Speaker 1: True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
Speaker 1: waters that this podcast was recorded on.
Speaker 2: It's a November evening in twenty sixteen, and police have
Speaker 2: just arrived at a family home in Cottage Grove, Minneapolis.
Speaker 2: Stephen Orwine and his nine year old son are waiting
Speaker 2: on the street after calling nine one one. Inside, officers
Speaker 2: are hit with the smell of roasting pumpkin on the
Speaker 2: stovetop as they make their way towards the master bedroom. Inside,
Speaker 2: they find the body of Amy or Wine on the
Speaker 2: floor with a single gunshot wound to the head and
Speaker 2: a gun lying in the crook of her left arm.
Speaker 2: It doesn't take long to confirm that Amy is right handed,
Speaker 2: she didn't inflict this wound herself. They realize that this
Speaker 2: is a murder, that this has been made to look
Speaker 2: like a suicide, but not just any murder. Amy's name
Speaker 2: is one of one hundreds on a giant list doing
Speaker 2: the rounds on the dark web, full of requests to
Speaker 2: fake accidents and disappear people for money. This is just
Speaker 2: one story on the kill list. I'm Jemma Bath and
Speaker 2: this is True Crime Conversations Amoma mea podcast exploring the
Speaker 2: world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who
Speaker 2: know the most about them. Six months before Amy's death,
Speaker 2: the FBI tracked her down and told her that someone
Speaker 2: had made a death threat against her on the internet.
Speaker 2: An unknown person going by the username dog day God
Speaker 2: had paid thirteen thousand dollars in bitcoin to have her murdered.
Speaker 2: But Amy wasn't the only name on that list, and
Speaker 2: it's a list that our guest Today journalist Carl Miller
Speaker 2: found himself staring at in twenty twenty, thanks to a
Speaker 2: hacker friend who stumbled across it. Over the past four
Speaker 2: year years, Miller and his team have intercepted one hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy five kill orders, leading to thirty four arrests
Speaker 2: and twenty eight convictions in eleven countries, resulting in over
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty years of custodial time. He has
Speaker 2: dedicated his life over the past few years to infiltrating
Speaker 2: an assassins for higher dark Web marketplace, and it's led
Speaker 2: him to some pretty grim places, which he's been sharing
Speaker 2: in his podcast kill List Karl joins us.
Speaker 1: Now, Karl, how.
Speaker 2: Did you find yourself looking at a kill list with
Speaker 2: the names of hundreds of ordinary people on it unexpectedly.
Speaker 1: It was really not anything that I set out to do.
Speaker 1: It was something that honestly landed in my lap. One
Speaker 1: day early twenty twenty, just as kind of COVID was
Speaker 1: collapsing society around all of us, a hacker who I
Speaker 1: had come to know Kres. Myself and him, we had
Speaker 1: been looking at these assassination markets on the Darknet, which
Speaker 1: were hiding in plain sight. They were very they were
Speaker 1: very obvious, they were very visible. They were marketing themselves
Speaker 1: in factors being the kind of go to places for
Speaker 1: someone to take out a hit on someone else. And
Speaker 1: then in twenty twenty one day, Chris phones me. He
Speaker 1: sounds like extremely agitated, quite upset, and it's because he
Speaker 1: has found a vulnerability. He found this kind of tiny
Speaker 1: little flaw in the way that this website worked, and
Speaker 1: he had just kind of wiggled through it and found
Speaker 1: himself basically in the middle or the back end of
Speaker 1: the website. And there suddenly he can see all these
Speaker 1: kill orders that are being sent into the into the
Speaker 1: site itself, and the next day there they are landing
Speaker 1: in my own box.
Speaker 2: Where were you at this point in time? Were you
Speaker 2: Were you a crime writer? Were you used to this
Speaker 2: kind of thing?
Speaker 1: No, I mean I not not a crime writer and
Speaker 1: not a hardened journalist at all. You know my background.
Speaker 1: So I'm basically a think tanker. I like kind of wafty,
Speaker 1: big concepts, and I write pamphlets about how digital technology
Speaker 1: is kind of changing the nature of society or politics.
Speaker 1: Now I had done a bit, I'd written a book
Speaker 1: about power in the digital age, and I was interested
Speaker 1: in how it was changing in all these different arena
Speaker 1: of our lives, including crime. So I had spent a
Speaker 1: bit of time with the police, I'd spent a bit
Speaker 1: of time interviewing cyber criminals, and a bit of time
Speaker 1: with people like Chris who were digging into the kind
Speaker 1: of how crime was really working on places like the darknet.
Speaker 1: But absolutely at the kind of most general level, like
Speaker 1: nothing so tangible was what I was going to be
Speaker 1: facing them. Then they're kind of years ahead.
Speaker 2: What does the front end of this marketplace or website
Speaker 2: that Chris found? What does it look like to someone
Speaker 2: that stumbles across it, someone.
Speaker 1: Was stumbles across it, or someone that finds it deliberately. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: so the website looks like a out of the nineteen nineties. Right,
Speaker 1: it's black, it's kind of got white text. There's kind
Speaker 1: of stock imagery of people wearing hoodies. Actually, ironically, some
Speaker 1: of the same stock imagery has been used by kind
Speaker 1: of media organizations reporting on the podcast Believe It or Not.
Speaker 1: Oh really yeah, and kind of interlates with all of
Speaker 1: that is nasty pictures of dead bodies, people holding guns,
Speaker 1: blood and the kind of pitch is hey with a mafia.
Speaker 1: Now we have a kind of dishtol wing as well.
Speaker 1: You know, we too have have gone into e commerce,
Speaker 1: you know, and we set up this kind of portal
Speaker 1: so that you can use us as a trusted third
Speaker 1: party to hire a hit man. So they say, we'll
Speaker 1: take your money, we'll connect up with a hit man,
Speaker 1: but we're only going to release some money to them
Speaker 1: once you tell us that you're happy that the person
Speaker 1: that you've targeted has really been killed. To be honest,
Speaker 1: like Jemmy, for anyone carrying any kind of skeepticism with
Speaker 1: them onto that site, there's pretty loud flags that it
Speaker 1: isn't that legitimate. I mean, it's got a copyright symbol
Speaker 1: on it, it's got lots of things that kind of
Speaker 1: make it appear like it's trying to be a legitimate
Speaker 1: website and wouldn't even remotely have on if it was
Speaker 1: actually genuinely being written by the mafia.
Speaker 2: I guess if you have decided you want to kill someone,
Speaker 2: you're not looking at those red flags, No.
Speaker 1: You're looking for the green flags. You're desperately looking for
Speaker 1: a solution to your problem, and here is a website
Speaker 1: that purports to offer you exactly that safe. Anonymous remotely
Speaker 1: transacted murder for higher and for people around the world,
Speaker 1: that is, at least it seems to them at the
Speaker 1: time like an absolute you know, like a panacea.
Speaker 2: One of the names on the list was amial Wine.
Speaker 2: She was murdered in twenty sixteen. How did police unravel
Speaker 2: that case because they realized pretty quickly it wasn't suicide
Speaker 2: as it initially appeared. What actually transpired, what.
