48 Hours - Post Mortem | The Firefighter's Secret

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

CBS Correspondent Nikki Battiste and 48 Hours Producer Ruth Chenetz discuss the case of Melissa Lamesch who was found dead in her burning home the day before Thanksgiving in 2020. Melissa was also nine months pregnant and had been involved with a firefighter. The team discusses the relationship between the two, the defense’s attempt to cast doubt on the investigation, and the touching story of how Melissa's family discovered the name she had chosen for her soon-to-be-born baby boy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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the case of Melissa Lamish. Now, the day before Thanksgiving in 2020, firefighters responded to smoke at an Illinois home. But once they were inside, they found Melissa. She was nine months pregnant, dead on her kitchen floor. She was scheduled to give birth actually two days later, she was was gonna be induced. So of course there's a lot to discuss when it comes to this case. We are joined today by CBS correspondent, Nikki Battiste and 48 hours producer, Ruth Tennitz.

Thanks for being here. It's good to see you. Hello, thanks. Okay, so just a reminder to everyone, I say this every week. If you haven't listened to the 48 hours episode yet, you can find the full audio just below this episode in your podcast feed. So go take a listen and then come back for this conversation.

All right, let's get into it. So Matthew Ploedy, he suspected of killing Melissa and the baby that they were expecting and then setting the fire in her home to conceal the death. But what's surprising about this is that he's an actual firefighter. And so one would think if anyone would be able to set a fire that would be difficult to investigate, it would be him. That was actually one of my very first thoughts when we were researching the story is, wait a second. He seems like the one person who might be able to set a fire

that would destroy evidence, but he's a firefighter. He's not an arson investigator. He doesn't necessarily know how to start the perfect fire. And remember, if he did in fact do this, he would have wanted to destroy all the evidence, but he would have no way of knowing exactly how to commit the perfect crime in that way. And even, as you know know from other stories we do, people have plans and they make mistakes.

Who knows what happened if he panicked, if he didn't complete his plan, but yeah, somebody who usually puts out fires starting a fire. Yeah, putting out a fire is definitely much different. The oven wasn't on, the burners were turned off. But when you see pictures of the crime scene and anyone who watched the show sees, I mean, the kitchen is destroyed when she was found, but a lot of the rest of the house,

including the room that had stuff for the baby, which is gut wrenching to see, was intact. So we know from the hour that the relationship between Melissa and Plotie, it wasn't great, but it had never been a real sort of solid relationship anyways. Do we know anything about Melissa's family and Plotie, whether they had a relationship?

Her older sister had heard about him, but didn't meet him. So it was one of these friends on again, off again, they never really dated. They were never boyfriend and girlfriend. The people that we spoke to had not met him before. And the older sister recalled hearing about him from when they were friends,

like how you talk about your group of friends to your siblings. Melissa and Matthew Ploety had known each other for some time. They met during college. They went to different colleges, but they met at a trivia night at a bar. And as Rusat had this casual relationship. But I remember Cassie, one of her sisters who we talked to in the hour telling a story about Melissa saying that the father of her baby was a bald firefighter.

And Cassie went on Facebook sort of scouring trying to figure it out and did. Ah! And sort of said, is it him? Really? And she's like, you know, I believe confirmed it. The reason she wasn't telling people the name is because according to the family, Melissa was like, he doesn't really want to be part of this. And so why do I need to tell you who he is, if he's not going to be part of the life of the baby?

I mean, how did her family feel about that? Well, I know Gus, Melissa's dad, he didn't want to know the name because... He didn't want to know. He didn't want to know who the father was because the father didn't want to be in the baby's life. And I think as Melissa's father, he's probably mad. Right. I don't even want to know who this guy is. I think my dad would feel that way. Right.

