#murderplot

A dark web cybercriminal who advertised hitmen for hire was so spooked by a request from a young Washington state woman—who wished her married lover’s wife dead—that he gave her up to the feds.

That’s according to an FBI search warrant affidavit unsealed this week, which details a surreal plot originating with a chance encounter at an event hosted by Landmark, a self-help group with roots in the 1970s, which has been labeled as a sort of “cult-lite” by some. The case centers on a philandering husband and his jealous lover, who planned on using her college money to have the man’s wife murdered.

Far from being disturbed by the revelation, when the man—identified in court filings solely as “J.M.”—found out about the plot against his wife, he “saw the behavior as an indication of her dedication and affection for him,” according to the affidavit.

The unsealed warrant—which The Daily Beast has redacted to withhold the suspect’s identify as she has not yet been formally charged—targets email addresses that the young lover used to register a Facebook account and talk with J.M., and contact financial institutions and a cashier at her community college. A source with firsthand knowledge of the case stated the investigation has been delayed as a result of COVID-19, however stated it’s still ongoing.

The alleged plot to have J.M.’s wife killed first came to the FBI’s attention on Feb. 12, 2020, when the bureau’s National Threat Operations Center obtained an anonymous tip from a ProtonMail account by way of an IP address associated with a VPN in Phoenix, Arizona. The tipster identified themselves as the administrator of a website on the dark web that provided contract killings for a price. About a week earlier, a potential customer transferred $5,000 in Bitcoin to the service to have a hit carried out within the Seattle area, the informant claimed.

“Just kill her ASAP. I don’t care how just make sure she’s dead. I’d prefer if you shoot her in the head,” the client instructed, before adding that the victim worked for a corporation in Bellevue. She added, “I don’t know if that helps you in someway. She has a 3 year old son that she picks him up at 5 P.M. so she normally will get home around 5ish. Please don’t do anything to the boy. That’s all. Thanks[.] Send me a proof when the job’s carried out.”

The tipster informed federal agents that their hitman website was actually only a Bitcoin rip-off, and that “no actual murders had been committed” on behalf of anybody.

“I feel that all targets which were paid for are in danger,” the con artist with a conscience wrote the FBI. “Customers that pay to kill somebody show that they’re serious about killing that particular person[.] I must be in contact with you and to give you the target info, payments proof, and other info to trace the customers. Customers don’t give their name or details and conceal their IP, however still could be tracked.”

The site administrator sent a photograph of the intended victim to agents, one of whom happened to recognize her as somebody she had met before, the affidavit states. The following day, the FBI met with J.M.’s wife and informed her that someone wanted her dead. It’s unclear how the FBI agent knew of J.M.’s wife previously.

When agents asked whether she knew of anybody who’d want her dead, J.M’s wife started to think about people from her past. There was a “snippy” and “aggressive” former colleague from Phoenix, with whom she’d had a “turbulent relationship” and last saw in January 2020, however she didn’t believe that particular person would ever try to hurt her.

A decade earlier, J.M.’s wife continued, her husband sued his boss over a sexual harassment claim. She informed agents she “felt that it was unlikely that J.M.’s former employer would solicit her murder,” the affidavit states, “but stated it was possible as a result of ‘life altering’ nature of the situation.” J.M. was entangled in another lawsuit in 2019, his wife added, when J.M. was sued by a company that accused him of quitting to start his own business, in violation of a non-compete clause.

Aside from that, there wasn’t much else—except for one unusual incident that occurred two days before Christmas 2019.

In an interaction captured on J.M. and his wife’s Ring doorbell camera, a young woman appeared on their doorstep and asked for J.M. by name. When J.M.’s wife stated he wasn’t home, the woman stated she was really there to see her and asked if she might come inside. The wife locked the deadbolt, and when J.M. joined the conversation remotely, the young woman walked away. J.M. informed his wife he didn’t know the woman, and his wife figured the woman must have gotten J.M.’s name from a package addressed to him that had been sitting outside.

The agents then asked J.M.’s wife about her relationship with her husband. She stated it had been “strained for the last few years,” describing the issue as a “loss of passion” which had turned their marriage from a romance into more of a friendship. The emotional distance between them started in 2018, following J.M.’s attendance at a Landmark conference. That year, J.M. asked for a divorce, an idea his wife said she rejected “for the sake of their son,” according to the affidavit. They started seeing a marriage counselor—online, because J.M. was too busy with work to do it in person. J.M.’s wife informed the agents she “had not had an extramarital affair and didn’t believe her husband had either.”

The FBI interviewed J.M. the same day. He claimed he couldn’t think of anybody who would want to kill his wife, the affidavit states.

“When describing his job, J.M. said that he has ‘great relationships with people at work,’ his clients ‘love’ him, he ‘just had a big win’ earlier in the day, and doesn’t believe he makes enemies,” the filing adds. “He said the ‘only major points of serious contention are that lawsuit against me and that thing out in Phoenix,’” referring to the old co-worker with whom his wife hadn’t gotten along.

Asked if he was having an affair, J.M. initially lied. He later admitted he met “somebody” at Landmark that “really liked” him. J.M. stated he took his first Landmark course in 2018, attended a second in 2019, and started a 3rd however dropped out at his wife’s request because it was keeping him away from home. His younger admirer was a college student, J.M. advised the agents, and stated they’d had a sexual relationship lasting “six months or so, a couple times, here and there,” the affidavit states.

“He claimed the romantic relationship ended in August 2019. J.M. stated he last saw [the young woman] in January of 2020, when she informed him she still loved him,” the document explains. J.M. stated he had helped the woman out with money a couple of times, including earlier that month, when he gave her $2,000 after she stated her parents lost their life savings in a burglary. However, she “gave him no indication of being a threat,” J.M. insisted.

