January fourteenth, two thousand and nine, was an unremarkable day at a daycare center in Lincolnshire, Illinois, until the afternoon when a daycare provider named Melissa Kallyauzinski called out to her coworkers for help. A sixteen month old boy in her care had become unresponsive. Nine on one was called
CPR was performed, but the infant never regained consciousness. After two autopsies, a forensic pathologist reported a rear skull fracture and massive bleeding that he believed were caused by blunt Ford's head drama, and after a fourteen hour interrogation, Melissa told investigators what they wanted to hear, which sent her away for thirty one years. But this is wrongful conviction. Wrongful conviction has always given voice to innocent people in prison,
and now we're expanding that voice to you. Call us at eight three three two o seven four six sixty six 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 eight three three two oh seven four six sixty six. 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 Lissa Kyle Yazinski. Melyssa, 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 appellent 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 thirty one year sentence of a young woman who was working in I think what we could all agree is a noble profession right doing daycare, and she was almost certainly Is it fair to say, Kathleen, she was convicted of a crime that never happened.
Yes, this is not a murder. This is just a complet 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 in this case, that's Melissa, who never even got close to being in trouble before this incident, but rather led a quiet life growing up in a loving family and a working class suburb of Chicago.
I grew up in Carpentersville. I mean, it's just your typical suburban neighborhood. My parents' names are Paul and Shurrel. 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. Me and her kind of did the same thing growing up. She babysat, I babysat We Love Children.
Melissa got the chance to work at this daycare center. It was called the Minnie Sabidi in Lincolnshire, which was a relatively Affluich Chicago suburb. Right.
I ended up going to the Arlington Heights one for majority of the time that I worked for many sube. When I transferred to the one in Lincolnshire, 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 late I had baby pew coming. Yeah, it smelled, but I mean I still loved what I did.
How this begins is that there was a young child there named Benjamin Kingen. What do we know about the pre existing conditions that now have come to life?
In October of two thousand and eight, Melissa hadn't even started working there and there was an incident at the daycare 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 maybe he was a headbanger because he had some stomach problems, so he'd throw 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 subdual heimatoma, 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 monitor the height weight in the head circumference of infants and toddlers. Before this incident in October two thousand and eight, both Ben and his twin sister's head circumferences were in the fiftieth percentile. However, leading up to the day of Ben's tragic passing, Ben's had rapidly expanded into the ninety fifth percentile by January fourteenth, two thousand and nine.
Yeah, so January fourteenth of two thousand and nine. 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 snacked and lunch. It was me and Nancy that day that afternoon, like after nap, So just went to see my sister, my nephew.
Significantly, Melissa leaves the room and it's probably gone for twenty minutes. The teacher's aid, Nancy Kallinger, who was in the room before Melissa came back. She said that he'd 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 respond, so I picked 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 pathologists testified well by the time he was unresponsive, this injury had to have occurred thirty 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 nine to one one is called.
Of course, we now know that a child can experience potentially up to seventy two hours of lucidity after a traumatic event before succumbing to the symptoms that can arise from head trauma, for example intracranial 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 Kalinger, it could have been as innocuous as a short fall that could have caused a rebleed of his previous head injury, and a slow, invisible creep towards unconsciousness.
It was just chaos. We took the kids next door back into the infant room so the paramedics can do what they do, and I was just following 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 doctor 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, the cause of death doesn'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 doctor Choi was instructed to do a second autopsy, detectives return to the Mini Subie 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 Lincolnshire PD, where she endured fourteen 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.
They got sexually assaulted back in two thousand and six, and.
She had a cute post traumatic stress. Her head was covered with a blanket, so she was like super clausterphobic and had PTSD. That condition was so bad that it showed up years later when I just had doctor 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 suggests 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 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.
Nine at least that we've counted, right, seventy nine 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 and pressing. They'll put you in a little room and mal press and pressed 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 no right answer. They want their answer.
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During Melissa's interrogation, Joy is performing the second autopsy and so the officers keep leaving the end 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, doctor Troy 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 for's ed trauma.
There's not a fracture that showed up on the clear X rays, and there was bleeding. Doctor Troy, 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 it was a skull fracture and that there had to be this tremendous blow to Ben's head. Well, subsequent pathologist
have said no, no, that's an accessory suture. That's not a skull fracture. There wasn't any tremendous blow to his head accessories.
Skull sutures are developmental anomalies which typically occur while the soft spots of a young child's skull solidified during the first twenty four months. So while X rays are typically a better assessment of fractures or sutures than the naked eye, doctor Choi chose or was pressured to trust his naked eye instead to assess the source of the intracranial bleeding.
There was fresh blood that had come from the old injury. It's very similar to the football player that has the concussion, then goes back in and is playing 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 barachnoid subgalile bleeding, but it still wasn't massive bleeding, and there was also old blood. So that's why doctor 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 tewing 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, doctor Joy admitted that he missed the previous injury during the autopsy, which should observed 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, denine. Then you tell her none of that's true. You've just talked to the pathologists. He had this horror 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 exhausters. Why don't you just tell us so we can all go home. I'm just wanted to get home, tell my parents what happened. 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 what I said. Everything they said I said.
