On the evening of October 23, 2017, Bruce Pleskovic and his daughter's fiancé, Jeffrey Scullin Jr., arrived home together at the family's house on Blazing Star Drive in Strongsville, Ohio, a suburb southwest of Cleveland. They found Melinda Pleskovic, 49, on the kitchen floor. Scullin called 911. "There's a lot of blood," he told the dispatcher, adding that Melinda had "multiple stab wounds" and wasn't moving, according to CBS News's account of the call. Melinda Pleskovic, a sixth-grade teacher who had spent more than two decades at Strongsville Middle School, was already dead. She had been shot three times and stabbed between 36 and 37 times.

For a week, the case looked like exactly what the household had been reporting to police for more than a year: a break-in that had finally gone catastrophically wrong. Then investigators traced a bloody knife back to the truck Jeffrey Scullin had been driving that day, and the story fell apart. Eight days after the murder, and three days after Scullin served as a pallbearer at Melinda Pleskovic's funeral, Strongsville police arrested him and charged him with her murder.

Evidence Log · Police reports, appellate record & federal habeas filing
A — Melinda Pleskovic shot 3 times, stabbed 36–37 times, Oct. 23, 2017
B — Tactical knife recovered with victim's blood and Scullin's DNA on the handle
C — Scullin served as a pallbearer at the funeral 3 days before his arrest
D — Pleaded no contest 2018; life sentence, parole eligible after 33 years

A son-in-law who never left

Jeffrey Scullin Jr. moved out of his father's house in Strongsville and into the Pleskovic home roughly a year before the murder, around the time he and Bruce and Melinda's daughter, Anna, had a child together. The couple got engaged, and a wedding was set for late October 2017. Scullin's own father was a former Cleveland police officer, according to Cleveland19's coverage of the sentencing, a detail that would matter later, once investigators went looking for a gun.

By every outward account, the Pleskovics had absorbed him into the family without reservation. "We had a loving, caring normal household," Bruce Pleskovic would say in court after it was over. "We took Jeffrey in as our own."

The intruder who wasn't

What the Pleskovic family did not know was that the household had spent more than a year fielding break-ins and prowler sightings that, prosecutors would later allege, Scullin had staged himself. Anna Pleskovic called police in June 2016 to report suspicious boys in the backyard. She called again in November 2016 about unknown boys knocking on the back door and peering through windows. More break-ins followed in the months after, including missing keys and a car theft at the property.

Four days before the murder, on October 19, 2017, Scullin called 911 himself to report a burglar at the house. Investigators later determined the call was false. Prosecutor Christopher Schroeder told the court that Scullin had been staging the burglaries for weeks, going back to around the time he moved in, laying the groundwork for a narrative he would ultimately use to explain his fiancée's mother's death, according to Fox 8's report on the case. Scullin never offered an explanation for why he had done it.

Fourteen declines

The wedding, prosecutors said, was the pressure point. In the weeks before the ceremony, Scullin's credit card was declined fourteen times when he tried to pay the venue. The venue eventually emailed Melinda Pleskovic directly, informing her the wedding would be canceled over the unpaid balance. Melinda, according to prosecutors, intended to confront Scullin about the money that weekend, five days before he and Anna were due to marry.

Melinda Pleskovic was killed on October 23, 2017. She never had the conversation.

Blazing Star Drive

The state's account of the murder came largely from physical evidence rather than any admission volunteered up front. Melinda was found in the kitchen of the Blazing Star Drive house, shot three times and stabbed 36 to 37 times. Bruce Pleskovic and Jeffrey Scullin discovered her together that evening and called it in immediately. In his 911 call, Scullin described walking back outside afterward with Anna and Bruce's teenage son, waiting for police to arrive, according to CBS News.

Given the household's documented history of break-ins over the preceding year, and Scullin's own false burglary report just four days earlier, the killing was initially treated as a home-invasion homicide. Strongsville police brought in Ohio's Bureau of Criminal Investigation to assist.

