Bruises, fights, a fall: Allister Adel’s rumored domestic violence ordeal

In the photo, Allister Adel faces a bathroom mirror, wrapped in a white towel with another twisted atop her head. Beads of water dot her shoulders.

Just under her collarbone is a purplish-black bruise. Her left hand aims her cell phone camera; her right showcases another bruise. Taped to the lower right corner of the mirror, there's a photo of Adel and her husband, David DeNitto, with their arms around their two young boys.

The bathroom selfie is one of several photos, recordings and texts that Adel emailed to a close friend in 2019 and 2020. Most were sent in the months leading up to Adel’s October 2019 appointment to be Maricopa County Attorney. One email was sent months after she was sworn in.

Labeled by Adel with names such as “more evidence collection” and “more pics for safekeeping,” the emails document red marks, bruises to her arms and allegedly abusive behavior by DeNitto.

Two emails contain recordings of Adel and her husband arguing. In one video, sent in March 2019, Adel seems to accuse her husband of throwing something at her. "That's why I have a wound now," she says. The sound of an unseen boy crying fills the room. "Mom, just stop fighting," he pleads.

The woman who received the emails shared them with Phoenix New Times on the condition of anonymity and that some of their contents — including the pictures Adel took of her bruises — not be published. Adel sent them to her, the woman said, as part of Adel’s contingency plan.

“Adel said she gave them to me in case something happened,” the friend told New Times.

Something did happen, several people close to Adel believe.

In April 2022, a little more than a month after resigning as county attorney under a cloud of scandal, Adel died of what a family spokesperson called “health complications." She was 45. Not long after, on Christmas Eve 2023, her widower snapped in a fit of anger, gunning down his girlfriend and her mother with an AR-15-style rifle before turning the gun on himself.

That tragedy forced Adel’s friends and co-workers to reassess the aggressive behavior they sometimes witnessed from DeNitto and the bruises that Adel would explain away as a result of roughhousing with her boys or as a side effect of the medication she was taking.

Over the past several months, multiple former employees of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office — including a member of Adel’s security team — have told New Times that they suspected DeNitto was mistreating Adel, though they said they lacked enough information to act at the time. Others expressed regret for not questioning her more about warning signs that now loom large in hindsight.

Adel came in as a Republican reformer, appointed as county attorney in 2019 to turn the page from her predecessor’s hard-line conservative policies. Less than three years later, she resigned, driven from office by a series of controversies and a rebellious staff who felt her high-profile health battles, with alcohol addiction and an eating disorder, were getting in the way of her job. If Adel suffered domestic abuse, it was a secret she kept hidden from most who knew her.

Looking back, friends and colleagues wondered about a mysterious 2020 fall that days later landed Adel in the hospital with a brain bleed the same night she won election to a full term as county attorney. They reexamined other signs of alleged abuse she’d been able to explain away. The county’s ultimate advocate for victims may have been a victim herself.

As much scrutiny as Adel faced in office, far more was happening behind the scenes. Only a select few caught a glimpse of her struggle. One of those was the friend to whom Adel documented evidence of her alleged abuse.

“I would always ask her, ‘Are the boys safe? Are you safe?’” that friend told New Times.

“Yes,” Adel would reply.

But was she?

Below the surface

When Adel was sworn in as Maricopa County Attorney on Oct. 3, 2019, DeNitto was there to cheer her on. A photo taken shortly afterward shows them arm-in-arm and all smiles. They appeared to be a driven, successful power couple.

Adel and DeNitto met while attending the University of Arizona in the late 1990s. She was a native of Dallas, where she attended the prestigious all-girls prep school that counts Swanee Hunt and Lisa Loeb among its alumnae. DeNitto was a Phoenix native and Brophy Preparatory Academy graduate. They married in 2002. Two years later, Adel graduated at the top of her class at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, joining the county attorney’s office as a fledgling prosecutor later that same year.

Adel was “very driven, very charismatic,” recalled Vince Goddard, who worked with Adel in the agency’s vehicular crimes bureau and later served as one of her division chiefs. In 2009, Adel gained notoriety for successfully prosecuting the drunk driver who killed Phoenix police officer Shane Figueroa in a car crash.

“She did this video of Shane’s life for the sentencing that I told Allister she should send to every Mothers Against Drunk Driving chapter,” said Goddard, who recently took a position as an assistant attorney general with the Texas Attorney General’s Office. “It was thrilling. I’ve never seen anything that good.”

