When a kill list was discovered on a Dark Web website advertising hitmen for hire, it was already too late for one target.
Stephen Allwine had grown tired of waiting for a hired killer to murder his wife Amy, a 43-year-old dog trainer and mother to a nine-year-old boy.
The church elder, from Minneapolis, had tried to pass off his wife’s death as a suicide, with a gunshot wound to her head.
But police were suspicious. The gun was on the wrong side of Amy’s body, there were bloody footprints through the house, Mr Allwine insisted on being accompanied by a lawyer for questioning
Upon inspecting his phone, police discovered he’d been having affairs and had sent messages and money to the Dark Web site in exchange for murder.
‘I am looking to hire you for a hit’, one message said. ‘What is the price, ideally making it look like an accident? For reasons that are too personal and would give away my identity, I need this b**** dead, so please help me. Thanks.’
Mr Allwine was sentenced to life without parole in 2018 for her murder.
The reason the hitman never delivered was because the entire site was a ruse to con money out of people buying hits, as Carl Miller, host of the ‘Kill List’ podcast, discovered.
Excuses followed payment, and demands for more money followed that, with the fraudsters often claiming their targets were too well protected for a single assassin to kill.
Man would-be clients kept coughing up, suggesting their intentions were genuine, even if the website’s were not.
But finding police too slow to act on his tip, Miller decided to take it upon himself to warn targets on the database a colleague had uncovered through hacking.
Usually they were the wives, girlfriends and ex-partners of men determined to take them out, Miller wrote for MailOnline.
That was the case for Elena, a woman in her 60s in Switzerland, who was ‘actually not really surprised’ by the news that someone with the username ‘Nordwand’ had paid £5,360 in Bitcoin to have her killed.
‘Can you please tell us what kind of accident do you think would be more OK?’, the site’s administrator Yura said in a message to Nordwand.
‘A car accident, or maybe robbery gone wrong? Is she suffering of any medical conditions that could help us do the job easier, maybe heart problems or something and we can use some untraceable drugs to make it look like natural death?’
Rather than dismissing Miller as delusional or a scammer like most of the people he called, Elena had an inkling who was behind the proposed hit.
She said: ‘I’m having an ugly divorce. It’s [been] going on for about three years now. There’s quite a lot of money involved, and my husband doesn’t want to pay it.’
When he was arrested, police discovered an apartment he secretly rented near her home, stocked with a sub-machine gun, AK47 rifle, pistols and a flick knife.
They also found pepper spray, a balaclava, rubber gloves, and a rubbish sack big enough for a body. He is now in prison.
Miller wrote: ‘I think it’s possible that by alerting Elena to her husband’s plans, my team and I saved her life. But I never set out to foil murder plots.’
The investigator managed to trace the website to Romania, where the FBI conducted raids on five addresses.
He said: ‘Those arrested appeared to be living lifestyles far more lavish than their day jobs could support. But as far as we know, there have been no prosecutions.’
In total, Miller disclosed 175 hits from the list to police, helping to secure 28 convictions and more than 150 years in prison sentences.
The website is still functioning.
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Fuente: https://ift.tt/koqWDv4
Publicado: October 16, 2024 at 09:05AM