But I think probably her sister clearly wanted to know. Right. I'd probably do the same thing. I'd be all over Facebook. And the family said, don't worry about it. If he doesn't want to help you, that's fine. We will. We'll help you financially. We'll help you with support. She had a lot of brothers and sisters. She was already an aunt. So they were like, don't worry, we'll help you. Yeah. If there's anything that you get from this hour about her is that if there's somebody who can handle being a single mother, she could. Like she'd take on the challenge and

you'd certainly see that she has a village supporting her. What about Plotie's parents? I mean, this would have been their grandchild. Matthew did not want his parents to know he was expecting a baby. And Melissa decided ultimately to take it upon herself to tell Matt's parents. And as we understand it, you know, they probably later spoke to him about it. So we don't know for sure. Investigators say they don't know for sure if that could have set him off. But certainly in our interview with some of Melissa's family, they wondered if it did. I remember Deanna, her mom, saying, you know, if only she hadn't told his parents, would she maybe be here? Would my grandson maybe be here?

According to Melissa's sister, Melissa told her that his parents were like, isn't that exciting? We're here. we'll help you. And the reason she did it, she mentioned to her family, I might tell his parents, they're like, why bother leave well enough alone? But she felt very strongly they had a right to know. This is according to her family that his parents had a right to know that they were going to be grandparents. And she was, you know, wanted other people in the baby's life. And she always thought they seemed like nice people. So she didn't see why she

shouldn't tell them. Which is admirable and says a lot about Melissa. We did try to speak with his parents, but they didn't want to sit down with us with 48 hours. But they were, as we understand it, there at the trial, the defense said they certainly were supporting him. We saw them the day of the sentencing. Really? I know it's hard to tell, but what was their demeanor like? I mean, this has got to be incredibly tough for them. Stoic. I remember they were very serious. But we never had the chance to speak to them to know what they think now, you know, after

the trial. So Melissa's family, they kind of know of Ploetie and they know that he's the father of the child, but they don't know much else. They know he's a firefighter. When Melissa's body is found in that house that has been set on fire, did they immediately think he might be responsible for this? They did. The family did. Not necessarily investigators. And the reason was that Melissa had been on the phone with her older sister, Cassie, earlier that day of the fire. And

they're talking about the baby. They're talking about Thanksgiving. And Melissa says, I got to go. Matt's at the door. Something like that. And she said, I'll call you back. And that was the last anybody heard from Melissa. So right away, they know he's at the house. And I think to the family, because he had been at the house that day, she didn't want anything to do with him.

And he had come by the house two days before two and she's like, why does he keep coming? To them right away, they're thinking he may be involved. Investigators look at it a little differently. Obviously, he's a person of interest because he was there and they called him in for questioning that evening, the evening of the fire. He willingly came and spoke with them. But also you have to remember in the beginning too, you don't know for certain that she was even murdered. Right.

You know, there's a fire, she's in the kitchen, she's dead. Maybe she was cooking something and it went up. And they don't really know what caused the fire, right? No, they never found a device. Investigators had dogs come in and sniff for accelerant. They didn't find any accelerant. They didn't find any electrical issues. So what they determined was that it was started at the cabinets above the stove, they believe,

to make it look like something happened in the kitchen. I think for this story, it mattered less what started the fire. What mattered was, was it accidental or was it intentional? An accidental fire and an intentional fire could both be started in the same way, really. So I think that was really what it was all about. So this is something that you guys may not know, but do you know if they had an adversarial relationship? She was not afraid of him. Like it wasn't like, oh my God, I'm not going to open the door. And Matthew Ploate had zero criminal record. He was known to be sort of quiet at work. It wasn't someone where you have like, oh, you know, that employee who flies off the handle all the time. That was not Matt. And she tried to, you know, keep

the door open in case he wanted to be involved, but she really had no reason to be afraid of him. Right. So, you know, perhaps one of the saddest sort of aspects to this story is that Melissa's mother, Deanna, who is waiting for her grandchild to be born and is expecting a new child into her life in just a few days, she meets her grandson for the first time at the funeral. She holds his hand because her daughter can't. You can't help but to fight back tears. And imagine the pain that she is feeling.

