BURNING down a home with people inside, forcing a heroin addiction, a gangland-style execution and a fatal stabbing made to look like a mugging gone wrong.
These were just a few of the chilling instructions discovered by British journalist Carl Miller on a dark web murder-for-hire site dubbed “Etsy for hitmen”.
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There ordinary people paid between £1,000 and £40,000 for a hit with graphic instructions about the killing methods, as well as one featuring a ‘bonus’ structure for fulfilling other sick demands.
Jealous love rivals, debt-ridden exes and bitter business foes were among the 175 people who took out hits according to Carl’s new podcast Kill List, from Wondery and Novel, which has reached number 1 on Apple Podcasts in the UK, US and Australia.
All was not as it seemed. Despite receiving more than £400,000, no murder was arranged by the hitmen marketplace.
But while it was all a scam, the targets were still in perilous danger.
In 2016, the body of Amy Allwine, 43, from Minnesota, US, was discovered in a pool of blood, after seemingly taking her own life with a handgun.
It later transpired her church elder husband Stephen, 43, drugged and murdered Amy, then staged a suicide, after discovering the hitman site he had used was a ruse.
Fearing history could repeat itself, Carl, 38, from London, and his team embarked on a four-year mission to warn others on the ‘Kill List’ after initially being dismissed as “mad” by police.
Eventually the FBI, the Metropolitan Police and Interpol would all be involved – so far 34 arrests and 28 convictions in 11 countries and prison sentences exceeding 150 years are the fruits of the investigation.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun, Carl – whose six-part podcast Kill List is out now – tells us: “I’ll never work on anything as urgent, scary or high stakes as this.
“To have to make decisions, which you know might literally be a matter of life and death, is a very heavy thing to do and it never gets lighter as you do it again and again over the years.
“It brought us face to face with the extremely grotesque, hidden desires people have but also the very resilient and very brave survivors.
“They are people like Jennifer, who was ordered to be kidnapped and forcibly addicted to heroin.
“It was the largest order at $50,000 (£40k) of Bitcoin. She went to every hearing to stare her husband down in court.”
£4.6million scam
The fake murder-for-hire sites falsely claimed to be operated by criminal organisations including the Chechen Mob, Russian Mafia, Cosa Nostra and Besa Mafia.
They left a breadcrumb trail explaining how to access their site on the dark web – a hidden part of the internet known for illegal activity including the sale of drugs, weapons and stolen information.
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On various murder-for-hire sites – including one named #1 Hitman Marketplace – individuals would share names, addresses, photos and social media profiles of their targets alongside descriptions of how they wanted them to be killed.
Carl learned of the ‘hits’ through Chris Monteiro, a British vigilante hacker, who discovered a “backdoor” into the site that allowed access to messages between the site and those soliciting murder.
He tells us the majority wanted the killings to “look like an accident” to avoid being suspects and many requested muggings gone wrong, car accidents, drug overdoses, stabbings and shootings.
One particular eerie order read: “Seeking house to be burned down with occupants inside. No survivors.”
We were trying to avoid them going into catatonic collapse, a panic attack or making them angry enough to take matters into their own hands
Carl Miller
Those seeking hits paid in Bitcoin – and Chris previously claimed in 2018 that the Romanian group believed to be behind it, known as Yura, had boasted about earning £4.6million from the scam.
After soliciting murder, messages would follow and those using the site would be extorted for increasing amounts of money.
‘I need this b**** dead’
In the case of Amy Allwine, Stephen – who used the codename ‘dogdayGod’online – furiously wrote “I need this b**** dead” in one post and complained multiple times about it not being carried out quickly enough.
Theories behind his motive include him wanting out of his marriage but feeling unable to divorce because he was a church elder. He had also messaged multiple women on affair site Ashley Madison and his wife’s life insurance policy was also worth £536,000.
He paid £10,000 for the hit and later secretly sent messages to Amy, his childhood sweetheart, threatening to harm to their family unless she killed herself.