Speaker 1: I transpired, was that an anonymous tipster had initially gone
Speaker 1: to the police with some information to say that a
Speaker 1: shadowy darknet music called dog Day God had been trying
Speaker 1: to hire someone to kill Amy. The police had in
Speaker 1: fact gone to Amy's house. I think a member of
Speaker 1: the local police department in Cottage Grove and a member
Speaker 1: of the FBI, and warned her and her husband that
Speaker 1: there was internet threats. I think that was the vocabulary
Speaker 1: they used, kind of these internet threats about her. They
Speaker 1: said that she should stay alert, and I believe they
Speaker 1: actually also said that they should buy a firearm to
Speaker 1: protect themselves. And then it was exactly that firearm that
Speaker 1: was used in an apparent suicide by Amy I think
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks later, and that was when the
Speaker 1: police kind of reattended the house sadly, of course, found
Speaker 1: Amy's body and then began an investigation to try and
Speaker 1: work out what happened. I think there was a hair's
Speaker 1: breadth diction between them closing the case that night and
Speaker 1: deciding it was a suicide and actually keeping it open.
Speaker 1: I think there was one police detective at the scene
Speaker 1: that night that had a kind of a bad feeling
Speaker 1: thought let's us keep it open. He was about to
Speaker 1: kind of declare it a suicide and they were going
Speaker 1: to scrub the house down, and he didn't, and they
Speaker 1: sent a forensics team and began to learn very quickly
Speaker 1: that something much more sinous to had happened.
Speaker 2: Jumping ahead and spoiling the story but it turns out
Speaker 2: to be her husband that murdered her in that house,
Speaker 2: and he'd gone through this website, hadn't he.
Speaker 1: He was dog Day God. So they found clear evidence
Speaker 1: actually then used in the trial linking him to the
Speaker 1: payments that dog Day God had made to the site,
Speaker 1: and in fact, I think other kind of technical information
Speaker 1: regarding the login and things like that that basically proved
Speaker 1: that he was dog Day God and he was using
Speaker 1: the site to try and have Amy kield before he
Speaker 1: decided to take into his own hands.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and why was the reason he took it into
Speaker 2: his own hands.
Speaker 1: Because the site never delivered the murder, and the site
Speaker 1: never delivers.
Speaker 2: The murders, so it's a scam.
Speaker 1: So it's a scam. What happened to Stephen Rwine dog
Speaker 1: de God happened to every other user of the site
Speaker 1: eventually as well, which is after the payment was made.
Speaker 1: And apparently the hitmen is dispatched, they get lost and
Speaker 1: they lose their weapon and they can't find their way
Speaker 1: to the house, and a more highly trained hit man
Speaker 1: has to be hired instead. And you could see in
Speaker 1: the messages that dog dea God sent this kind of
Speaker 1: climbing sense of urgency, of frustration, time and again. You know,
Speaker 1: he saw that the murder hadn't been carried out of
Speaker 1: the allotted time, and eventually, he, like lots of users
Speaker 1: on that site, he was asking for his money back.
Speaker 2: I'm sure that the listeners are starting to it's starting
Speaker 2: to tick over in their head why this is so dangerous.
Speaker 2: It's You've got these ordinary people ordering hits on people
Speaker 2: in their lives, realizing it's not going to happen, and
Speaker 2: then the threat of something like what Stephen did is
Speaker 2: really high that they could end up taking matters into
Speaker 2: their own hands.
Speaker 1: That's right, and in twenty twenty, the memory of Amy
Speaker 1: was the first thing that I think was in my
Speaker 1: head and in the head of all of us when
Speaker 1: we were then reading these kid orders for the first time.
Speaker 1: We knew as soon as we could see the kid
Speaker 1: orders again, we knew that it wasn't just Steven All
Speaker 1: weren't being scammed. Every single one of these users was.
Speaker 1: But we knew that Amy had been killed exactly by
Speaker 1: the person like all of these other people who were
Speaker 1: using the site trying to have someone killed, and so
Speaker 1: it was an immediate reminder about how dangerous the circumstances
Speaker 1: that each of these targets on the kill list must
Speaker 1: be in and how close possibly the people were to
Speaker 1: them in their lives, who were actually in secret or
Speaker 1: they thought trying to plan for their murder.
Speaker 2: How many people over the course of your investigation. I
Speaker 2: know Chris started to find more and more names, but
Speaker 2: how many names did you see on that list?
Speaker 1: We ended up over the years investigation disclosing one hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy five kill orders to police around the world.
Speaker 1: Each one of those was a we believe a serious
Speaker 1: threat to life in the sense that it was a
Speaker 1: person normally addressed pattern of life information, really serious sustained
Speaker 1: determination to have them killed. This wasn't someone erantly sending
Speaker 1: a single message to the site. Every single one of
Speaker 1: these cases, you know that it was very clear what
Speaker 1: the person wanted. And then also payments, So each and
Speaker 1: every single one of those one hundred and seventy five
Speaker 1: have payments attached to them. In terms of the total
Speaker 1: number names on the list, if you look at the
Speaker 1: people that didn't have payments, though, it's probably in the
Speaker 1: five hundreds, maybe even not to one thousands.
Speaker 2: That's terrifying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty staggering.
Speaker 2: Why do they want those people killed? What were you
Speaker 2: seeing as the reasons?
Speaker 1: When I first started this, my kind of assumption was
Speaker 1: that we were going to be stepping into like organized
Speaker 1: crime of one kind or another. I was expecting to
Speaker 1: see drug deals gone wrong, like kind of feuds, kind
Speaker 1: of revenge attacks. But you know what was striking Jenba
Speaker 1: was that when we began to kind of unravel these cases,
Speaker 1: reach the people on the list, get to know them,
Speaker 1: and then ultimately get to know in the police investigations
Speaker 1: the people that were trying to put them, but that
Speaker 1: had put them there were trying to have them killed.
Speaker 1: They were normal people, like everyone was a normal person
Speaker 1: apart from someone that determined that someone else should die.
Speaker 1: I mean they were They lived normal lives. They look
Speaker 1: like you and me. They are often hiding in plain sight,
Speaker 1: and they almost always I think, were driven by some
Speaker 1: kind of desire for control. Most of the cases ended
Speaker 1: up being about coercive control within spousal relationships, So basically
Speaker 1: some kind of romantic relationship gone terribly terribly awry, either
Speaker 1: that existed or someone trying to leave it, and it
Speaker 1: was kind of in those contexts. Generally, we found these
Speaker 1: kid orders to emerge from.
Speaker 2: Am I right in saying that you saw a lot
Speaker 2: of the victims were women and it was kind of
Speaker 2: ex partners or partners that had put these hits out
Speaker 2: on them.
Speaker 1: That's right. It was somewhere between sixty to seventy percent
Speaker 1: of the targets were women. But then almost all the
Speaker 1: cases were going between genders, so it was women trying
Speaker 1: to kill men, men trying to kill women within the
Speaker 1: context of some relationship. Always, I think control was at
Speaker 1: the core of it. You know, sometimes it was romantic,
Speaker 1: sometimes the motivation seemed to be sexual or possessive. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it was to do with control of children, though it
Speaker 1: could have been an adoption conflict. And sometimes there was
Speaker 1: kind of money mixed in and around there as well,
Speaker 1: you know, a divorce with money on the table, or
Speaker 1: maybe some kind of inheritance or idea that money's been
Speaker 1: stolen from someone as well.