Yeah, which I am. I have a baby, so every time I think about this, I still get emotional. Yeah, Deanna wanted to see her daughter and her grandson Barrett, who remember was a baby about to come out into the world. And Deanna carries around a picture with her. In the picture is Barrett, and she's holding Barrett's hand, Deanna, and she keeps that in

her wallet and carries it around. And to see the picture just sort of makes your heart stop for a minute. You realize what this family has lost. She's lost her own daughter, her grandson, her daughter's lost a child she never got to meet. I mean, it's horrific in every way. And for me, seeing that photo is just something I'll never forget. [♪ music playing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't.

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People like that you know are capable of doing anything. Lords of Death is available now. Listen for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Postmortem. So investigators interviewed Ploety twice, first on the evening of the murder and then nine months later. Clips from both of those interviews were actually shown during the hour, but both went on for much longer obviously than you can ever show in an episode.

The second interview lasted a full seven hours. But what was his demeanor like during those interviews? Well, he willingly agreed to those interviews and there was no lawyer present. He didn't even hire a lawyer until later. Seven hours sounds like a long time. If there was talking going on, they would ask a question and often he either didn't answer or there'd be two minutes before he would answer. So most of the seven hours were the investigators asking questions, trying to get him to talk and him saying very little.

And I think too what's striking or what might strike a jury is not once is he emotional. And I think, you know, juries, humans like to watch behavior and behavior, as his lawyers will pronounce, doesn't mean guilt or innocence, no matter what it is. But it's hard to tell jury that. Absolutely. The defense says for as long as we've known him, that's how he is when we talk to him. But the investigators say, you know, we were accusing him of some pretty horrendous things. And most people would say, enough, leave me alone, how dare you? And he was very calm and not saying much. I think for me, what strikes me the most is neither of his interviews,

did he ever say, I didn't kill Melissa and our baby? And I would think if you are in fact innocent, you would probably say that. Absolutely. But even sort of one of the clips that is in the episode where they say to him, Melissa is dead. And I don't know exactly the phrasing that they use, but he's like, oh. And I thought, isn't like the first impulse to be like, what happened?

And again, the defense looks at it and says, well, look, he didn't get rattled. Interesting. So another kind of interesting component of this hour has to do with the fire chief, right? His boss, fire chief Rob Schultz, he agreed to wear a wire and confront Ploate about the night of the murder. And initially fire chief Rob Schultz says that he said no. And I kind of understood why, because I thought, you

know, you're the leader of these groups of men and women. They have to trust you to go to you. And this is kind of a betrayal of that trust for a really good reason, a murder investigation. But still, I could understand why he would waffle on it a little bit. And you could see the pain in his face when Nikki spoke to him about this, you know, where he's like, I don't readily talk about, I'm not proud that I did this, but there is a grieving family out there looking for answers. And in the end, he didn't have to wear, like they put something on his phone and the desk, but he's a wonderfully thoughtful man who cares about his firehouse.

And you can sense how troubled he is by all of this. And when he first got the call that Matthew Ploety was being investigated for the murder of, he didn't even know about Melissa, had never heard the name Melissa Lange. She didn't know there was a baby. But when he was told all of this and that Matthew was being investigated, he couldn't believe it. He was like, no, no way. Not that not the Matthew that I know. He knows him. He's known him for years. But he said, I think the moment for him where he thought, wait, maybe something, you know, maybe Matthew is involved is that he, Matthew had taken off that day from work. And I think

for him, that was the moment where things started to fall into place. And it wasn't just that it couldn't be Matthew, to Chief Schultz, the concept of a firefighter, someone who saves lives, who helps people doing it, he was like, it couldn't be any of my guys, because that's not what we do. Again, Matthew willingly came in, and I think some of it was, gee, am I ever going to get my job back? That maybe that might have been part of the lore. And Chief

Schulz was like, look, I will help you deal with this. Like if you tell me, I can go with you to the police. You can call me at two in the morning. Rob Schulz thought if he could appeal to him on that way, but he really, he just. He wouldn't give anything. Yeah, didn't say anything. What I really got from the fire chief was that he not only felt a little uncomfortable doing this, but also he was questioning himself a little bit. I know this guy, what did I miss? Which I think we see often in many of these 48 hours cases.