Stephen was caught out because the gun was found in Amy’s left hand when she was right-handed as well as bloody footprint traces through the house and eventually a Bitcoin account used to pay ‘Yura’ linked to him.
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For Carl it was this case that highlighted the danger the people on the “Kill list’ were in, with him saying: “The real threats were coming from the people using the site.
“There was no shadowy hitman being sent out but we were really afraid in each and every case that the person using the site would seek more effective ways of causing the murder or doing it themselves like Stephen.”
Carl passed on details to the police, who at first disregarded him, before taking it more seriously. Ultimately, he decided he needed to take things into his own hands.
“It felt like a very lonely place,” he tell us. “The British police initially thought I was mad and did run mental health checks on me.
He was renting a secret room near to her flat in Zurich, which was full of guns, zip ties, bin liners and rubber gloves.
“Once they decided I wasn’t mad and did take it seriously, they didn’t laugh me out of the room, but they decided these cases around the world weren’t their problem.”
The cases were passed onto Interpol, who shared the information with local constabularies around the world who would decide whether to investigate or not.
Secret room with guns, zip-ties and bin liners
But Carl felt enough wasn’t being done so he set out to warn the potential victims that someone in their lives wanted them dead and crafted a script with a psychiatrist to break the news.
He said: “We were trying to avoid them going into catatonic collapse, a panic attack or making them angry enough to take matters into their own hands. We wanted to avoid that if we could.”
The first was Elena, from Zurich, Switzerland, who to his surprise “didn’t cry or scream or anything” but she refused to leave her home despite the imminent threat to her life.
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Carl recalled: “It was a really frenetic week, desperately trying to convince her to leave her home. Every day we we would see new messages on the site – the money went from $7,000 to $30,000. The guy was saying he wanted it done quickly.”
Police would arrest Elena’s ex-husband, who she claimed owed her large sums of money following a costly divorce and it appears was planning a terrifying execution.
He shuttered up his house… Every day he’d get out of his car ready to fight and ready to be shot in his garage.
Carl Miller
Carl says: “He was renting a secret room near to her flat in Zurich, which was full of guns, zip ties, bin liners and rubber gloves.
“It was quite clear that he was in some kind of active planning stage and seriously considering killing Elena himself.
“From that point on, I was in absolutely no doubt that the people using these sites were extremely dangerous.”
‘Ready to be shot’
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Some targets Carl called hung up on him. Others, to his surprise were pragmatic and asked questions, including Travis Harper, an air traffic controller, from Wisconsin, whose ex, Kelly Harper, put out a ‘hit’ on him.
Carl recalls: “The news haunted his every waking moment, all he thought about was all ways he could be killed.
“He shuttered up his house… Every day he’d get out of his car ready to fight and ready to be shot in his garage.”
In 2021, Harper, who Travis branded a “monster” who put him “through hell for six years”, was handed a six year sentence as part of a plea deal. They had been going through a contentious child custody battle.
The case that frightened Carl “more than any other” was Ronald Ilg, a celebrated neonatal doctor, from Washington, US, who was jailed for eight years in 2023.
He then took out a hit on his dog and tried to order himself to be beaten up on the site, to perhaps flesh out the alibi
Carl Miller
He paid £40,000 for his estranged wife ‘Jennifer’ to be kidnapped for a week, injected with heroin twice a day and then filmed injecting herself with the drug.
Ilg, who was branded “really egregious and evil” by a judge, devised a ‘bonus structure’, suggesting the attackers could break her father’s hands and kill her dog in a bid to get ‘Jennifer’ to stop divorce proceedings and return to him.
Other big cases included Microsoft engineer Christopher Pence, who tried to have the biological parents of his adopted children killed.
Other site users were Nelson Replogle, who wanted his wife killed on her way to a veterinary appointment, and Scott Quinn Berkett who tried to kill a lover after refusing to accept she had ended their relationship.
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Love triangle, fling obsessions & ‘Harry Brown’
There are also many cases in the UK, including Whitney Franks, 27, of Milton Keynes, who ordered a hit on her Sports Direct love rival Ruut Ruutna.