Speaker 2: And we're talking all over the world. This isn't just
Speaker 2: kind of in the UK, where you are.
Speaker 1: All over the world eleven countries. I think we've seen
Speaker 1: convict in now dozens of countries in terms of where
Speaker 1: we were disclosing these cases. There were cases in Australia,
Speaker 1: cases in Switzerland, lots of cases in America, Germany, the UK.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was truly a kind of global sprinkling
Speaker 1: of conspiracy to commit murder.
Speaker 2: Before we jump into you taking control of the kill list,
Speaker 2: you and Chris, separately as well, tried to go to police,
Speaker 2: didn't you. How did that go for both of you?
Speaker 1: I did what any sane person would do is their
Speaker 1: first thing when receiving these orders and reading those kinds
Speaker 1: of documents, which is I phoned the police in the
Speaker 1: UK and I was like, Hey, this is horribly serious,
Speaker 1: this is very worrying, and they came to my house
Speaker 1: the middle of COVID. I remember it actually still very vividly.
Speaker 1: It was the first time that I'd seen anyone in
Speaker 1: months face to face, and they were very young and
Speaker 1: very serious. And after they they did admit to me
Speaker 1: that one of the reasons they were there was to
Speaker 1: conduct a mental health check on me. They thought I
Speaker 1: was mad once they were convinced I wasn't, though they
Speaker 1: did take it seriously, actually, the British police. But the
Speaker 1: problem was because there weren't any British cases, they basically
Speaker 1: didn't think it was their problem, right they kind of
Speaker 1: packaged up the cases, sent them off to Winter Poll,
Speaker 1: kind of washed their hands of it.
Speaker 2: And that was that tell me about the decision to
Speaker 2: actually start contacting people on the list, because that's a
Speaker 2: big next step. You've basically taken the police work into
Speaker 2: your own hands.
Speaker 1: It's a massive next step. But I think it was.
Speaker 1: It was one of the most important and probably reluctant
Speaker 1: decisions of my life, of my career. For sure. It
Speaker 1: was somewhat born out of desperation, if I'm honors with you.
Speaker 1: So once we disclose these cases to the police, this
Speaker 1: is a somewhat technical explanation, you have to bear with me,
Speaker 1: but it's extremely important and it does kind of provide
Speaker 1: the grounding for what happens. So the British Police said, hey,
Speaker 1: we're going to send everything off to to POLL. Now,
Speaker 1: Interpol is this kind of global policing organization that tries
Speaker 1: to be the glue between all these national police forces
Speaker 1: around the world, and Interpol said, we're going to send
Speaker 1: all of these to the local police forces. Now, the
Speaker 1: problem was that going via the Metropolitan Police to Interpol
Speaker 1: to another police force around the world, they would have
Speaker 1: no idea. This receiving police force who we were, we
Speaker 1: had no idea who they were, and being discollected in
Speaker 1: that way, they could not do any kind of mental
Speaker 1: health checks on us. They would have had no idea
Speaker 1: about whether we were credible, legitimate journalists, crazy people, or
Speaker 1: anyone else, and we couldn't send them any further information.
Speaker 1: So when we later on began to work with the
Speaker 1: police on investigations, it was a very very like two
Speaker 1: way street. They'd be asking for us for explanations about
Speaker 1: the technical information about the payment, We'd be sending them
Speaker 1: updates on the orders. We'd be doing all kinds of things,
Speaker 1: and we were just convinced that going via Interpol, none
Speaker 1: of that was likely to happen. And so the only
Speaker 1: thing that we then thought we could do was to
Speaker 1: begin to reach out to the people on the list,
Speaker 1: warn them directly they're in danger, and then work with
Speaker 1: them in whatever way they wanted to go to the
Speaker 1: local police, go to the national police, do whatever in
Speaker 1: order to try and precipitate a law enforcement investigation with
Speaker 1: them in the middle of it, which.
Speaker 2: Is easier said than done, because how do you do that.
Speaker 2: You kind of jump on the phone and what do
Speaker 2: you say Hi, I'm Carl, I'm a journo, as someone
Speaker 2: wants to kill you.
Speaker 1: How did it go exactly? And they just slam the
Speaker 1: phone down. I think it was a mixture of me
Speaker 1: stepping into all of this somewhat naively thinking that my
Speaker 1: kind of good meaning, kind of jawn T Foe like
Speaker 1: voice on the end of the phone was somehow going
Speaker 1: to convince these people that I wasn't a scammer, and
Speaker 1: that was overwhelmingly not the case. The story is so ridiculous.
Speaker 1: I mean I actually to this day believe the story
Speaker 1: is so ridiculous. No self respecting scammer would ever would
Speaker 1: ever choose something so unbelievable. I think they would go
Speaker 1: for something far more kind of likely sounding than all
Speaker 1: of that. The other problem, though, was as we began
Speaker 1: to tackle this kind of challenge of reaching people, one
Speaker 1: of the things that I was terrified of was that
Speaker 1: the person that had put them on the kill list
Speaker 1: would be literally stood right next to them as I
Speaker 1: was making the call. Right We remember the Stephen or one.
Speaker 1: He was in the house with Amy, He was there
Speaker 1: when the police warned her. We thought that was going
Speaker 1: to be the case again and again there would be
Speaker 1: there were going to be people very close to the targets.
Speaker 1: The targets might be completely unawares. What kept me up
Speaker 1: at night at that point was being worried that my
Speaker 1: phone call might actually precipitate a murder. You know, they
Speaker 1: would listen to my warning, they would realize that their
Speaker 1: kind of window of opportunity was closing, and they would
Speaker 1: act in that moment, or they'd act. They'd act as
Speaker 1: soon as they felt they could. So the calls are
Speaker 1: quite angular. I'd worked with this kind of psychologist. We'd
Speaker 1: thought a lot about it internally, we'd kind of designed
Speaker 1: this approach where I was. I came on the phone
Speaker 1: line and I was like, hey, we're these journalists doing
Speaker 1: this kind of investigation into scam sites. Probably not actually
Speaker 1: helpful to mention scam sites in the context of the
Speaker 1: concerns around me being a scammer, but that's what we
Speaker 1: decided to do. The idea didn't work, but the idea
Speaker 1: was that we were trying to arrange a separate follow
Speaker 1: on call for them at some time whenever they wanted to,
Speaker 1: wherever they felt safe and alone. That's what we were
Speaker 1: trying to do. So I could and I thought that
Speaker 1: was the only way we could really deliver that safely,
Speaker 1: the warning safely to them.