In 2011, Adel moved on to positions with the state transportation and child services departments before serving as the executive director of the Maricopa County Bar Association starting in 2016. Then County Attorney Bill Montgomery was appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2019, and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors tapped Adel — over current County Attorney Rachel Mitchell and Mitchell’s GOP primary opponent, Gina Godbehere — to lead the office.

By then, DeNitto had established himself as a prosperous wealth-management consultant for Wells Fargo. The couple were Phoenix Country Club members and owned a five-bedroom home in the affluent Rancho Solano neighborhood. They were raising two boys, born a year apart in 2010 and 2011. Adel’s Facebook page shows a happy family of four, eating out, attending Diamondback games, making cupcakes and dressing up in “Ghostbusters” attire on Christmas Day.

But social media is hardly reflective of reality. Goddard said DeNitto had a temper he described as a “diffused anger,” while the friend who shared photos with New Times said he was “arrogant” and “very intense.” Both Adel and DeNitto drank — “Him more than her, actually,” Goddard said — though several people who knew the couple didn’t find that problematic at the time.

“I thought they were a happily married couple with two great kids,” said David Gonzales, former U.S. Marshal for Arizona who socialized with the pair, “and it seems any issues they had were behind closed doors.”

But in private, as the recordings and photos described above attest, Adel and DeNitto had a contentious relationship.

In one audio recording shared with New Times, Adel asked DeNitto if they should curb their drinking. “I’m the one making all the money, staying in this world,” he responded. “So unless you want that to stop, you’re gonna knock it off and focus on yourself and not me.” In an undated text conversation between the two, which Adel shared with her friend, she had a similarly hostile reaction to DeNitto’s suggestion that she “sober up.”

“Plz come rage on me,” she responded. “It just helps things, like the last three nights when you called me a cunt.”

Adel eventually did seek help for her drinking, checking herself into a local rehab facility after an intervention was staged by her family in August 2021, according to a friend of the family who spoke with New Times on the condition of anonymity. Adel later transferred to a clinic in California. But taking that step to solve her addiction issues wound up creating professional ones.

Then-Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone learned that she was running her office from rehab and threatened to inform the Board of Supervisors if she didn’t tell them herself and go public. On Sept. 10, Adel publicly revealed that she had sought treatment for anxiety that had led to an eating disorder and alcohol abuse.

“The work we do at this office is hard and I am not immune to its effects," she said in an email to county attorney’s office employees. After her death, and in the wake of evidence that DeNitto may have been physically abusive, a sentence in that message strikes the ear a bit differently.

“Those who are suffering in silence,” Adel wrote, “should be able to ask for help.”

‘He had a temper’

The professional scrutiny aimed at Adel did not fade.

She relapsed with drinking on more than one occasion after returning to the office and was sometimes absent from work without explanation. Ultimately, five division chiefs in her office — including Mitchell — called for Adel’s resignation in a February 2022 letter to Adel, the Board of Supervisors and the State Bar of Arizona.

Initially, Adel defied the demand, telling her division chiefs to go pound sand in a letter of her own. “The fact that I have admitted an alcohol abuse issue, sought treatment for it and experienced relapses, is not an ethical violation,” Adel wrote. If her top prosecutors thought she was incapable of doing the job, then they could resign.

Shortly after that, news broke that her office had dropped 180 misdemeanor cases because they were not filed on time. Adel tendered her resignation on March 21, 2022. Her battle with addiction was fodder for local pundits and media, but her alleged struggle with spousal abuse remained largely unknown.

But not completely unknown. Rudy Dominguez, a former Phoenix police officer who served on Adel’s three-person security detail, suspected that DeNitto was abusive toward Adel. Dominguez, who regularly drove Adel to work and to various public events, remembered seeing red finger marks on her arm one morning when he picked her up.

Dominguez asked Adel about the marks, which Adel claimed were from one of her sons. That explanation didn’t track to Dominguez. “I’ve been a cop long enough, and I’ve been involved in a lot of domestic violence investigations,” Dominguez said. “If a woman has marks on her arm like that, somebody held her pretty tight.” But he “didn’t want to embarrass her,” and he let the subject drop.

“But I wanted her to know that I’m paying attention,” Dominguez said.

Dominguez also saw flashes of DeNitto’s anger, usually directed at the couple’s boys. Once, as the boys climbed into the car while arguing with each other, DeNitto yelled at them to “Shut the fuck up and sit down.” Dominguez recalled, “I turned around and gave him the look.” After that, DeNitto addressed the boys in a reasonable tone.

“Allister was all embarrassed because he went from zero to a hundred for no reason,” Dominguez said. “So did he have a temper? Oh, yeah, he had a temper.”