Franks was furious she had also been sleeping with their boss James Prest, a married dad-of-two, and took out a hit on the site.
“It was a love triangle,” Carl explains. “That was a quite a notable one because she initially got 12 years in prison for a £1,000 payment. One of the smallest payment yet with one of the heaviest sentences.”
There was also a married mum-of-five Helen Hewlett, 43, who paid £17,000 to have former colleague Paul Belton, 50, killed after becoming “obsessed” with him following a brief fling.
The former Linda McCartney factory worker, from Fakenham, Norfolk, noted it was “vital it looks like an accident” in the hit order and was jailed for seven and a half years in May 2023.
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And just two months ago, former lawyer Martin Ready was found guilty of trying to have Darren Harty, a rival in the legal industry, killed in a “gangland-style execution”.
Adopting the moniker “Harry Brown” – Michael Caine’s character in a 2009 film about a pensioner who takes the law into his own hands – he offered £5,000 for the killing that he said “should be a nice easy job” because the target was “extremely soft”.
Carl says there are many UK cases and several are still going through the courts. He remains appalled by one in Bath, featuring an unnamed woman whose brother-in-law took out a hit and had also fitted a secret camera in her bathroom.
He tells us the crook was convicted after “an extremely torturous two years” battling with the police and CPS – but even after his arrest tried to worm his way out.
Carl says: “He undertook an absolutely bizarre defence trying to claim that a gang had pressured him to take out the hit.
“He then took out a hit on his dog and tried to order himself to be beaten up on the site, to perhaps flesh out the alibi.”
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What is the dark web?
THE internet is made up of three different layers: the surface web, the deep web and the dark web.
The top layer, the surface web, are web pages that show up using search engines such as Google – like The Sun website that you’re looking at right now.
The deep web are web pages which search engines can’t access and are therefore hidden, accessed via passwords and authorisation.
Any time you log into an account you’re accessing deep web content that won’t show up on a search engine.
For example, work intranets, password-protected areas of online banking and draft blog posts are all stored on the deep web.
This means that if someone was to Google your name, your banking information or Amazon wishlist won’t show up in the results.
The dark web is a network of untraceable online activity and websites on the internet. They cannot be found using search engines and to access them you need to use specific software, configurations or have authorisation. They are used by lots of different people to keep their web activity hidden.
‘Thousands’ at risk
Carl’s multi-year investigation would catch the attention of the FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security, who in 2022, raided seven homes in Romania alongside local police.
They announced the arrest of five members and four witnesses allegedly connected to an organised criminal group believed to be behind the ‘Kill List’ websites.
Hours after the raid, Carl’s team discovered hundreds of posts had been removed and the loophole they used to get into the site had been closed, meaning they no longer had access to targets’ names.
A year later, reports emerged that 130 detectives from police forces in the UK and overseas had begun making arrest from evidence seized from the site.
After losing access, Carl admits he was “relieved” to no longer “have to carry the burden of the Kill List” but insists the story is “far from over”.
There are just hundreds upon hundreds of other people who haven’t been informed by any police service
Carl Miller, Kill List host
He adds: “There are still the targets that live with this every day and all of the people that don’t know they are on kill lists, but are, and that is slightly alarming.”
Despite the big arrests and ongoing court cases, the problem is far from over as Carl believes there are scores of rival sites that haven’t been investigated.
He also notes that 175 orders from the ‘Kill List’ sites he looked into were only those that included payments – there were 500, if not thousands more without.
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Of those they did work on, Carl says many haven’t been “properly prosecuted” which considering the seriousness is “mind boggling”.
He adds: “Also there are just hundreds upon hundreds of other people who haven’t been informed by any police service.
“They’ve been put onto the site, there might not have been a payment but someone still loaded a name, address and a face onto an assassination site – those people deserve to know.”
All six episodes of Kill List, from Wondery and Novel, are available now on Wondery+ and everywhere you get your podcasts.
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