On Valentine’s Day 2020, an FBI agent interviewed the college student. She stated the last time she saw J.M. was three weeks prior, when they traveled to Portland, Oregon, for an evening. J.M.’s secret girlfriend stated she was unaware at first that he was married, according to the affidavit. When she found out, J.M. told her that he “couldn’t stand his wife,” but that she had cancer and he couldn’t leave her.

But the younger woman told agents she unearthed pictures online of J.M. and his wife that appeared to contradict his story. After first denying she took steps to have J.M.’s wife murdered, the woman allegedly confessed to soliciting the hit. She then claimed she got nervous and tried to delete the transaction after submitting it, but was unable to do so.

“When asked if she [hoped] J.M. would come live with her as soon as his wife was killed, [the young woman said] ‘…yeah,’” the affidavit states.

Indeed, the younger woman told agents she tried to sabotage their marriage. Before showing up at J.M.’s home in December 2019, she created a fake Facebook account under the name “Katlyn Everson” and sent the wife messages saying J.M. was having an affair.

“I know it because I know the particular person he’s cheating on u with,” Katlyn wrote, according to the affidavit. “If u dont believe me, they’re gonna meet up today at the Kizuki Ramen restaurant in Olympia at 4:30 PM. You can prove it by yourself.”

But J.M.’s wife apparently never saw these messages.

The FBI returned to J.M. for more info in March 2020, since his initial statements didn’t add up. In his second interview, J.M. admitted that he had previously lied to agents when he denied recognizing the younger woman in the Ring footage; at the time, he didn’t want his wife to find out about his extramarital relationship.

J.M. informed investigators that he spoke to the girlfriend shortly after she visited his Bellevue residence unannounced, and asked why she did it. She told J.M. “she was there to kill [his wife] and that she brought a knife along with her as a way to accomplish the murder,” the affidavit states.

Soon after that interview, J.M.’s lover lawyered up and met with the FBI to discuss making a deal. For her part, the woman claimed she never meant to kill her lover’s wife and wasn’t armed during their encounter. She stated she only told J.M. this because she was upset.

She added that J.M. had previously “made comments about wanting to kill his wife and once asked [her] if she knew anybody” willing to do the job.

The woman told authorities that their affair, which started in the summer of 2018, “ebbed and flowed,” and that she’d dumped J.M. a number of times because she was annoyed by his refusal to leave his wife. She claimed J.M. informed her they couldn’t be together until his spouse “died or something happened,” the affidavit alleges.

Over the course of their relationship, she stated, J.M. had a litany of other excuses: the wife had cancer, he was afraid of losing custody of his child, his wife had threatened to kill herself in the past when he threatened her with divorce.

After the couple reunited in the fall of 2019, the college student made plans to end J.M.’s marriage by way of the murder-for-hire plot. She stated she’d used $2,000 that J.M. sent her through PayPal, as well as college scholarship cash to solicit the spouse’s execution.

The young woman stated she and J.M. went out to dinner following her unannounced appearance at his house in December 2019.

“J.M. asked why [she] went to his house, and [she] informed him that she went there to kill [his wife],” the affidavit states. “[She] said that she didn’t actually intend to kill [J.M.’s wife], and was not armed when she went to the house, but told J.M. this because she was upset. [The young woman] claimed that J.M. wasn’t angry but instead saw the conduct as a sign of her dedication and affection for him.”

In order to pursue the murder plot, the woman informed agents, she used an old cellphone she’d obtained from her pastor, then used it to download an application to access the dark web. According to the affidavit, the student surfed reviews of websites providing hitmen—whose services included beating, maiming, or killing victims, she stated—and requested price quotes before landing on the alleged Bitcoin scammer. She chose the Phoenix killer because their website “had an escrow system, giving her a sense of security that her funds wouldn’t be stolen,” the filing states.

The gal pal instructed the phony hitman to not hurt the wife’s child and sent them the victim’s Facebook profile image and address. She’d release the funds, she stated, as soon as she had photographic proof that the victim had been murdered.

Weeks went by, and J.M.’s wife was still alive, the young woman informed the FBI. She contacted the “hitman” through their website and asked what was happening. The scammer, who claimed they by no means really planned on carrying out the assassination, provided an excuse: The hitman they hired for the job had been arrested, so they had been searching for another person to pull it off.

Needless to say, it never happened. The search warrant was executed last April, and filed in court this week, showing that FBI agents mined two of the woman’s email accounts for further clues and proof concerning the aborted hit.

The young woman was unable to be reached. Her lawyer isn’t identified in the filing and isn’t listed in court records.

There have been myriad reports of attempted murder-for-hire plots hatched by way of the dark web in recent years, though a majority of them end up being scams. In each of the instances, men paid online goons several thousand {dollars} in Bitcoin. Around the same time J.M.’s girlfriend was looking for an assassin, CBS 48 Hours highlighted the case of a Minnesota teenager whose British gamer ex-boyfriend had ordered her murder online by way of a mysterious dark net fraudster referred to as “Yura.”

Me: *6 hours of sleep in 5 days* “yeast concerns me”

Friend: “why?”

Me: “Let’s put fungus in dough. Oooohhh it rises, let’s eat it and hope we don’t die” (bread is still delicious, yay for do that)

Friend: “Shhhh. It’s called evolution and humans are stupid.”

Me: “Chef Friend, teach human to not die.”

Friend: “No. More dead humans, less competition for Mikaela.”