six