Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (24 page)

And he paid special attention to the
COPS
waiver.

After he explained her Miranda rights to Dalia, and before he had her sign an affidavit to that effect, Sheridan had Dalia sign a release to allow footage of her to appear on
COPS
. As previously stated,
COPS
producer Jimmy Langley was livid when he found out, pronouncing the waiver useless, since it was easily argued Dalia didn’t know what she was signing. (As far as she knew, her husband had just been murdered.) Cameraman Chris Flores later approached Dalia in a holding cell and persuaded her to sign a second waiver.

In his deposition, Sheridan stated that he had secured Dalia’s signature on the form at Langley’s behest, a claim that Langley took issue with in his own deposition. A proven supporter of law enforcement whose livelihood depended on it, Langley also took the additional step of complaining to Police Chief Matt Immler, presumably to protect his reputation and that of the series. Unbeknownst to him, at the behest of Chief Immler, BBPD Internal Affairs began an investigation into Sheridan’s actions and subsequent statement, ultimately finding no fault with Sergeant Sheridan and attributing the discrepancy to miscommunication. On the basis of that, I successfully filed my motion to keep the IA investigation out of the trial, as well as any argument the defense might make that Flores obtained Dalia’s second waiver improperly, arguing that whatever he did after Dalia was arrested had no bearing on the case.

“Their buttholes puckered over that whole brouhaha over who got her to sign the consent waiver,” says Ranzie. “They were thinking they were losing their footage. They were scared to death about losing their fantastic story. And that’s why they were concerned about following their rules even more so. Ratings. They didn’t care about the case. They knew they were on the bubble because of that whole Sheridan thing. Again, I’m not picking on Paul. But the facts are there. The video is there and it shows what it is.”

As a kind of grace note at the end of his cross-examination, Salnick said, “You said that you objected and made it very clear about the TV show
COPS
being involved. Tell us why.”

“Because of what’s happening right now,” said Ranzie.

On redirect, I had Ranzie state for the record that the presence of the
COPS
crew had no effect on the crime scene or the way the case was investigated. Throughout his testimony, Ranzie was truthful in his answers, but I felt he largely kept his considerable opinions to himself.

Such is not the case if you talk to him outside the courtroom.

Internally, Ranzie was a vocal critic of almost every aspect of this investigation, beginning with the staged crime scene, which was predicated on a case Sheridan worked earlier in his career where they actually re-created a murder scene with fake blood and special effects, placed the daily newspaper by the victim’s head, and took Polaroids as photographic proof. Sheridan also initially proposed himself to play the part of the undercover hit man.

“Basically, I love Paul Sheridan,” says Ranzie. “He’s a really good guy, but he started coming up with ideas on how to put this together based on something he did twenty years prior. I don’t mean to say that in a bad way, but twenty years ago they had Polaroid cameras.”

Ranzie’s opinion did not change once the crime scene tape was uploaded to YouTube and the media took notice. “I was beside myself when the chief authorized the PIO to release that video,” he says. “I was beside myself! It was almost like they put the cart in front of the horse, because I thought, Oh this is a slam dunk . . . I can guarantee you that no lawyer in the world wants the evidence out there before we’ve even filed the criminal charges.”

These criticisms were largely procedural, and they tied the staged crime scene and the
COPS
presence together in a way that Salnick’s vaunted defense largely did not, by measuring their impact on the people who were affected. As it was designed, the investigative plan would have unfolded in three parts: the meetings with undercover operatives to ensure the crime threat was credible; the fake crime scene to convince the suspect her efforts had been successful; and then a carefully choreographed interrogation, taking place over many hours, where the noose slowly tightens, cutting off her options. It was this last part that suffered in the final accounting.

“That plan didn’t make it to its final end,” says Ranzie. “Had it made it to its end, I believe we would have avoided even the prosecution’s court case because I believe she would have pled out to something and took a serious hit. Here’s the plan: You’re the widow. We serve you up water or something
and make you comfortable. Let her sell her soul with the lies about thugs and people that would want him dead. Then, after she’s relaxed with her lies, we were gonna say, ‘We got a guy we found in the area who matched the description. Come take a look.’ She would have seen him [through a one-way mirror]. Who brings the suspect of a violent crime into the interview room? . . . Bring her back to the room. Corral her with some other nonsense. Twenty minutes later, the detective is going to come in with a cell phone. Do the whole thing, make sure she sees it. Step out for a minute, come back in: ‘Dalia: You know that guy you said you don’t know? Why is his phone number in your phone?’ That was the plan. Then, she would have been like, ‘I don’t know.’ And we already got her phone. That fell apart . . .

