Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (26 page)

Dalia laughed at this, a deferred tension-breaker from earlier, when Moreno earned hazard pay for reading these things in the first place.

SALNICK: All right, so when a comment is made between the two of them about sex, that’s normal if that’s what two people want to do.

MORENO: Yes.

SALNICK: Have you ever sexted?

The courtroom dissolves into laughter, Dalia included.

PARKER: Objection, your honor—irrelevant.

SALNICK: I’ll withdraw it. I’m sorry. Don’t answer that.

JUDGE: And it was going so well there for a while.

On redirect, I returned to the issue of the seventy-five phone calls between Mohamed and Dalia.

PARKER: Did you tell Mohamed to act normal in his actions with Dalia?

MORENO: Yes.

PARKER: Why was that important?

MORENO: We didn’t want her to get suspicious in any way. They were friends; they talked on a daily basis. I directed him that if she calls you at any time and she starts talking about the case to contact me—which he did numerous times, and I was able to record some of those conversations.

Detective Moreno noted that some of the calls Mr. Salnick had asked him about dated back to March 2009, although he became involved with the case on August 1, the day after Mohamed walked into BBPD with a story to tell. Using their phone records as a guide, he confirmed there were seventy-four phone calls between Mohamed and Dalia in the period from July 31 to August 5. On further questioning, he revealed that forty-five of them—about three-fifths—were a minute or less.

PARKER: Tell the jury how many of the calls are over 180 seconds, or three minutes in duration.

MORENO: Seven calls.

PARKER: Now, of those calls, and you may need to refer to your report, how many of those did you record?

MORENO: Three calls were recorded that we heard in court.

I had to make one final point about the text messages.

PARKER: In all of the text messages that you reviewed in this case, including the ones that you read out loud in court, did you ever read anything about the defendant being involved in a reality show stunt?

MORENO: No.

PARKER: Why did you never have a conversation with Michael Dippolito about this being a reality show stunt?

MORENO: Throughout my investigation, that wasn’t brought up—not when I spoke to Mike Dippolito or the defendant. I didn’t even find out about that until just recently.

Detective Moreno stepped down from the witness stand and I rested my case. At last, it was time for Salnick to present this audacious defense he had been threatening for months. First to the stand he called Dalia’s mother, Randa Mohamed.

Randa has three children, of which Dalia is the oldest. She has been divorced for ten years, and has worked in the health care industry for twenty. She first met Mike in October 2008 when Dalia brought him by the house.

SALNICK: What do you remember about him when you first met him?

RANDA: (laughs) Not a good impression. I didn’t like him as soon as I saw him. As a mom, I felt something—I don’t know, I just felt something. He wouldn’t look in my eyes. Every time he would talk, he had a nervous tic, a nervous smile, and he would laugh when there was nothing funny.

She began crying while recounting the happy times she had spent with Dalia before the marriage, which abruptly came to an end once Dalia met Mike. As if on cue, Dalia cried along with her. According to Randa, Mike and Dalia were always together, always rushing off somewhere to do something. She was taken aback when they announced they had gotten married without telling her, which flew in the face of all the plans they had made
as mother and daughter. She remembers Mike’s celebrated outing to the Marlins-Phillies game as a burden on her father, who was very sick and had to be encouraged to go. (Outside of court, Mike was surprised to learn of Randa’s comments on the stand, recalling how he had teased her about her paramours, their frequent outings to Ruth’s Chris steakhouse and the Cheesecake Factory—always as his treat. He thought she was “fun” and that their relationship had been “casual and friendly.”)

Randa’s father passed away from prostate cancer the same week Dalia was arrested, having briefly lapsed into a coma. This was Randa’s explanation for why Dalia had been searching for funeral homes and crematoriums.

RANDA: While I was going through that, I was taking care of everything for my Dad, so I asked my daughter for help to go online and do some researches to get everything prepared, because that is what hospice advised us to do.

SALNICK: What did Dalia do to help you?

Randa Mohamed being sworn in to testify during the trial.

RANDA: She looked for different places according to the budget—he wanted to be cremated, and she needed to look at different places, and from there she needed to decide which one we were going to go with.

She testified that she ultimately picked one of the places that Dalia had researched and given her information on.

On cross-examination, as gently as I could, I tried to establish a time line and context in which to better understand this computer search for which Dalia had taken time out from planning her husband’s murder. It was a balancing act, since the witness had just lost her father, and stood to lose her daughter. I wanted to respect that, and I also didn’t want to appear aggressive or uncaring in the eyes of the jury.

PARKER: I’m sorry that I have to ask you questions about your father—I know this is a very uncomfortable and upsetting situation to talk about him in.

RANDA: It is.

PARKER: . . . Now, do you know what day she did that funeral search on her computer?

RANDA: I don’t remember exactly—the week before. I would say a week or two. I don’t know exactly when.

PARKER: And when she was on the computer, did she call you right then and tell you what she found?

RANDA: I don’t remember. Obviously, at one point we discussed the prices, but I don’t know if it was right then—I was going through a lot.

Her voice started to rise.

PARKER: Can you tell me if it was the same day?

SALNICK: Objection—she has already said she doesn’t remember.

PARKER: Can you tell me if it was before or after she was arrested?

SALNICK: Objection! She has stated she doesn’t know.

PARKER: Judge, I’m trying to get a time frame.

RANDA: (yelling) I don’t have a time frame! This is about my Dad! You should have a little respect for this—you are talking about somebody who passed away who has nothing to do with this! [She’s yelling and crying now.] This is about him being cremated, and you want me to go back through all that!

PARKER: Ma’am, I apologize. I did not mean to upset you.