Chief Schultz was his pure good. Yeah, you get that. And I think he wants to think that of everyone in his life and his firefighters and his world has been shaped. I mean, his world will never be the same. Okay, let's talk a bit about the trial now. What was Ploati's main defense at the trial? Well, there were two things

that the defense found inadequate. An inadequate investigation that maybe to question other old boyfriends or other people, and then that the fire itself was not investigated well enough. Right. And the person that the defense mentioned in their closing argument was Gus, Melissa's dad, saying, you never looked at Gus, you never questioned him. He was at the grocery store buying groceries for Thanksgiving when he got the call about the fire. Like, why didn't you verify that he wasn't at the house earlier?

And they were making that point. In fact, I want to play a portion of our interview with defense attorney John Cupp that was not in the show, where he explained just why he made this argument. Our job is to point out things that give a jury doubt. The detectives involved in this case should have taken steps to determine where someone like Gus Lamish

or other people in the neighborhood, they should have determined where those people were or could have been at the time of this alleged crime, but they didn't do any of that. And here's another unaired clip from Gus Lamish reacting to the argument during his victim impact statement. How do I have Melissa and Barrett taken from me? They want to accuse me of killing them. How heartless do you have to be to be able to do this to a grieving parent? This was an insult to

injury. I don't believe that the defense truly thinks Gus had anything to do with it. They were using Gus as a concrete example of here's a timeline and you didn't even check that. But to Gus, obviously, as he said, it's like insult upon injury. It's a bold move, I think, on the defense part. I asked the lawyers, is there a shred of evidence that Gus had anything to do with Melissa's murder, with the fire, anything? And they said, no.

So it was, you know, but as defense lawyers, as they do, we're just trying to create some sort of doubt. And that was one of the ways they did it. Right. And I think they chose Gus because he gets the call at the supermarket and that could have been something very easy. Call the supermarket, see if he was really there. It's his house. And they didn't do it. But the prosecutor said if there were other people worth looking at, investigators would have.

So that's why to them it wasn't television. They looked at who they needed to look at. Hearing Gus refer to that in his victim statement was powerful. I remember, I think we even looked at each other like, ugh. And then also we sat down with Gus after that day, and he had such raw emotion. I feel like dads sometimes try to be really tough, and he just, it was so sad and so heartbreaking. Melissa had moved in, her parents were divorced. She had moved in with Gus into their childhood home because she had to stop working as the

baby was coming. And Gus, in the interview said to Nikki, you know, he was looking forward to like almost raising this child. Sure, move into my house. I'll give you some, some help. Clearly, they were so close. She's living with him. He's supporting her. There's a room in his house ready for a baby with diapers and teddy bears and he's lost it all and his house. Right. You reveal, and we talked about this earlier, in the hour that Melissa's baby was going to be named Barrett. What's the story behind that name?

It's a sweet story. It's a great name. I love the name. According to her family, Melissa never told anyone the name, but they really wanted to try to figure it out. They knew that she liked double letters. They knew it was a boy. And she was calling the baby little bear. So after she passed, they were able to see her Internet searches. And one of them was, what does the name Barrett mean? So they decided to go with that name. And coincidentally, one of the meanings of the name Barrett is Bear Strengths.

Oh, which is sweet. So that's the name that he was given. That's the name that's on his tombstone with his mom. I mean, if there's anything that I get from this is that this really did not have to happen. If the theory is true that he just didn't want to be a dad, he didn't have to be. She was fine without him. And it sounds like she was a powerhouse. She would have been an amazing mother, but you did very well at bringing her to life. So another excellent hour. Thank

you so much, guys. Thank you. Yeah. She sounds like she was an incredible woman. Yeah. And would have been a great mom. Indeed. Indeed. If you like the series, please rate and review 48 Hours on Apple Podcasts and follow 48 Hours wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen ad-free on Amazon Music, OneDri Plus and the OneDri app, or with a 48 Hours Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. Thank you

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