“Basically, we had all day. We could have talked to her for hours. And then got her to the point of possibly confessing. What I’m saying is, there was some overzealousness in that moment. Almost like a jump-up-and-high-five moment where ‘we got this case locked and loaded.’ And then guys start tripping over themselves and make mistakes.”

In Ranzie’s telling, the Boynton Beach Police Department was just learning something that Hollywood has been exploiting for well over a century: put a camera on somebody, and their behavior changes. Now they’re watching themselves through someone else’s eyes, and their behavior starts playing catch-up with everyone else’s imagined expectations.

“I believe in the man, but for whatever reason, in that moment, Paul got frustrated that this was going to take time. You could tell . . . He’s old school: ‘Let’s get this shit done.’ So he basically kicked the other detectives out of the room and went in there and ended it. At the end of the day, did it harm the case? No, it didn’t, but it did leave a lot of flexibility for the defense to run circles around a lot of things, including that waiver and a whole bunch of other stuff.”

Ranzie voiced some of these concerns on day one, in a meeting with Jimmy Langley in attendance. Langley told him he appreciated his honesty, and promised his crew would never get in the way, which physically at least they did not. But it also didn’t account for the things Ranzie witnessed that stayed with him—like how a potential victim had to learn his whole world was about to cave in on him with a big boom mic hanging in his face, or
parading Widy Jean or her resurrected husband in front of Dalia for the cameras as a kind of visual “gotcha,” the endless B-roll of walking, talking, and prefabricated interstitial moments, which under oath he called “an unpleasant experience.”

“That’s their show,” he says, “but I didn’t have to like it.”

At the end of that first meeting, Sheridan overruled him and told him to make it work, and he said okay. It aired as a “special episode” on September 24, 2011.

After he testified in the Dippolito trial, Ranzie was severely dressed down by Chief Immler in a supervisor’s meeting, essentially, he believes, for telling the truth. “Me and him have never been right since,” he says. From where he sits, he can see his era ending.

“I don’t know how else to phrase it, but this is not the decade of policing I signed up for,” he says today. “It’s not the political correctness and over-the-top liberalism that I signed up for. It’s not what I’ve grown up to do, so I think it’s time to turn over the reins and let a new generation that will be indoctrinated into this new way of policing handle it. Because, to be honest, I’m getting too frustrated with the way things have changed . . . I’m considered a dinosaur. I don’t want to be that guy anymore. Let them take over and move forward.”

After I was finished with Ranzie on the stand, I put up another five policemen in quick succession, beginning with Sergeant Craig Anthony, who helped set up the crime scene. My co-counsel Laura Burkhart Laurie conducted the examination. In between Anthony’s accounts of securing the premises and the couple’s pets, photographing interiors to maintain integrity (i.e., preserving their ability to restore everything to its original condition), stringing yellow tape, etc., Laura used him to tweak Salnick’s imminent reality defense in rather pointed fashion: “Did you see any scripts lying around?” “Did you see any paperwork pertaining to a reality TV stunt?” On cross, Salnick tried to tweak Laura’s tweak:

SALNICK: You didn’t see any open file cabinets, did you?

ANTHONY: No.

SALNICK: Desk drawers?

ANTHONY: No.

SALNICK: . . . Okay, and I imagine you didn’t find any notes saying, “I’m going to kill my husband,” either, did you?

ANTHONY: I did not.

Detective Jason Llopis and Detective Brian McDeavitt drove Dalia to the station, which allowed me to enter the tape of their conversation into evidence. Llopis said it caught him off guard when Dalia asked how he got her number, and he improvised an answer on the spot that seemed to satisfy her. On cross, Salnick solicited Llopis’s critique of Dalia’s performance, and then tried to reverse-engineer that into proof of this reality TV gambit:

SALNICK: You weren’t buying anything she was saying, were you?

LLOPIS: Not from what information I had been told.

SALNICK: Okay, you didn’t believe anything she said. What she was saying? She was making things up. She was acting, wasn’t she?

