Normal life

In 1995, Steven Pladl was 20 when he met a 15-yearold girl named Alyssa on the internet. She soon became pregnant and gave birth to a girl they named Denise.

Alyssa Pladl told The Associated Press last week that they put the girl up for adoption when she was 8 months old. They were young and poor, she said, but she also believed Steven Pladl physically abused the baby.

“It was so hard to give her up,” Alyssa said, “but I had to because I wanted her to live and be happy.”

For most of what was to be her short life, she was.

Tony Fusco and his wife, Kelly, adopted the girl they renamed Katie and raised her with their biological daughter in Dover, about 80 miles north of New York City.

“They had a very, very normal life,” said Cary Gould, Kelly Fusco’s brother. “My nickname for Katie was Pac-Man. She was always eating. She loved animals. She was a vegetarian.” Katie was an aspiring artist known at Dover High School for drawing comic strips. She planned to attend college and pursue a career in digital advertising.

“A pen and something to draw on became a safe place for me,” she wrote in a blog post. “Ink became my weapon against rules and regulations. To be short; for me, a life without art is no life at all.”

After turning 18 in January 2016, Katie found her birth parents and messaged them.

The Pladls were happy to reunite with her.

Instead of going to college in August 2016, Katie moved in with the Pladls in Henrico County, Va.. Tony and Kelly Fusco were apprehensive, Gould said, but they supported Katie.

All was not well in the Pladl home.

Steven and Alyssa had already decided to separate and were sleeping in separate rooms. Alyssa Pladl said she had suffered emotional and verbal abuse by her husband for years.

“I was always on eggshells, whatever his mood was, everybody knew, and that mood was often not happy, a lot of yelling, a lot of things smashed in the house, in front of our kids,” she said.

Alyssa Pladl told Katie that Steven Pladl had abused her as a baby and that a major reason for the adoption was her own safety.

Katie, according to Alyssa, didn’t appear to be concerned. Steven Pladl impregnated and married his daughter, Katie. He later killed her, the baby, her adopted dad and himself. the house with Katie.

Alyssa Pladl finally moved out in November 2016.

In May 2017, she learned from her 11-year-old daughter’s journal of the incestuous relationship and Katie’s pregnancy. Her daughter wrote that she and her sister were told by Steven Pladl to refer to Katie as their stepmother.

“I started to become hysterical, and I called him,” she said. “I said, ‘Is Katie pregnant with your baby?’ He just said, ‘I thought you knew. We’re in love.’

“I started screaming. I was just cursing him out: ‘How could you? You’re sick. She’s a child.’ ”

Then she called the police. a cul-de-sac in Knightdale, N.C., just east of Raleigh, but wedded bliss did not last long.

They were arrested on incest charges in January. A judge ordered them to not contact each other, and Steven Pladl’s mother had custody.

Steven Pladl’s lawyer, Rick Friedman II, said there was never an allegation that Steven Pladl pressured Katie into a relationship.

“This case is an 18-yearold girl who shows up at the doorstep of a 40-year-old man who’s going through difficult times with his wife,” Friedman said. “They have a bond because they’re biologically related, but they never knew each other before they had a sexual relationship. He was head over heels in love with her, so much so that that outweighed the issue of them being biologically related.”

After the arrests, Katie moved back with Tony and Kelly Fusco. Every Tuesday and Thursday, she would travel to her adoptive grandmother’s home in Waterbury, Conn., Gould said.

On April 12, Katie and Tony Fusco left the Dover home for Waterbury. In a minivan nearby, Steven Pladl watched them leave, surveillance video shows.

Minutes later in nearby New Milford, witnesses reported someone opening fire. Katie and Tony Fusco, 56, were fatally shot. Steven Pladl was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot back in Dover.

Shortly after the New Milford shooting, Steven Pladl’s mother called 911 to report her son had told her he killed the baby, Katie and her adoptive father.

Her son, she said, was upset because Katie, by then just 20, had broken up with him.

Police found the baby dead and alone in Katie and Steven’s home.

Alyssa Pladl struggles to make sense of it all.

“I’m grieving. I’m sad. I’m upset,” she said. “But I also want to have something good come out of this. If it’s to get truth out there, to open people’s eyes to incest.”

ALYSSA PLADL 2016