How I Accidentally Ended Up in a Secret Battle with Dark Web Assassins

What would you do, if you got a phone call telling you that someone wants you dead? 

One gray afternoon in November 2020, I’m on a video chat with my colleague Carl Miller, a technology researcher and author. We’re speaking to a woman from Switzerland, who I’ll call “Elena.” She’s middle-aged, with brown hair and glasses. Elena is a complete stranger. But we’ve called to deliver some news that’s about to change her life. 

Someone, somewhere, has paid thousands of dollars in bitcoin on the dark web to have her murdered.

When we break the news, Elena looks at us inquisitively through the screen. Her expression is calm as she absorbs our words.

“I’m not really surprised,” she says, finally. ”I’m having an ugly divorce.”

The reason I ended up on that call with Elena is because, for the last few years, I’ve been part of a small team working in secret to try to prevent people like her from being murdered. 

Our investigation has spanned more than 11 countries, and involved the FBI, Interpol, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Crime Agency, and local police forces all over the world. It’s now the subject of a podcast series, Kill List, from Wondery and Novel. 

But we didn’t start out intending to do any of it.

I don’t work at an NGO, a private detective agency, or in law enforcement. I’m a podcast producer, and earlier in 2020 I’d started work on a new series about the dark web. Then one day in June, our team got a call from Chris Monteiro, and everything changed.

By day, Chris is an IT professional, but by night he’s a dark web researcher and hacker, and wears his long hair in a ponytail. Chris had been looking into a network of dark web sites that claimed to offer hitmen for hire. They branded themselves as a branch of the mafia, and promised murder for sale, at the click of a button.

Chris was calling because he’d just hacked into one of them. 

He’d exploited a vulnerability in the site to gain access to the back end, and now, astonishingly, he could see everything that the site administrators could see. Every message from every customer. The details of who they wanted killed and how, with smiling photos of each target. And payments in bitcoin for the hits—many in the tens of thousands of dollars. 

I felt completely unqualified to deal with this situation. We were a couple of journalists stuck at home during the pandemic, and we’d just been handed a list of people with a price on their heads. But we couldn’t look away, either. So we started trying to figure out what to do with the information Chris had handed over—what we’d started to refer to as the ‘kill list’.

Our first priority was figuring out how much danger the targets were really in. And what the messages revealed was that there were no real hitmen. Instead, the administrators would make up excuses for why the murder hadn’t been carried out—the hitman got lost, or the victim was too well protected—before the customer finally gave up. 

The assassination site was a scam. But that didn’t mean the targets were safe. 

Reading page after page of detailed instructions of exactly how and where a target should be murdered, it was clear that many of the customers were deadly serious. Our fear was that one of them would find a real hitman, or take matters into their own hands. And it wasn’t just a hypothesis. Prior to our investigation, in 2016, a woman in Minnesota named Amy Allwine was murdered by her church counsellor husband Stephen Allwine, after he tried and failed to place a hit on her using the same dark web hitman site we’d penetrated.

Knowing what happened to Amy Allwine, we had to act. So we did what anyone else would: we phoned the police. The response was lukewarm, at best. After checking Carl wasn’t mentally unwell, the Metropolitan Police passed the buck to the international policing agency Interpol. They, in turn, would supposedly hand the information on to the relevant local cops. 

But that meant we had no way of knowing what information local law enforcement received, or if investigations were underway. One of the major challenges of policing cybercrime is that it’s so international, and it can be easy for things to fall into the cracks between different jurisdictions. We couldn’t provide any context or updates to investigators or know if they had even notified the targets about the threat. 

So, we decided to contact the targets ourselves. 

That proved easier said than done. When we first tried calling people, we would only get so far before they hung up, thinking (understandably) that we were scammers. So to get around that, we recruited some brave local journalists from each target’s home country to try and reach them in person, and put them in touch with us. 

It was a risky step. But we also knew that doing nothing might be even worse. The first person we deployed that strategy with was Elena, the woman in Switzerland. And it worked; we found that the victims were more likely to believe us, and local police forces were more responsive when we approached them alongside the person who’d been targeted. 

Over the months that followed, we contacted a fishmonger in Northern Spain who’d been targeted on the site; a man in Wisconsin locked in a custody dispute who suspected his ex-wife was behind the hit; a woman in France whose ex-boyfriend was out for revenge; a woman in Washington State targeted in an attempted kidnapping by her estranged husband. 

Each time we made contact and broke the news, the target went from being a string of personal details in a kill order, to a complete person. As I spoke to them, and the first perpetrators were arrested, I began to understand the types of crime we were dealing with.

Often, we were stepping into situations that had been escalating for a long time. Many of the targets were women caught up in cases of intimate partner violence—a crime notorious for not being taken seriously by law enforcement. We made progress in some cases, but we also encountered police forces that literally laughed at the victims when they tried to report the crime, or tried to discourage them from believing us.

The more involved we became in the lives of all of these people around the world, the more it heightened my anxieties about their safety. It was impossible to keep an emotional distance, because the Kill List had connected us. And with new cases coming in all the time, the pace was relentless. Instead of writing podcast scripts or editing interviews, my days were spent on the phone to victims and FBI agents, drafting witness statements, trying to explain technical details about bitcoin to police officers and embassies, or sifting through graphic descriptions of torture and murder. Everything was urgent, and in the depths of the pandemic lockdown, with no distractions, the Kill List became all-consuming. 

It became increasingly clear that this wasn’t sustainable. But although we were seeing arrests in individual cases, for a long time none of the police forces we encountered seemed to have any interest in proactively investigating the hitman-for-hire dark web site themselves. It was an isolating feeling. Even though I’d spoken to more police officers and special agents and prosecutors than I’d have imagined meeting in my life, and I’d even had the local cops visit my flat, it seemed if we didn’t keep watch on the targets, nobody else would. 

It would take a three-year investigation, involving law enforcement agencies all over the world, before our team was finally able to step away from monitoring the hitman-for-hire site.

But the story of the Kill List isn’t over yet. Over the course of the investigation, our team passed 175 hit orders to law enforcement. So far, there have been 34 arrests and 28 convictions. But many more of the targets are still waiting for justice, in the knowledge that someone in their life wants them dead. 

Follow Caroline on X at @cathornham

Kill List, from Wondery and Novel, is available everywhere you get your podcasts.