RANDA: (screaming) You are, because you are asking me so many times and I already told you!

PARKER: I’m just trying to find out—

RANDA: Find out what? When she called me, and when she did this? I already told you that she did research a lot of places. I was here by myself taking care of my Dad.

Forget for a moment that Randa had agreed to return as a defense witness explicitly to discuss the details of her father’s cremation, as they pertained to the assistance Dalia allegedly rendered her. Many in the courtroom doubted the sincerity of her outburst, and a number of them sought me out afterward to tell me they thought it helped my case—especially the fact that I didn’t take the bait and push back. In fact, the crematorium Randa settled on for the disposal of her father’s remains, A Cremation Service of the Palm Beaches, briefly appears on a long list of options brought up by a Google search on Dalia’s computer on August 3, but neither the website itself, services offered, nor pricing information was ever accessed. In addition, Dalia’s phone records, which were in evidence, indicate that she did not speak to her mother either that day or on the day before (when she might have received a request for help). They did speak the day after, August 4, but for no longer than one minute and twenty seconds—hardly long enough to present a credible list of choices with prices and variety of
services, as Randa testified. Dalia’s grandfather died on August 9, and the arrangements were made on August 10. I knew that I would point all of these inconsistencies out in my closing argument.

Next up, the defense called Dr. Sarah Coyne to the stand. Dr. Coyne— still in her twenties, attractive, relentlessly positive—is a Professor of Human Development at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, with a PhD in psychology. When her name turned up as an expert witness a few weeks before the trial, I researched her pretty thoroughly. I also took her deposition—by phone, since there was no time to fly to Utah and depose her in person—to get a sense of her particular approach to the material. That first exposure was entirely a fishing expedition on my part, and my first real confirmation of where Salnick might try to take the defense, which at that point still seemed kind of mind-boggling. They had a mouthpiece for some of the trial balloons they were floating in Michael Stanley, but at this point it was pretty clear they wouldn’t be calling him to the stand. Coyne had published thirty-eight peer-reviewed articles on the subjects of reality TV and violence, its effects on children, and other social implications of popular entertainment. Under Florida law, an expert witness can testify on any subject, but it must be outside the general knowledge of the jury, as well as something in which the witness has specialized knowledge, training, or experience. What I learned in the deposition is that since she was strictly an academic, she would not express an opinion on this particular case—whether it was a reality show stunt or whatever they might allege. She would merely talk in general terms about reality television, the function of fame and celebrity in society, and the lengths that people have gone to historically to gain access to what is still a new and evolving medium. So that’s what I concentrated on in my research.

Salnick spent the first part of his questions managing our expectations by having her designate what she would not address: She would not speak about any of the personalities in the case, discuss their psychological development, or offer clinical evaluations of their behavior. Nor would she discuss the television production process from anything more than a layman’s understanding. Her testimony would remain solely theoretical.

SALNICK: How do you define reality TV?

COYNE: In the academic world, we think of it as “unscripted drama,” and anything goes in reality television. You have reality shows about [everything] from baking cupcakes to catching fish to building a home to falling in love, falling out of love and breaking up and eating bugs . . . A lot of boundaries are tested there. They kind of push the limits on what is accepted behavior on reality TV and what’s normal, and so pretty much anything goes on reality TV.

She identified six categories under the heading of Reality TV: Reality Dramatic (documenting a group of individuals, like
Big Brother
or
Jersey Shore
), Crime Shows (following law enforcement, like
COPS
or
America’s Most Wanted
), Romance Shows (
The Bachelor
), Game Shows or Competitions (
Survivor
or
Fear Factor
), Talent Shows, where people try to become famous (
Dancing with the Stars
or
American Idol
), and Information (anything focusing on a single topic and ostensibly educational or anything else). She defined YouTube as a distant cousin—unscripted, but with no production elements—and “going viral” as something possibly for just friends and family that gets passed on by word of mouth or e-mail.

SALNICK: From your studies and your work, why do people watch reality TV?

COYNE: There’s a theory out there, it’s called “Uses and Gratifications Theory,” and it answers that question. It talks about why we watch anything on TV: we watch things to fulfill a certain need that we have. So for reality television, we’ve done quite a bit of research on this, and there are a few characteristics of people who really turn to reality television. The first is “voyeurism,” and that’s just kind of getting a sneaky peek into other people’s lives. It’s our curiosity to find out what happens to other people—what goes on in other families. Another one is “status,” and people who are
highly motivated by status want other people to pay attention to them; they have a desire that they’d like to become famous—fame is important to them. Things like having a lot of money is important to them, having the right look, the right clothes, driving the right cars, status.

Salnick asked her how people get on reality shows, and she listed three avenues: The extensive and somewhat grueling audition process, which amounts to an open casting call. Pitching your own series to a producer or production company. Or doing something crazy enough that people take notice.

COYNE: A good example of this—if you remember the “Balloon Boy” hoax: he told the media that his son was in the balloon, and there was this big chase on television, and it came out later that the guy was on
Wife Swap
before, and he’d done this whole thing as a kind of way to get back into reality TV. And so, not a very successful way to get on it, but people certainly do it.

SALNICK: Do people gain fame or celebrity status from doing this type of thing?

COYNE: Yeah, sure. The thing about reality TV is anyone can do it; anyone can become famous. When you’re watching it, that’s kind of the message . . . They say, “Oh, well, he’s just an ordinary guy. If he can do it, if he can behave like that, so can I. I can become famous.” And some of these people go on and make millions. They get endorsement deals and spin-off shows, and so, you know, there’s a lot riding on it.