Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the afternoon of Monday, August 3, 2009, a young woman got into a car in a pharmacy parking lot in Boynton Beach, Florida.
The man at the wheel had been told she wanted her husband killed. Now he wanted to hear it from her.
She seemed relaxed. She giggled. When he talked about money, she tried to pay less.
Her name was Dalia Dippolito. She was 26 and had been married for six months.
He went through it with her. It would be Wednesday morning, at the house. He would break a couple of windows and take a few things, so it looked like a robbery that went bad. Then he would be gone. And she needed to understand one thing: once this was set in motion, she might not be able to change her mind.
“Nobody’s going to be able to point a finger at me,” she said.
She told him not to judge her by her looks. “I’m a lot tougher than what I look,” she said.
He gave her chance after chance to walk away.
“I’m determined,” she said. “I’m positive, like 5,000 percent sure.”
Six months married
Michael Dippolito, 38, met Dalia while she was working as an escort. He divorced his wife to marry her. They married early in 2009 and lived in a townhouse in Boynton Beach.
Michael was no angel. He was a convicted con man on probation. He would later tell detectives that Dalia had taken more than $200,000 from him, and that he had signed the title of their home over to her.
Strange things had started to happen. He said an officer stopped him one morning and searched his truck after a tip, and found nothing. The next day, he said, he found drugs hidden in his gas cap. He suspected his wife. Court documents also alleged that she had put antifreeze in his Starbucks tea. Her lawyers fought that claim for years.
On July 31, 2009, a tipster went to the Boynton Beach police. Mohamed Shihadeh, an old friend of Dalia’s, said she wanted her husband dead and was trying to hire someone to do it. She had given him photos of Michael and $1,200 for a gun.
Detectives hid a camera in his car.
Then Shihadeh told her he had found the right man, and set up the meeting in the parking lot.
Sgt. Frank Ranzie, who watched the video, described her as “calm, cool, calculated.”
She agreed to pay $3,000 after it was done. She told the man about the alarm. She told him when her husband walked the dog, and that their door was always unlocked. She would go to the gym, she said, or get her hair done, somewhere people would see her.
“I’ll be very happy,” she said, and she laughed.
Wednesday morning
At about 6 a.m. on Wednesday, August 5, Dalia left the townhouse and drove to the gym.
She left the front door open.
Soon there were officers at that door. A sergeant told Michael to take a deep breath. “Your wife has hired a person to kill you,” he said.
“I’m not very surprised or shocked about all this,” Michael told detectives at the station. “I guess fool me once, fool me twice, fool me three times.”
Back at the townhouse, police got to work. They ran yellow tape around the scene. They parked cruisers and a crime scene van out front. A crew from the TV show “COPS,” which was filming with the department, recorded it all.
At 6:21 a.m. a sergeant left a message on Dalia’s phone. When she finally called back, he would not tell her anything.
“It’s very urgent,” he said. “It involves your husband. There’s been an incident.”
She arrived in a tank top and a black cap. Sgt. Ranzie took her aside.
“We had a report of a disturbance at your house, and there were shots fired,” he said. “I’m sorry to tell you, ma’am, he’s been killed.”
She broke down, crying into her hands and against his chest, in front of two cameras.
She asked to go inside and see him. They told her it was a crime scene. Did he have any enemies?
Two detectives drove her to the station.
They took her to a small room with an orange table and a bottle of water. There was a camera in the corner. An older sergeant, Paul Sheridan, sat down across from her.
He asked if she knew anybody who would want to kill her husband. She said she did not.
“The game’s over with,” he said. “I want to know if you know this guy.”
Then he called out to someone in the hall to come in.
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