The Case Against Brian Spencer

Two of the police officers involved would comment later, at the coroner's inquest, on the exceptional length of time it took Roy Spencer to fall.

On Nov. 27, 1984, a 25-year-old man named Leslie Raymond Fialco was married in a civil ceremony to Diane De Lena. According to prosecutor Baldwin, Fialco had no hint that his new wife had ever worked for an escort service or that she had been involved in a murder case then 2� years old. The couple settled into Palm Beach Shores and started a family. According to Baldwin, the marriage has produced two children.

Two years passed, and then one day at work Mrs. Fialco looked up from her desk and found herself being handed a subpoena. It had been a long time since the sheriff's deputies had questioned her about the Dalfo murder, and she did not realize at first what the subpoena was for.

When she walked into the state attorney's office on 3rd Street in West Palm Beach, however, and saw all the old, familiar faces, she broke into tears. According to the assistant state attorney, she cried, "I thought this was over."

Now, one of the many things that is still hazy about this case is exactly what leverage the sheriff's investigators and the state attorney's office used on Diane Fialco to get her to hand them Spencer. She was given "use" immunity, meaning she could not be prosecuted for the murder based on her own statement and would go to jail if she failed to testify, and perhaps that was leverage enough.

Lynne Baldwin has said, "The police knew they [De Lena and Spencer] did it all along, but they just couldn't prove it," and she has acknowledged that part of the deal to get Diane De Lena Fialco to testify was her promise to do what she could to shield Diane from publicity.

There is no question that the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department wanted Spencer for the Dalfo murder. Here is Lieut. Pat McCutcheon of the sheriff's detective division: "From the outset of the investigation, we looked at him as a suspect. But because of the lack of cooperation [from De Lena] we couldn't implicate him. A couple of times we thought she would testify, but she changed her mind. Maybe out of affection, maybe out of fear."

Fear, of course, can come from a lot of different directions, and in the end Diane Fialco, apparently afraid of something, gave the prosecutors what they wanted. The story she has told, in a sworn statement, goes like this:

On the night Dalfo is killed, she drives to his condominium sometime before midnight, leaving the keys in the car, and stays about an hour. She always leaves the keys in the ignition except when Spencer drives her to a job and waits—a precaution against having to leave without her purse.

While she is there, Dalfo is snorting a lot of cocaine and, according to Baldwin, finds himself impotent. He asks her to stay an extra hour and offers to write her a check.