Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: The Widow of Woodland Hills

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Josh Mankiewicz and Blayne Alexander sit down to talk about Josh’s episode "The Widow of Woodland Hills.” In 2017, celebrity hairstylist Fabio Sementilli was stabbed to death in what appeared to be a home robbery. Blood left inside the victim’s beloved Porsche led detectives to uncover a killer and a torrid affair. Josh shares a podcast-exclusive clip from his interview with Fabio’s sister and tells Blayne what he learned about the special team of investigators who followed the two lovers suspected of the murder. Plus, they discuss Josh’s iconic accessory as they answer your questions from social media.Learn more about the SIS tactical surveillance unit: https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/video/learn-more-about-the-lapd-s-special-investigation-section-237160005724.If you have a question for Talking Dateline, send us an audio message on social @datelinenbc or leave us a voicemail at [phone].Listen to the full episode of “The Widow of Woodland Hills” on Apple: https://apple.co/43PyvARListen to the full episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2fWnwT6AQdvi0msB3JUp4i

Hi, everyone. It's Blaine Alexander, and today we are talking Dateline. I am so happy to be joined by the one, the only Josh Mankiewicz. Hi, Josh. Hi. Hello. How you doing? I am great. So we're talking about your episode, The Widow of Woodland Hills. If you haven't seen it, it's the episode right below this one on your Dateline podcast feed. So go there, listen to it, or stream it on Peacock, of course, and then come right back here.

Quick recap. When Hollywood hairstylist Fabio Cementelli was stabbed in his own backyard, investigators wondered if it was a burglary gone wrong. What they uncovered instead was an affair that turned deadly. For this Talking Dateline, we've got an extra clip from Josh's interview with Fabio's sister and more about how the murderer has torn this family apart. Okay, let's talk Dateline. Let's talk Dateline. You know, I think that this story is kind of what Talking Dateline is made for because

as we sit here recording, it's 3.36 p.m. Eastern Time on a Friday. We just got the verdict two hours ago? Something like that, yeah. This was kind of a breaking news bit for us. And it's great when that kind of thing can happen, when we can go on the air at nine o'clock on a Friday night and say, this happened today. That doesn't always happen that way. A lot of times we do stories that were adjudicated more than a couple of years before we went on the air. But when we're covering a trial

right down to the minute, it's great to be able to say, this is the latest news on this, the actual verdict. And I think it's a testament to just the dexterity of our producing team, of everyone who puts these shows on the air, because I mean, yes, to scramble and get that together and fill the holes that need to be filled. Yeah it takes a team it takes an effort. No no our I mean the Chet Najoshi, Jessica DeVera, Michelle Madigan, the producers who worked on this, Allison Orr the senior producer like these the people whose names you don't know at Dateline the people you don't see on TV are the big stars here. And as a result of the incredible organization of this team, we were completely

ready. Well, I love it. It's amazing to see. It's amazing to watch it and, you know, at least from the podcast side, be part of it for today. So let's jump into this episode, Josh. I think the first thing that if you watch Dateline, you work on Dateline, you always know, okay, they're going to look at the partner first, right? This one, you had me fooled for a minute because I'm listening to them talk about the marriage and the things she posted. And I'm like, no, this marriage is solid. So I was actually surprised when I heard about the affair. I actually did not see that coming. No, I mean, I think nobody did. You know, I have friends who lived in that part of Woodland

