Rent-A-Hitman: Murder, Interrupted

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She provided a picture of a three-year-old that she wanted to have murdered.

It was her own three-year-old.

Welcome to the Knife.

I'm Patia Eaton.

I'm Hannah Smith.

This week, we have an unusual story for you.

We are talking with a webmaster named Bob Innes all about his website, rentahitman.com.

And yes, I am saying hitman.

I actually came across this website a couple of years ago and reached out to Bob, but never heard back.

We recently got in touch and sat down for an interview with him, and it was so much more wild than we expected.

Let's get into the interview.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So, I first reached out to you a couple of years ago.

Didn't hear anything back.

It's okay.

It's not the first time that's happened to me.

I didn't take it personally, but

I reached out because I came across a story about your website.

Can you introduce yourself however you think we ought to introduce you or that you would like to be introduced?

Sure.

My name is Bob.

I'm the webmaster of rentahitman.com, your point and click solution.

It is a parody website.

It's safe to go to.

Please visit.

Bob registered rentahitman.com in 2005.

It was a tech startup that focused on IT security that he and a couple of his buddies created after graduation.

The hit in Hitman actually refers to website clicks.

HIT pertains to website hit traffic, network traffic, analytics, how many page views your podcast gets, for example, or that kind of thing.

We wanted to start a post-graduation business that would test customers' networks, Wi-Fi networks, home networks.

We would test it for vulnerabilities.

We would let them know what they need to do in order to tighten their security of their network.

If you remember back in the 80s, 90s, I guess, Staples had an easy button, a little red easy button.

Maybe they still do.

You used to be able to click it and your problem would be solved.

Well, our little catchphrase was, rent a hitman, your point-and-click solution, with a little image of a speedy click mouse kind of a thing.

And, you know, that was the whole idea behind our business plan.

The internet in 2005 was so different than it is today.

Just one year before in 2004, Facebook was launched for Harvard students and Google debuted a brand new app called Gmail.

It was really this tech scramble to see who would create something that could last, that would help define the internet as we know it today.

Rent a Hitman did not become the next staples.

It didn't do much of anything at all.

Bob and his friends moved on with their lives, getting jobs in different cities.

And Bob was left with this domain.

And for years, it just sat there doing nothing.

Didn't really know what to do with it at that point.

I tried to auction it off on several auction websites.

Nobody wanted to buy it.

A couple of years passes.

This is right around 2008.

And I decide to go in and check the inbox.

And I'm shocked.

There's about 250 to 300 emails.

What kinds of emails were you getting?

Yeah, so initially,

I was expecting to see people interested in the domain name, but unfortunately that didn't happen.

There were people inquiring about asset extraction.

What countries do you operate in?

There was even a female out of the UK who was looking for a relationship.

She wanted a relationship with a hitman so that she could learn the trade.

So these were people looking for hitmen.

They were looking for hitmen.

and people to do their dirty deeds.

As you're reading these emails, like, what's going through your mind?

You know, I was not equipped at that point to kind of take in, comprehend the request.

But as the years passed, you know, I joked about it with friends.

Sure, you know, there's people out there that are so mad, they're Googling how to hire a hitman.

Bob didn't respond to any of the emails.

It was strange, he thought, that he was getting them at all.

At the time, the website didn't have much on it except a notification that it was for sale.

But somehow there still seemed to be people who believed rentahitman.com was run by an actual hitman, an assassin, a killer for hire.

Were these real requests?

Bob chalked it up to a few practical jokes, kids having a laugh on the internet.

But then, in 2010, he got an email that sounded different, one that he could not ignore.

A lady by the name of Helen sent an email to the website indicating she had three family members in the UK that she wanted murdered.

It was over a family inheritance.

By the end of the day, she had written two full-on, long and rambling emails on what she wanted done, who the intended targets were, the addresses, her reason, where she was in Canada and the whole thing.

Bob did something he'd never done with prior emails.

He decided to respond.

There was something about this email that sounded real, like this woman, Helen, might actually want her family members killed.

So he emailed her back, posing as the man who could arrange a murder.

And I had responded and asked her if she still required her services and wanted to be placed in touch with a field operative.

And she responded yes.

And you responded to her that way because you were like, this lady's serious.

I need to see like how serious.

Yeah, there was definitely, she was providing way more information than I had ever anticipated.

