Woman sought ‘hit man’ to kill ex-husband with ricin, FBI says
PONCA CITY — The post on Craigslist was for a 10-day acting gig overseas promising “competitive pay!”
The requirements included a “creative, outgoing and friendly, positive personality” and “boldness and bravery.”
The Ponca City woman who made the post, though, actually wanted to hire a “hit man” to poison her ex-husband in Israel with ricin, federal prosecutors allege.
Danielle Dana Layman, 37, was arrested Friday after a search of her home. She was charged Saturday in Oklahoma City federal court with using the internet to solicit murder.
Layman and her exhusband, Shahar Abecassis, have been in a dispute in Israel over their daughter.
During the search Friday, federal agents found instructions on the kitchen counter of her home about how to make ricin, an FBI task force officer reported in a court affidavit.
Agents also found several dozen castor beans in the kitchen as well as a mortar and pestle, the task force officer reported.
She admitted in a telephone conversation with her current husband — in front of the FBI task force officer — that she had ordered castor beans, that she knew how to turn them into ricin and that she had printed instructions off the internet a year and a half ago, according to the affidavit.
A person who responded to the Craigslist post called the FBI on May 9 after meeting with Layman in a Ponca City coffee shop, according to the affidavit. Layman used the fake name “Samantha Dowry” during the meeting, according to the affidavit.
Layman offered $4,000 in cash, plus $1,000 for expenses, to poison the “mark,’’ a taxi driver, and gave the person a baggie of ricin, according to the affidavit.
The instructions were labeled “Operation Insecticide,” according to the affidavit. The “mission details” included hiring the taxi driver for a week to see tourist attractions and then giving the “mark” the ricin in a cup of coffee every morning.
“It was crazy weird,” the witness who called the FBI told The Oklahoman Monday. “It was very awkward. I was like, ‘Wow.’”
The witness, Tinsley Ariana Taylor Keefe, said the woman claimed to be in the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, and claimed the target was in ISIS. Keefe said the woman claimed she couldn’t do it herself because she was pregnant.
The defendant was born in Israel but moved to the United States with her children after meeting a soldier, Jeremy Layman, in 2007 on vacation. The two wed in 2010. They lived in Kansas before Ponca City.
During a family visit to Israel in 2014, her exhusband learned she was there and went to a rabbinical court to seek visitation rights with their daughter, according to news reports at the time. The daughter, then 13, was blocked from leaving during the legal proceedings.
“We are dealing with a fanatical religious court. I’m not going to leave without my daughter, and I’m going to raise hell in the USA,” Danielle Layman told The Times of Israel in 2014.
She told a newspaper in Kansas in January 2015 that she was able to place her daughter on an airplane to the United States without being caught.
If convicted, Layman could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison and fined $250,000. Her attorney did not immediately respond Monday to a request for comment.