Hills and they knew the Semantilli family. Not very well, but they knew them. Both my friends described life over there as extremely happy. It was a house that seemed to be full of love, not full of anger, not full of distrust, which is why nobody, certainly nobody at first thought that Monica could have had anything to do with this because she seemed happy, he seemed happy. Nobody detected this. Nicole Soule-North So I mean, one of the big themes of this, of course, we hear about this a lot in Dateline, but betrayal. And I really think that that's a, it seems like that was certainly a running theme of the story. But when you talk about

the betrayal of, even if Monica was saying, you know, oh, he worked a lot or he was never home, it didn't seem like Fabio knew that that was an issue with them. I want to talk about Fabio though, because we really get a sense, and this is something we try and do in all of our Dateline episodes, but we really get a sense of who this guy was. I mean, he seemed like someone who loved his life. I was really struck by the fact that he had just sent this email about this epic 50th birthday trip that he was going to have. And then what was it the next day? He was killed. I mean, you know, it's a tragedy. I mean, this guy never made it to 50. And he, you

know, he, yeah, he got his start cutting hair in the basement. His sister was showing him how, you know, and the next thing you know, he's this big hairdresser. And the next thing you know after that, he's got this huge job with Wella and he's moving to Los Angeles. And, you know, that is, you know,

that's the kind of life people dream of. And he was living it. He just didn't live it long enough. This seems like a good time to juxtapose Fabio with one Robert Baker, who was Launica's lover. I mean, you just ran down the man's CV in his life. And I mean, he really was just an impressive kind of larger than life figure. And then you have this man who is a former porn star. He's a convicted sex offender, he wears a pleather jacket that everybody liked to talk about. And one can't help but wonder, like, how do you go from

married to this guy to a very deep steamy affair with that guy? We don't know how it started. There's so much yardage between I met this guy at the gym and I'm going to fool around with him because I'm bored my husband isn't around to I'm in love with that guy. I'm planning a life with him and I'm gonna have him stab my husband. I mean, it's incomprehensible. And here's one more thing that's incomprehensible. This is in some ways a familiar story on Dateline. Someone has an affair and the person you're having the affair with decides, I want them for myself, so I'm going to get rid of the partner. That certainly has happened before on Dateline.

Here's the part that hasn't happened before, or at least hasn't happened in the stories that I've done, is he takes the fall. You know, this guy knows how the criminal justice system operates. He's been in it before. She doesn't. But he goes in and says, I did it. And she didn't have anything to do with it. She didn't even know it was being done. That to me is very unusual. Why he did that?

I don't know. I would have loved to have asked him, like, what's going on there? Is that love? I mean, what is that? And he even said on the stand, they said, you still love her, right? He said, yes. And they said, do you hope that you'll still be together? And he even admitted, no, that's never going to happen. That's never going to happen, right? Like knew that it's not like they were going to go towards some sort of far off happy ending here.

No, he pled to the top count. That's it. He's going away, regardless of what happens to her. Yeah. I want to talk about the affair, but I also want to talk about how it came to light. The SIS, the Special Investigation Section. Did you know about this branch of LAPD? Yeah. It's not spoken of that often, but they are absolutely an elite unit. They're part of the robbery homicide division.

They've been around for a while and their specialty is surveilling like robbery crews, people who they think are going to knock over a bank or are going to go into somebody's house for a home invasion. And they think they know who it is, so they're following them. And then they need to be ready to move and like go to tactical right away if they see that the crime is going down. And you know, sometimes, you know, that ends up in an arrest right there. So this was an unremarkable case for for SIS because Monica and Baker were not in the process of committing any additional crimes. And they were also completely oblivious to the fact that they were being followed.

The guy that we interviewed, Rob Burks, an old friend of mine, I mean, I've known him for a while. And very recently he said to me, you know, what are you working on? And I said, oh, it's the, you know, the Semantilli case out in the valley. He's like, oh yeah, we followed her. I'm like, what?

I said, you didn't tell me that. He's like, I didn, we followed her. I'm like, what? I said, you didn't tell me that. He's like, I didn't know you were on it. So then very sort of late in the game, I asked him if he would talk about SIS's role in following them and sort of giving the primary investigators sort of the, you know, putting the pieces together so that they could understand Monica and Baker's relationship. I mean, that definitely filled in a lot of

blanks for investigators on this. I thought that it was one of the more interesting parts of the story, just kind of seeing how they do their job. Yeah. Well, you know, it's one of those assignments that people get within the LAPD and then they never want to leave. It's very kind of high tension and you have access to all this technology that other people don't have access to. I mean, you can follow people with drones and trackers and helicopters and all kinds of stuff. Interesting. Another thing that we saw in this episode was a lot of just different audio,

