A Los Angeles woman found guilty of plotting her husband’s 2017 murder will spend the rest of her life behind bars.

District Attorney Nathan Hochman of Los Angeles County, on Monday, June 23, 2025, announced that Monica Sementilli, 53, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The punishment comes two months after a jury found her guilty of murder with special circumstance allegations that the killing was carried out for financial gain and lying in wait, plus one count of conspiracy to commit murder.

Prosecutors accused the mother of two of “orchestrating” the murder of her husband, renowned hairstylist Fabio Sementelli, 49, with her adult film star lover, Robert Louis Baker, 63, to “collect millions in life insurance benefits,” according to Hochman’s office.  

It’s a story filled with the Hollywood flair one might find in the Oxygen original series Real Murders of Los Angeles.

The case was also featured in an April 2025 episode on NBC’s Dateline, titled “The Widow of Woodland Hills.” In it, loved ones called the beloved and talented Mr. Sementilli an “inescapable phenomenon of Canadian hairdressing” who later moved his family to the United States.

About the murder of Fabio Sementilli

On January 23, 2017, prosecutors say Baker fatally stabbed Fabio Sementilli in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of L.A. at the behest of Monica Sementelli. Baker and an accomplice murdered the married man as he sat on his backyard patio. The perpetrators left the crime scene in the victim’s Porsche, which was later found abandoned.

The married couple’s teen daughter returned home to find her father dead, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.

The L.A.-based media outlet reported Baker was a convicted sex offender and former porn star who’d met Monica Sementilli as her racquetball coach at a West Hills gym. Although prosecutors reminded the court that Mrs. Sementilli stood to gain $1.6 million from her husband’s death, Baker maintained he killed out of love and not for financial gain.

“I murdered him because I wanted her,” Baker testified during Monica Sementilli’s 10-week trial.

Monica Sementilli’s defense said the only thing she was guilty of was having an adulterous affair with Baker and nothing more.

Baker previously pleaded guilty to charges of first-degree murder and was handed a life-without-parole sentence, according to the D.A.’s office.  

Victim’s sister calls Monica Sementilli a “demon”

Another defendant, former Oregon probation officer Chris Austin, 39, pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and faces up to 16 years in prison, according to CBS News. He admitted to the court that Monica Sementilli had left the door to the Woodland Hills residence open, allowing Baker and Austin to easily gain entry.

Austin claimed he “covered [Fabio Sementilli’s] eyes and stabbed him once” after “Baker covered his mouth and started stabbing him.”

Fabio Sementilli’s sister, Loretta Picillo, chastised Monica Sementelli ahead of sentencing, stating they “treated her like family,” according to ABC’s Los Angeles affiliate.

“That day, [Monica Sementilli] told Fabio she was going out to get dinner and left the front door unlocked so that her lover and accomplice could enter the home,” the sister told the court. “Only a demon could orchestrate the murder of a loving husband and savagely time it so her own daughter would come home to find her father’s lifeless body lying in a pool of blood.”

Sementilli’s life sentence

In handing down the most recent life sentence, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald Coen called Monica Sementilli a “mastermind,” saying Baker “did not have the intelligence to plan the brutal, well-thought-out slaughter,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

The judge called the crime an “execution of a human being” and Monica Sementilli the “prime mover,” CBS News reported.

Judge Coen rejected the defense’s bid to seek 25-to-life on the conspiracy charge instead of the more serious charge of murder, per the ABC affiliate.

“Monica Sementilli betrayed the person who loved and trusted her the most,” D.A. Hochman said Monday. “Her calculated scheme to profit from her husband’s death cost a kind and talented man his life and devastated a family.”

One of Monica Sementilli’s defense attorneys, Leonard Levine, said after sentencing that his client “continues to maintain that she did not commit this crime and is innocent,” per KABC-TV.