A Cincinnati man diagnosed with a severe mental illness is on trial for the 2013 murder of a 28-year-old woman he says he confessed to killing only because television news reports fed him details he then repeated to detectives. Aleksey Koloskov, 39, is charged with murder in the death of Melinda Sue Ingram, whose body was found on the side of Interstate 75 in Kenton County, Kentucky, in August 2013. Koloskov walked up to a Cincinnati police officer in 2022, nearly nine years after Ingram died, and told detectives he strangled a woman in the passenger seat of his car before driving her body into Kentucky and leaving it near a wooded area beside the highway.
Koloskov is standing trial in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court, and jurors this week watched video of his 2022 interview with two Cincinnati police homicide detectives, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. In that footage, Koloskov told detectives he picked up Ingram near an Avondale AutoZone. Attorney Jeff Heile has said that location was mere steps from where Ingram lived. Koloskov also told detectives he was very drunk when he killed her, that he could not explain why he did it, and that he left her naked, describing feeling pleasure while strangling her and believing he could do what he wanted with no consequence.
A Confession Full of Contradictions
The defense's case rests heavily on inconsistencies in what Koloskov told detectives. He described Ingram's hair as blond, though she had brunette hair with red extensions. He also could not point out where along Interstate 75 he left her body, even though he separately described an area near the tree line that matched where she was actually found — a detail prosecutors say only Ingram's killer could have known. Koloskov did identify Ingram's photograph out of a group of six women's photos shown to him.
Prosecutors have argued Koloskov provided information about the case that was not publicly available, pointing to that tree-line description as evidence he was present at the scene. Defense attorney Tad Brittingham countered that not one thing Koloskov told detectives was ever confirmed, and said Koloskov's mental health had been declining for years by the time he spoke to police in 2022. According to court documents, Koloskov later told a forensic psychologist his confession was false. Koloskov has said he learned about Ingram and what happened to her from television news reports rather than from any memory of the crime.
Diagnosis Came After the Confession
Koloskov, a native of Russia with no previous criminal history beyond a 2018 speeding and open-container citation in Clinton County that cost him $295 in fines, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder only after he was charged. He was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital for a year. Brittingham has said Koloskov was paranoid, heard voices, saw things that were not there, and became intensely religious as his condition worsened — and that, according to his attorney, he told police he wanted to confess to a murder because he wanted to enter jail to spread a religious message. Koloskov has said he felt very on top of the world at the time.
Schizoaffective disorder is described as a severe and persistent mental illness, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness notes it is a rare chronic condition combining features of schizophrenia and mood disorders that affects roughly 0.3% of the U.S. population. Clinical guidelines from the Mayo Clinic state that a diagnosis requires at least a two-week period of psychotic symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations, without a concurrent major mood episode — the kind of clinical picture Koloskov's defense says explains why he confessed to a crime he did not commit.
Why False Confessions Loom Large in Murder Cases
National data lends context to the defense's strategy. A 2021 forensic study analyzing National Registry of Exonerations data, detailed by Reid, found that roughly 72% of exonerees with documented mental illness or intellectual disabilities had falsely confessed during police interrogations. Separate research published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law found false confessions contributed to 63% of DNA-exonerated homicide cases nationwide between 1989 and 2016, while the Great North Innocence Project has put the false-confession share of wrongful convictions in all homicide cases at roughly 22%.
The Innocence Project has also found that in at least 52% of false confession cases it evaluated, suspects detailed non-public facts about a crime that they had absorbed from interrogators or media coverage rather than from firsthand knowledge — a pattern the defense says mirrors what happened when Koloskov described the tree line along I-75 after years of intermittent local news coverage of Ingram's unsolved death.
The Jurisdiction Question
Because Ingram's body was found across the Ohio River in Kenton County, Kentucky, while Koloskov is being prosecuted in Hamilton County, Ohio, prosecutors must establish that the fatal act occurred in Ohio. Under Ohio Revised Code 2901.11, the state holds criminal jurisdiction over a homicide only if the fatal act or physical contact took place within its borders, meaning prosecutors need jurors to accept that the strangling happened in Cincinnati before Koloskov, by his own account, drove roughly 15 miles down Interstate 75 from Avondale, through downtown, and across the river into Kentucky, where he left Ingram's body near a wooded embankment.
Ingram's body was found with a black dress pulled up to her neck and a bra, and her cause of death was listed as undetermined. When Koloskov first approached investigators in April 2022, local reporting at the time indicated Ingram's family was told he claimed he could not stand to keep suffering before admitting to her 2013 death. The case has faced numerous delays before reaching trial this week, and Koloskov has told detectives he committed a terrible crime against an innocent person even as his defense insists that confession itself cannot be trusted.
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