DATELINE Hit List – Cop Valerie Cincinelli tried to get her boyfriend to kill her husband

John DiRubba says he fell in love at first sight with NYPD police officer Valerie Cincinelli, who was 20 years his junior. The fact that she was married didn’t bother him because Valerie told John her husband Isaiah Carvalho was a bad guy. Things escalated to devastating levels when Valerie tried to convince John DiRubbia to hire a hitman to kill her husband.

John, who appears on tonight’s Dateline, now thinks Isaiah is a good guy and is shocked by what happened. He said he had no idea Valerie was capable of doing this. In 2019, Valerie offered John $7,000 to hire a hitman to kill her husband when their marriage fell apart and the divorce proceedings got ugly. When Valerie also wanted to hire a hit on John’s 15-year-old daughter, he turned her in. The FBI then organized a sting operation that required Isaiah to play dead to convince Valerie that the murder had occurred.

In a 2019 interview with ABC News, Isaiah revealed that he sat in his car with glass all over the car while Isaiah hunched over his steering wheel.

Isaiah is thankfully alive, but because of this experience, he lives in fear of his life. “I look over my shoulder constantly. There’s not a day that I don’t go by that I’m not afraid for my life,” he during an early 2022 episode of Inside Edition. “I thought I was marrying someone who swore to protect and serve … a cop … Instead, I got a crazed lunatic,” Carvalho added.

Valerie maintains that she is innocent of a murder-for-hire plot, but has pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for deleting images off of her iPhone. The plea deal she accepted dropped the two charges of murder-for-hire. She was sentenced to four years in prison in 2021.