For the first time, Dr. Oz goes behind bars to meet with Melisa Schonfield, a grandmother who was sentenced to prison for trying to hire a hitman to kill her daughter’s boyfriend. Find out what made her do it and what her daughter has to say.
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00:00 Today, I'm doing something I have never done before.
00:03 I'm going to this woman's prison in upstate New York
00:05 to talk with a woman who confessed to hiring a hitman
00:08 to kill her daughter's former boyfriend.
00:10 What made her do it?
00:11 And what is life like now for her and her family?
00:14 Today, I'm going behind bars.
00:16 The 2014 headlines were both eye-catching
00:21 and head-scratching.
00:23 Melissa Schoenfield, a 57-year-old wife,
00:26 mother, and grandmother accused of hiring a hitman
00:30 to murder the father of her young grandson.
00:34 Cops claimed the social worker,
00:35 who was married to a dentist at the time,
00:38 met an undercover detective at a local Walmart parking lot
00:41 and offered up $5,500 down payment,
00:45 half of the agreed-upon $11,000
00:47 to end the life of the man she says
00:50 was abusing her then 31-year-old daughter
00:53 and young grandchild.
00:55 Allegedly instructing the pretend hitman
00:58 to throw the father's body to the alligators.
01:01 Schoenfield was pulled over minutes
01:04 after leaving the lot and arrested,
01:07 leaving her daughter with regrets.
01:09 She wouldn't be where she is
01:10 if I didn't have a relationship with someone
01:15 who was not a safe choice.
01:19 In 2015, after pleading guilty
01:22 to second-degree attempted murder,
01:24 Schoenfield would be sentenced to five years in prison,
01:27 but she still remains.
01:29 No longer married and separated
01:32 from the daughter and grandchild she sought to protect.
01:34 I want my mom released.
01:37 I wanted her released from the very beginning.
01:40 My mom's not a bad person.
01:42 She kind of fought with her heart
01:44 and trusted the wrong people.
01:47 It's long overdue for her to come home.
01:49 I must admit that when I met Melissa in prison,
01:54 I was surprised.
01:55 She seems like a typical mom,
01:57 actually like a grandmother, which is what she is.
01:59 But when this story first broke, it shocked everyone,
02:02 especially those who knew the family.
02:04 Joining us now, investigative correspondent,
02:06 Marcia Gavacampo, who has covered this story extensively.
02:10 Can you describe the family at the time of Melissa's arrest?
02:13 Yeah, this family, Dr. Oz, is the last place
02:16 where you would expect to find a murder-for-hire plot.
02:19 The husband, a prominent dentist,
02:21 Melissa was a social worker
02:22 whose job it was to help people.
02:24 These were respected and well-liked members
02:26 of the community, and they had a beautiful family,
02:28 a grown daughter, a grandchild.
02:30 But clearly, there was this hidden, darker side
02:32 of alleged abuse that very few people knew about.
02:35 During my interview with her,
02:36 you're gonna hear it in a second,
02:38 she said that this could happen to anyone.
02:41 I want you to remember that.
02:42 Lisa Schoenfeld, there was one question
02:44 that continued to haunt me.
02:46 How did she end up here?
02:47 This is a first for me.
02:50 I've covered the events leading to crimes
02:52 and the aftermath, but I've never been inside a prison
02:56 to meet a criminal, to see what it's really like
02:59 to be in prison.
03:00 No cell phones allowed, no electronics,
03:02 just the minimal equipment for my crew.
03:04 Lisa, thank you for spending some time with me.
03:09 And I've gotta say that when you think of,
03:11 at least when I think of a person in prison
03:13 for hiring a hitman, you're not what I would imagine.
03:16 A grandmother's not what pops into your mind.
03:19 You must hear that, I would hope.
03:21 All the time.
03:22 The thought of taking somebody's life,
03:25 I still can't wrap my brain about where I was.
03:28 I just think it was total desperation.
03:30 And not being able to see that there were any other choices,
03:33 because I couldn't see any other choices.
03:35 So can I get into how this all came down?
03:37 My daughter wound up moving home
03:43 when her son was three months old.
03:47 The abusive situation just became over the top.
03:51 So she moved home Thanksgiving with her baby
03:54 and her two dogs, very stressful.
03:56 He didn't stop, he still continued to harass her.
04:00 And it never ended, it was like poking somebody,
04:02 you know, and the kids in the back seat,
04:04 they just keep, pop, pop, pop, pop.
04:05 And finally you just lose it,
04:07 and that's really what happened.
