Dalia Dippolito wanted to be famous. She wanted to be a reality TV star, and in a way, she got her wish – just not the way she wanted. Dippolito hatched, and then fell victim to, her own plot to murder her husband for insurance money. It’s a crazy story that involves drugs, prostitution and one woman putting on the performance of a lifetime in from of the cameras from the TV show COPS.
It took three whole criminal trials, but Dippolito was finally convicted of solicitation of first-degree murder. How she got there is quite the tale.
How did Dalia Dippolito meet Mike Dippolito?
As legend has it, Dalia was working as an escort and Mike was an online entrepreneur. They first met at his office, after he “picked” her on a dating website, and sparks flew so fast and hard that Mike immediately left his wife.
The same week his divorce went through, Mike married Dalia. That was on Feb. 2, 2009. It was a good life, for a while anyway. They lived in sunny Boynton Beach in a quarter of a million dollar condo, and they enjoyed the benefits of a wealthy lifestyle.
They partied at night and they worked out together during the day. It was picturesque, until it wasn’t. By all accounts, things were good for that first month or so. Dalia even left a cute note on her fridge during those early days: “The Happiest I’ve ever been! Completely unreal. My dream guy! Love you Now, always & Forever.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
What was the Dalia Dippolito Murder Plot Against Her Husband?
Before Dalia Dippolito paid $7,000 to have her husband murdered, her husband Mike kept having weird encounters with law enforcement. Mike was an ex-convict and on probation for manipulating stocks. One time he was pulled over, and cops found a bag of cocaine in his cigarette pack. Fortunately, he didn’t have to act innocent, because his wife stashed it there and called the cops. He was let go.
On another occasion, Dalia, playing the good wife, got her husband a drink from Starbucks. He got so sick he was in bed for days. Then police got a tip he was a drug dealer. He got scared and transferred his assets to his new wife in July of 2009. They had been married five months.
Enter Mohamed Shihadeh, another former flame of Dalia’s. They had a sort of friends with benefits relationship that kept going even after she was married to Mike. Dalia told Mohamed that she was unhappy in her marriage and that her husband was more valuable to her dead, because of the insurance payout she’d get.
Mohamed worked at a convenience store and moonlighted as an actor. When she asked him to find a hitman, he went to police. They asked him to meet with Dalia in his car and discuss the plan while secretly recording a video.
She gave Mohamed $1,200 so the hitman could buy a gun.
From that meeting, she got in touch with the “hitman,” who just happened to be an undercover cop. On August 3, they met in the parking lot of a CVS Pharmacy.
“How soon can we get everything going?” she asked.
“Well that’s up to you,” said Widy Jean, the undercover officer. After they discuss various logistical issues, they decide that Dalia will go to the gym early on the day of the planned murder to have an alibi.
Widy asks her, “you really wanna kill this dude?” He explains to her that after this conversation, there’s no turning back.
“I’m positive, like 5000 percent sure,” she said. “I’m a lot tougher than what I look. I know you came here, and ‘oh what a cute little girl’ or whatever, you know, but I’m not.”
The hitman told her her husband would get “two in the head.” She didn’t act concerned. She had no idea that police were recording everything she said.
On Aug. 5, while at the gym, she got a call from Boynton Beach Police Sergeant Frank Ranzie. You need to come home right now, he said. Police had set up the scene to look like a murder had happened, and the TV show COPS was also on hand filming.
She pulled up to see yellow tape around her house and a forensic photographer “gathering evidence.” When she was told her husband was killed, she screamed and cried. Police brought her to the station house and initially treated her like someone who’d just lost a loved one.
They brought in Widy Jean and said they caught him running from the house. They denied knowing each other. After it became clear that she was not going to confess, Mike appeared in the doorway.
She acted shocked, but it probably wasn’t acting.
“Mike, come here. Come here please, come here. I didn’t do anything to you,” she pleads. He ignores her and she’s placed under arrest.
Why did Dalia Dippolito Have Three Trials?
Dalia Dippolito went to trial for solicitation of murder in 2011. Her defense was that the whole thing was her husband’s idea so they could get on a reality show or at least be reality TV famous. Ironically, she got her wish.
She claimed she was just “acting” and didn’t really want her husband dead. She said Mike was the mastermind but he obviously denied this in court. The judge called her plot “pure evil,” and a jury agreed. He sentenced her to 30 years. That should’ve been the end of it, but it most definitely was not.
In 2014, an appeals court ruled that the jury wasn’t selected properly and the conviction was thrown out. She faced another trial in 2016. This time, she said the Boynton Beach Police Department acted illegally and unethically by staging a crime scene.
“The presence of the ‘COPS’ TV show created a frenzy within the Boynton Beach Police Department to manufacture good television,” her lawyer told 20/20 in 2015. This time the trial ended with a hung jury, so she had to be tried again.
In 2017, after yet another trial, a jury convicted her after deliberating for 90 minutes. She was sentenced to 16 years. She’ll be released in 2032 when she is 49 years old.
