The underlying irony of Katie Pladl’s violent death was the immense effort to keep her safe and alive.
Desperate to remove Katie from her abusive father, Steven Pladl, her mother, Alyssa Garcia, put the baby girl up for adoption in 1998.
Eighteen years later, driven by a desire to meet her biological parents, Katie Pladl reached out to Garcia and Steven Pladl.
A reunion followed and brief happiness, which spiraled downward when Steven Pladl had an affair with Katie. The father and daughter married and had a son, which led to incest charges in January 2018.
Shortly after, Pladl went on a multistate rampage. He killed his infant son in Knightdale, North Carolina, then fatally shot Katie and her adoptive father in Connecticut.
“I’ve interacted with a number of dangerous felons, murderers and rapists, people who have committed all kinds of atrocious crimes. But I never have seen a case like this,” Knightdale Police Chief Lawrence Capps tells A&E True Crime.
Pladl’s actions indicate an “extraordinarily disturbed person,” Capps says. “Perhaps a person that is battling some true demons internally.”
‘A Special Kind of Scary’
Garcia was 15 when she connected with Pladl, 20, on the internet in 1995. The adolescent girl was seduced by Pladl and they became a couple, resulting in Katie’s birth when Garcia was 17. [When the two were married, Alyssa Garcia went by Alyssa Pladl.]
The relationship quickly devolved into a nightmare, Garcia told DailyMail TV in an interview.
Because Pladl was unable to hold down a job, his moods would swing from morose to enraged. He beat their cats, verbally abused her and tormented the baby, she recalled.
“The adoption actually happened because I was worried about Katie’s safety,” Garcia said. “She would cry, and it would just instantly trigger him.”
She described Pladl pinching the infant, and sometimes placing her in a cooler, then shutting the lid, putting Katie at risk of suffocation.
“He was a special kind of scary,” Garcia recounted, noting Pladl owned a number of guns. Katie was adopted at eight months old.
“It was so hard to give her up, but I had to because I wanted her to live and be happy,” Garcia told the Associated Press.
Incestuous Spiral
That wish was granted initially. Katie Pladl had a happy childhood with her adopted parents, Anthony “Tony” and Kelly Fusco, in small-town New York, relatives said.
She loved drawing, specializing in comic strips and wanted to attend college. “They had a very, very normal life,” Kelly Fusco’s brother Cary Gould told the AP.
As she grew older, however, Pladl yearned to know her biological parents. In January 2016, at age 18, she found them online and reconnected.
That summer, Katie Pladl dropped college plans and moved to her re-found family’s house in Henrico County, Virginia.
She walked into a broken home. Garcia and Steven Pladl, who had married and had two more children, were in the midst of a messy separation.
Pladl spruced up his appearance after Katie’s arrival, wearing tight-fitting clothing and shaving off his beard, Garcia told AP. He began to sleep in Katie’s room, sparking a volcanic parental dispute.
Garcia moved out that fall but learned in May 2017 that Katie was pregnant.
She called Pladl and screamed, “‘How could you? You’re sick. She’s a child,'” Garcia told AP. She also informed police.
Loving Parents, Secret Longings
Adoption-related trauma may have played into Katie Pladl’s choices, experts surmise.
“Adoptions are traumatizing in the sense of being given away,” psychologist Christine Courtois tells A&E True Crime. “Even with the most loving [adoptive] parents…for some kids, the being given away is the big issue.
“And that would make a daughter very susceptible to an abuser,” explains Courtois, an expert in sexual assault and incest.
“And if he’s that manipulative…and he prefers younger women—this may have been his ultimate dominance or his ultimate win. And she would be very vulnerable in a situation like that.”
Father and daughter were wedded on June 20, 2017, after lying on their marriage application, AP said. A son, Bennett, was born on September 1, 2017, and the couple settled into a home in Knightdale.
But the household was disrupted in January 2018 when Knightdale Police charged Steven and Katie Pladl with incest, adultery and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Authorities awarded custody of Bennett to Steven Pladl’s mother, and Katie returned to her adoptive parents in Dover, New York.
‘She Was Supposed to Be His’
At about 9 a.m., April 12, 2018, Steven Pladl’s mother called the Knightdale Police Department’s 911 center in distress.
She told the responding dispatcher that Steven had confessed to murdering Bennett, Katie and Tony, after Katie broke up with him.
Knightdale police rushed to Pladl’s home and found Bennett’s body. The Chief Medical Examiner’s report said the 7-month-old died of suffocation on April 11. Earlier, Pladl had convinced his mother to give him the child, explaining he wanted Katie to see Bennett.
“Many of our officers are mothers and fathers themselves. I would be lying to you if I didn’t say that a situation like this certainly does stir deep emotions,” Capps recalls.
Over in Connecticut, authorities were investigating a double murder near New Milford. Pladl, who knew Katie would be visiting her grandmother that day, followed Fusco’s truck and opened fire on both of them.
Pladl then fatally shot himself in Dover.
Asked to explain Pladl’s fury, Courtois notes some incestuous fathers view their daughters and sons as possessions. “The ones who are like that can be excessively controlling. They’re king of the castle, [and] what they say goes.”
Fusco’s presence may have “made [Pladl] more jealous… [Katie] was supposed to be his. The new baby was his. Somehow, his control and dominance got interrupted.”
Capps thinks that once authorities got involved, Pladl may have felt that murder was his only option.
“[Pladl believed] the only way out of this was death for those involved,” says Capps, “which is unfortunate because certainly there could have been a different outcome for everyone.”
How To Help Prevent Incest
Sexual abuse involving incest is all too common in the U.S., Mara White, senior manager of consulting at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), tells A&E True Crime.
“Unfortunately, a lot of times it takes something this extreme for people to start talking about it again,” White says.
It’s frequently assumed rape perpetrators are strangers, but between 34 percent and 49 percent of child sexual abuse cases involve family members, according to RAINN.
“When you read a story like the Pladl case, it impacts you… It’s such a tragedy and we all feel it,” White says.” So, it’s really important to continue having these conversations.”
Reports of incest can be made confidentially to the National Sexual Assault Hotline at (800) 656-4673.
“A lot of people are so hesitant to do something because it [may be a] suspicion, and they don’t have evidence,” White says. But because of the serious nature of the crime, “suspicion is all you need. If you turn out to be wrong, then you’re wrong.”
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