but the undercover audio. When Monica was being held with the cellmate, quote unquote, who was actually an undercover officer. What an assignment that is. Inside law enforcement, that's known as Perkins. That's from a, I think it's a Supreme Court decision, Perkins versus Illinois, about statements that are made to law enforcement. For example, if you're charged with a crime and you say, I want an attorney and I'm not talking to the police, and then I'm a cop and they put a jail uniform on me

and shove me in there and say to you, hey, you know, I just committed murder, Blaine, what did you do? And you start talking. That frequently will get thrown out because I am the police trying to interrogate you, even though you have said, I'm not talking to the police, which is your right under the Constitution. So Perkins, the thing they did with Monica

in this case is a way around that. And there are very specific rules for what you can and can't say to the person. So, you know, they ran a Perkins operation and it definitely produced some things, although it did not produce the admission that prosecutors were hoping for, which is Monica admitting, yeah, this was my plan. The only thing that came out of that was she admitted the affair and she gave some sense of how into Baker she was. To me, the smoking gun piece of audio in this, it's when Baker and Monica are in the patrol car and they've just been pulled over and arrested

when they were out driving in Monica's nice Mustang. And they put them both in the back of a police car. And a lot of police cars, a lot of black and whites are I think wired for sound and video. But they did get Monica whispering to Baker, which you saw in our episode, and she says, somebody must have talked. Okay, innocent people do not say somebody must have talked.

Innocent people say, what are we doing here? Why would they think we would have anything to do with this? This is insane, right? Somebody must have talked about what? That's the, yeah. That to me, that's the smoking gun here. Absolutely is.

And who did they tell? When we get back, Fabio and Monica's daughters chose to stand behind their mother even after she was accused of killing their father. We've got a clip of what Fabio's sister has to say about that decision. We learned a lot about Fabio from his son, Luigi. And obviously that's his son from a previous marriage. I think that's important to point out because you kind of certainly see the different position that Luigi had versus their two daughters

who shared with Monica. His relationship with Monica began as an affair. Fabio was married at the time, right? So she was having an affair with a married guy, which was him, right? There are people who will say, neither one of those people should trust each other because they're willing to have an affair with a married guy, which was him, right? There are people who will say neither one of those people should trust each other because they're willing to have an affair. And if they did it before, they will do it with you. And I know that that is necessarily

true because sometimes people meet the right person and they did seem extremely happy together. But yes, they began as an affair. And that's what ended the relationship with Luigi's mom. I think it's also worth pointing out, Fabio obviously chose divorce to kind of begin a new life with Monica. And some could say like she had the blueprint right there, right? And in front of her, I thought that it was interesting to dive into why she didn't choose divorce. You and I have had this conversation plenty of times on talking date line that yeah, it may suck. You may be embarrassed. You may get shunned by your family, but someone doesn't have to die. You don't have to spend the rest of your life in prison, right? How does that become the top choice?

Yeah. I mean, you'll be divorced like so many other people are in this country. And there should be no stigma about it. If relationships are not working, murder, it is the most astonishingly foolish, selfish, mistaken way to get out of a marriage. There is no worse way. I felt terribly for their two daughters in all of this. They stood by their mom, maintained that she was innocent of this whole thing. One testified for her.

I know that you asked Fabio's sister, Morella, what she thought about the kids supporting their mom. We have a clip of that. It was devastating. This has cut you off from your nieces. I know. I just look forward to the day that we could probably reconcile or be together again. It's not unusual for children to take the side of the surviving parent because nobody

wants to hear or say to themselves, you know, dad killed mom or mom killed dad. Yeah, but she had an affair. She brought this into the house. And I just feel like the sooner they face reality, the more complete they would be. That's a good example of something that we see all the time on Dateline, which is that, you know, kids frequently want to believe that the parent who lived and who is charged did not do it. And believe me, I get it. My heart just goes out to them, especially the daughter who found her father stabbed

to death on the patio. And the jury has decided Monica was responsible and the prosecutor is telling that she essentially orchestrated for her daughter to find her father bleeding out and stabbed to death. Because she wanted an alibi. It's a terrible, I mean, for a mother to do that to a child is, is something that's just fully beyond me. This we have talked about, which is you think you're going to take away the parent of your kids and they're just going to be fine? Yeah.

