A woman accused of hiring a hit man to murder her ex-husband, who is a prosecutor in Aspen, apparently felt he was responsible for the 20 months she spent locked up in an immigration detention center, court records show.
A confidential informant who set up a sting that led to the arrest of Elinor Dvir, 36, told police he asked her why she wanted her ex-husband, Richard Nedlin, a Pitkin County prosecutor, dead. She told him she had been "arrested by ‘INS’ [now called Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE] for importing diamonds from Israel” and “that is why she [was] pissed,” an arrest affidavit said. She later told a detective posing as a hit man that Nedlin “had taken her daughter and put her in an immigration jail” and that “he cleaned me out of everything, my clothes, and car” and she was “really terrified for her life. Elinor said he knew how to find her and he had sent investigators to her house.”
Reached at the district attorney’s office in Aspen on Tuesday, Nedlin declined comment. A spokeswoman for the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting the case, said Nedlin was present Monday when Dvir had her first court appearance, which was done over closed-circuit television.
Dvir was on an immigration hold from Dec. 16, 2005, to Sept. 11, 2007, an ICE official said, but she successfully petitioned her way out of detention when a judge agreed to grant her U.S. residency. A supervisor at the Denver Immigration Court, which is a division of the U.S. Justice Department, could not explain why Dvir was granted U.S. residency, saying the case had been sealed.
After she was released, Dvir allegedly began turning tricks for an escort service called Denver Metro VIP. She advertised her services under the name “Capri” on Craig’s List and other Internet sites that provide erotic listings. The police informant refers to her as “an Israeli hooker” in court records and he claimed the escort service later fired Dvir for not turning in all her receipts. A message left for Denver Metro VIP was not returned and its Web site page was “not available” on Tuesday. Other ads for “Capri,” matching Dvir’s description, were still up on Craig’s List, one of them pimping her as a “classy, exotic, petite, stunning princess serving only the gentlemen who wish for finer treatment” at a “luxury in-call location with all the amenities.”
Nedlin and Dvir were in an ongoing and “really dirty” custody dispute over their daughter, the arrest affidavit said. The girl is currently living with Nedlin and his current wife — all of whom live in a Victorian home in Aspen that Nedlin’s parents own. Dvir showed the undercover officer posing as a hit man a diagram of the house, pointing out where Nedlin’s bedroom is located and an elevator that leads to the upper portion of the house where the family lives, the affidavit said. She noted that the home should be easy to enter since many people in Aspen don’t lock their doors all that often, the affidavit continued.
Dvir allegedly told the undercover officer to make the murder look like an accident because if it looked like foul play, she would be the primary suspect.
“If the body disappeared that’s fine but I’d prefer it to look like an accident, like stuff his body with cocaine, like an overdose. It has to be done in a very smart way,” read an excerpt from a transcript of the undercover officer’s alleged conversation with her.
Dvir also said she “didn’t give a shit” whether Nedlin’s current wife, which the affidavit said is pregnant, was killed, the affidavit said. Dvir also haggled on the price, allegedly negotiating the bogus hit man down to $2,000.
She was arrested at her Denver home Sunday and remains in Jefferson County Jail on a $100,000 bond. She was booked for suspected solicitation of first-degree murder, although prosecutors haven’t yet decided what charges they will file. Her next court appearance is in Jefferson County at 10 a.m. Friday. At press time Tuesday, no attorney had entered an appearance on Dvir’s behalf.
hoop@aspendailynews.com
