Five years later, Dippolito on trial again in murder-for-hire
Prosecutors cite her words; defense says Boynton cops to blame.
WEST PALM BEACH — For what must have been at least the third time in a recorded conversation played for a jury Wednesday, Dalia Dippolito asked her boyfriend whether he was sure the hit man he found to kill her husband would follow through.
“Are you ‘sure’ sure?” Dippolito asked.
“How sure do you want?” an exasperated-sounding Mohamed Shihadeh responded, raising his voice. “You’re planning a murder, c’mon!”
Dippolito, it turned out, had good reason to wonder. Jurors at the start of her murder solicitation retrial Wednesday learned that her conversations with Shihadeh, and later a man she thought was a hit man, all became part of an August 2009 undercover Boynton Beach police investigation.
And the recordings became the highlight of testimony at the start of what so far has been a much less flashy, no-frills version of Dippolito’s first trial more than five years ago.
At her first trial in 2011, prosecutors painted Dippolito, now 34, as a master manipulator who used men as puppets in a deadly, greed-fueled game. And in what became known as the “Balloon Boy defense,” Dippolito’s attorneys argued that she and her husband conspired together to fabricate the plot in hopes it would score them a reality television show.
Jurors convicted her at the end of that trial, and a judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison, but an appellate court’s decision to overturn the case two years ago cleared the way for a new trial Come to PalmBeachPost.
live streaming from the courtroom and continuous updates from Post reporters on the proceedings.
already rocked by defense claims that Dippolito can’t get a fair jury in Palm Beach County.
This time around, Assistant State Attorney Craig Williams presented a much shorter opening