Murder Plot Mirrors Best-Seller

In a scheme that was all but ripped from the pages of the thriller “Presumed Innocent,” a man and his girlfriend are accused of plotting to murder his wife and plant someone else’s semen and blood at the scene.

Unlike in the book, the alleged plot was thwarted before anyone was killed.

Daniel D. Hynes, 43, and Monica W. Fritz, 33, were arrested Dec. 20 and charged with conspiracy to commit murder after police were tipped off that someone had been asked to donate the blood and semen for the scheme.

They were jailed on $250,000 bail.

“The murder plot had elements of the film ‘Presumed Innocent,’ with overtures of the Nicole Simpson-Ron Goldman murder investigation,” Ocean County Prosecutor Daniel J. Carluccio said in a statement.

In Scott Turow’s best-selling 1987 book, a prosecutor’s wife kills her husband’s ex-mistress, then leaves a glass bearing his fingerprints near the dead woman and plants his semen inside her. The prosecutor is tried and acquitted. The book was made into a 1990 movie starring Harrison Ford.

In this case, the intended victim was Hynes’ 43-year-old wife, Linda, who was divorcing him after 24 years of marriage. She had gotten a protection order against him in May and had accused him of slapping and kicking her numerous times.

Hynes and Fritz allegedly planned to do the killing themselves sometime before Christmas. Prosecutors won’t say exactly how or when.

The person allegedly approached about providing the two with semen and blood told another person, and the information eventually reached a police officer, Carluccio said.

The two face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.