Speaker 2: But you can understand, you know, someone on the other
Speaker 2: side of the phone being like, I don't know what's
Speaker 2: going on. It's probably easier for me to just ignore
Speaker 2: this call as even happening. So you didn't have a
Speaker 2: lot of luck when you were on the phone call,
Speaker 2: so you decided to track down these people in real
Speaker 2: life instead. But remembering it's twenty twenty, pretty much the
Speaker 2: whole world is in lockdown, so it's not like you
Speaker 2: can just jump on a plane. How did you go
Speaker 2: about recruiting people in the countries to track down these
Speaker 2: people in real life?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean I don't think I was legally allowed
Speaker 1: to leave my flat at that point, let alone jump
Speaker 1: on a plane. Yeah. It was just the worst circumstances
Speaker 1: to be trying to do an international investigation requiring face
Speaker 1: to face contact. I can't think of any other circumstances
Speaker 1: full of less privy to that. So we reached out,
Speaker 1: like there's all these brilliant journalist networks that exist around
Speaker 1: the world for journalists to reach other journalists. That in
Speaker 1: fact actually wasn't the problem. We could kind of reach
Speaker 1: these there's all these websites where you can hire stringers
Speaker 1: and you can hire fixers, and you can hire people
Speaker 1: on the ground, and we quite quickly found that we
Speaker 1: could reach kind of predominantly young journalists in these areas
Speaker 1: that were willing to go out and actually try and
Speaker 1: reach these people for us. And the idea was to
Speaker 1: kind of on board them, so to speak, onto an investigation,
Speaker 1: explain to them what happened, see their kind of mounting
Speaker 1: horror and surprise as we kind of laid out the investigation,
Speaker 1: and then work with them to basically on a case
Speaker 1: by case basis, like design the approach like which quite
Speaker 1: often meant they would be driving past the house for
Speaker 1: days as we were trying to get a fix on
Speaker 1: where the person was. And of course, as I said,
Speaker 1: you know, we're trying to reach them alone, so we're
Speaker 1: trying to learn as much about them as we can
Speaker 1: so that when we do in fact actually make contact,
Speaker 1: we are doing that in a way which is most
Speaker 1: likely to be able to reach them safely. Of course,
Speaker 1: with an actual young journalist, well, with a journalist there,
Speaker 1: it made it a bit easier actually, because it meant
Speaker 1: that they could like kind of read the situation, you know,
Speaker 1: and kind of make kind of judgment calls on the ground.
Speaker 1: And you know what I still find unbelievable when I
Speaker 1: listen back, you know, to the podcast. Is the bit
Speaker 1: that makes me more emotional than anything else is in
Speaker 1: one of the early episodes where there's a whole medley
Speaker 1: of all these voices in all these different accents around
Speaker 1: the world. Yes, they all said yes. It was just
Speaker 1: the bravest thing I can possibly imagine. You know, we
Speaker 1: weren't stepping into these circumstances. They were. They were physically
Speaker 1: stepping into a circumstance. The only thing about which they
Speaker 1: knew was that it was super dangerous.
Speaker 2: But they wanted to help these people.
Speaker 1: They wanted to help them. Yeah, Yeah, they wanted to
Speaker 1: help them, and they were willing just to try. And
Speaker 1: it was just so moving to me that they agreed
Speaker 1: to do it. I don't think we had no right
Speaker 1: to expect that they were going to say yes to
Speaker 1: this kind of assignment. And it's just yeah, to this day,
Speaker 1: I think for all of the kind of darkness and
Speaker 1: gruesomeness of the kill List and as story, the fact
Speaker 1: that there are those shining lights of human bravery as
Speaker 1: part of you know, part of the story too. I
Speaker 1: think it's something that I kind of have flung on
Speaker 1: to and actually remember kind of more vividly.
Speaker 2: You're listening to true crime Conversations with me Jimmy Bass.
Speaker 2: I'm speaking with journalist and podcaster Kyl Miller about his
Speaker 2: podcast kill List. Up next, Kyle tells us about the
Speaker 2: moment he met Elaina and warned her that someone was
Speaker 2: plotting to have her killed. I want to touch on
Speaker 2: Elna's story, which is a fake name that you gave
Speaker 2: a woman who was on the kill list in Switzerland
Speaker 2: and you saw a hit against her on the list.
Speaker 2: What happened when you told her about it, when you
Speaker 2: said someone wants you to die?
Speaker 1: Well, so Elena was the first person from the kill
Speaker 1: list I saw face to face fire zoom, and that
Speaker 1: was a strange experience because it's kind of like meeting
Speaker 1: a celebrity. I've been staring at her face for weeks
Speaker 1: on ends. And they're always nice photos, by the way,
Speaker 1: they are always these really glitsy, glamorous photos from people's Facebook.
Speaker 2: So people submit photos of the people they want to
Speaker 2: kill well obviously, so the hitman can find them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they do, and they're always staring back at you
Speaker 1: from the kill list what we compiled with these unknowing eyes, relaxed, happy,
Speaker 1: surrounded by their family. That was when it all became
Speaker 1: emotionally difficult, because they're becoming real people then, and you're
Speaker 1: just staring at these photos just thinking, you know, does
Speaker 1: Elane have any idea about the kind of danger that
Speaker 1: she's in? Finally got her on zoom. It was extremely nervy,
Speaker 1: kind of twenty twenty five minutes, thirty minutes way as
Speaker 1: the local journalist was kind of going around I think
Speaker 1: a kind of block of flats in a suburban Zurich,
Speaker 1: trying to find hers. And finally she comes on the
Speaker 1: zoom call and I like stammer out like probably the nervoest,
Speaker 1: most halting warning that you could possibly imagine. I'd been
Speaker 1: like rehearsing it for weeks.
Speaker 2: I've heard it. It doesn't sound that bad.
Speaker 1: It's pretty bad. And that's after the edit. Believe me,
Speaker 1: there was there was a lot of halting, stammeringness. That
Speaker 1: was the can't hear the.
Speaker 2: Big thing to tell someone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was awful. Going into this. I was like,
Speaker 1: the two things to avoid were one Elena having some
Speaker 1: kind of breakdown, to Elena deciding that she knows who
Speaker 1: it is and decided to take matters in her own hands.
Speaker 1: I was like, those are the two dangers. That's what
Speaker 1: we have try and manage. What I had not anticipated
Speaker 1: was that Elena is made a sterner stuff than that.
Speaker 1: Elena took it absolutely brilliantly. There's no easy way of
Speaker 1: really saying this. We've come across some information which might
Speaker 1: mean that someone had put some information regarding you on
Speaker 1: the site.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm actually not really surprised, really in what way
Speaker 2: I'm having an ugly divorce.
Speaker 1: She didn't even become visibly nervous. In fact, you know,
Speaker 1: I was like trying to convince Elena to kind of
Speaker 1: leave her flat that night. I was like, she thought
Speaker 1: she knew who it was, and I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: he's nearby, leave the flat. Elena didn't even change her
Speaker 1: plan for the evening. She went and met a friend
Speaker 1: of hers who is like next door neighbors with the
Speaker 1: person that she thought had put her on the list.
Speaker 1: She did believe me, this wasn't a story of Elena
Speaker 1: brushing us off and thinking this isn't real It's just
Speaker 1: that Elena is basically tough as old boots and and
Speaker 1: just isn't particularly flappable and certainly wasn't going to change
Speaker 1: her life, particularly as a result.
Speaker 2: Her situation was, you know, an ugly divorce. Her ex
Speaker 2: didn't want her to get money, so he paid this site,
Speaker 2: you know, upwards of thirty three thousand dollars in the
Speaker 2: end to kill her. What was the outcome with that story?
Speaker 2: Did he get arrested?
