On a January day in 2009, Melissa Calusinski began her shift at a daycare in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, where all the children appeared happy and well.

However, within just hours, a tragedy had unfolded as a 16-month-old boy was found dead, and Melissa found herself in a stark interrogation room being intensely questioned by the police.

At 22, Melissa recounted that while a colleague at Minee Subee daycare in Lincolnshire temporarily left the room, she noticed young Benjamin Kingan in a bouncy chair with foam and blood emerging from his nose.

Frantic, Melissa screamed for help and her sister Crystal – who also worked at the daycare center – rushed in and began performing CPR.

Benjamin was declared dead at the hospital an hour later.

A pathologist determined the toddler, who had no obvious wounds or bruises, died from a head injury caused by ‘strong force’ that left him with a fractured skull.

Melissa was found guilty of aggravated battery of a child and first-degree murder in 2011 and sentenced to 31 years in jail – where she remains to this day.

But 14 years later, the shocking case has been thrust back into the spotlight as Melissa makes a fresh bid to overturn the conviction and secure her release.

Adding to the mystery, her powerhouse attorney Kathleen Zellner claims that it may be the only case in America where someone has been locked up for a murder when the death certificate does not state homicide as the cause.

‘I’m innocent. They got it all wrong,’ Melissa, now 38, tells DailyMail.com from the Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln, Illinois.

‘I’m not the one who did this. It was like any other day. Ben was fine. I didn’t have any problems with him at all, or the other children.’

The biggest challenge for Melissa as she fights for her freedom is that she confessed during a police interview to playing a role in Ben’s death.

However, her legal team and advocates claim this is a case of a ‘false confession’ and that she was pressured into admitting guilt by heavy-handed detectives.

During a nine-hour interrogation – and without an attorney present – the 22-year-old denied 79 times that she injured Ben. But eventually she said she had thrown the toddler on the floor, thinking she would be able to go home if she just told them what they wanted to hear.

Melissa claims she was parroting a story suggested to her by the cops and recanted her confession that same day. But it was too late.

‘I kept telling them I had nothing to do with this. I was doing everything in my power, everything to get out of that room, because I had nothing to do with it,’ she recalls.

‘They weren’t listening to me so I told them what they wanted to hear thinking I’d be able to go home like they told me. I was trapped and blindsided. I was trying to help but it backfired because they tricked me.’

Zellner says her client was wrongfully ‘coerced’ into giving a confession and ‘misled’ by police.

‘Nothing would satisfy the detectives except for admitting that she threw the child on the floor and she didn’t realize the ramifications. We know from extensive testing of her that she’s got a fairly low IQ,’ the attorney explains.

‘She had been the victim of a rape some months before and was triggered by being in the room with these very aggressive detectives. It’s a classic case of someone very, very vulnerable being taken advantage of in a way that’s just destroyed their life.’

However, in June 2015, Melissa’s case took an explosive turn when her father, Paul Calusinski, 67, received an anonymous phone call out of the blue.

The man on the other end said: ‘You need to tell your attorneys to get the second set of X-rays.’

The caller claimed that the originals had been hidden from Melissa’s attorneys and they could prove her innocence because they showed there was no fracture in Benjamin’s skull.

Stunned, Paul asked who was calling, but the line went dead.

During Melissa’s murder trial, prosecutors repeatedly referred to Benjamin’s fractured skull and called multiple experts to testify to the injury.

Her defense team claimed that the X-rays provided were unreadable, making it unclear if there was a fracture.

In the end, the jury sided with the prosecution and found Melissa guilty.

After receiving the phone call years later, Paul immediately called the Lake County coroner at the time, Dr. Tom Rudd, and asked him to investigate.

Dr. Rudd had been elected as coroner in 2012 and held the position for four years.

He found the original X-rays and saw then that there was no evidence of a fracture. He also claimed the evidence showed Benjamin suffered a head injury weeks prior to his death – before Melissa was employed at the daycare as an assistant teacher.

‘The X-ray clearly does not show a skull fracture. This is clear evidence that this is an old injury,’ Dr. Rudd tells DailyMail.com.

‘He [Benjamin] was known to be rambunctious and somewhat of a head banger,’ he continues. ‘He was constantly banging himself around. He was damaging the old wound and re-bleeding in his brain and causing an edema so his head was getting larger and larger over the six weeks.’

