ELIZABETHTOWN, NY – Alleged killer dad Luciano Frattolin sat emotionless in court Wednesday as the state played video evidence of his continued claims that his daughter had been abducted — even after police investigators grilled him to come clean about the grisly murder of his nine-year-old.
Frattolin, 45, stared blankly at two state investigators asking him in the police interviews repeatedly to fess up to what he allegedly did to his daughter, Melina Frattolin, after he’d been shown photos of her dead body covered in mud along Paragon Brook, eight miles off of Interstate 87 in Ticonderoga.
He is on trial in Essex County for the July 19, 2025, murder.
“We both came back to the car,” he claims to state police investigator Ashlee Marks in the July 20, 2025, recordings, despite being told his daughter had already been found dead hours earlier and placed under a tree about 10 minutes into the Adirondack wilderness down a hiking trail.
Police were led to her body by cell phone data from Frattolin’s phone, which also had a trackable Apple air tag attached to it.
But despite being told this and even showed a gruesome picture of Melina’s lifeless body, Frattolin continued repeating a bogus story about how they went to a trail near a lake, but couldn’t swim because houses lined the shoreline.
“There were 100 homes,” he says in the recording to Marks, who had just returned from the remote area where the little girl’s body was found.
“We know there were no houses on that trailer,” the investigator tells a defiant Frattolin, who is wearing a white Tyvek suit with his legs crossed while he is chained to a bench at a state police station.
“It’s changing, you’re adding information, you’re changing information,” Marks charges in the recording.
Earlier in the day, Frattolin told investigators he pulled off the section of I-87 known as the “Northway” to go to a “big lake” he and Melina spotted while driving because she wanted to go swimming.
But Paradox Lake, the nearest to where Frattolin’s cell data pinpointed him on July 19, 2025, isn’t visible from the thruway.
The accused killer also was caught in another lie, originally telling state police he hadn’t changed his clothes on the day his daughter was allegedly abducted.
But he later altered his story to say he changed his shirt.
Frattolin then changed his story again after he was told he was captured on camera outside of a McDonald’s with Melina wearing an entirely different set of clothing earlier that day.
He was supposed to return Melina to her mother in Montreal the same day he allegedly murdered her.
The trial is expected to resume Thursday.
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