HUNTER: Sementilli murder an echo of 1944 film noir classic?
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In Billy Wilder’s seminal 1944 film noir gold-standard Double Indemnity, a femme fatale decides to take her wealthy hubby off the board.
Enter the sucker: Everyman Fred MacMurray as insurance salesman Walter Neff.
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Neff succumbs to the lusty charms of Barbara Stanwyck’s character, Phyllis Dietrichson, and the duo concoct a scheme to get rich and ride off into the sunset together.
When the old boy croaks, the big insurance payoff will follow.
But to reach that nirvana, murder will have to be on the menu. And it will be served cold.
The trope of a scheming wife and the rube who does her bidding is as old as the Bible.
Double Indemnity was set in southern California.
And so was the vicious murder of beloved hairstylist Fabio Sementilli.
The 49-year-old Toronto native was stabbed to death on the patio of his home in Woodland Hills, Calif., on Jan. 23, 2017.
It was his daughter who found his body.
And like in Double Indemnity, there was a pile of insurance money in the offing.
Now, the Toronto Sun has learned that the first-degree murder trial for his accused killers will begin in 2020 sometime from April to June.
Accused are his widow, Monica Crescentini, 47, and her boyfriend, Robert Louis Baker. A third suspect who allegedly assisted in the cold-blooded murder has never been found.
With the death penalty off the table, neither the suspected black widow nor her beau has any incentive to drop a dime on the mystery man.
None of the charges have been proven in court.
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The prosecution’s theory is that Crescentini wanted her husband out of the picture for love, sex and a $1.6-million life insurance policy.
Details in the case have offered a smorgasbord of the smutty and the lurid.
According to court documents, Crescentini and Baker had been carrying on a clandestine affair for 18 months prior to the slaying.
In the days before the murder, cops say the twosome sent hundreds of texts back and forth.
And after Sementilli was dead, his widow began pestering police about her big insurance payout.
Baker the lothario — who also allegedly had a string of women on the go — even showed up to the Wella executive’s wake.
The pair then fled to Las Vegas, where they partied and had sex in a hotel room. Naturally, the defence wanted the dirty details torpedoed. Fair trial and all that. But Judge Ronald Coen gave the prosecution the green light on the salacious bits.
The merry widow will have a tough road ahead in the character department. The prosecution has characterized Crescentini as vain, manipulative, sex-crazed, and greedy.
In Double Indemnity, the lovers’ sinister plot eventually goes sideways.
The problem is insurance investigator and Walter Neff’s mentor, Barton Keyes, played by tough guy Edward G. Robinson in an acting tour de force.
“Murder’s never perfect. Always comes apart sooner or later, and when two people are involved it’s usually sooner,” a fired-up Robinson tells MacMurray.
“They’ve committed a murder! And it’s not like taking a trolley ride together where they can get off at different stops.”
He then added: “They’re stuck with each other and they got to ride all the way to the end of the line and it’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery.”
Now, will life imitate art?
@HunterTOSun
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