“Do you know this guy?”
The man who walked into the room was the man from the car.
“You know who this guy is?” Sheridan asked.
“No,” she said.
“You’ve never seen him before?”
“I’ve never seen him before, ever.”
His name was Widy Jean. He was a Boynton Beach police officer. He had been undercover from the first minute. There had never been a hitman at all.
“That’s an undercover police officer,” Sheridan told her. “We filmed everything that you did. Recorded everything that you did. You’re going to jail for solicitation of first-degree murder of your husband.”
“I didn’t do anything,” she said.
Then he told her the rest.
“Your husband is well and alive.”
“Thank God,” she said.
Detective Alex Moreno had his own view of that moment. “She was more in shock that he was alive,” he said.
She asked to see Michael. She was told he did not want to see her.
“There’s no reason she had to do this,” Michael told reporters. “She was well off. She could have just left.”
The sergeant played her the tape. She asked him to play it again. She said he was treating her like a criminal. “I’m not that kind of person,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything,” she kept repeating, “and I didn’t plot anything.”
Police called her crying at the scene the worst acting they had ever seen.
“The bottom line is, we wanted her to believe without question that when she arrived that her husband was dead,” a department spokeswoman said.
The department put the video on YouTube. By the next morning, the case was on national television.
Three trials
It took eight years to finish the case.
At her first trial, in 2011, her lawyer offered a defense nobody saw coming. It was a stunt, he said, a “bad prank” that Michael had staged to land a reality TV show. Michael took the stand and called the idea “ridiculous.”
The jury convicted her, and she got 20 years.
An appeals court threw that out. The second trial, in December 2016, ended in a hung jury, three jurors to three. This time her lawyer went after the police, accusing them of staging the fake crime scene for “COPS.” The department denied any wrongdoing.
The third trial came in June 2017. By then she was a mother. The jurors watched the video of her in the car.
They deliberated for about 90 minutes. On June 16, 2017, they found her guilty of soliciting the murder of her husband.
Michael Dippolito said he was “5,000 percent happy.”
On July 21, 2017, she was sentenced to 16 years in prison. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear her case. In 2020, state records listed her release date as April 6, 2032. Her lawyer said she still wanted to be “vindicated.”
The man she tried to have killed is alive, and he has found love again.