If I didn't respond to the email, somebody else may have gotten it and, you know, results are going to be different probably.

She provided so much information.

I was on my iPhone, like iPhone one or whatever it was way back in the day.

And I was corroborating and verifying addresses.

And the more I looked into it.

I just knew she was serious.

I could just tell that she was in a spot mentally that was not good and that these people were in danger.

Who did she want killed?

Aunt, uncle, and another family member.

All over an inheritance.

All over a family inheritance.

Once Bob realized this murder for hire request was real, he felt the need to report it to authorities.

There was an officer in Novato at the time where I grew up.

And we had become friends over the years.

And I had printed all this information out.

I had about 20 pages of information and i brought it down to the police station i gave him the stack of papers told him you need to look into this i mean this is very serious he reached out to uh somebody that he knew in canada who put him in contact with the niagara regional police services and they ended up doing the rest but it was very serious And she had fled the UK, ended up in Canada, lost her passport, had nowhere to go, and reached out to the website.

And then when the authorities in Canada went to perform a welfare check on her, they obviously validated, verified the information.

She had a warrant out of the UK.

So she was extradited after 126 days.

When you got news of Helen's arrest, like, how did that make you feel about?

the website and all of this playing out.

Wow.

Yeah.

It was a kind of an awakening experience.

I mean, it was a $9.20 website.

It just basically saved the lives of three people.

And with little to no effort on my part.

It is a federal crime to hire someone to commit murder, even if it's never carried out.

And if money is exchanged, the maximum penalty is a fine and up to 10 years in prison.

For Bob, the idea that he helped stop a potential murder was sort of exhilarating.

It made him think totally differently about rentahitman.com.

He no longer had hopes of selling the domain.

Instead, he decided to build out a website.

You know, it was getting organic traffic on its own.

People were seeking it out.

Obviously, I'm not here to capitalize or make money off the website.

There is no advertising.

These are visitors who are actively seeking out the website.

Maybe they've heard about it through podcasts or whatever.

Most of them haven't.

And they're seeking a solution for an issue that they have and there's web forms that people can utilize to fill out the who what when where and why in their own words and

the intake form can capture an ip address there's warnings on the page that the site is not real yeah i want to like just for anyone who's not not looking at the website right now It is loud and clear that this is not real,

but it has saved lives and it has worked you created this intake form where people really sort of they out themselves as wanting to have someone killed yeah

yeah yeah and so you build out the website after helen's arrest and you continue hearing from people and even more so or how does that all go down

Yeah, so in 2010 with the Helen email,

that's when I kind of took everything into consideration and thought, man, these people are coming to a website or they're trying to seek out a solution for obviously a very serious problem that are going through.

Why not create like a honeypot, you might say?

I mean, technically, it's not a honeypot in the IT sense, but it attracts people that have nefarious things in mind.

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Bob describes his sense of humor as inspired by the Cohen brothers, and this appreciation for absurdist dark comedy is on full display at rentohitman.com.

If you actually read the website, it's full of jokes, like his fake CEO, Guido Finelli, who seems to be inspired by the Italian mob, or the photo of Al Capone on the Contact Us page with the caption, one of our best field operatives.

Bob said he's not trying to trick people into thinking that this is a real website to hire real hitmen.

If you take just a few seconds to read it, it's very clear this website is a farce, and that can be confirmed with a quick Google search.

This is registered with GoDaddy.

It is 100% safe and secure.

We have disclaimers on the page.

You can Google the webpage and read Wikipedia articles and People magazine and Rolling Stone.

I mean, there's podcasts, there's news stories.

I mean, people, please do your homework.

And then let's just say that you're one of the angry ones and you're searching for a solution.

So you land on the website.

You see, rent a hitman, your point-and-click solution.

And then there's a friendly note from the CEO, Guido Finale.

Fictitious by all means, but anyway, it basically explains the website is fake.

You know, thanks for checking in.

And then, you know, we offer

solutions.

We have over 17,985 U.S.-based field operatives.

That's the same number of police departments in the U.S.

in 2016, by the way.

We have customer testimonials, discount packages.

Like it is mind-blowing, right, that someone would take this seriously.

Cool cats and kittens discount, 10% off.

Yeah, customer testimonials.

Let's see.

We have a gallery of images.

Can you read us one of the customer testimonials?

Yeah.

