In the Dateline episode “Hit List,” Andrea Canning investigates the 2019 attempted murder of 32-year-old Isaiah Carvalho from Oceanside, Long Island, a suburb of New York City. The episode includes video footage from the morning when two Suffolk County detectives knocked on the door of his estranged wife, former NYPD cop Valerie Cincinelli (and mother of Carvalho’s five year old son), and delivered the (false) news that Carvalho had been murdered. See below.
The man in the room with Cincinelli was her former boyfriend John DiRubba, whom Valerie allegedly offered $7,000 to hire a hitman to kill her estranged husband. DiRubba went to the police and became an informant for the FBI when Cincinelli allegedly said she also wanted DiRubba’s 15-year-old daughter murdered.
In April 2021, murder-for-hire charges against Cincinelli were dropped and she pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. She has been held in custody since her arrest in 2019. In October 2021, Cincinelli was sentenced to four years in prison as part of her plea deal.
When Dateline’s Andrea Canning shared the photo above of her interviewing DiRubba, she wrote: “Meet the man at the center of one of the wildest cases I’ve ever covered!”
Dateline airs Fridays at 9 pm on ABC.
