48 Hours Correspondent Erin Moriarty and Producer Stephanie Slifer discuss the death of 16-month-old Benjamin Kingan and the questionable conviction of Melissa Calusinski. They talk about the anonymous phone call that revealed a surprising discovery years after the trial, the hours-long police interrogation that led to Melissa's confession, and what's next in the case. 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
Full Episode
Welcome back to Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green. And today we're looking at the case of Melissa Koyuzinski. She was a daycare worker who was convicted of murder in 2009 in the death of a 16-month-old baby boy, Benjamin Kingen. Now, Melissa remains in prison, and she's already served 16 of the 31-year sentence that she received. But she's long insisted that she is innocent.
So today joining me is 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty, who has been reporting on this case for more than a decade, and producer Stephanie Slipher, who also worked on this case with us. Welcome, ladies. We love being here.
This is one of those very complicated cases, so an opportunity to talk more about it. I'm in.
Yes. Thank you so much for having us.
And Stephanie, I want to thank you because I know you're feeling a little under the weather and you still made it in for this podcast. So I really, really appreciate it.
Thank you. Yeah, it's an important case. So we definitely wanted to be here to talk about it.
And remember, if you haven't listened to this episode of 48 Hours yet, you can go find it. You can find the full audio just below this episode in your podcast feed. So go take a listen and then come on back so we can talk about this case. All right. So, Aaron, 48 Hours first began reporting on Melissa's case in 2014.
That's about five years after Benjamin's death and almost three years after Melissa was actually convicted of his murder. When you first interviewed Melissa, was there anything that stood out to you about her? What were your impressions of her?
Well, I'm going to tell you, Anne-Marie, that I encountered something with this case I had never encountered before. Right away, I saw issues. I started asking Melissa questions, and I realized she wasn't quite understanding what I was asking. Now, I had known that she had cognitive issues. That came up during the trial and later on.
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