How would you react to finding out that your name is on a ‘kill list’?
That someone, perhaps close to you, wants you dead and has paid a lot of money to have you murdered.
I have had to break that news to dozens of people. For during an investigation into online crime in 2018, I was shown a site on the Dark Web that made my blood run cold.
It was a live database of anonymous users seeking to hire a hitman… and their targets.
Carl Miller was shown a site on the Dark Web that made his blood run cold
In many cases, they were men who wanted their wives, girlfriends or ex-partners murdered. Other files revealed love triangles, unrequited romances and bitter family feuds. And in one chilling instance, as I describe in my new podcast Kill List (co-produced by Wondery and Novel) – now a chart topper in the UK, US and Australia – the target had actually been killed.
She was murdered in her own home by someone who had taken matters into his own hands after growing frustrated at the amount of time it was taking for the hitman he had hired to act.
In a bid to cover his tracks, the killer tried to make her death look like suicide.
Amy Allwine, from Minnesota, was 43 years old, a professional dog trainer and the mother of a nine-year-old boy. In November 2016, her husband Stephen called police in a state of distress. He had returned home, he said, to find his wife dead on the bedroom floor. She had apparently shot herself in the head.
Stephen was a church elder, respected in his Minneapolis community. But the police’s suspicions were raised when he insisted on having a lawyer with him during questioning.
But the website Carl had discovered was a front for fraudsters, set up to con money out of people intent on getting away with murder
One detective told me: ‘In my entire career, I’ve never had the loved one of a suicide victim talk to us with an attorney before.’
When police checked his phone, they discovered Stephen had been hooking up with numerous women using dating apps. Far more incriminating than that, was the fact that he had also been sending messages and money to a site on the Dark Web that promised to arrange murders.
And now, I was looking at those very messages. One read: ‘I am looking to hire you for a hit. 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.’
And that was just one commission among dozens on the website. My first reaction was to call the forces of law and order and, as I’m based in the UK, that meant the British police.
But I soon found that the police, both here and around the world, moved too slowly, so my next was to start calling the targets, to warn them of the threat to their lives.
However much I varied the script, there was no easy way to say it: ‘Hi, you don’t know me. This is going to sound weird but I have proof that somebody is planning to get you killed.’
Some assumed I was a nut, or a scammer, or a hoaxer. So we started sending local journalists to reach members of the Kill List directly. The first woman we reached was a lady in her 60s named Elena.
I’d been dreading telling her, worried she have a panic attack or break out in a rage. But in reality, she just said: ‘Yeah, I’m actually not really surprised.’
Elena, who lives in Switzerland, had agreed to take a video call from me, after meeting one of my colleagues. This was November 2020 at the height of the pandemic. The person who appeared on my screen was a brown-haired woman, sitting on a sofa, wearing rimless spectacles. And she didn’t seem remotely shocked to learn that somebody with the online username ‘Nordwand’ had paid $7,000 (£5,360) in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, to a site on the Dark Web that offered hitmen for hire.
Nordwand uploaded detailed information to the site, including photos of Elena, her address and even a description of her car. We had logs of the messages between Nordwand and the site’s shadowy administrator, a criminal using the alias Yura. ‘Can you please tell us what kind of accident do you think would be more OK?’ Yura wrote. ‘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?’ Nordwand didn’t care much how Elena died. More important was the timescale: ‘Can you do the job in the next two weeks?’
As I explained this to Elena, she knew exactly who Nordwand was: ‘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.’
Her husband – who we’re calling Bruno – was computer-savvy, she said, and she ‘wouldn’t put it past him’ to know how to access the Dark Web. But she found it hard to believe any professional killer would charge as little as $7,000.
Elena was right on both counts. The website I had discovered was a front for fraudsters, set up to con money out of people intent on getting away with murder. The ‘clients’ paid up-front for assassinations that would never be carried out.
But that didn’t make the intent any less real. Bruno really did want his wife dead – and, as Elena predicted, he was willing to do it himself. When police arrested him, they discovered a secret apartment he had been renting near to her home. Inside, he had amassed a horrifying arsenal of weapons.
His cache included a sub-machine gun, rifles including an AK47, pistols and a flick knife. He also had pepper spray, a camouflage balaclava, a rubbish sack big enough to contain a human body, and black rubber gloves.
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. As a specialist in uncovering disinformation on the internet, I was working on a podcast with a Dark Net investigator called Chris Monteiro. He alerted me to a site called Besa Mafia, offering assassinations for cryptocash.
By hacking into the site through a weak spot in its security, Chris could see a database of all the clients – how much they’d paid and who they wanted dead.
He could also see that Besa Mafia wasn’t actually killing anyone. The front man, Yura, simply took the fees, then served up excuses as to why the murders hadn’t happened, before demanding more money.
