A Pekin woman’s attempt to solicit the murder of her husband will be spotlighted Jan. 23 on an episode of “Dateline NBC.”
The venerable newsmagazine will air a piece during the Jan. 23 episode examining how Allison Salinas, 48, tried to either kill her husband or find someone else to do it, leading to her arrest last year for solicitation of murder.
The episode will air at 8 p.m. Jan. 23 on WEEK-TV and will also be available for streaming on Peacock the next day.
Salinas was arrested last July after Pekin police investigated allegations made by her ex-boyfriend that she tried to kill her husband, either with his help or through other means. According to court documents obtained by the Journal Star from the Tazewell County Circuit Clerk’s Office, the ex-boyfriend contacted Pekin police in February 2024 to report the plot.
The investigation hit a dead end until July 9, 2025, when Salinas was implicated in a Facebook video discussing the plot. Detectives interviewed the man, who said that he and Salinas had dated as teenagers and were in a long-distance relationship since 2021.
Shortly after the pair had resumed their relationship, she learned of an inheritance he had received, leading to her trying to manipulate him for her benefit, prosecutors said.
Salinas then began discussing leaving her husband for him while trying to prevent splitting her assets. Discussion of murder began in late 2023, with the man telling Salinas he wasn’t interested in trying to help her kill him, according to court documents.
The man began recording his phone conversations with Salinas shortly after his initial contact with Pekin police. Salinas would continue asking the man if he had hired someone to kill her husband, which led to him lying and saying he had contacted the U.S. Secret Service about the murder plot.
The man would eventually create the Facebook post on July 9, trying to get attention onto the case. Pekin police received a pair of phone conversations between Salinas and the man, along with screenshots of text messages the two shared.
Murder-for-hire plot
Salinas told her ex-boyfriend that she could hire some old friends of his father to kill her husband, saying that she was counting on him to make that work. One text message chain from May 27, 2024, showed pictures of her husband with a message to the ex-boyfriend saying “Take care of this.”
Her follow-up message alleged that she and her husband had gotten into a dispute over a business they owned, with the text ending, “please make him go away.”
Two months later, Salinas sent her ex-boyfriend texts of a Google search she did, highlighting a response showing that a spouse could not be forced to testify against another in a criminal case.
A friend of the pair was also interviewed by Pekin police, who told them about a phone call she overheard in which they had discussed trying to find a “ghost” – a slang term for hitman – to try and kill her husband. She also told police Salinas considered putting shellfish in her husband’s food to cause an allergic reaction.
When police interviewed Salinas, she said that her ex-boyfriend wouldn’t know she was being serious about the plot and first learned about spousal immunity through an ex-husband, Delbert Mills, who was found guilty of killing his wife in Texas in 2003.
While Salinas and Mills had been married after the murder, she told Pekin police she had nothing to do with the murder of his ex-wife, saying she didn’t learn about her fate until after they had been married. She said Mills pushed for the wedding as a way to avoid having to testify in court about the killing.
Salinas would later admit to the text messages sent to her ex-boyfriend and said she understood the context. She was taken into custody and would plead guilty a few weeks later.