Laura from Arizona caught my husband cheating with the babysitter, and our relationship was terminated after a free public relation consultation.

I'm single again and looking to mingle.

Thanks, Squeedoo and Rena Hitman.

Amazing.

Yeah.

But I can see how if you are,

I don't know, you haven't done your research, like you said, you go to this website, you are angry, you're not really reading it so much.

You could potentially ignore all of this and click.

I mean, it's hard to imagine, but like, yeah, I mean, you could click and just write in, this is who I want killed, I guess.

Is that happening?

It is happening.

It's happening more frequently than I can handle personally.

I'm just a one-man show.

I've had to dumb the website down and turn it down so that it only receives a trickle of submissions.

I mean, if I had funding, if I had had people that work with me to create the nonprofit that I am aiming to create,

then this would be a 24-7 operation.

Because you're getting so many submissions.

Yeah, every single day.

Are you able to tell us like how many you're getting?

Yeah, give me one second here.

Let me pull up something.

Just from April 1st, I've had 28 submissions on one web form.

We talked to Bob in mid-April.

That means in about two weeks, he had 28 submissions to the site requesting the service of a hitman.

You got to say, maybe two or three of those are worth looking into.

I get a lot of spam.

And they're not all murder for hire solicitations.

Some of them are cries for help from kids being bullied at school or at home.

There's some kind of an abuse situation and they're trying to seek some kind of a solution.

You know, there's obviously people out there that are seeking assisted suicide.

I've had emails as recent as last week.

Hey, I don't care if this is a joke website.

I'm looking for a way to,

and yeah, the best thing I can do is like respond in an email and send them links to resources that they'll probably never use.

I mean, I'm not in a position to dispense therapy.

I'm not a therapist.

How does it impact you to sort of get emails like this from people who are either just so hateful that they've lost all sense of morality or in such a hopeless situation that they don't know how to get out of that they might seek out something like this?

Man, you know what?

It is tough.

I mean, I obviously have a pretty good support group around me to keep me sane, but there's a lot of people out there that need help.

It's hard to open your inbox in the morning and see two or three more people that you wish you could help, but it's troubling.

It's troubling.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What is the tipping point for you when you contact authorities, when it's someone who is crying out for help, whether it's a child or someone else?

You know, is there like a sort of procedure you follow, just even though you're a one-man show with those?

Well, there's a couple of different things I look at.

Number one,

is there a child involved?

Is the solicitor or the target a child?

If so, that's automatically reported for a welfare check.

I don't care.

I don't play around with those.

If the threat or email comes from an academic domain, EDU, a school, I don't mess around with those.

Those go to school resource officers.

They can sort that out.

There have been threats where a student has made threats directly against the superintendent of that school district because his own mother is a teacher in the district who is disciplined somehow.

And the student, child, wanted to seek some kind of retaliation.

That didn't go well.

Bob found himself unexpectedly on the receiving end of these messages.

Some of them were cries for help.

Some were empty threats by frustrated people with nowhere else to turn.

But some were real, from people who wanted someone in their lives dead and who were ready to take action on that plan.

And now Bob, who isn't in law enforcement, is being told about these homicidal plans.

And now he has to decide what, if any, responsibility he has in all of this.

So there are cases that come through that he reports to law enforcement.

And sometimes they even make the news.

Like in 2023, when a young mother reached out to him.

Jasmine Paez.

This is a woman out of Florida, 18 years old.

She filled out a submission in her own words, provided her name, address.

She used a fake name to fill it out, but that wasn't hard to get around.

But she provided a picture of a three-year-old that she wanted to have murdered.

It was her own three-year-old.

She had said in her request, She wanted to have the kid taken far, far away and possibly killed.

She had later stated that she had tried to take the kid to the forest to get eaten by bears or drown.

And I guess ultimately what came out of it was the investigators had determined after interviewing her and her boyfriend, her boyfriend had given her an ultimatum, lose the kid or I'm done.

And

this was the result.

Wow.

And so can you tell us a little bit about how her case played out after you notified authorities?

Well, yeah.

So notifying the authorities was really a bit difficult in this case.

It took several, several phone calls for me getting through to the law enforcement agency in Miami before somebody would take this seriously.

And during the course of trying to report it, hours had gone by.

And I'm getting more and more kind of irritated.

And I keep asking for a supervisor and they keep transferring me around.