Speaker 1: Yes, he was arrested. The police then found that he
Speaker 1: was renting a secret flat near to hers, containing weaponry,
Speaker 1: zip ties, lock picks, masks, black bin bags, just horrendous
Speaker 1: like arsenal of equipment. It looks like he was in
Speaker 1: some kind of practical planning stage actually of killing her,
Speaker 1: of trying to kill her himself. He's now convicted and
Speaker 1: is in prison.
Speaker 2: Carl, how did that feel to be the one that
Speaker 2: warned her, to be the one that kind of intercepted
Speaker 2: that for her?
Speaker 1: I mean that was awful. I mean I got recurrent
Speaker 1: nightmares about this for months afterwards. When Elena told me
Speaker 1: that they had found that flat, it was just this
Speaker 1: just a kind of indescribable kind of gut churning sense
Speaker 1: of how dangerous these people could be, and the fact
Speaker 1: that was he I mean, it just begins a kind
Speaker 1: of whole like line of thinking that actually you shouldn't
Speaker 1: really do Was he there when we sent the journalists around?
Speaker 1: You know, like, was he there the next time I
Speaker 1: phoned her? We were tracking his orders, so we were
Speaker 1: kind of intercepting in the days after we met Elee
Speaker 1: in this increasing urgency and more money being paid, and
Speaker 1: over that whole time, I was thinking, you know, was
Speaker 1: he about to do it himself? You know, at any point?
Speaker 1: How close did he become? So yeah, that was really difficult.
Speaker 1: I mean that that might one of the just personally
Speaker 1: for me, one of the kind of lowest like emotionally
Speaker 1: lowest moments of the whole investigation.
Speaker 2: And that's only one name, one woman's story. How did
Speaker 2: this investigation as it started to unfold for you take
Speaker 2: over your life? How much time are you dedicating to this?
Speaker 1: Well? I mean it was very consuming when you're planning
Speaker 1: a kind of to approach someone and tell them something
Speaker 1: like that, it isn't I mean, of course we're having
Speaker 1: to be up at three am, four am to speak
Speaker 1: to someone in Australia or one am for someone in
Speaker 1: Canada in the UK, so it was definitely extremely weird hours.
Speaker 1: But I think more than that is just the way
Speaker 1: it always sits in your kind of peripheral vision, kind
Speaker 1: of like you know, some kind of just just something
Speaker 1: looming over you that you really don't want to do
Speaker 1: and sits there for days or weeks on end. So
Speaker 1: I remember I was kind of walking around the kind
Speaker 1: of you know, a nice garden in the UK and
Speaker 1: my friends. I would just errantly find myself basically thinking
Speaker 1: about the call that I needed to make the next
Speaker 1: morning to someone on the other side of the world.
Speaker 1: So it was very consuming, but it got better, and
Speaker 1: you know, as the investigation developed, we learned how to
Speaker 1: do it, and I think I learned myself how to
Speaker 1: make it all more sustainable and to compartmentalize things better
Speaker 1: and to stop allowing it to kind of consume all
Speaker 1: of my waking moments.
Speaker 2: One of the parts of your investigation I found interesting,
Speaker 2: I was going to say saddening, was the way some
Speaker 2: of the police stations in the different countries responded to
Speaker 2: these people, often women coming into the station and telling
Speaker 2: them about this kill list. I want to use Anna's
Speaker 2: story to kind of tell a little bit of that story,
Speaker 2: because she was a woman that you contacted on the
Speaker 2: Spanish coast via one of these freelance journalists that you
Speaker 2: kind of hired, and she went to the police to
Speaker 2: tell them what had happened. How did they react?
Speaker 1: So, yeah, so she physically went into the police station
Speaker 1: with Esperanza the local journalists and one of the things
Speaker 1: actually we didn't anticipate was how supportive the local journalists
Speaker 1: could be to those people in those crisis moments. And
Speaker 1: Esperanza was absolutely brilliant. She's actually become really good friends
Speaker 1: with that. And now, in fact, Anna invited both me
Speaker 1: and Esperanza to her wedding. Went that's amazing, which which
Speaker 1: is just like one of my kind of most favorite
Speaker 1: memories of all of this. So Esperanza, they both went
Speaker 1: in and sat in a room surrounded by posters kind
Speaker 1: of announcing new campaigns to fight gendered violence. They told
Speaker 1: the police about this case, about how kind of un
Speaker 1: safe kind of Anna felt it was. It was in
Speaker 1: the late evening, in fact, as well, we'd taken all
Speaker 1: day to get hold of Anna, and it was it
Speaker 1: was as the kind of dusk was building. That's when
Speaker 1: finally I managed to get on the call with her
Speaker 1: andes Brands had managed to track her down, and the
Speaker 1: police laughed her out of the police station. I mean
Speaker 1: literally like it's on it, we have it. It's part
Speaker 1: of the podcast is you can hear this kind of
Speaker 1: chortilling in the background as they leave, And sadly that
Speaker 1: wasn't the kind of one off. One of the complexities
Speaker 1: with this story is that the police aren't a single
Speaker 1: character in it. Yeah, like they the police are in
Speaker 1: different times amazing and resourceful and proactive and terrible and
Speaker 1: downright dangerous at others. But we did at that especially
Speaker 1: at that point investigation, we were really struggling to kind
Speaker 1: of overcome this kind of skepticism that police forces were
Speaker 1: having with us around the world. Yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: difficult time to try and convince the police that we
Speaker 1: weren't like mendacious, cynical, headline grabbing kind of journalists. We
Speaker 1: were just genuinely like doing our best to try and
Speaker 1: disclose these cases safely and precipitate effective law enforcement investigations.
Speaker 2: Did you intercept an he kills in Australia And how
Speaker 2: did our authorities react.
Speaker 1: We did in Canberra. It is a woman who tried
Speaker 1: to have her parents killed.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: The alleged motivation was for a share of inheritance. We
Speaker 1: did not manage to reach them directly, so our engagement
Speaker 1: in this case was with the police of the Australian
Speaker 1: Capital Territories. We assisted them and they conducted a law
Speaker 1: and this was one of the earliest cases, by the way,
Speaker 1: So this was all happening in like twenty twenty and
Speaker 1: it led to a arrest and then a year's long
Speaker 1: legal battle, which is actually very interesting. So the defense
Speaker 1: were argued for ages that the kill order itself, the
Speaker 1: evidence that we'd submitted was basically hearsay, and the reason
Speaker 1: that they were trying to do that was because we
Speaker 1: could not go into the courtroom and testify. And this
Speaker 1: actually was a general pressure that we were under at
Speaker 1: that point, you know. The very understandably actually, the Australian Police,
Speaker 1: like other police forces around the world, were like, okay, great,
Speaker 1: you've given us this information. Can you please come to court,
Speaker 1: you know, and tell us how you got the information.
Speaker 1: We need you to demonstrate to the jury how you
Speaker 1: acquired these messages from the site. Otherwise it's as a
Speaker 1: word document, you know, with some words written on it. It
Speaker 1: could be anything. We could not do that. We could
Speaker 1: not go into the court, we could not testify because
Speaker 1: what we were having to do was to balance that
Speaker 1: particular case with our access to the website in general.
