Wife in deadly love triangle with racquetball coach and her hair mogul husband gets life sentence
The wife of a celebrity hairstylist will spend the rest of her life in prison for having her lover kill her husband in what was supposed to appear as a home invasion robbery gone wrong.
Monica Sementelli, 53, was sentenced to life without parole Monday for the brutal stabbing of her husband, Fabio Sementelli, 49, in their Woodland Hills home eight years ago. A jury in April convicted her of murder and conspiracy to commit murder for masterminding the slaying on their Woodland Hills deck, where one of their daughters would later find him wounded in a pool of blood.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald Coen, before pronouncing sentence, rejected a bid by Sementelli's legal team to get her sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Fabio Sementelli suffered multiple wounds to his face, jawline, neck, chest and thigh and the fact that his $8,000 Rolex watch was left on his wrist when he was killed left detectives puzzled.
Blood from the crime scene was soon linked to Robert Baker, a convicted sex offender and former porn star who began an affair with Monica Sementilli after serving as her racquetball coach at a West Hills fitness club. While prosecutors have painted Sementilli as the 'mastermind' behind the slaying, as she stood to gain $1.6 million in life insurance payouts, Baker took the stand during the 2 1/2-month trial and insisted he killed the hair mogul for love.
'I murdered him because I wanted her,' Baker testified during her trial. 'She had nothing to do with it.'
Baker was previously convicted of Fabio Sementilli's murder and also sentenced to life without parole.
During Sementilli's trial, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Beth Silverman presented video evidence that showed Monica Sementilli watching a live feed of the area shortly before the attack to ensure Baker had a clear path to her husband. Mitzi Roberts, a veteran homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, also testified that Sementilli and Baker exchanged 95 messages through an encrypted messaging app called Viber on the day of the killing and 180 messages the day before.
While Sementilli denied all wrongdoing and publicly grieved her husband — an executive at the hair care company Wella — she was involved in a torrid affair with Baker. The pair sexted during her husband's funeral, according to Silverman, who said the the new widow even sent nudes to Baker during the service in Toronto.
Baker's accomplice, Christopher Austin, also testified for the prosecution and insisted Baker told him Sementilli had directed her husband's murder. Austin, a former Oregon probation officer, said he never spoke to Monica directly, but Baker made clear his lover wanted her husband 'gone.'
'Everything he did, he did after he got a text message, which told me he was talking to her via text message.' Austin testified. 'I did not hear him talk to her on the phone ... but everything happened in sequence.'
Defense attorney Leonard Levine insisted, 'Adultery is not murder. ... Everything she did was to protect the affair, not to cover up the murder.' He called Baker a ``Svengali,'' saying that Sementilli made the ``biggest mistake of her life'' in becoming involved in an extramarital affair with him.
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