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