And finally, I get through to somebody, a supervisor in their dispatch center, and I explain the situation.

I told them, hey, this isn't a prank.

You know, I've been in people in Rolling Stone and I kind of referenced some news stories.

And the lady's like, okay, I get this.

I get this.

That's when they took it seriously, when she could verify that, hey, it's not just some random report.

But once they got in there and investigated, I believe they made an arrest within six hours.

The Miami-Dade Police Department opened an investigation after Bob sent in the tip.

An investigator posed as a hitman for hire and texted with Jasmine Paez.

She moved forward with an attempt to hire him, agreeing to pay $3,000 to have her three-year-old child killed.

Jasmine Paez and her boyfriend, Gamaliel Soza, were both arrested in 2023.

Jasmine has lost custody of her child and is charged with first-degree solicitation of murder and unlawful use of a communication device.

Soza was charged with first-degree murder conspiracy and unlawful use of a communications device.

This joke website had actually turned into a tip that potentially saved the life of a three-year-old.

And Bob gets messages like this all the time from different people in different counties run by different law enforcement departments.

And each time that he has a hitman request that seems real, he will then call the local PD, introduce himself, and try to explain the situation.

This is for real.

It's a satirical website, or I don't even know if that's what you would call it, but it's this website, rent a hitman, that is a joke, but people do seek it out.

And please take this seriously.

Do you get a lot of pushback of like, you know, this can't be real?

I do.

I get a fair amount of pushback.

I've had some agencies basically laugh and say, ha ha, you know, whatever.

But once I send people a link to like a news story or kind of explain it a little bit further and kind of lay it all out, they tend to comprehend it a little bit better.

You know, fortunately, there's U.S.

Department of Justice press releases out there which reference the website.

There's legitimate news services and stories and stuff that have covered it.

It's getting easier to be received by agencies, but there's still challenges.

It makes sense that it would be difficult to communicate the situation to law enforcement.

As much as Bob is trying to help and is helping, he's not in law enforcement.

He's not a government official.

He's not even an incorporated nonprofit with guidelines or operating procedures.

He's just a guy who happened to create a website that is getting hundreds of submissions from people who are planning or want to commit murder.

And he's just trying to stop that from happening.

Step one for Bob is to verify a submission is real and not a joke.

He needs to know that the person who submitted it is a real person.

It's not that hard to verify.

Most people have an online footprint these days, but it can take a lot of time going down rabbit holes, looking for social media pages, searching names and addresses.

If Bob can confirm that the person trying to hire a hitman is a real person, then it's on to step two, make contact.

Then that's when I'll send a message back.

Do you still require our services?

Would you like me to place you in contact with the field operative?

If they respond back with, ha ha, I was just kidding.

Have a nice day.

Okay, that gets filed one way.

If they say yes and, you know, I really want this done urgently.

Well, obviously they've kind of expedited their own request.

And that's when it's basically drawn up.

I'll do a statement.

I'll reach out to an agency and basically hand it off and tell them they can either perform a welfare check on the intended target or they can work it as they see fit.

And, you know, the ones that they arrest are the ones we hear about in the news.

Wow.

I mean, that's a lot of work.

Like, how many hours are you spending on this a week?

Well, like I said, I've had to tone it down to maybe 20 hours a week now, you know, for my own personal sanity.

But at the rate things are going, I could spend the entire week on this.

I mean, literally, it would fill every hour of every day.

It's just that crazy.

There was a time when I was putting in a 40-hour work week somewhere else and I'd come home and do this, you know, for 40 or 60 hours.

I'd be up all night.

My wife wouldn't like it, but you know, that's kind of sorry.

Bob says he gets murder for hire requests from literally all over the world.

A while back, he received hundreds of emails from Indonesia after an Indonesian YouTuber posted about rentahitman.com on the dark web.

And the lengths that Bob went to in order to report these requests is surprising.

I had contacted the U.S.

State Department.

They're like, yeah, we don't care.

I reached out to the U.S.

Embassy in Jakarta, never heard back from that guy.

So I decided to take this information to the Indonesian consulate in San Francisco, and I gave them the information.

And the reason I did that was five of the requests were for assassination of their president, Joko Widodo.

I don't know whatever came of the information that I gave.

All I can do is just kind of clear it off my chest.

And, you know, at least you guys have the information.

