“Kelly Morrisy was a young girl who didn’t like to stay home. She liked to hang out with her friends.”
“June 12th, 1984. Kelly walks to a pay phone near a Shell gas station over on Merrick Road in Lynbrook, and meets up with another one of her friends, and they make some phone calls. After that pay phone, we don’t know where Kelly went.”
“Knowing Kelly, there is no way I believe she ran away.”
“No.”
“And then on November 10th, 1984, just five months later, Teresa Fusco disappears.”
“Yes.”
“And what is the initial thought?”
“The initial thought is there might be a connection.”
“Teresa worked at Roller Inc. on Merrick Road in Lynbrook—Hot Skates—and for her to go to Hot Skates, she would have to walk in this direction down the street.”
“Did you ever worry about her walking?”
“No. I never really worried about her walking anywhere in the neighborhood.”
“That evening, she apparently got fired. She’s upset and then she leaves. Wasn’t she supposed to go to Lisa Kaplan’s house?”
“Yeah, her best friend.”
“Yeah. She was going to come to my house after she got off of work and sleepover.”
“So it becomes like 9:00. She’s not there.”
“Yep.”
“9:30. Not there.”
“10:00. I just thought maybe she went home.”
“Well, the next morning, her mother called, and her mom asked my mom, ‘Can you please have Lisa send Teresa home?’ And my mom said, ‘Well, Teresa’s not here.’”
“Her mom called the police department. We went to all the places we would hang out and she wasn’t anywhere that we searched.”
“It’s just very coincidental. Same neighborhood, same time frame, two girls who knew each other. I’m like, ‘Something’s not right. Something’s just not right.’”
“And then 25 days later, there’s two boys coming back to hang out here in the woods. They see a body and they run to the deli and ask to call 911. Police show up and they find Teresa Fusco.”
“Teresa had been strangled, beaten and raped.”
“It truly was shattering at 16 to never have lost anybody that you loved in such a horrific way. You just can’t get over that. But until there’s a connection in the two cases, one’s still a missing girl and now one’s a homicide.”
“John Kog was brought in by the detectives as a suspect in the murder of Teresa Fusco. And during that time, he confessed to the murder of Teresa.”
“We decided that I had to kill him.”
“And then during that confession, he implicated two of his buddies.”
“And when I saw the three men who were arrested in handcuffs, I thought to myself, ‘Who are these people? They’re older.’”
“Who are they?”
“The theory was always it was three guys.”
“Yeah, and the DNA didn’t match any of them.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“If they didn’t do it, then who did it?”
“Today, we arraigned 63-year-old Richard Bowdo for the murder of Teresa Fusco.”
“And I said, ‘Okay, here we go again.’”
“First, 15-year-old Kelly Morrisy vanished into the night on June 12th, 1984. She left her home after dinner and never came back. 5 months later, it was her friend, Teresa Fusco. On November 10th, 1984, the 16-year-old left her job at Hot Skates, a popular roller rink, never to be heard from again.”
“41 years ago, trying to find them was a different job. Police had to look for real footprints, not digital ones. And it was easy to vanish without a trace.”
“Kelly Morrisy and Teresa Fusco were growing up in the suburbs of Long Island.”
“Vicky Papagno lived around the corner from Kelly in Massapequa.”
“She actually was the first person I ever smoked a cigarette with, was Kelly. I was from a divorced family. She was from a divorced family. We connected that way. She was like my sister I never had.”
“When they were in junior high, Kelly’s family moved about 10 miles away to Lynbrook. By then, Kelly had made some new friends. One of the first people that she met when she moved to Lynbrook was Teresa Fusco.”
“Kelly’s mother, Iris, and her then-fiance, Paul Mstead, watched the friendship develop.”
“She was very good friends with Teresa, and so she made friends very easily. She met her friends at malls and in person. Kids roamed around freely. No one could keep tabs on each other 24/7. It was a different time. And Kelly Morrisy and Teresa Fusco were typical teens for 1984.”
“Well, let’s take them on a little stroll down memory lane. That was the year Ronald Reagan was president. Ghostbusters and Footloose were the breakout hits. Madonna was climbing the charts, and fashion followed. It was the year Steve Jobs introduced something revolutionary.”
“Hello, I am Magentto.”
“We didn’t have cell phones, social media, so we were pen pals. We would get our stationery and we would just write back and forth, and that’s how we communicated.”
“When Vicki was visiting Kelly, she would sometimes hang out with Teresa, who also became her pen pal.”
“Postmark 1982 from Lynbrook, New York, from Teresa Fusco. And it says, ‘Dear Vicki, hi. What’s up? Nothing much here. When are you going to visit Kelly again? When you do, call me. Okay? How’s all the boys there? They cute in Lynbrook?’”
“By far, the best place to meet boys was at Hot Skates, as advertised here in 1984.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Oh, we would go to Hot Skates Roller Rink. We would go there, roller skate around.”
“How important was Hot Skates in your life?”
“Oh, Hot Skates was a big deal to everybody that lived in the area, even outside of the area. We would just go there and hang out with our friends and listen to music.”
