Canadian Father Convicted of Murdering His 9-Year-Old Daughter and Staging Her Abduction

Luciano Frattolin, a Canadian citizen, was found guilty on Monday of murdering his 9-year-old daughter, Melina. According to the prosecution, he drowned the child in a marshy area of a mountainous region in northeastern New York.

During the trial, it emerged that the motive for the crime was linked to Frattolin’s desire to take revenge on his former wife, Callie Galanis, who had sole custody of Melina.

Frattolin, who works in the coffee industry, killed his daughter in July 2025 during a trip they were taking together. After the crime, he hid her body beneath a rock.

He then made it appear that the 9-year-old had been abducted. The father alerted the authorities, prompting an alert and a large-scale search operation to find her.

The jury reached its guilty verdict after just one hour of deliberations. Frattolin now faces life in prison for second-degree murder and concealment of a body.

“Melina’s short life came to a violent end,” Essex County District Attorney Michael Lange said on Monday during the sentencing hearing. Frattolin avoided eye contact while the prosecutor spoke.

The prosecutor also described the condition in which the girl’s body was found: “Everything was covered in mud. Her long black hair was covered in dirt and grass.”

Callie Galanis was granted sole custody of Melina in 2019 after ending her long-distance relationship with Frattolin. However, in the years that followed, she had allowed her daughter to travel with her father.

In testimony given several days earlier, Galanis said Melina did not want to travel abroad with her father, particularly to Ethiopia. “She didn’t want to go,” the 9-year-old’s mother said.

Galanis said she had also begun to feel increasingly uneasy about the trip, as she had doubts about whether she should allow it to take place abroad. She said her lawyer had warned her about cases in which separated parents took their children abroad and then refused to return them.

According to her testimony, Frattolin later proposed extending the stay in Ethiopia. Galanis’s conversations with her daughter about the trip ultimately convinced her to cancel it.

“I felt uncomfortable. I no longer agreed with it,” Galanis said, explaining the reasons for her decision.

After the trip to Ethiopia was canceled, Frattolin suggested that Melina travel with him to Connecticut and New York.

But the trip ended in tragedy. On the day they were due to return to Quebec, where her mother lived, Frattolin killed his daughter and then staged her abduction, alerting the authorities and triggering a major search operation.

Following the jury’s verdict, Luciano Frattolin faces life in prison for murdering his 9-year-old daughter and concealing her body.