A pallbearer

Nothing in the week that followed suggested Scullin was a suspect in his own household's eyes. He attended Melinda Pleskovic's funeral and served as one of her pallbearers, carrying the casket of the woman prosecutors say he had killed, just three days before Strongsville Police Chief Mark Fender announced his arrest on October 31, 2017, according to Patch's report on the arrest. He was charged with aggravated murder and held on a $1 million bond set by the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. He made his first court appearance by video from jail on November 3, 2017, and did not enter a plea.

The evidence that undid the story

The forensic case against Scullin, once it came together, was direct. A large tactical knife was recovered from the truck Scullin had driven the day of the murder; testing matched Melinda Pleskovic's blood to the blade and Scullin's own DNA to the handle. A firearm tied to the shooting was recovered from a vehicle at the home of Scullin's father, the former Cleveland officer. Between the staged break-in reports stretching back to 2016, the false burglary call four days before the murder, and the weapon evidence, prosecutors built a case that ultimately expanded well past the original aggravated murder charge to include murder, felonious assault, tampering with evidence, making false alarms, and child endangerment, according to the Eighth District Court of Appeals' later summary of the case record.

Plea and sentence

Scullin initially pleaded not guilty and the case was heading toward trial when, on October 17, 2018, he changed course and entered a no contest plea to the charges against him, including aggravated murder, murder, felonious assault, and tampering with evidence. Judge Nancy Margaret Russo sentenced him twelve days later, on October 29, 2018, to life in prison with parole eligibility after 33 years, 30 years for the aggravated murder charge plus a mandatory three-year firearm specification, with credit for 363 days already served and three years of supervised post-release control if he is ever paroled, according to Cleveland19's sentencing coverage.

The Pleskovic family addressed the court before sentencing. Anna Pleskovic, who had been engaged to Scullin and had a child with him, told the judge: "The extent of his monstrous actions have forever crippled the lives of everyone he knows." Her sister, Megan Pleskovic, said: "Our lives will never be the same because of Jeffrey Scullin. My mother was the face of compassion, love and perseverance." Bruce Pleskovic, who had welcomed Scullin into his home a year earlier, told the court: "We had a loving, caring normal household. We took Jeffrey in as our own… The loss of Melinda will have a rippling effect on the kids and I forever."

"The extent of his monstrous actions have forever crippled the lives of everyone he knows."

— Anna Pleskovic, victim impact statement, Oct. 29, 2018

When Judge Russo asked Scullin if he wished to address the court, he said one word: "Nothing."

Appeals, and a door that keeps closing

Scullin did not let the conviction stand unchallenged. He appealed to the Eighth District Court of Appeals, arguing the trial court had wrongly denied his motions to suppress evidence and to compel discovery. On August 8, 2019, the appellate court affirmed his conviction in full. He then asked the full twelve-member Eighth District to rehear the case en banc; all twelve judges voted to deny it. He took the case to the Ohio Supreme Court, which declined to accept jurisdiction on March 3, 2020.

Scullin's post-conviction efforts continued into federal court. He filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, which a federal judge in the Northern District of Ohio denied on February 12, 2024, dismissing two of his four grounds as noncognizable and rejecting the remaining two on the merits, according to the federal court's ruling in Scullin v. Schweitzer. As of that ruling, Scullin remains in custody at Ohio's North Central Correctional Complex, serving a life sentence with a mandatory three additional years, the same sentence handed down in a Cuyahoga County courtroom in the fall of 2018.

What the neighbors never suspected

Nothing about Blazing Star Drive marked it as a house under siege from within. To the family and to responding officers over more than a year of calls, it looked like an ordinary suburban home plagued by an unusually persistent prowler, one that a young father living there had even called in himself. Melinda Pleskovic spent two decades teaching sixth grade in the same town where she was killed, remembered by former students as, in one description offered to reporters, one of the most lighthearted and kindhearted women they knew. The man who killed her walked behind her casket before anyone but the investigators knew what the knife in his truck would say.

Sources

Trial, sentencing, and appellate proceedings referenced above are matters of public record in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (State of Ohio v. Jeffrey W. Scullin, Jr.) and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio (Scullin v. Schweitzer). Jeffrey Scullin Jr. was convicted on a no contest plea in 2018; his conviction and sentence have been upheld through direct appeal and federal habeas review.