Police make arrest in Schuylkill River cold case killing of Vito Maglio

Police arrested Melanie Morat, 30, of Philadelphia, in the killing of Vito Maglio, the 69-year-old whose body was found in the Schuylkill River in 2015. CBS Philadelphia said the arrest came 11 years after the body was found, and that Morat was charged with murder, conspiracy, arson and other offenses. FOX 29 said the charges included murder and criminal conspiracy, and that the Maglio family issued a statement.

Maglio lived in Bustleton, in Northeast Philadelphia, and disappeared in December 2014. NBC10’s earlier coverage said he was pulled from the river on Kelly Drive with gunshot wounds to the head. A Facebook post from NBC10 said investigators found his body floating in the Schuylkill River near the East Falls Bridge, and that the Medical Examiner determined he died from multiple gunshot wounds.

A Facebook post from the Philadelphia Inquirer said Maglio was identified by his pacemaker, a detail that underscored how much of the case depended on piecing together the river recovery after the fact. By the time police announced the arrest, the death had long been treated as a cold case, with the public record marking the shift from an unidentified or unresolved river death to a homicide investigation that could finally support charges.

The arrest puts a name to a case that had sat for years in the files of one of Philadelphia’s more difficult homicide mysteries. Maglio’s body was recovered from a river that can strip away the kind of trace evidence investigators often need, leaving the timeline of the disappearance, the river recovery and the gunshot wounds as the central facts that survived.

With Morat now charged, the focus moves from the discovery of Maglio’s body near East Falls Bridge to the prosecution that police say followed 11 years later. The remaining question is what evidence investigators say finally tied that river death to Morat.