Dominguez wasn’t the only one close to Adel who noticed troubling things. The close family friend who spoke to New Times also remembered seeing bruises on Adel’s arms that Adel said were caused by blood-thinning medication she took since suffering a heart attack several years earlier. Goddard also recalled seeing arm bruises as Adel campaigned for election in 2020. She would preemptively raise the subject before anyone questioned her.

Adel’s chief of staff, Candice Copple, now an associate vice president for educational outreach and student services at Arizona State University, also recalled Adel’s bruises, which Adel associated with “some health challenges that she had” or some sort of accident. “But I had no indication that there was anything going on at home,” she said.

At one point, Dominguez said he confronted Adel about his suspicions. “I said, ‘Boss, my job is to protect you when you’re with me. I’m not going to let anybody hurt you. Not in my presence. That includes your husband,’” Dominguez recalled telling her. He said Adel thanked him and made a stunning admission.

“She’s like, ‘I think I’m fine. He did hit me many years ago. But it hasn’t happened lately,’” Dominguez said.

Dominguez said Adel made the same admission to another member of the security team, all three of whom he said harbored concerns about Adel’s possible abuse. Dominguez said the security team even met with a county attorney’s office superior in early 2022 to ask what to do if DeNitto threatened Adel in their presence.

According to Dominguez, the supervisor agreed that they needed a plan to handle that scenario if it occurred, though one was never created. One county attorney’s office employee — who asked not to be identified — confirmed that the security detail suspected DeNitto was abusing Adel but said the team never had enough evidence to press the issue.

That former employee also had seen bruises on Adel’s arms. “She had excuses for all of them,” he said.

Dominguez said he hoped the supervisor, who was friendly with DeNitto, would warn DeNitto privately to watch his behavior. Adel also told a friend that, at one point, she and DeNitto sought counseling. But Dominguez said DeNitto’s behavior never changed.

“He was still a loud, obnoxious drunk, and he just thought he walked on water,” Dominguez said. “One, because he’s rich, and two, because his wife is the county attorney.”

‘It's certainty’

If Adel’s death caused her friends and colleagues to reconsider their memories of her, DeNitto’s demise cast things in a completely different shade.

On Christmas Eve 2023, 19 months after Adel’s death, DeNitto exploded in a drunken rage, using a semiautomatic rifle to fatally shoot his girlfriend, Maryalice Cash, and her mother, Cynthia Domini, before killing himself. According to the Phoenix Police Department’s incident report, DeNitto had been hosting a Christmas party when, as one of his sons later told police, “things started getting out of control.”

A drunken DeNitto got into an argument with Cash that devolved into DeNitto throwing glasses, spinning Cash “head first into a wall” and pointing a gun at one of Cash’s sons as he drove away from the house. When that son returned to help his mother and grandmother, he heard three shots ring out as he pulled up to the garage.

Police later found Cash and Domini dead on the floor of the garage, covered in blood. DeNitto lay nearby, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He had fired more than 20 rounds, according to the police report. The toxicology report showed DeNitto's blood alcohol concentration to be 0.266%.

Cash’s son told police that he’d never seen DeNitto act that way before, and it was “completely unlike him.” But one of DeNitto’s sons, whose name is redacted in the report, said his father drank “regularly” and that DeNitto and Cash would “start arguments, say horrible things to each other and push each other out of the way.”

DeNitto’s fatal rampage has led several of Adel’s friends and coworkers to reassess the fall that precipitated her election night hospitalization.

On election night, according to Dominguez, DeNitto ran out of the family home to tell him that Adel was convulsing and foaming at the mouth. Dominguez rushed inside to find Adel pale and unconscious. DeNitto called 911, and an ambulance took Adel to HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center. Dominguez followed them to the hospital, where Adel underwent emergency surgery to remove part of her skull. Adel later told news outlets that doctors did not know if she would survive.

In an interview with 12 News’ Brahm Resnik, Adel said the fall — which reportedly happened on Oct. 25, 2020 — was the result of a freak mishap.

"I was trying to plug in a light in my bedroom,” Adel said, “and I had my Zoom station set up right next to this light. I tripped on the bottom of the table, the leg there, and I fell and hit my head. At first I just thought, 'Ow, this kind of hurts.'”

However, multiple people who knew Adel no longer buy her explanation. Dominguez is one of them. “I believe (DeNitto) pushed her,” Dominguez told New Times. “And here’s why: You don’t get an injury in the back of your head by falling forward and tripping, you get an injury from getting pushed back and falling.”

