A Montreal businessman accused of murdering his nine-year-old daughter in New York state last summer is asking a judge to throw out key pieces of evidence ahead of his trial.
The request from Luciano Frattolin, 45, comes after a judge has already denied his requests to dismiss evidence obtained by police from his Montreal apartment and to throw out the two charges he’s facing — second-degree murder and concealment of a human corpse.
His daughter, Melina Frattolin, was the subject of an Amber Alert after her father reported her kidnapped to state police on the night of July 19, 2025, on their way back to Montreal from a road trip to New York. The next morning, Melina’s body was found in a shallow pond near Ticonderoga, N.Y., approximately 200 kilometres south of Montreal.
Preliminary findings from an autopsy determined Melina died of asphyxia due to drowning in what police say was a homicide.
Frattolin’s public defender filed a motion to ask a judge to toss out evidence obtained from a search of Frattolin’s cellphone and statements he made to two New York State Police troopers during a two-hour car ride in the middle of the night while searching for his daughter. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday at the Essex County courthouse.
The court documents, obtained by CTV News, offer a window into the accused’s past, the steps police took to determine how he allegedly fabricated the story of his daughter’s abduction, and show how his ex-wife in Montreal, who had sole custody rights, told police she was concerned Frattolin might kidnap their child.
The evidence has not yet been tested in court and Frattolin, who remains detained, has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
‘Someone took my kid’
A New York State Police investigator wrote in an affidavit to obtain a search warrant that there were inconsistencies in his story and that Frattolin “omitted” critical information when he reported the kidnapping the night of July 19.
“Yeah, hi, (inaudible). Someone took my kid. I’m on the highway. I try to follow them, I lost them. I don’t know where I am,” the father said, according to a transcript of the 911 call at 9:58 p.m.
“She had to pee. I stopped. We see the first area closed. The second area was open. And then I turn around, it was so fast, and they took off. It was a white van,” Frattolin said on the call while on the side of Interstate 87.
When he meets up with police, he explains that two men pulled up to their vehicle in the van near a rest stop on I-87, grabbed his daughter, and took off.
However, cellphone records show that approximately two hours before the 911 call, his mobile phone left the Interstate and headed east on Route 74 for about 13 kilometres toward Eagle Lake, N.Y., which is the area where Melina’s body was eventually found.
Licence plate readers on the highway also photographed his rented Toyota Prius at various times on the Interstate.
“Luciano never stated that he drove off the Interstate and remained off the Interstate for a period of an hour and 24 minutes” in his statements to police, the investigator wrote.
Text messages with his ex-wife
Frattolin also received several text messages from his ex-wife who grew increasingly worried about her daughter, who was supposed to be dropped off at her home in Montreal by 6 p.m. that evening.
At 8:52 p.m., Frattolin texted his wife, “I’m on my way.” His estranged wife wrote back, “I’d like to speak to Melina,” to which he replied, “She’s sleeping.”
The investigator believed this part of the exchange was “significant” because he didn’t write back, “We’re on our way” in his texts.
“It implies that Luciano is by himself. 8:52 PM is an hour before he reported Melina as being missing and there would be no logical reason for him to say he was on his way towards [his ex-wife] if Melina had already been kidnapped by that time,” the investigator wrote.
At 9:40 p.m., she texted via iMessage: “What time are you arriving exactly?”
Frattolin wrote back: “10.”
She responded: “Why do you keep getting delayed,” to which he replied, “Traffic.”
According to the indictment, Frattolin is alleged to have killed his daughter between 7:35 p.m. and 9:05 p.m. near Route 74 and concealed her body by placing a rock on top of it in a wooded area in water near a fallen tree.
After the father consented to a search of his rental car, forensic identification officers found “a roll of white tape with long hair stuck to the tape in a backpack.”
“The long hair in the tape is indicative of being used on a person bound with the tape,” the investigator wrote.
Those events gave the investigator reason to believe that “Melina Frattolin was not kidnapped in the manner reported by Luciano” and that “he has criminal involvement in her disappearance,” according to the court document.
The court filings also reveal that police received an anonymous 911 call on July 25 from a man who said, “I killed Melina Frattolin,” but investigators did not believe it to be genuine.
“I think it’s pretty well … established at this point who did … kill her but, you know, we’re probably gonna have to at least track down who this person is and have him interviewed,” a sergeant said, according to a transcript in the court filing. The police’s efforts to track down the caller were unsuccessful.
Ex-wife expressed fear of kidnapping in statement to Montreal police
On July 20, while police were searching far and wide for the nine-year-old girl, Frattolin’s ex-wife provided a three-page, handwritten witness statement to Montreal police as part of the investigation. She described how she and Frattolin had separated in 2019 and over the years they had disagreements about his desire to travel abroad with their daughter.
After negotiating through their lawyers, he had taken Melina on trips to Italy in 2023, to Ethiopia in 2024, and to New York for New Year’s Eve in 2024.
Last summer, he had wanted to take her on another trip to Ethiopia, but the ex-wife refused. Instead, their lawyers settled on the road trip to New York from July 11 to 19.
“The risk of kidnapping became a concern around his desire to take Melina to Ethiopia, where he has been a resident since I’ve known him in 2009,” she wrote in the witness statement.
“He also never wanted to live here, had ties to Ethiopia, both family, friends and economic ones. He has had a lot of resentment about our separation and refuses to talk to me or come near me, and has said disparaging things to Melina about me,” the statement reads.
She also claimed that Frattolin did not respect the parental exchange agreements and would often be late.
In one case — the month before Melina was killed — Frattolin was supposed to drop her off to her mother at 5:30 p.m., but instead he took her out to dinner and brought her back at 9 p.m.
“It was very surprising and unacceptable,” she told police.
Father says ‘I was tricked’ into letting police search his iPhone
The court records obtained by CTV News show that Frattolin signed on July 19 a consent form authorizing police to search his rental car, his Apple iPhone, and AirTag.
But in a sworn affidavit filed last November, Frattolin claimed he was never informed he had the right to refuse to sign the forms or ask questions, and thought the forms were necessary to find his daughter.
“At the time I signed these forms, I was having difficulty thinking clearly. I was worried about my daughter. I often have difficulty thinking clearly in stressful situations ever since 2019, when I was struck in the head with a rock in Ethiopia and was in a coma for five nights,” he wrote in the court document.
“I now believe I was tricked into signing these forms by the police, who were pretending to search for my daughter’s kidnappers, while all the while they really were investigating me as the prime suspect in her disappearance.”
That evidence, as well as the statements he gave to police, will be the subject of the court hearing this week.
Frattolin’s trial is scheduled to begin in April.
