Father of Murder Suspect Appears in Court

ELIZABETHTOWN, N.Y. – Luciano Fratlin, whose daughter is a murder suspect, remained expressionless during court proceedings on Wednesday. Recently released video evidence suggests that the daughter was abducted, despite law enforcement’s intense interrogation aiming to extract a confession regarding the brutal death of his 9-year-old son.

Mr. Fratlin, 45, fixated on two state investigators who repeatedly pressed his daughter, Melina Flatlin, to confess during a police interview. In the interrogation, photos of her daughter’s mud-covered body, discovered along Paragon Brook, were presented to him—these images were taken about eight miles from Interstate 87 in Ticonderoga.

He faces charges in Essex County for the alleged murder occurring on July 19, 2025.

In a recording from July 20, 2025, Melina recounts to state police investigator Ashley Marks that “we both went back to the car,” while also revealing that she had been informed her daughter was already dead, found hours earlier beneath a tree on a hiking trail in the Adirondack Wilderness.

Law enforcement was led to the body through tracking data obtained from Melina’s cellphone, which had an Apple AirTag attached.

Even after being confronted with this information and shown a harrowing image of Melina’s lifeless body, Mr. Fratlin continued to recite an implausible story about visiting a trail near the lake but claimed he couldn’t swim due to the proximity of houses along the shoreline.

“There were 100 houses,” he asserted to Marks, who had just come back from the area where the girl’s body was found.

Marks challenged Fratlin, stating, “We know there was no home in that trailer,” as he sat allegedly unchanged from the day of the incident, dressed in a white Tyvek suit and shackled to a police station bench.

“It’s changing, information is being added, information is changing,” Marks pressed in the recording.

Earlier, Fratlin mentioned he wanted to swim and exited Interstate 87, or the Northway, to visit a “big lake” he noticed while driving with Melina.

However, Paradox Lake, identified via his cellphone data on July 19, 2025, is not visible from the highway.

Fratlin contradicted himself further by initially denying any change of clothing on the day his daughter was reportedly taken.

However, he later admitted to changing his shirt after being told that surveillance footage captured him at a McDonald’s earlier that day with Melina, wearing completely different attire.

He was meant to return Melina to her mother in Montreal that same day he allegedly killed her.

The trial is set to resume on Thursday.