Goddard also thinks DeNitto pushed Adel, though he admits that’s a conclusion drawn long after the fact and colored by DeNitto’s murder-suicide. But he remembers that Adel and DeNitto had different stories about the fall. Adel was “all over the place” but described the table she hit at length. DeNitto’s version “was completely different,” Goddard said.

“The dog had jumped on her, and she lost her footing and hit her head,” Goddard said, recalling DeNitto’s explanation. “It was a lot less detail.”

Following DeNitto’s violent death, Goddard and other friends and co-workers began to compare notes: drinking, bruises, antianxiety meds, political pressure, a suspicious fall, a husband with a temper. “It’s not reassessing,” Goddard said. “It’s certainty. You just can’t believe in coincidences like that.”

The friend to whom Adel sent evidence of her alleged abuse also believes DeNitto pushed her. She had her suspicions after Adel’s sudden death, but she said part of her still didn’t want to believe the worst of DeNitto. “But when the murder-suicide happened, that’s when I was like, ‘There’s no fucking way that she fell on her own,’” she said.

When asked what he thought caused Adel’s fall in 2020, the former MCAO employee who spoke to New Times simply replied, “Domestic abuse.” The Christmas Eve bloodletting was a shock, he said, but not a complete one.

“I think that potential was there for a long time,” he said, “even when Allister was alive.”

‘Looked like death’

So far, there is little evidence to suggest others in the county attorney’s office suspected that Adel was being abused by her husband. The agency has not responded to a request for a comment, and the evidence suggests that Adel largely managed to keep her alleged abuse a secret.

One reason for that, said the friend to whom Adel sent photos and recordings, is that Adel worried about what such a revelation would mean for her career.

“The one woman who’s in charge of prosecuting all sorts of violent crimes across the fourth-largest county in the U.S. couldn’t even control what was happening at home,” the friend said, predicting the hypothetical fallout. “It would politically take her down.”

The fear of being shamed is a natural one for victims, said Jenna Panas, the CEO of the Arizona Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence. She explained that victims stay in abusive relationships for a number of reasons: fear of separation from their children; fear of being killed; fear of being ostracized by family, friends and peers.

But it’s not surprising — or at least shouldn’t be — that someone in so lofty a law enforcement position could also experience domestic abuse. Panas said that data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics suggests one in four women and one in 10 men experience domestic violence during their lifetimes.

“It happens across all educational spectrums,” she said “It happens across all levels of professional accomplishment, and it happens across all incomes.”

The alleged abuse never became public, but Adel was politically taken down anyway. Though she instituted a number of reforms — including establishing a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, revamping the county’s diversion program to make it more accessible and allowing gay couples in-house representation in uncontested adoptions — Adel was weighed down by her controversies.

She caught the most flak for her office’s decision to charge 15 anti-police brutality demonstrators arrested in October 2020 with a variety of serious offenses while claiming they were members of a street gang. Local reporting, including from ABC 15’s Dave Biscobing, exposed that narrative as bogus.

The saga further put a target on Adel’s back. When her addiction issues resurfaced early in 2022, an Arizona Republic columnist criticized Adel for being “less than forthcoming” about her health, alcohol use and “other personal challenges.” The day her resignation took effect, protesters cheered outside her office.

Adel spent her last day as county attorney at the Mayo Clinic. Dominguez saw her there that day. “She looked like death already,” he said. “She was in bad shape.” He asked where her husband was. She rolled her eyes and told him that DeNitto dropped her off at the curb before going to work.

Dominguez said he helped Adel check in and accompanied her to her room, stepping outside when doctors came in to speak with her. When he returned, Adel was crying. She told him her liver and kidneys were shot and that doctors gave her three months to live.

“They said there’s no cure. I’m going to die,” Dominguez remembered her saying. “I can’t die, Rudy. I’ve got babies.”

Dominguez and Adel talked for a while longer, promising to reconnect when she was discharged. “But she never made it out,” Dominguez said. “That was the last time I saw her.”

Adel’s time as county attorney remains controversial. But the people who knew Adel want the public to know what she endured privately. She meant well, they say, despite her flaws and missteps. “She cared,” said the friend who became her confidant. “She really cared.” Copple expressed a similar sentiment. She remembered that her former boss liked to say, “I want to do the right thing for the right reason.”

The anonymous former colleague who spoke with New Times believes Adel was in a no-win situation. “She never had a chance,” he said. “She wanted to do the right thing and do good for people, and I think it just ended up hurting her.” He now has “a lot of regrets” about not pressing her more about his suspicion that she was being abused. “Would it have changed anything with her? Probably not,” he said, trailing off.

He sighed and reconsidered.

“Maybe,” he said, “she would have listened.”