The Latest: Tipster says abuse claim preceded murder plot

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – The Latest on the retrial of Dalia Dippolito, a Florida woman accused of trying to hire a hit man to kill her husband, in a case that was the focus of a special episode of the “Cops” TV show. (all times local):

4:15 p.m.

Lawyers for a Florida woman accused of trying to have her husband killed in a case made famous on the “Cops” TV show have called a man described as her former lover as a defence witness.

Mohammed Shihadeh is also the undercover informant who first told police that Dalia Dippolito told him she wanted someone to kill her convicted con-man husband, Michael Dippolito.

But Shihadeh has testified he wanted police to help her, not build a case against her. That’s because he says she told him her husband was abusing her, and her only way out was to die or have him killed.

Shihadeh says detectives pressured him to put her in touch with an officer posing as a hit-man, and that he didn’t believe she would go through with it.

But under cross-examination, Shihadeh agreed that his belief was wrong.

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1 p.m.

Millions of people have seen a secretly recorded video of Dalia Dippolito telling an undercover police officer she was “5,000 per cent sure” about hiring him to kill her husband.

At her retrial on Thursday, six Florida jurors who said they had never seen the 2009 video watched Dippolito tell Boynton Beach Detective Widy Jean that she would pay him $7,000 to kill Michael Dippolito in a staged robbery.

The 34-year-old Dippolito has testified at her previous trial and in court hearings that she was only acting the part of a murderous wife in hopes of getting her own reality TV show.

Her first jury didn’t buy that defence, but an appellate court threw out her 2011 conviction and 20-year sentence for attempted first-degree solicitation of murder. She faces the same sentence if convicted again.