Speaker 1: We were terrified that basically the first time we stept
Speaker 1: foot in court, it will be obviously publicly reported by
Speaker 1: the press. It was an open court, and you were
Speaker 1: the person running the site could see that it was
Speaker 1: one Google away, and then he could see that we're
Speaker 1: in the middle of the site and he could then
Speaker 1: shut us out. So we thought, we have to balance
Speaker 1: all these future cases and all these other warnings with
Speaker 1: not being able to assist in the prosecution of any
Speaker 1: individual case. And that's what led to this very long
Speaker 1: kind of legal interplay that happened in Canberra very recently.
Speaker 1: A very senior judicial figure finally ruled to say that
Speaker 1: our evidence was admissible in the.
Speaker 2: Case, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: And then immediately after that the perpetrator changed her plea.
Speaker 2: There was one request on the kill list that was
Speaker 2: a little bit different. Can you tell us about the
Speaker 2: kidnapping torture plot that was ordered on an American woman
Speaker 2: named Jennifer.
Speaker 1: Jennifer, Yes, well, I mean this one was horrendous in
Speaker 1: the sense that it wasn't trying to have Jennifer killed.
Speaker 1: So the order was for Jennifer to be kidnapped forcibly
Speaker 1: addicted to heroin, filmed, and then released. There was a
Speaker 1: bonus structure associated with this, so there was a series
Speaker 1: of like sub awards and money attached to each of
Speaker 1: them being fulfilled. The dog was to be beaten or killed,
Speaker 1: other things like that. It was probably the most graphic
Speaker 1: order I ever read. It also had the largest amount
Speaker 1: of money attached to it, So about ninety thousand dollars
Speaker 1: payment had been sent for this. Yeah, and it was
Speaker 1: for a woman called Jennifer in Spokane County at Washington
Speaker 1: State to be to have that all done to her.
Speaker 2: It kind of became common that you would approach these
Speaker 2: often women, and say that you're on this, and they
Speaker 2: would know immediately who it was. Did that shock.
Speaker 1: You, No, I don't think it did shock me. My
Speaker 1: working assumption was for most people to have someone else
Speaker 1: want them to be killed, that would make some kind
Speaker 1: of contextual sense about that slotted into other things happening
Speaker 1: in their lives now, and Jennifer is a good example here.
Speaker 1: It was often surprising and it made sense at the
Speaker 1: same time. So the escalation was surprising. The fact that
Speaker 1: they had were capable of having them her or killed
Speaker 1: in the way that they were trying to was surprising,
Speaker 1: But it wasn't surprising that someone was trying to do
Speaker 1: them harm or someone was trying to control them. So
Speaker 1: Jennifer immediately knew that her estranged husband, Ron, you know,
Speaker 1: who was a eminent neonatologist, you know, and a senior
Speaker 1: kind of clinical figure within one of the local hospitals,
Speaker 1: was behind that order. But then you know, Jennifer was
Speaker 1: in the middle of leaving Ron, you know, Ron was
Speaker 1: leaving GPS trackers in her car, spiking her drink, had
Speaker 1: started relationships with a series of other women, had been
Speaker 1: physically threatening her, you know, so it kind of made
Speaker 1: sense to her to have this warning arrived.
Speaker 2: The police obviously got involved with that case, and Ron
Speaker 2: was arrested in the end. How did that change things?
Speaker 2: Because the FBI kind of started to get more involved
Speaker 2: in your investigation, didn't they?
Speaker 1: It did? I mean, it changed everything. I mean, that
Speaker 1: was the case that saw this this step change in
Speaker 1: like law enforcement emphasis. So until then, you know, we'd
Speaker 1: been talking to police forces and kind of trying to
Speaker 1: convince them, and sometimes it was working and sometimes it wasn't.
Speaker 1: But we would be giving over this technical information to
Speaker 1: someone in the local police force, and then kind of
Speaker 1: there'd be these weeks would go by and like no
Speaker 1: one would even be asking us any questions, and we
Speaker 1: were like, this isn't good, you know. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you're sending like bitcoin wallet transferred data, you kind of
Speaker 1: expect there's going to be some follow up questions. You
Speaker 1: want there to be follow up questions. If no one's
Speaker 1: asking you followup questions, they're not investigating it. But with Jennifer,
Speaker 1: all of that suddenly changed. So so Ron flew to
Speaker 1: Mexico as an alibi, we think in the run up
Speaker 1: to this kidnapping happening, and when he landed, he obviously
Speaker 1: expected this all to be in motion. What it wasn't
Speaker 1: expecting was eleven FBI agents scattered across the international airport,
Speaker 1: you know, and another fifteen combing his house, you know,
Speaker 1: And suddenly like there's there's a giant FBI investigation like
Speaker 1: unfolding across the state, and we can hear the interviews.
Speaker 1: You know, they've got a strategy that they've got away
Speaker 1: of kind of beginning to get the information from him
Speaker 1: that they need and to us, it was this dramatic
Speaker 1: change in how law enforcement was treating all of this,
Speaker 1: a change by the way that we saw all the
Speaker 1: way through. So the very latest case that we've seen
Speaker 1: where we're not involved, you know for one whey or another,
Speaker 1: the case from the kill list, are still seeing prosecutions.
Speaker 1: That one involved five different law enforcement organizations and the
Speaker 1: Home Secretary of Austria, the Home Mistry of Austria. Wow,
Speaker 1: So we've like, it's just a completely different world now
Speaker 1: in terms of how seriously this is being taken to
Speaker 1: how it was in those early days of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: When the FBI, because after Jennifer's case they started to
Speaker 2: take on more of the names and investigate more of
Speaker 2: the kind of cases and take it out of your
Speaker 2: hands quite a lot.
Speaker 1: Was that a relief?
Speaker 2: Was that frustrating for you because you had this great
Speaker 2: story that you were on. Oh were you happy to
Speaker 2: step back at that point?
Speaker 1: Oh? It was an enormous relief. We wanted them to
Speaker 1: do it. I mean, you know they took all the cases.
Speaker 1: So you know, they were the first law enforcement agents
Speaker 1: see that looked at the whole thing from a global perspective.
Speaker 1: They weren't just interested in the one case, and they
Speaker 1: weren't just trying to pressure us to testify in one
Speaker 1: case to jeopardize all the others. They saw the whole thing,
Speaker 1: and they realized how serious it was. And not only
Speaker 1: did they agree to start investigating the American case, they
Speaker 1: also agreed to vouch for us when it came to
Speaker 1: talking to police. I mean, honestly, like, I don't know
Speaker 1: if people are going to believe this or whatever, but
Speaker 1: during the whole time of all of this twenty twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, twenty twenty two, we are I'm genuinely not
Speaker 1: thinking as a podcast or as a storyteller or as
Speaker 1: a journalist. We're recording everything we're doing, but what we're
Speaker 1: trying to do is just handle this information in whatever
Speaker 1: way is the safest, genuinely, so, like it was, I
Speaker 1: loved the idea that the FBI was getting involved in
Speaker 1: the way they did and taking the beginning to take
Speaker 1: with responsibility away from us. In fact, actually my key
Speaker 1: frustration was they wouldn't do more of that. So what
Speaker 1: we were trying to convince them to also do was
Speaker 1: actually to break into the site itself. We were still
Speaker 1: the only people that were doing that bit, So we
Speaker 1: were still intercepting the messages, packaging them up, and then
Speaker 1: tracing the money and then sending over to the FBI.