LLOPIS: I didn’t believe everything she was saying . . .

When Llopis finally volunteered that he thought she was putting on a show, Salnick stopped fishing for a better quote.

Detective Brian Anderson talked about the search warrants, and about Dalia’s interview at the station with Detective Sheridan, which he was present for. On cross, Salnick tried once again to solicit an admission from law enforcement that Dalia was acting—terminology crucial to his defense, but here elicited at a heavy price. In a lengthy back-and-forth with one of Dalia’s inquisitors concerning her performance in the interrogation room, which should have been her finest hour, Salnick’s own sense of the dramatic failed him, pitching over into farce, and leaving him clutching his empty moral outrage like a worthless prop.

SALNICK: How many times do you remember her saying that she wanted to talk to her husband?

ANDERSON: Once or twice.

SALNICK: She is pretty emphatic about it though: “Mike, Mike, come here!”

ANDERSON: Yes.

SALNICK: You indicated that when you met her, and when you were in the room with her, she had a total lack of emotion—is that correct?

ANDERSON: That’s true.

SALNICK: As if she wasn’t upset about her husband being dead.

ANDERSON: Correct.

SALNICK: As if she didn’t care, in your opinion.

ANDERSON: Yes, that’s my opinion.

SALNICK: What if she knew her husband wasn’t really dead? Wouldn’t you expect her to have a total lack of emotion?

ANDERSON: If she knew that.

SALNICK: And you said that there were no tears.

ANDERSON: I didn’t see any tears.

SALNICK: In other words, it was sort of like acting, or a fake type of crying.

ANDERSON: A fake crying—yes.

SALNICK: How would she do that—can you explain to the jury?

ANDERSON: Like I said before: when someone goes through the motions and is making that crying noise and carrying on without tears.

Salnick asks him to demonstrate for the jury. In the courtroom, Dalia laughs at his attempt.

SALNICK: So she is sort of faking it, right?

ANDERSON: Yes.

SALNICK: Acting like she is crying.

ANDERSON: She was faking it.

SALNICK: Acting like she is crying.

ANDERSON: Faking it.

SALNICK: You don’t want to say the word acting, do you?

ANDERSON: Why wouldn’t I want to say that?

SALNICK: Well, was she acting like she was crying.

ANDERSON: She was faking like she was crying.

Salnick looks over at the jury dramatically.

SALNICK: I understand that, but I would like you to answer my question.

ANDERSON: I just did.

SALNICK: (emphatically raising his voice) Yes or no, sir: Was she acting like she was crying?

ANDERSON: Yes.

SALNICK: No further questions.

Crime Scene Technician Robin Eichorst testified next. I had asked him prior to trial to fingerprint the money Dalia gave to Mohamed, even though we both knew it was highly unlikely her prints would be found on it. In this CSI era, this is a question jurors want answered. Eichorst explained to the jury the procedure for fingerprinting evidence and why he was unable to retrieve any prints from the money. And Detective Brian McDeavitt had been located adjacent to Dalia when she collapsed into Sergeant Ranzie’s
arms, and had driven her to the station with Officer Llopis. He basically reiterated what Llopis said earlier.

I followed up with Sergeant Sheridan, who could remember only one other case like this in thirty-three years of law enforcement. For his part, Sheridan took responsibility for virtually every area of controversy raised by the defense. He owned the decision not to tape the conversation at Chili’s, weighing the failure of the Unitel wire against the disruption of removing one from Widy Jean’s vehicle, where it was already in place for the rendezvous at the CVS. None of his superiors oversaw his decisions in the case. It was his idea to bring the fake crime scene to
COPS
’ attention, as it was to conduct the interview with Dalia himself. “I do that every once in a while,” he claimed. He volunteered that he rarely tells suspects they are being taped in an interview room “because there is no expectation of privacy in a police station,” making his argument for Dalia to sign the
COPS
waiver all the more specious. When I asked him why he didn’t arrest Dalia after her meeting with the hit man, let alone the second she gave money to Mohamed, he said, “We still wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, to see if she was going to continue with it and to see her reaction.” When I raised the question why he didn’t alert Mike any earlier, since there was ostensibly a murder contract out on him, Sheridan answered, “I didn’t have a fear that he would be harmed by anyone else other than the person that she was planning on meeting with—that she thought was going to do the job.”