Dr. Rudd adds that Benjamin had been to his pediatrician for complaints of uncontrollable vomiting, irritableness and sleepiness – but doctors missed his head swelling.

‘He had a twin sister whose head was at the 50th percentile, yet Ben’s head was at the 90th percentile.’

After looking at the original X-rays, Dr. Rudd changed the cause of death on Benjamin’s death certificate from ‘homicide’ to ‘undetermined.’

He says he believes prosecutors misinterpreted a growth plate line as a skull fracture.

‘There are multiple lines in the skull so that the skull grows with the brain,’ he explains.

‘This is a slam dunk. The autopsy shows she couldn’t have done it. It’s simple. They claimed that she killed the child on the day he died. But there is no acute pathology there to show that. There’s no recent hemorrhage in the brain.’

Dr. Rudd thought his findings would force a new trial, but it was not to be. The original judge wasn’t swayed by the new evidence and declined to schedule another trial. An appeals court agreed with the judge.

Melissa’s lawyers later hired forensics expert Andrew Garrett to examine the X-rays shown to the jury.

Garrett was given a copy of the hard drive from the laptop of the coroner at the time and used a software program to search for deleted data and inspect the files.

He was able to access a total of 50 individual X-ray files and found that just one – Benjamin’s – had its settings changed. He tells DailyMail.com that images of the X-rays had been altered to the ‘max’ to make them appear darker.

When Garrett adjusted the images by applying the original settings, ‘images that were completely black with just a little line around the outside suddenly became really clear,’ he said.

The forensics expert says the images were clearly manipulated.  

Melissa and her father both say that authorities are lying.

‘The prosecution said I called my own phone, but it’s all a lie,’ Paul said of the anonymous phone caller. ‘They were going after my daughter. They didn’t want any of this to get out.’

‘I just can’t believe how they could do that to me?’ Melissa adds. ‘Lie and manipulate – I don’t understand why people would do that.’

She claims Benjamin had suffered a head injury at the daycare six weeks earlier – when she was not yet working there.

Melissa also says that two co-workers were playing catch with a plastic bat when one accidentally ‘whacked Ben on the side of the head’ in the same area the toddler had a previous injury.

Zellner tells DailyMail.com that Benjamin’s parents were never made aware of how severe the blow to his head was during the October 27, 2008 bat incident because it was covered up by daycare bosses.

On January 13, 2009, the day before his death, Ben was kept at home by his parents because he was vomiting, a sign of head trauma and swelling, Zellner says.

The following day, she adds, Ben banged his head on the floor of the daycare center.

She claims Nancy Kalinger, another daycare worker, was in the room with Ben when he threw himself back and hit his head on the tile floor.

Kalinger testified to this during the original trial and confirmed Melissa was not in the room at the time. Zellner says Melissa ‘did not re-enter the room until about 10 minutes before Ben became unresponsive, making it even less likely that the blow was inflicted on his head when Melissa was in the room, according to our experts.’

‘The pathologist who did the autopsy made a huge mistake,’ the lawyer adds. ‘He didn’t see the prior injury. And so the medical part of the case is highly, highly suspicious that this was even a murder.’

Zellner has filed a petition with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker asking him to exonerate and release her client.

She believes he may make a decision in the coming weeks.

She says Melissa’s case is ‘unique because of her lack of criminal history. Also by the way the autopsy was handled and missing major medical findings.’

‘We’re optimistic about the governor because I think he’s intelligent and fair-minded,’ Zellner adds. ‘If that doesn’t work we have the option of going back to the trial judge or going to federal court.’

DailyMail.com reached to Gov. Pritzker’s office for comment.  

Zellner says Melissa even has supporters at the prison where she is incarcerated.

‘The administration and the guards know she’s innocent,’ the attorney claims. ‘She’s treated well. She’s always had a job while she’s been incarcerated. She’s never had any trouble.’

However, Benjamin’s parents, Andrew Kingan, 51, and wife Amy, 52, still insist Melissa murdered their son and that she belongs in prison.

‘I hope [the parents] can realize at some point that they’ve been very misled. It’s sad. It happens in all these wrongful conviction cases,’ Zellner says.

‘That’s another great tragedy. I don’t know if they’ll ever wake up and see it.’

Melissa understands the parents’ anguish and anger, but ‘I would keep telling them please, it’s not me,’ she said.

‘I’ve been keeping hope and keep fighting because I know my innocence. Eventually the truth is going to come out.’