Speaker 1: And I always felt, and that went on for years,
Speaker 1: I could not get them or any other police force
Speaker 1: to do that bit. And I always felt that was
Speaker 1: so tenuous because without a police force breaking into the site,
Speaker 1: I always felt that our you know, we were stepping
Speaker 1: on eggshells. Our kind of access was kind of hanging
Speaker 1: by a thread, you know, and that really to make
Speaker 1: all of this safe, you know, that needed to happen,
Speaker 1: and we needed to step away completely.
Speaker 2: After the break, we learn what happened when Kyl, his
Speaker 2: team and the police decided to go after Eura, the
Speaker 2: mysterious figure running the site. You've mentioned that the administrator
Speaker 2: or the person behind the site was someone who called
Speaker 2: themselves Eura, And you did try and track this Eura down.
Speaker 2: What did you find out about the personal people behind it?
Speaker 1: Yes, we did. I mean we decided that that was
Speaker 1: the only way actually for us to get rid of
Speaker 1: the responsibility of the kill lists. So we decided that,
Speaker 1: you know, okay, if we need to kind of try
Speaker 1: and gather as much information to basically lead the FBI
Speaker 1: to Era, because then that we thought, maybe they'll arrest
Speaker 1: him and then they'll break into the site, and then
Speaker 1: we can finally stop doing this. By this point, by
Speaker 1: the way, you know, the kind of gut wrenching terror
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty is kind of transformed into a kind
Speaker 1: of real long term fatigue. I mean, by like twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two into twenty twenty three, we are very very
Speaker 1: tired of doing this. Like it's become this kind of
Speaker 1: drum beat of flashes of scary, gruesome incidents scenarios, and
Speaker 1: it just wasn't something that we felt like we need
Speaker 1: we could be doing forever. We got very tired, we
Speaker 1: got very stretched. We needed to stop doing it. We
Speaker 1: tried to learn as much as we could about euro
Speaker 1: He's someone that we managed to learn quite a lot about.
Speaker 1: We were very confident it was from Romania. We were
Speaker 1: confident that he was a financially motivated scammer. We thought
Speaker 1: that he was under the protection of the Russian state
Speaker 1: very like loosely, which is, and we thought we identified
Speaker 1: some members of his circle actually by name and by address.
Speaker 1: So we managed to uncover some information which kind of
Speaker 1: pointed towards a couple of individuals in Romania who were
Speaker 1: associated with the wallets that he was using to get
Speaker 1: the money out of the marketplace of the site. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that together was we turned into a package. And
Speaker 1: then I kind of merreadly flew on over to New
Speaker 1: York then met the FBI rather odd location for a
Speaker 1: secret meeting. It was above Times.
Speaker 2: Square, hiding in plain sight.
Speaker 1: Indeed, Yeah, it was very odd in this kind of restaurant,
Speaker 1: like surrounded by literally thousands of tourists all around us.
Speaker 1: As I was trying to kind of lay out the
Speaker 1: information that we had and then try to do what
Speaker 1: we could to support the FBI basically going after Europe
Speaker 1: and ultimately wrestling control of the site away from him.
Speaker 2: Or they did do a massive raid in Romania in
Speaker 2: around April twenty twenty two. Did that make a difference,
Speaker 2: did do anything to the site? Was Eura arrested?
Speaker 1: We do not know, if absolutely for certain, whether Eura
Speaker 1: was part of any of this. Like we know it
Speaker 1: was the same location in Romania that we were looking
Speaker 1: at in part, and we knew that it at the
Speaker 1: site that we were looking at began to change immediately
Speaker 1: after all of this happened. So we began to see
Speaker 1: like this, like technical rum around on the site. People
Speaker 1: kept getting kind of moved around, They try to hire
Speaker 1: people in quickly. It's all very confused, if I'm honest
Speaker 1: with you. We never saw any court cases emerge. But
Speaker 1: then by the end of that year, we finally were
Speaker 1: locked out of the site, so we finally could see
Speaker 1: no more messages. I think it was New Year's Eve
Speaker 1: into yeah, into New Year's Day of that year. Finally
Speaker 1: it all stopped.
Speaker 2: So this is since then has has stopped for you?
Speaker 2: Are you still investigating the kill list or are you
Speaker 2: now just kind of it's in the police's hands.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, and I think it is in the police's hands.
Speaker 1: So for months actually after that, I mean, it really
Speaker 1: was a kind of an end that didn't feel like
Speaker 1: an ending, if I'm honest, it was very dissatisfying. You know,
Speaker 1: we were locked out, We didn't know what had happened,
Speaker 1: We didn't know who had done what, We didn't know
Speaker 1: if Europe was free or in prison, and we didn't
Speaker 1: know whether the people on the keill list were being protected,
Speaker 1: and that, you know, made me feel that very impotent,
Speaker 1: like very unable to help. And for all the kind
Speaker 1: of you know, the difficulty of the killers, the responsibility
Speaker 1: of it, it was also like, you know, enormously meaningful
Speaker 1: to be doing this. I mean, I was sure, from
Speaker 1: the very beginning to the very end of the whole
Speaker 1: thing the most meaningful thing I'd ever do in my life.
Speaker 1: But then right at the very end of all of this,
Speaker 1: the best news story I ever saw wasn't actually the raid.
Speaker 1: It was another prosecution and another conviction that looked exactly
Speaker 1: like ours. It was the same evidence, the same bitcoin,
Speaker 1: tracing the same kind of perpetray to the same site.
Speaker 1: The only difference was it had nothing to do with us.
Speaker 1: You know, we hadn't seen any of the information. We
Speaker 1: hadn't seen the kill orders, you know, we had never
Speaker 1: passed any of that over to the police. And then
Speaker 1: we got an email from the police basically saying about
Speaker 1: that case, Hey, we hope you saw this, and we
Speaker 1: hope that you know that, like, you know, it was
Speaker 1: kind of linked to the work that you'd been doing,
Speaker 1: and so I think without in so many words, that
Speaker 1: was the police telling us that they had broken into
Speaker 1: the site and they were then running it, and that
Speaker 1: meant that I and you know, Caroline and the other producers,
Speaker 1: that we work on this for so long, we could
Speaker 1: kind of like walk away, I think, with some sense
Speaker 1: of closure, but not a full sense of closure. This
Speaker 1: will never feel completely ended for me because so many
Speaker 1: of the people on the kill list never saw any
Speaker 1: of those convictions or prosecutions. Like most people's lives to
Speaker 1: continue without any of that kind of ending for them.
Speaker 1: But at least I felt that we didn't hold the
Speaker 1: kill list anymore, but someone responsible did.
Speaker 2: So this website is still up, it's still operating.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean I don't check every day, so
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell you if the website's still there right now,
Speaker 1: but yeah, last time I checked, it's still there. It's
Speaker 1: still operating, it's still accessible. It's not us, by the way,
Speaker 1: breaking the news that police saw in it. This has
Speaker 1: already come out in court documents, it's already been reported.