04:09 So this just became larger than life.
04:13 Did your daughter want to leave him?
04:15 Yes.
04:17 It just took time, we had to plan it,
04:19 we had to do this carefully.
04:20 What was your biggest fear for your daughter,
04:25 for your grandson?
04:26 I wasn't sleeping well at all.
04:27 I was terrified of what was going to happen to this baby.
04:32 And there's something special about grandparenting
04:35 that's very different than parenting.
04:36 And I vowed to keep him safe.
04:40 Why couldn't you call child services?
04:42 I mean, there's systems to protect children.
04:46 I feared that if child protective got involved,
04:49 that somehow or another he'd wind up in foster care.
04:52 And even though my daughter was doing nothing wrong,
04:54 that was my fear.
04:55 We called the police.
04:57 When we would call the police,
04:58 you know, he has to do something here.
05:01 He would be ever so polite that,
05:04 yes, yes, officer, I'm not gonna do this again.
05:08 I think you reach a point where you stop thinking,
05:14 and the desperation for safety,
05:17 you're not logical anymore.
05:21 That's what happens.
05:23 You're just, you make a huge mistake is what happens.
05:27 When was the first moment
05:28 you actually thought about hiring a hitman?
05:33 When my husband came into the bedroom
05:34 and said to me, "This has to end."
05:36 And what about that comment made you think about a hitman,
05:39 about killing this person?
05:41 It's the way he said, "End."
05:43 And I, it was enough.
05:48 There was no other way to make him stop
05:51 in my mind at that point.
05:53 It's subtle, but you hear it in her voice
05:59 as she tries to make sense of what went down.
06:01 I don't know how many of you have experienced this
06:03 in your lives.
06:03 You've made a bad mistake
06:05 and you try to figure out what, when you dissect it,
06:08 could explain it.
06:10 And I began to appreciate she had fear.
06:12 She obviously had not been taken care of
06:14 when she was a young woman
06:16 and she wanted to be a better mother
06:17 than she thought she had.
06:19 And it led to an inexcusable error.
06:24 Yeah.
06:25 So Melissa had never been in trouble before,
06:27 just so you're all clear on this to our knowledge.
06:29 And you've covered these crime stories for years.
06:32 You've dealt with a lot of criminals.
06:33 How common is it that someone who's never crossed
06:36 the border between honesty and illegal activity
06:40 does something like this?
06:41 How does someone like her do something like this?
06:44 Yeah.
06:44 When we see crimes like this,
06:45 they're almost always either a crime of passion
06:48 or a crime of protection.
06:50 Someone who has no criminal history,
06:52 someone who is not a criminal,
06:54 is doing something like this
06:55 because they feel they have been pushed to the edge.
06:57 And it's interesting because in the interview,
06:59 you hear her say she thought her grandson
07:00 would go to foster care.
07:02 This was a woman who worked as a social worker.
07:04 So you've got to imagine,
07:05 she's seen these things happen over and over again
07:07 and she's thinking, could this happen to my family?
07:09 She seemed to be committed at any cost
07:11 to protect her daughter and her grandson
07:14 from these allegations of abuse by the grandson's father,
07:18 her daughter's former boyfriend.
07:19 And this was not the first time
07:21 he faced accusations of abuse.
07:22 He faced similar allegations from a former girlfriend.
07:25 Now we should point that he has vehemently denied
07:27 any allegations of abuse.
07:29 He's never faced any charges in this case.
07:31 But it does seem that Melissa felt like
07:33 this was her only way to protect her family.
07:36 I just want to point something out.
07:37 There have never been any charges filed
07:39 against the boyfriend, but this is not really about him.
07:40 It's about the fact that she felt,
07:42 and she's inside the system,
07:43 she felt the system wouldn't protect her
07:46 and her daughter, so she had to do it.
07:48 So what does the man who Melissa wanted killed
07:51 say about all this?
07:52 - Yeah, he said he was shocked by all of this.
07:54 He had no idea why she would want to have him killed.
07:57 He said he hadn't even spoken to her for years,
08:00 so this really caught him off guard.
08:01 And he said today that he pities her.
08:03 - How did you find this hit man,
08:07 this person you were gonna hire?
08:09 - I'm a therapist, I was a therapist.
08:14 And there was somebody who was thrown out
08:19 of a government agency saying that he had bipolar disorder
08:23 and he had a bunch of weapons
08:26 that he wasn't supposed to have.
08:27 And in time we learned that he did not have bipolar disorder.
