The Case Against Brian Spencer

Staying beyond the agreed time and accepting checks, however, are both against Fantasy Island rules, and she starts to leave. Dalfo stops her, writes the check anyway, payable to cash, and puts it in her hand. She gives it back. He drops the check on the coffee table, angry now, and she walks out the door. She is afraid.

She drives from Palm Beach Gardens back to the trailer on Skees Road, but Spencer isn't home. She goes over to the Banana Boat—a bar where Spencer likes to drink—and tells him what has happened at Dalfo's. She also tells him that she is afraid that Dalfo may have followed her home. She then drives to the hotel in West Palm and sees another customer.

An hour or so later she meets Spencer at home, and he gets upset and wants to go to Dalfo's place. Diane De Lena wants to forget the whole thing, but Spencer won't. She is afraid of Spencer—"Spencer had hit his women," Lynne Baldwin says. "Another woman he knew showed up for work with her face bruised. She said she had been in a car accident. Her boss was suspicious." De Lena thinks he only wants to talk, or at the outside, to rough Dalfo up. She does not think Spencer wants to kill him.

So they head over to Dalfo's. De Lena's plan now is to tell Spencer she can't remember which condominium Dalfo lives in. As all the condominiums at PGA National look the same, this is not a bad plan. There is, however, a built-in flaw: Because the condominiums do look alike, it is Dalfo's habit to wait outside his place for visitors from the escort service, and so when Spencer and De Lena arrive, Michael Dalfo is standing out front in his black bikini swimsuit and his gold chain, waiting for his fourth "escort" of the evening.

Spencer asks Dalfo to get into the car. (When Diane De Lena told this version of the story to the police, she did not remember Spencer's using a gun. In a more recent version, Baldwin says, that detail came back to her.) At any rate, Dalfo, Spencer and De Lena drive out of PGA National to PGA Boulevard, turn west and travel six-tenths of a mile and then come to a white sand road. There is a sign at the junction: PGA WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANT, SEACOAST UTILITIES.

Four hundred feet up the road, Spencer stops at a spot where the trees recede from the road, creating a weedy clearing. A sign says NO DUMPING.

Spencer tells De Lena to get out of the car. Spencer and Dalfo begin to argue and Dalfo says, "If you touch me, I'll call my lawyer." This infuriates Spencer, and the arguing gets louder. Diane De Lena, who is afraid, begins to run up the road, in the direction of PGA Boulevard. Dalfo is alive when she leaves. She runs, but she never hears any shots. And so when Spencer picks her up in the car a few minutes later, she assumes he has beaten Dalfo up and left him.

They drive back to the trailer. According to Baldwin, Spencer then tells De Lena to take off all her clothes. She does that, gives them to Spencer, and never sees them again. She believes they were burned or buried.

A week later, the sheriff's department is asking her questions about Michael Dalfo's murder. This, of course, scares Diane De Lena. More than Michael Dalfo scared her, more than Spencer used to scare her before Dalfo was killed. She tells the sheriff's investigators nothing except that she was with Dalfo the night he was killed.

And while she will not turn Brian Spencer in, says Baldwin, De Lena now makes plans to leave him. She does not want him to think it is because of the Dalfo murder, however, so she distances herself from him gradually over the next several months, and then she moves out.