CBS Correspondent Nikki Battiste and 48 Hours Producer Ruth Chenetz discuss the case of Melissa Lamesch who was found dead in her burning home the day before Thanksgiving in 2020. Melissa was also nine months pregnant and had been involved with a firefighter. The team discusses the relationship between the two, the defense’s attempt to cast doubt on the investigation, and the touching story of how Melissa's family discovered the name she had chosen for her soon-to-be-born baby boy. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened to Melissa Lamesch?
Right. You know, there's a fire. She's in the kitchen. She's dead. Maybe she was cooking something and it went up. And they don't really know what caused the fire, right? No, they never found anything. you know, a device. Investigators had dogs come in and sniff for accelerant. They didn't find any accelerant. They didn't find any electrical issues.
So what they determined was that it was started at the cabinets above the stove. They believed to make it look like something happened in the kitchen. I think for this story, it mattered less...
What started the fire? What mattered was, was it accidental or was it intentional? An accidental fire and an intentional fire could both be started in the same way, really. So I think that was really what it was all about.
So this is something that you guys may not know, but do you know if they had an adversarial relationship?
She was not afraid of him. Like it wasn't like, oh my God, I'm not going to open the door. And Matthew Plody had zero criminal record. You know, he was known to be sort of quiet at work. It wasn't someone where you have like, oh, you know, that employee who flies off the handle all the time. That was not Matt.
And she tried to, you know, keep the door open in case he wanted to be involved, but she really had no reason to be afraid of him. Right.
So, you know, perhaps one of the saddest sort of aspects to this story is that Melissa's mother, Deanna, who is waiting for her grandchild to be born and is expecting the new child into her life in just a few days. She meets her grandson for the first time.
at the funeral she holds his hand because her daughter can't um you can't help but to sort of fight back tears and imagine the pain that she is feeling yeah which i am yeah i have a baby so every time i think about this like i still get emotional um yeah deanna
wanted to see her daughter and her grandson, Barrett, who, remember, was a baby about to come out into the world. And Deanna carries around a picture with her. In the picture is Barrett, and she's holding Barrett's hand, Deanna, and she keeps that in her wallet and carries it around. And to see the picture just sort of makes your heart stop for a
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Chapter 2: Who are the key people involved in the case?
I think for me, what strikes me the most is neither of his interviews did he ever say, I didn't kill Melissa and her baby. And I would think if you are, in fact, innocent, you would probably say that.
Absolutely. But even sort of one of the clips that is in the episode where they say to him, Melissa is dead, and I don't know exactly the phrasing that they use, but he's like, oh...
And I thought, isn't like the first impulse to be like, what happened? And again, the defense looks at it and says, well, look, he didn't get rattled.
Interesting. So another kind of interesting component of this hour has to do with the fire chief, right? His boss. Fire Chief Rob Schultz, he agreed to wear a wire and confront Plody about the night of the murder. And initially, Fire Chief Rob Schultz says that he said no. And I kind of understood why, because I thought, you know, you're the leader of these group of men and women.
They have to trust you to go to you. And this is kind of a betrayal of that trust for a really good reason, a murder investigation. But still, I could understand why he would waffle on it a little bit.
And you could see the pain in his face when Nikki spoke to him about this, you know, where he's like, I don't readily talk about, I'm not proud that I did this, but there is a grieving family out there looking for answers. And in the end, he didn't have to wear, like they put something on his phone on the desk.
Right, yeah.
But he's a wonderfully thoughtful man who cares about his firehouse. And you can sense how troubled he is by all of this.
And when he first got the call that Matthew Plody was being investigated for the murder of... He didn't even know about Melissa... Had never heard the name Melissa Landers. She didn't know there was a baby. But when he was told all of this and that Matthew was being investigated, he couldn't believe it. He was like, no, no way. Not the Matthew that I know. He knows him. He's known him for years.
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Chapter 3: What evidence points to Matthew Plody's involvement?
In fact, I want to play a portion of our interview with defense attorney John Kupp that was not in the show where he explained just why he made this argument.
Our job is to... point out things that give a jury doubt. The detectives involved in this case should have taken steps to determine where someone like Gus Lamish or other people in the neighborhood, they should have determined where those people were or could have been at the time of this, you know, alleged crime, but they didn't do any of that.
And here's another unaired clip from Gus Lamish reacting to the argument during his victim impact statement.
Not only do I have Listen, Barrett taken from me. They want to accuse me of killing them. How heartless do you have to be to be able to do this to a grieving parent? This was an insult to injury.
I don't believe that the defense truly thinks Gus had anything to do with it. They were using Gus as a concrete example of here's a timeline, and you didn't even check that. But... To Gus, obviously, as he said, it's like insult upon injury.
It's a bold move, I think, on the defense part. And I asked the lawyers, is there a shred of evidence that Gus had anything to do with Melissa's murder, with the fire, anything? And they said no. So it was, you know, but as defense lawyers, as they do, we're just trying to create some sort of doubt. And that was one of the ways they did it. Right.
And I think they chose Gus because he gets the call at the supermarket. And that could have been something very easy. Call the supermarket, see if he was really there. It's his house. And they didn't do it. But the prosecutor said if there were other people worth looking at, investigators would have. So that's why- To them, it wasn't tunnel vision. They looked at who they needed to look at.
You know, hearing Gus refer to that in his victim statement was powerful. I remember, I think we even looked at each other like, ugh. And then also, we sat down with Gus after that day, and he had such raw emotion. You know, I feel like dads sometimes try to be really tough, and he just, it was so sad and so heartbreaking.
Melissa had moved in. Her parents were divorced. She had moved in with Gus into their childhood home because she had to stop working as the baby was coming. And Gus, in the interview, said to Nikki, he was looking forward to almost raising this child. Sure, move into my house. I'll give you some help.
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