A woman in Florida has been charged with solicitation to commit first-degree murder in hiring an undercover police officer, that was pretending to be a hit man for hire, to murder her husband, as reported by ABC News and other news outlets.
D.D., 30, has stated that the allegation is false, she is only guilty of pretending to hire a hit man – it was all a scripted plan so that the couple could be on a reality television show.
D.D.’s defense attorney, Michael Salnick, has claimed that the entire gun-for-hire scenario was only a ruse. Furthermore, Salnick attests that his client’s intended victim, her husband M.D., was in on the whole thing.
Salnick said in his opening statement, “The plot for the contract killing of (M.D.) was never real.”
However, once on the stand and given the opportunity to testify, M.D., said that he was shocked that his wife was trying to have him killed.
Detectives, using a camera and crew from the reality TV show “Cops”, set up a sting operation and filmed D.D.’s response upon hearing of her husband’s “death”.
While one video of D.D. depicted her planning her husband’s demise, the later clip caught her tearful response to the news of his murder.
In the former clip, D.D. is overheard telling the man she thought was a hit man, “I just need to make sure everything is going to be taken care of.”
D.D.’s defense has argued that it was really M.D. that was behind the scheme. M.D. has a criminal past – he is a convicted felon on probation.
Defense further attested that M.D. got the idea of the murder from the many reality TV shows he watched. M.D. thought that the publicity could garner the two their own reality TV show.
Salnick stated, “It was a stunt that (M.D.), whether he'll admit it or not, hoped to capture the attention of someone in reality TV. (M.D.’s) hoax to achieve fame and fortune was a bad prank.”
Defense claims that D.D. fully expected her husband to tell investigators what he had been up to as soon as she was arrested.
The prosecutor’s opening statements included that D.D. already had some experience appearing in a reality show when she was a teenager. D.D. appeared on “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment.”
The episode she appeared on included a storyline with a fake hit man.
Prosecutor Elizabeth Parker, in her opening remarks said, “He asks her, ‘are you sure you want to kill him?’ As if she had ice running through her veins, she says, ‘there's no changing. I'm determined already.’”
A legal analyst for ABC, Dan Abrams, regarding the possibility of D.D. testifying said, “You always say to jurors, you cannot hold it against the defendant if she doesn't testify. I think in this particular case that if she doesn't testify, the jurors will hold it against her because it's so dependent on what was happening in her mind throughout this that I think to believe the defense without her testimony is very tough.”
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