Like you'll be, they'll be okay because you're happy? It's nuts. It's just insane. I mean, it's a terrible thing to put your kids through. And you know, in that way, in that sense, Monica and Robert Baker have something else in common, which is they were both willing to expose someone they loved, to enmesh them in this plot.

Monica getting her daughter to find Fabio's body, and Baker getting his lifelong friend, Chris Austin, no criminal record, somebody who looked at him like an uncle and who trusted him and who clearly did not wanna be involved in this murder plot at the beginning, and getting him to do it, making him a murderer, now he's wrecked his life and his family's life and he's going away too.

I mean, it is astonishing display of selfishness and willingness to hurt people close to them for their own means, it's a terrible thing. The level of manipulation, yes, is insane. Let's talk about Chris Austin. I can't remember being as glued to the screen for a portion of a Dateline as I was when he was on the stand and describing what happened that day. I'm always stunned by just how almost easily someone can agree to be a henchman, if you will, or a sidekick in a murder, right? He had no stake in this, to do that and to be okay with playing a part in ending a life,

it's just shocking to me. I completely agree because it's pretty obvious he tried to sort of get out of doing it a couple of times, but when the chips were down, Baker kind of just, you know, said, we're doing this. And he lacked the strength at that moment to say, you may be doing it, but I'm not. He just didn't have the courage to act on it. He just didn't have it. The trial itself was full of a lot of kind of dramatic moments. This trial was long, two and a half months.

Yeah. Why was it so long? This was very long. A lot of people and a lot of story to tell. One of the great things about this is that you have the two murderers on the stand, each telling different stories. Baker's saying, I loved her then, I love her now, and I did the murder myself. Austin comes on, and he very sorrowfully, and I thought clearly, honestly, told the story of not just what happened, but about how wrenching it was for him

to have gone through that. The problem was, he couldn't testify firsthand to any of Monica's involvement. All of his connection with Monica was through what Baker said about with Monica was through what Baker said about what Monica wanted and what Baker wanted. And so that made these two completely divergent accounts of what happened in that backyard so important and the jury had to sort it out.

Hostie- Her reaction to the verdict, she was emotional. Host- She did seem stunned by it, I would say. And Fabio's family seemed relieved to the extent that a guilty verdict can be any kind of relief because as we said in the story, it doesn't turn the clock back. Yeah. Yeah. Up next, we're taking with the one and only Josh Mankiewicz to talk about our social questions, comments, thoughts from your episode. Yes.

We have some good ones. And there were a few. There were a few. So I think something that stood out to a lot of our viewers was the nickname Ravioli. That was Fabio's childhood nickname. We asked our viewers on Friday night what their nicknames were growing up. So Marie Wilson writes, Feetzy was her nickname because I kept growing so quickly out of my PJs. Cute. J.C. Delaney wrote Beans. I don't know why.

Beans, just beans. Did you have a nickname growing up, Josh? Oh, you know, I mean the usual Dweeb, Loser, President Truman, that was a popular one. President Truman? Well, he was president when I was growing up. No, I do not remember nicknames. But you know, everybody in my family is known as Mank, we all are, like our whole lives. Like my dad was, my grandfather was, my brother is known as Mank. We all are. Like our whole lives. Like my dad was, my grandfather was, my brother is, you know. That can be confusing like at family gatherings if someone just yelled out Mank. That's why we never have family gatherings. Maybe that's why.