“Lisa Kaplan, now Johnson, was Teresa Fusco’s closest friend.”
“We always would try to dress very similar. We would buy the same clothing. We would wear our makeup the same.”
“Did you guys confide in each other about everything?”
“Literally everything. Literally everything.”
“No one gave safety a second thought. You could walk absolutely anywhere and not be afraid of anything in the dark, during the day, alone with friends. And that explains why it was business as usual at the Morrisy house, a couple of miles away.”
“When 15-year-old Kelly walked out the front door alone after dinner, she said she’d be back by 9:30. It was June 12th, 1984. Iris didn’t give it a second thought. She and Paul were raising eight children together.”
“Somebody came in. I heard somebody in the kitchen, yelled down, ‘I’m home.’ And okay. You could hear doors opening, closing, kids coming in and out. And I took it, it was Kelly.”
“It wasn’t until the next morning when she didn’t come down to go to school that I went down there and realized that her bed wasn’t made and the clothes was still there and she hadn’t come in.”
“I mean, were you panicking at that point, Iris?”
“Oh, yeah. And then we called the police, but they told us that she wasn’t missing 24 hours at that point, and they really wouldn’t take a report on those days. They waited.”
“Nassau County Detective Freddy Goldman would review both Teresa and Kelly’s cases some 25 years later. He’s retired now, but he agreed to walk us through the timeline and the evidence from back then.”
“At the time of Kelly’s disappearance, he says police found no reason to think there was a crime. It seemed like she was a runaway. There’s tons of missing person’s cases on a daily basis.”
“Is that how Kelly Morrisy’s case was initially handled?”
“Of course. Yeah. At 15 years old, she wouldn’t know how to do life unless somebody was there to help her. I don’t foresee her ever just running away and not talking to anyone, not reaching out to anyone. So I knew it was…”
“Teresa Fusco, the DNA. That’s it. That’s it.”
“And they don’t find it convincing. It’s being overstated and overvalued. And what’s more, this district attorney’s office, this police department in 1985 stood before a court and said, ‘These three men did this,’ and they had an ample amount of evidence to prove it.”
“Is that a concern that they’re going to point to the fact that three men went on trial, were convicted for this crime?”
“Yes, I would assume that’s what they’re going to say. But the difference now is we have science behind us, which they didn’t have 40 years ago. And to me, you don’t beat the scientific evidence.”
“But at John Kogut’s retrial in 2005, the Nassau County DA’s office had argued the opposite, that the unidentified DNA taken from Teresa was meaningless. The same DA’s office stood up and said, ‘We still believe based on all of this evidence that these men are responsible for Miss Fusco’s death.’ So I don’t know how now in 2025, because you were able to put a name to that DNA, suddenly none of that matters anymore.”
“All of their lies against John Kogut, John Restivo, and Dennis Halstead are going to come back and haunt them during this retrial.”
“Paul Castelli, John Kogut’s former defense attorney, fears that Bill’s lawyers will put the blame on the three men who were cleared of the murder two decades ago.”
“They’re going to have a trial in which I’m sure the defense is going to be arguing they’re guilty.”
“And Castelli says that’s just more salt in the wound for John Kogut, Dennis Halstead, and John Restivo.”
“It’s never ending. What Nassau County did to them just has no ending to it.”
“All three men sued Nassau County. Two of them were awarded damages: $18 million each to Restivo and codefendant Dennis Halstead. Both exonerated a decade ago for the 1984 murder and rape of Lynbrook teenager Teresa Fusco. But in Kogut’s case, a jury found no wrongdoing by Nassau County police and gave him nothing.”
“Let me ask you, though, if in fact Richard Bowdo is convicted, will either one of you apologize to the three guys who were convicted?”
“No, because I don’t owe them an apology. I wasn’t even in the office at the time.”
“Represent the office.”
“Yeah. But for the Nassau County DA’s office, Mr. Dillon did what he thought was right when he dismissed against two of them, and I think you know they got their apology at that point.”
“The idea that the district attorney of Nassau County can apologize to these three guys for what they did to them is outrageous.”
“While the Nassau County authorities say once again they have the killer of Teresa Fusco, Richard Bowdo is not facing charges in either Kelly Morrisy’s or Jackie Martella’s cases. Both remain unsolved, leaving two families in limbo.”
“I mean, you’re anticipating something and then it never shows up.”
“She didn’t have a bad bone in her body. She missed out on just living a simple life, you know.”
“You know, I look at women in their 50s now and think that could be Kelly. I mean, that’s how old she would be.”
“When Richard Bowdo goes on trial for the murder of Teresa Fusco, her father, Thomas, and her once best friend, Lisa, will be back in the courtroom for what they hope will be the last time.”
“Closure to me is that if this is the individual then justice will be done. It’s just completely over. 41 years is over. Beginning and end.”
“Do you hope, do you think that it might finally be resolved this time around or do you still have questions?”
“I trust in the DNA this time. I am so hopeful that there will be a conviction and we can finally put this to rest. 41 years afterwards. It’s a long time. It’s… it’s a lifetime.”
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
