ALYSSA PLADL: The Mother Who Lost Her Daughter Twice: Adoption, Betrayal, Incest, and Murder in an American Family

She gave her daughter away to save her life. Eighteen years later, she lost her anyway.In 1998, seventeen-year-old Alyssa Pladl placed her eight-month-old daughter for adoption. The man who had fathered the baby was violent and dangerous. Giving her up was the hardest thing Alyssa had ever done. It was also, she believed, the only thing that would keep her daughter alive.For eighteen years, she was right.Katie Rose Fusco grew up safe and loved in Dover, New York, raised by adoptive parents who gave her everything a child deserves. She became an artist, a dreamer, a young woman with plans for her future. In 2016, she did what thousands of adopted young people do every year.She went looking for where she came from.What she found would destroy everything.The reunion that became a nightmare.When Katie made contact with her biological parents in August 2016, it seemed like the missing piece of her life had finally fallen into place. Her biological father, Steven Pladl, welcomed her with an attentiveness that felt, at first, like the love of a father who had spent eighteen years missing his daughter.It was not love.Within months, Steven had begun a systematic campaign of grooming targeting his own biological daughter. By the time Alyssa discovered the truth inside her younger daughter's diary, it was already too late. Katie was pregnant. Steven was the father.Alyssa went to the police immediately. The system told her it would handle it.It did not handle it fast enough.The failures that cost three lives.In January 2018, Steven and Katie Pladl were arrested and charged with incest and adultery. Then the court released them both on bond.On April 11, 2018, Steven killed his seven-month-old son. On April 12, he killed Katie and her adoptive father, Anthony Fusco, shooting them through a car window on a quiet Connecticut road. Then he drove to New York, called his mother, and shot himself.Three people were dead in forty-eight hours. A baby. A young woman of twenty. A good man of fifty-six who had loved his daughter without condition and died beside her.The mother who survived. The story that needed to be told.ALYSSA PLADL: The Mother Who Lost Her Daughter Twice is the definitive account of one of the most shocking true crime cases in recent American history. Drawing on court records, law enforcement statements, and Alyssa's own published testimony, author Reid Calloway reconstructs the full story, from the online chat room in 1995 where a twenty-year-old man found a fifteen-year-old girl, through the adoption, the reunion, the grooming, the arrests, and the forty-eight hours in April 2018 that ended three lives.This is not just a true crime story. It is the story of what happens when the systems designed to protect the most vulnerable move too slowly, and of a woman who tried to make them move faster.Read it. Remember her. Demand better. Read more