08:31 In fact, it was a seizure disorder.
08:32 So he was grateful to be able to get off
08:34 a lot of the meds he was on.
08:35 He said, "If there's anything you ever need, just ask me."
08:39 So I didn't know anybody to do this.
08:42 How do you find somebody?
08:43 I have no idea what you do.
08:46 So I called him and I asked.
08:47 I explained the situation.
08:48 He hung up saying that, "You know you're on a phone
08:52 "and I can't help you."
08:54 10 minutes later, I don't remember if it was Facebook
08:56 or a text message he sent me
08:59 to give me time to work on this.
09:01 In the 10 minutes that it took him to write that,
09:03 he'd already called the police.
09:05 And the police obviously said,
09:08 "Let's see where she's gonna go with it."
09:09 Her former patient connected her with a hitman named Jay,
09:13 who agreed to do the hit for $11,000.
09:16 They arranged to meet to exchange the down payment.
09:19 We went to the Walmart parking lot.
09:21 He came, he found my car, got in,
09:23 I handed him the money and I said to him,
09:25 "I wiped the money down."
09:29 He took the money.
09:30 He looked at me and said,
09:32 "You sure you wanna go through with this?"
09:34 Shook my hand, left my car.
09:37 And I pulled out and I thought to myself,
09:43 "I can't do this.
09:45 "Who are you?"
09:47 And I stopped, I braked and I thought,
09:50 "I can't stop this."
09:52 - You made a comment to the undercover officer, the hitman.
09:56 When he asked what to do with the body,
09:59 you said, "Throw his body to the alligators."
10:02 - Yeah, it's come back to haunt me in many, many ways.
10:04 I said to him, "What are you going to do with the body?"
10:08 And in hindsight, body, I'm going down here,
10:11 no matter what, once I said body.
10:12 And he looked at me really puzzled and I said,
10:16 "You're gonna be in Florida, throw it to the gators."
10:18 Clearly that wasn't a very funny comment at the time.
10:23 And that's the comment, unfortunately,
10:24 that went international.
10:28 Sadly, my grandson thinks that my favorite animal
10:33 is a alligator.
10:35 - As you're driving away and you looked
10:36 in the rear view mirror and you saw those cop cars
10:40 with their lights on coming, what were you thinking?
10:44 - Believe it or not, I actually thought
10:47 they were going after somebody else.
10:49 So I pull over for them to pass, but they don't pass me.
10:52 So I pull into the Ramada parking lot.
10:56 And what's troublesome is I wasn't nervous.
10:59 I rolled down the window and there were several officers
11:03 there and the female officer said to me,
11:05 "We believe a crime was about to be committed."
11:08 I thought, nobody knows, how could they know?
11:10 - Did anyone try to stop you from doing this
11:13 who knew that you were up to it?
11:15 - No.
11:16 - The story in the press is that your husband
11:18 did not know anything about this.
11:20 - Correct.
11:21 - Did he?
11:22 - You'll have to ask him.
11:25 - Have to ask him.
11:26 Lisa was very careful when talking about her ex-husband.
11:29 But there are reports that Lisa has said in the past
11:31 that her husband did know that she was involved.
11:35 - We have heard those reports, but he has denied
11:37 having any knowledge about this plot.
11:39 And in fact, he's never faced any charges related to this.
11:42 And it's now her former husband.
11:44 - To me, as I spoke to her, it's just another example
11:46 where she would take the hit for the family.
11:49 She was always putting herself between her family and harm.
11:52 She'll be the one who makes the deal with the hitman.
11:55 She'll procure the money somehow.
11:56 She'll protect her daughter against issues
11:58 that she was having in her life.
12:00 Some feel Melissa's five year sentence was harsh.
12:04 She could have gotten up to 25 years, just to be clear.
12:06 That's the maximum for this.
12:07 What are your thoughts about the sentence?
12:08 - Yeah, well, let's keep in mind, like you said,
12:09 there are a lot of women who right now
12:11 are serving much harsher sentences for the exact same crime.
12:15 Murder for hire is no small thing.
12:17 So she could be serving 25 to life.
12:20 But the sentence does raise a really interesting question
12:22 and an interesting debate.
12:23 Because a lot of people see her as a woman
12:26 who was pushed to the edge,
12:27 who just wanted to protect her family.
12:29 But on the other side, she tried to have a man killed.
12:32 So ultimately, I think the important question is,
12:34 is she a danger to the community and to society?
12:37 I think we can all agree that she is not.
12:40 Thank you for watching.
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