One typical excuse was that the target was too well protected for a single hitman to kill. A two-man team would be needed, with extra equipment – and that meant more money upfront. Incredibly, many clients would keep paying, perhaps driven by their obsessive hatred, or simply unwilling to accept they’d been scammed.
Stephen Allwine killed his wife Amy then tried to make it look like suicide
Stephen Allwine, in Minneapolis, had come to that conclusion and given up on Besa Mafia. Instead, he killed Amy himself, then tried to make it look like suicide – though he left the gun on the wrong side of the body and trailed bloody footprints through the house. He was charged with first degree murder and, in 2018, sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Despite this, I had great difficulty getting any police force in Britain, Europe or the US to investigate the site or take responsibility for the list.
The Metropolitan Police sent two officers to my home during lockdown – who were polite and attentive, but also worried that I was mentally ill.
The British police were at least prepared to listen but because there were no UK targets at that point, all they could do was to forward to kill orders to Interpol.
The Spanish police treated the whole story as a joke: when a journalist colleague went to them with details of potential targets, they laughed until she gave up and left.
We realised that detectives were far more likely to investigate if the threat was reported by people whose names were on the list – such as Elena in Switzerland. Her husband Bruno is now in prison.
But the breakthrough came in the US, when we contacted a woman named Jennifer in Spokane, Washington. Someone hiding behind the username Scar215 was messaging the site, asking for Jennifer to be kidnapped.
The client was willing to pay an additional $10,000 (£7,660) if Jennifer ‘returns back to her husband permanently for reconciliation of their marriage and relationship’. It was pretty obvious that Scar215 was her ex-husband, Dr Ronald Ilg.
Jennifer fled her marriage after Ilg, who was obsessed with bondage and sadistic sex, brought another woman, who we’re calling ‘Amanda’, into their marriage. He tried to insist on continuing a relationship with both of them.
Now I had to tell her that Ilg had paid a total of £42,900 to the site, to have her kidnapped. After she contacted police, the FBI were waiting for Ilg as he flew into Spokane from a holiday in Mexico. The agents had a warrant to seize and search his phone – and before he even handed it over, Ilg started making excuses about why he had been trying to hire a hitman.
He was depressed, he said, and contemplating suicide.
The only person he wanted to have harmed was him, because his life insurance policy wouldn’t pay out if he killed himself.
Ilg didn’t know that we’d handed over all our information, everything we had downloaded from the website – including his messages. He couldn’t even deny that he was Scar215 because when police searched his house, they found a safe containing a gun and a scrap of paper with his username and password on it.
Last year, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for trying to order the hit.
The FBI involvement came as a godsend for us. We were trying to cope with dozens of investigations in parallel across different countries, with police who wouldn’t believe us and targets who were sometimes equally sceptical.
And now the biggest law enforcement agency on the planet had finally seen the potential of the information we had. They put their own resources into verifying what we were telling them.
But while the FBI would take the cases, no police force had gained their own access to the site. Our investigation dragged on, for months, then years, until we arrived at the conclusion that the only way to end it for good was to find out who Yura was.
We started with a clue to Yura’s location. In one of the files, the master criminal behind Besa Mafia had accidentally screenshotted his own computer desktop with a Google page open.
And all the language on that page was in Romanian.
By now it was very clear that Yura was not running this operation alone. It was slickly promoted, with adverts disguised to look like blog pages or news reports that came up when users typed a phrase such as ‘hitman for hire’ into a search engine. These pages directed people to Yura’s site on the Dark Web.
Since the gang demanded payment in Bitcoin, which has quadrupled in value since October 2020, the scam must have been very lucrative, possibly running into many millions of dollars.
We told the FBI what we had discovered, and they carried out raids on five addresses in Romania, in parts of the country that are heavily associated with cybercrime. 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. And, while the website is still functioning, the security hole that enabled us to hack it has been plugged.
We can no longer see the names of victims on the kill list, or the messages from people who want them murdered.
My strong suspicion is that law enforcement has infiltrated the site themselves, either by hacking into it or, more likely, by pressuring Yura and his associates to hand over all their information. Perhaps, in return, they are allowed to keep scamming the gullible.
For me, the investigation is over. I’m not a victim in this story – far from it. But being in possession of the Kill List, and the terrible responsibilities that came with it, was was quite an emotional burden to carry for so long. I still suffer from recurring nightmares.
We ended up disclosing a total of 175 kill orders to police over the years we held the Kill List. Each of them had been paid for. So far, there have been 28 convictions and over 150 years of prison time handed down thanks to our work.
So despite everything we’ve done, the majority of the cases haven’t yet seen convictions. Some may not have even been investigated.
I don’t hold the Kill List any more – that burden now rests with others, but the story of the Kill List is, I suspect, far from over.
- Kill List, from Wondery and Novel, is now available everywhere you get your podcasts
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