Court documents show how police zeroed in on father in Melina Frattolin case
“I repeat things a lot,” the trooper said. “A reason I repeat things a lot is because I want to know every goddamn detail when it ultimately comes down to it.”
Luciano Frattolin was in a State Police car with two investigators as they drove the Northway in the middle of the night, looking for the site of his 9-year-old daughter’s alleged kidnapping.
They did not find it.
Earlier that evening, just before 10 p.m. on July 19, he had called 911 to report that his daughter, Melina Galanis Frattolin, 9, had been grabbed by two men and forced into a white van at a rest stop on Interstate 87.
They had stopped to use the bathroom, Frattolin told them. He had looked away to give his daughter privacy. When he looked up, he saw her being taken.
The investigator wanted to know more. “Was she kicking?” Frattolin is asked at one point.
Frattolin’s responses to that question and many others during initial interviews and conversations with police are redacted. Transcripts of that interview, Frattolin’s 911 call and a host of other materials were filed by his public defender in Essex County Court in mid-November. He has been charged with murdering his daughter and concealing her corpse in a body of water off Route 74 near Ticonderoga.
Judge Tatiana Coffinger has set a trial date of April 20. Frattolin has pleaded not guilty.
Court documents show Frattolin and his wife, Kali Galanis, had been separated since 2019. They lived separately in Montreal, and Galanis had full custody of their daughter. He had sought and gained Galanis’ permission to take their daughter on a trip to New York City on July 11, and they were expected to return to Montreal the night of July 19.
The documents provide a clearer picture of the events before and after an Amber Alert for Melina awoke much of the region just before 1:30 a.m. on July 20. Frattolin’s statements to police touched off a frantic search across northern New York for the purported kidnappers. Police told Frattolin that the alert would be sent “everywhere,” because of “the magnitude of a missing 9-year-old.”
By the end of the day on July 20, police would announce they believed Frattolin had lied to them and that there had been no kidnapping.
A sworn statement by a State Police investigator, made as part of an application for a warrant to search items belonging to Melina found in Frattolin’s rented Toyota Prius, laid out the timeline of events during which police and prosecutors believe Frattolin killed his daughter.
The court record also includes a handwritten statement Galanis made to Montreal police, where she describes her communications with her husband and daughter.
Melina spoke with her mother on a WhatsApp voice call at 6:26 p.m. and told her they would be arriving in Montreal at 8:30 p.m.
The records show where the vehicle traveled and Galanis’ increasingly concerned calls to her estranged husband. The car was captured by a license plate reader heading north on I-87 near Pottersville at 6:32 p.m. Twenty minutes later, a plate reader catches the car heading south on the highway, again near Pottersville.
The Pottersville plate camera then catches the car heading north at 7:31 p.m. By 7:43 p.m., the car is tracked on Route 74 heading east toward Eagle Lake, the area where Melina’s body would later be found.
By 8:42 p.m., Galanis is growing concerned, according to a handwritten witness statement she provided to Montreal police. She texted her husband to ask when they would be returning and placed three calls to him, all of which went unanswered.
At 8:52 p.m., Frattolin texts his wife, “I’m on my way,” followed by “8:15” and “9:15,” the documents show.
“I’d like to speak with Melina,” Galanis writes back.
“She’s sleeping,” Frattolin replies.
By 8:55 p.m., Frattolin’s Prius is tracked heading west from Eagle Lake back toward the Thruway. By 9:12 p.m., Frattolin is on the highway in Schroon Lake and heading south.
For the next 40 minutes, Galanis continues to seek answers from her husband. Frattolin continues to push their arrival time back, saying traffic is to blame. At one point, Frattolin tells his wife they are less than 20 minutes away from her home in Montreal.
Frattolin stops responding after that. Calls to him go directly to voicemail.
At 9:58 p.m., Frattolin reports that his daughter has been kidnapped.
The sworn statement from the State Police investigator notes that a search of his car turned up a roll of tape with long hair stuck to it. The investigator said that it was “indicative of being used on a person bound with the tape.”
“Based on this timeline of events, there was critical information that Luciano Frattolin omitted when reporting this matter to the police,” the investigator wrote. “(He) never stated that he drove off the Interstate and remained off the Interstate for a period of an hour and 24 minutes.”
Other issues surrounding the trip from Montreal to New York make it into the record. “We have had many disagreements related to his desire to travel with Melina abroad,” Galanis wrote in her statement to the Montreal police. She wrote Frattolin took Melina to Italy in 2023 and Ethiopia in 2024, after lawyers for the couple negotiated the terms. Galanis refused to let Melina travel with her father to Ethiopia in the summer of 2025, instead settling on a weeklong trip to New York.
Court filings describe Frattolin as an Italian passport holder who was born in Ethiopia. He has been variously described as an entrepreneur or businessman before and after his arrest, and his social media presence, in which Melina featured prominently, had outward displays of wealth and success. The father and daughter could be seen on lavish safari trips in Africa, and Frattolin expressed a fondness for Porsche sports cars.
Frattolin is being represented by the Essex County Public Defender’s Office, which represents indigent clients. Representatives for that office did respond to requests for comment.
Court documents show that while in New York City, Frattolin claimed to have lost his wallet while visiting a woman whom Galanis described as “a friend (or girlfriend)."
A summary of the State Police interview with the woman revealed that she gave Frattolin her credit card before she left for a preplanned trip to Italy. That card, as well as two cards in Frattolin’s name, were found when police searched him at the sheriff’s station in Queensbury.
Frattolin’s lawyers argued that physical evidence obtained through search warrants should not be allowed at his trial because the warrants were overly broad. Coffinger ruled against them in a decision issued in December. Pretrial hearings on whether the contents of Frattolin’s cellphone and statements he made to police, including utterances he made while traveling on the Northway with the troopers the night Melina disappeared, will be the subject of a hearing on Feb. 25.
His lawyers also drew attention to a July 25 phone call in which someone called a State Police barracks and confessed to killing Melina. Troopers do not appear to think it is genuine.
“I mean, I think it’s pretty well established at this point who did kill her,” a sergeant says on a transcript in the court record. “But, you know, we’re probably going to have to at least track down who this person is and have him interviewed.”
Though the person was never found, Coffinger agreed that the prosecution had made a good faith effort to find the caller and ruled against a sanction for which the defense had requested.
Before he was arrested, Frattolin allegedly signed forms allowing police to search his phone and the rental car. Whether that amounted to consent is something his attorneys dispute.
“I now believe I was tricked into signing these forms by the police,” Frattolin says in an affidavit. “Who were pretending to search for my daughter’s kidnappers while they really were investigating me as the prime suspect in her disappearance.”