I would say eighty five percent of the interrogation is them talking. They believe that she just snapped and threw him down. They tell her exactly what to say. Did 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 got it,
they ran with it and they're couching it in. If you haven't done anything really wrong, you'll get to go home. I mean, 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 I 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 atops who lined up with reality. Yet Melissa has not seen the outside since January fifteenth of two thousand and nine.
After everything had happened. I do remember being in the back of a police card and saying I'm innocent. I did not do this, and I kept calling them and I kept telling them there is a big mistake, and they were not listening to me. At hall, I felt like this tiny little mouth 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. There is a big mistake.
She immediately we can't at 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 awaiting 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 de Luca, 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 de Luca tried to get the confession tossed out, and he brought in Richard Leo, and they did my Q testing, verbal testing, and they did all the right things, and the judge would not let any of that evidence in. Remember this was in twenty eleven. 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, was the sexual assault and unresolved PTSD. Well, Paul de Luca knew that, but you know, he was focused on Richard Leo and trying to get all of that in. But 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 confessions as well as how 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 twenty eleven trial, Melissa's defense was provided with a digital image of Ben's 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. Doctor Shaku Tease testified about both the unreadable images as well as doctor Troy's shoddy work.
Doctor Troy didn't take samples of the skull fracture, They didn't do the slides that he should have done, So doctor Tease, 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. Ben was only sixteen months old, so his skull was still in that formative you know, where you have the little soft spot and the skull is more vulnerable, and so anyway, te said this could be an accessory suture that's part of the final skull formation, and that Troy had just
mistaken it for a fracture. Then Paul de Luca brought in doctor Leedsma, who's a renowned pediatric physician in Chicago, and he tried to convince the jury this was a rebleed of the prior injury.
The defense also called the other teacher's aide, Nancy Kalinger.
She claimed that she'd taken him to the changing table and he didn't need his diaper change, and that she set him down on the floor and she claimed that he Melissa's not in the room, that he threw himself back really forcefully.
Which directly supports the rebleed theory. Then the state presented an alleged forensic pathologist named Manny Montez, who said that he had felt the fracture with his own hands, which, according to the recently resurfaced raw digital images of Ben's skull, appears to have been a total fabrication.
Totalized Yes, So what happened was the state sprung doctor 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 thirty 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 practice, skull fractors. Keep hitting that point right, and you could probably they could probably see the reaction in real time that the jurors just probably wanted to throw up thinking about this terribly violent act. So at the end of the day,
you've got lay 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 vile temper.
It was just heartbreaking with me, and then how these people lied to them to make it look like something when it isn't. You're qu in innocent personal ways. Thirty one years my heart literally went up to my mouth when I went to Duwai. It was scary a little bit, and it was weird. I was with hermids 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 to 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 albums. So by me staying quiet and kind of saying to myself, which I did in the county, I did here as well. So I was cautious that 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 thirty one years. It's just a number. Don't stress out about this. And then when they told me that Kathleen, when I got Kathleen zelln there, I just kind of knew like I just had to kind of suck it up my emotions and set aside 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, and 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 in federal court. The Seventh Circuit in the northern district, so the state courts are lagging behind.
So the court just pretty much does a knee jerk sort of opinion. Know the proofs there beyond a reasonable doubt, and I think we'd already started really reinvestigating, finding out the history of the injury, talking to doctor 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 access researcher. We got doctor Choi to recant
his testimony. Doctor Chroi 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 Gavin 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, Doctor Rudd then stepped in discovered the tiff image. So when Paul de Luca was representing Melissa, he was given these unreadable JPEG images of the skull. It 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 doctor Montez.
That was very thought out. So doctor 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 doctor Joy'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 rebleed of a previous injury.
They knew they'd pressured the pathologists. I mean, it was so extreme. When doctor Rudd came along years later, doctor Troy 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 unfucking realize 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 there, and she was too ill to come in
and testify. So we brought in doctor Zimmermann, and he was head of the 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 tiff 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 better understanding of the medicine and the radiology than doctor Zimmermann, 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 state's 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, Saulcassen is one of the foremost experts in the world on false confessions.
Sawcassen 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 in 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, Affid David, and I have an additional pathologist who's looked at said this was not a murder. 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. 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 Kathleen t Zelner dot com. They'll be untached 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'll put links in the episode description, and then with that we're going to turn to closing 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 twenty three wrongful convictions resolved. 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 till someone opens them.
If people are out there then know of my case. There's still time to do support letters on my vhas 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 uplisting for me. I just
hope and pray that everything goes well. And I thank everybody sold so much from the Boutmary Heart of hearing this and hearing my story and seeing that I am innocent and they wrongfully convict me, and I just I'm just grateful for people that reach out. Thank you very much.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful 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 Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Clyburn. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated
composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flahm. Wrongful Conviction is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with signal Company number one