The Case Against Brian Spencer

Forty-five minutes later he called Fantasy Island again and ordered a fourth girl. When the service didn't send one, he ordered yet another—this one from a different outfit, Rainbow Escorts—who showed up at about 3:30 in the morning and found the door to Dalfo's condominium open. She told police she walked in and found no one home. She used Dalfo's phone to call Rainbow Escorts and report she had been stood up. Then she left.

And the next person known to have seen Michael Dalfo was a truck driver named Albert Brihn, who wasn't even looking for him.

Almost from the beginning, the investigation into Dalfo's death centered on the woman named Diane De Lena. Sheriff's investigators say they found matchbooks on Dalfo's coffee table with the names and numbers of several escort services printed on the backs, Fantasy Island among them. They found Fantasy Island's phone number written on a check, made out to cash, for $75. They also found a small quantity of cocaine.

Within a week, a detective from the sheriff's department got in touch with De Lena, who, in tape-recorded interviews, admitted that she had been with Dalfo on the night he was killed but said she had left him, healthy, sometime around midnight and gone to a West Palm hotel for her next appointment. She said she hadn't seen him again and, according to prosecutors, stuck to that story for almost five years.

It was not just De Lena, though, who caught the investigators' attention. At the time of the murder, Diane De Lena was living with a man who had once been a major league hockey player. His name was Brian Spencer, and he had spent more than eight years in the National Hockey League—with Toronto, the Islanders, Buffalo and Pittsburgh. He was an aggressive player without exceptional talent, scrambling to stay even, scrambling to stay in the league. A scrappy 5'11", 185-pound left wing, Spencer did not produce dazzling numbers but was still a favorite of the fans; he was even voted the most popular Islander by the team's booster club in 1973. By 1979, however, the popularity and the scrambling weren't enough, and he was sent by Pittsburgh to the minors, where he stayed a season and a half and then left the game. His marriage dissolved, and he got in his car and drove to Florida.

The assistant state attorney says the sheriff's department "knew" Spencer had done the actual shooting all along. Spencer and De Lena had lived in a trailer on Skees Road, at the far western edge of West Palm Beach. The place may not be officially designated as a swamp, but the mosquitoes come in clouds, the ground is wet all the time, and anything you step on that doesn't bite you or go "squish," crumbles.

Spencer must have liked the swamps. Two, maybe three years later, he began to build a house and a shop in Loxahatchee, which is officially a swamp, but he ran out of money and ended up building neither. He was good with his hands, he seemed to understand the way things worked and could fix them when they didn't. He met De Lena, in fact, when he did some repair work on her car.

During the time he and De Lena lived together, he worked as a mechanic for an electrical contracting company, Fischbach And Moore. His Florida friends say the mechanical work was enough, that it had replaced whatever he had in hockey. Spencer had loved the game and the life of a big league professional. "I loved the travel, the people; I loved it all," Spencer said. But when it was over, he wanted to leave it behind—the game, the people. And in the end, leaving was failure. "Even Gordie Howe, at 52, was seen as a failure," Spencer said.

"He used to talk about playing," said a friend named Dan Martinetti, "but he loved working with his hands—fixing equipment—more than hockey. He went from nothing to having everything, and then he went back to chopped bologna. But he didn't care about money, he still doesn't. You could give him $100,000—he'd look at it and then go spend it on tools and equipment."

Diane De Lena, now Diane De Lena Fialco, has a different story. Offered immunity and threatened with jail for contempt if she did not testify, she has told the state attorney that Spencer bragged constantly about his days in the NHL. She has said that he roughed her up. She draws a picture now of a frustrated and violent man and says she was afraid of him.