Speaker 1: But yes, I believe that the raids in Romania likely
Speaker 1: scooped up some members of that gang, and I think
Speaker 1: we haven't seen any convictions so I think something then happened,
Speaker 1: some agreement happens, so that either they're running it for
Speaker 1: the police or the police are running it directly themselves.
Speaker 1: But they are now in the middle of the market
Speaker 1: one way or the other.
Speaker 2: Something I keep thinking about is this was one website
Speaker 2: or one interface that people could find. Are they more
Speaker 2: out there? Are there is this happening over and over
Speaker 2: and over again, or do you think that this kind
Speaker 2: of site had the monopoly.
Speaker 1: No, there are plenty of others. We know this because Eura,
Speaker 1: who is nothing if not a very talented and resourceful
Speaker 1: digital marketer, has built and this is going to sound
Speaker 1: very odd, a hit man for higher Comparison site. Oh
Speaker 1: my gosh on the light net. So he's actually built
Speaker 1: a funnel which begins with him hacking Google. It turns
Speaker 1: out that people looking for a hit man go to
Speaker 1: Google to find one. They google how to hire a
Speaker 1: fit hit man, And right at the very top of
Speaker 1: the search rankings for years was his hitman for high
Speaker 1: Comparison site. And he would point to all the other
Speaker 1: sites that existed, a dozen others, and say they're all shams,
Speaker 1: they're all fakes. The only real deals are and he
Speaker 1: point to his own. He actually was running a couple
Speaker 1: of them, So we often talk about this as a
Speaker 1: single site, like more realistically, it's actually a series of
Speaker 1: sights with that kind of recycling brands amongst themselves. It's
Speaker 1: a bit more chourney than that. But yeah, those were
Speaker 1: the sites, and then the hit Man for High Comparison
Speaker 1: site would also offer you actually some quite useful cybersecurity advice,
Speaker 1: how to get onto the dark net, how to download
Speaker 1: the specialist browser that you needed, and so on. And
Speaker 1: it was from there that he then dragged people down
Speaker 1: actually into those sites so that he could scan them.
Speaker 1: But actually, and in an episode that hasn't come out yet,
Speaker 1: we're going to look at another hit Man of Higher
Speaker 1: Comparison site and actually interview someone a bit like Eura.
Speaker 2: Will definitely be tuning in for that because this world
Speaker 2: is fascinating and terrifying.
Speaker 1: What has it taught you.
Speaker 2: Being a part of this kind of world and seeing
Speaker 2: what normal people are willing to do to other people
Speaker 2: in their lives.
Speaker 1: I mean, there is something definitely very chilling about the
Speaker 1: capacity for some seemingly normal people to kind of reconcile
Speaker 1: themselves with having someone else killed in secret and not
Speaker 1: just anyone, someone very close to them, someone that has
Speaker 1: been very close to them, like someone that they loved
Speaker 1: or loved and maybe that loved them. And for all
Speaker 1: of that to happen without often the kind of this
Speaker 1: veneer of respectability and normality being broken. So all of
Speaker 1: this kind of in the messages that we saw, this
Speaker 1: kind of tumultuous, churning, horrible, grotesque wave happening kind of
Speaker 1: under often lives which, as I said, on the surface,
Speaker 1: you know, appear very normal. That's definitely there, that's definitely there.
Speaker 1: Is there is something that looking at the kill lists
Speaker 1: brings you towards that is deeply, profoundly unsettling and scary.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, it is also stories of resilience
Speaker 1: and recovery and bravery, you know, those journalists again doing
Speaker 1: what they did. I think, you know, it is also
Speaker 1: a kind of a story about how journalism, especially in
Speaker 1: an age where we poor journalists are getting pulled into
Speaker 1: all kinds of politics and all kinds of suspicion, you know,
Speaker 1: and often cynicism. I think it is a story about
Speaker 1: how journalism can still be important. Not to blow my
Speaker 1: own trumpet too much, but you know, I mean, we
Speaker 1: sat there for years trying to offload this, you know,
Speaker 1: and not managing to get law enforcement to do it.
Speaker 1: And I do think it is also a story about
Speaker 1: law enforcement. I think this is a story about that
Speaker 1: these law enforcement agencies around the world being very badly
Speaker 1: undercut and really struggling to deal with these forms of crime.
Speaker 1: And then lastly, it has to be maybe even primarily
Speaker 1: a story to do with coercive control and gender violence.
Speaker 1: I was not expecting this to be about spousal relationships,
Speaker 1: you know, falling apart, but that's what we found. And
Speaker 1: the kind of willingness, especially of men, to kill, especially
Speaker 1: women who are either leaving them or have left them
Speaker 1: from a rantom relationship. Well, I don't want to say
Speaker 1: that shocking or astonishing, because I think plenty of people
Speaker 1: won't find any of that shocking or any of that astonishing.
Speaker 1: But I think it's a lesson actually there that has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the darknet. There's nothing to do
Speaker 1: with technology. Has to do with some very very dangerous
Speaker 1: capacities within some men to be willing to do that
Speaker 1: sort of thing.
Speaker 2: Which we're constantly dealing with as a society. Has this
Speaker 2: got you hooked? Carl, I know you're still dropping episodes
Speaker 2: of the pod. You're still very much in this world,
Speaker 2: But are you going to keep doing investigations or are
Speaker 2: you done now?
Speaker 1: There's plenty more to come, So we're going to be
Speaker 1: running episodes all the way through to the end of December.
Speaker 1: You know, each one of them is actually really they're
Speaker 1: really important to me that each one of these is
Speaker 1: a deep dive into the cases we found on the killer.
Speaker 1: This we tell the initial story quite quickly, only six
Speaker 1: episodes covering four years. The next twelve really about all
Speaker 1: of those cases and the people and the killers, and
Speaker 1: the people that put them there and sometimes the people
Speaker 1: that caught them. And I hope people listen to those
Speaker 1: because they kind of are are the ways in which
Speaker 1: this investigation kind of falls into the kind of full
Speaker 1: three D kiotechnic color of normal human life. As for me,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I really hope whatever I do, though,
Speaker 1: that I don't have to deal with anything like the
Speaker 1: kill list. Again, Honestly, it's wonderful to see this investigation out.
Speaker 1: It's wonderful to talk about it and to reflect on
Speaker 1: all of the things it might mean for us, and
Speaker 1: it is certainly what it means for me, but to
Speaker 1: transport myself back into those moments in twenty twenty when
Speaker 1: we were in the dead of night, in the midst
Speaker 1: of COVID, having to try and work out how we
Speaker 1: could reach someone in their home alone so that their
Speaker 1: possible spouse didn't know that we were trying to warm
Speaker 1: themselves being killed. That is just a horrible thing to
Speaker 1: do and I wish I never have to do anything
Speaker 1: like that again.
Speaker 2: Thanks to Carl for helping us to tell this story.
Speaker 2: Kill List is still dropping episodes exploring different stories on
Speaker 2: the kill List. You can find a link in our
Speaker 2: show notes. True Crime Conversations is a Muma mea podcast
Speaker 2: hosted and produced by me Jemma Bath and Tarlie Blackman,
Speaker 2: with audio design by Tom Lyon. Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 2: I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation