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On July 26, 2023, Dateline will air a new episode titled "The Sting." It will revisit the case of Dalia Dippolito, a young woman convicted of soliciting first-degree murder in 2017, when she attempted to hire a hitman to kill her husband, Mike Dippolito. The episode premieres on Oxygen at 7 pm ET.
The official synopsis of the episode, as per IMDb, reads:
"Newlywed Dalia Dippolito returns home from the gym to the awful news that her husband had been killed; in a case where almost nothing is as it seems, investigators want to know if Dalia is diabolical or an unwitting pawn in a hoax gone wrong."
The episode will take a closer look at the evidence that led to Dippolito's conviction, including the video that captured her discussing her plans to have her husband killed. It will also feature interviews with Dippolito herself, as well as with her friends and family, and the detectives who investigated the case.
The episode will offer viewers a new perspective as it explores the question of whether Dippolito was truly guilty of trying to have her husband killed. The episode will also examine the factors that led to Dippolito's decision to try and kill her husband.
5 facts about Dalia Dippolito's murder-for-hire plot
1) Dalia Dippolito first met Mike Dippolito when she was an escort
In his testimony, Mike Dippolito revealed that he first met Dalia in October 2008 when he'd hired her for s*x when she was an escort in Florida. He claimed that they'd clicked so well that they eventually decided to get married just a few months later in February 2009.
However, he said that, after a month, he began to have suspicions that she was robbing him and putting narcotics in his vehicles in an effort to have his probation for a fraud conviction revoked. He also claimed that Dalia had once attempted to kill him by spiking his iced tea with antifreeze.
After Dalia's murderous plan had come to light, Mike Dipolito commented on their relationship in an interview with WPBF 25 News. He said:
"I really wish, for all of our sakes, not just for me, I just wish me and her never met … we had plans. We were looking at baby names and all kinds of different things."
2) Her murderous plan was caught on tape
Dippolito met an undercover police officer named Widy Jean in August 2009 and offered him $7,000 to kill her husband. In an effort to appear on the reality television program Cops, the entire discussion was caught on tape. She told the officer how she wanted to kill Michael Dipolito and even showed him a picture of him.
Widy Jean has since spoken out numerous times about the incident and described the events to several news outlets. In the latest interview with ABC News, the officer stated:
"It is possible to hire hitmen in the movies, but it is very hard to do in real life. It almost always turns out the hitman is an undercover cop."
3) Dippolito's case went to trial three times
Dalia Dippolito was found guilty in 2011 and given a 20-year prison sentence for soliciting a first-degree murder. The court reprimanded her for her lack of remorse throughout the trial. The presiding judge on the case said the following to Dippolito during her testimony:
"I think ‘I’m sorry’ would have gone a long way. It’s astonishing, the cold-blooded denial you’re willing to go to.”
However, the Associated Press reports that this conviction was overturned on an appeal as a result of problems with the jury selection in the case. Then, in 2016, again due to a problem with the jury selection, Dippolito's trial was dissolved.
In 2017, a jury was finally able to convict her of soliciting first-degree murder after just 90 minutes of deliberation. Her defense team consistently asserted that Mike Dippolito, Dalia's husband, was a part of the scheme to make them famous, a claim he vehemently disputed.
4) Dalia Dippoito was sentenced to 16 years in prison
Dalia's third trial resulted in a 16-year prison term for her. According to NBC News, Glenn Kelley, the Court Judge remarked at the sentencing that Dippolito had acted in a "cold and calculative" way. She further stated at the courthouse,
"This particular crime was committed not in an unsophisticated way, but in a sophisticated way, in a calculated fashion. There was a plan put in place by Dalia Dippolito to kill Mike Dippolito.”
Despite the prosecutors' wish to sentence Dippolito to 30 years in prison, which was the maximum sentence for this particular crime, the judge upheld the prior 20-year sentence and handed Dippolito credit for four of the eight years she'd served in house arrest during her previous legal trials.
She is scheduled for release in 2032.
5) Dalia Dippolito tried to break out of prison in 2017
After hearing of a prisoner in South Carolina who had successfully escaped prison, Dippolito allegedly discussed deploying a drone to aid her escape over a jail phone with a man named "James" in 2017. In the recording, which was later made public by ABC News, Dippolito said to the man:
"He had somebody fly a drone over and drop off wire cutters and he cut wires and escaped from prison. Everyone here was like pumped up when they read that.”
However, Dippolitos' attorneys have since denied such claims and continue to make statements about how the recording has been taken out of context.
Dateline's upcoming episode "The Sting" premieres on July 26, at 7 pm ET, exclusively on Oxygen.