I think mine, I don't know, Blaine. It doesn't lend itself to, you know what, when I was running track and cross country in high school, we put nicknames on the back of our shirts and mine was legs with two G's because I'm very tall and I'm all legs. So that was, you know. That's good. I take it. It was earned, right? That beats President Truman, I'll tell you that. It does. We have an audio question about the daughters from Lori Keeble Bailey. Let's listen. Did Monica's daughters still support her

up until the end of her guilty verdict, even with all the evidence against her? Dr. Craig Schuster The answer, Lori, and by the way, this continues our tradition of only people with three names being allowed to ask audio questions. The answer, Lori Keeble Bailey, is as far as I know, they believed her right up until the end and they believe her today. Whether that changes over time, I don't know. But, you know, as we said, I mean, you know, nobody wants to believe mom killed dad. Well, we're going to our next question continues the trend of three named audio questions.

This comes from Jessica McCourt Hughes, who has a question on how we report our cases. Hey, Josh, how hard is it to keep an open mind when reporting on a case where the facts so clearly point to guilt at a suspect? Jessica, thank you. First of all, for nearly every reporter I know, certainly Blaine included, it's not difficult to step back and look at any story objectively. Because there's usually something on both sides that makes you think, you know, this could be true. Even if there's a mountain of evidence, there's something on the other side that points towards innocence.

For example, there is no piece of audio anywhere in which Monica says, thanks for going along with my plan or I'm glad we did this or whatever. So no, it is not hard to keep an open mind. Here's an important question. One more audio question. Let's listen. Hey, Josh, Julie from Raleigh, North Carolina. Great episode on Friday, and I'm sure you're getting a lot of great questions. But I think the important one is about your pocket squares. Are those selected based on your mood or maybe the vibes of the case that you're working, possibly location?

Inquiring minds want to know. Thanks, Josh. Julie. I need to know what your other two names are. But well, good question. As we say in television when we don't quite know how to respond. I have a lot of pocket squares. I've been wearing them for about 40 years. I started in the early 80s. And they are kind of based on my mood at the moment. I should have some lie and say that it's like some kind of code as to like where I am in the country at the time or, you know, right? But it's not true. It's sort of, you know, what I think, you know, sometimes I find one, I think like, oh, I haven't worn that in a

while, then I want to get that one on the air. But a lot of times that has to do with sort of what shirt and tie I'm wearing because you don't want to go, you want to compliment those, not be completely crazy. You can't clash. Yeah. I wish I could say that there's rhyme or reason in my pocket squares, but there isn't. If you had to give a number, real quickly, how many pocket squares would you say you have?

250. Wow. Yeah, I know, it's crazy. We have a couple of questions about the sentences that everyone received. Cindy Wilson-Shepard is asking, but what sentence did the two guys get for killing him? Chris Austin got a deal. He hasn't been sentenced yet. His sentencing comes later in April, but he's looking at

something around 16 years. Robert Baker pleaded to the top count. He's life without parole. He's going away. Yeah. Okay. And then last question from K-Star Maddox. What's Monica's sentence? Never heard what it was. We don't know. Her sentencing is not until June, but she's looking at the same numbers as Robert Baker. We don't know. Josh Thank you. Thank you. And that's it for Talking Dateline this week. Remember, if you have any questions for us about stories or about Dateline, you can always reach us 24 seven on social media at Dateline NBC. And if you have a question for Talking Dateline,

you can leave it for us on our social media or in a voicemail. That number is 212-413-5252 for a chance to be featured on a future episode. I'm told that that number rings directly to a traveling Blackberry that has passed around amongst correspondents. Uh, maybe not. We will see you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.

Also make sure to check out Dateline True Crime Weekly. This week I will be in. I'm hosting for Andrea Canning while she's out on vacation for the week. So we've got some updates on some big cases that we've been following. We also have a very fascinating interview about a new book on a rather high profile crime down in Houston. So all of that is coming up on Dateline True Crime Weekly. Make sure you listen to that Thursday morning wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks so much for listening.