With the case of like these Indonesian requests, you know, you have been told by multiple governmental agencies, you know, the U.S.

consulate that essentially they don't care or maybe they care personally, but they're not going to put resources and time into this.

And you hit multiple roadblocks.

And then your response is to go in person.

to the Indonesian consulate in San Francisco.

Why do you think you're so driven to do that?

When even these governmental agencies are like, we're going to kind of wash our hands of this.

What do you think it is that makes you want to follow through with this?

Yeah, you know,

I just don't want to see anybody get hurt.

And, you know,

if I'm the kind of last line of defense before those people end up getting hurt or whatever.

Damn right, I'm going to do something.

And yeah, I ended up going to the consulate myself with my dad.

I took my dad.

That was a scary, scary moment, man.

I don't know what they're going to do to me in there.

I mean, am I treading on some kind of international law, you know, that I don't know about?

Or I didn't know what the hell to expect.

I really didn't.

Yeah.

If I could help everybody, I would.

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Wendy Wine is the first story I came across that led me to your website.

And so from, you know, my recollection, Wendy came across Renta Hitman in July of 2020, and she wanted to

have her ex-husband killed.

Yeah.

And, you know, this is like all playing out on your dialogue with her on the website.

You're letting authorities know they're in Michigan.

And she then offers to pay you.

Am I remembering correctly that that's like the moment you're like, okay, this person's really serious.

Yeah, Wendy is a very unique situation, by the way.

Because,

yeah,

when she submitted the information, she submitted the information under an alias.

It wasn't hard to see through her alias and figure out who she really was.

I could tell this was a woman who had obviously a beef with her ex and wanted him taken out.

She made it very clear.

After verifying the information and sending her an email, you know do you still require our services and that kind of thing and after she responded well that's when it got passed off to michigan authorities and you know the the rest of that story but for those who don't know can you tell us but for those who don't know

she actually met up with uh undercover who played the part of a field operative or the hitman Apparently, there was some money exchanged.

It was July of 2020 when Wendy Wine found rentahitman.com.

According to reporting from CNN, Wendy wrote,

It's kind of weird that your company isn't on the deep or dark web.

She then went on to offer to pay $5,000 to have her ex-husband killed.

The Michigan State Police sent a trooper in plain clothes to meet with Wendy in Detroit.

She reportedly provided her ex-husband's home address and work schedule and handed him $200 as a down payment.

She was ultimately arrested.

She was ultimately convicted.

She

is serving her time

right now.

I hope she's doing well.

Her ex-husband is living in another state and has been since this whole thing started.

And I wish him well.

There's something about the Wendy thing that I think needs to be pointed out.

And this was never brought out in trial.

However, that's because she kind of took her deal.

Right.

Wendy pled guilty.

Yes.

Yeah.

She did.

She had actually gone to the dark web.

She had gone to a dark web website and she had basically provided her name and her alias, rather, and the name of her target, Wendy, Georgina Harris, Harris was her alias, had gone to the dark web days before going to my website.

So she had actually reached out to the dark web seeking services and didn't get the results there that she was after.

Potentially, or do you know, like actually getting in contact with someone who could render Hitman services on the dark web?

Yeah, she had tried and failed in some way and then went to your website.

Yeah, I don't know what the result was of her getting help on the dark web, but I only imagine.

that I had intervened before things could get to that stage.

In talking with Bob, what became clear to us is that he spends a lot of his time on this website, following leads, verifying submissions, assessing if a threat is serious, and then trying to convince police departments or local sheriff's offices that his information is real and should be looked into.

It's a lot for him to do after he signs off from his paid job.

The idea that he would miss a tip and then maybe someone would be killed because of that, it's too much for Bob to bear.

So he has spent sleepless nights fielding emails and following leads.

He hopes to change that by creating a nonprofit.

He'd love more help sifting through all the murder for hire requests, educating the public about internet safety, and he'd like for someone to help him navigate the best way to report these tips to law enforcement.

A retired FBI special agent, for example, I have somebody in mind that I would love for that role, and he's excited about it too.

You know, just somebody that can communicate better with law enforcement than I can, somebody that maybe has the credentials to actually not just talk to a call taker, but actually get into somebody, decision maker, investigator, you know, that kind of thing.

What I would ultimately like to accomplish is with the creation of the nonprofit, obviously have a staff.

Some people that are good with open source intelligence and cyber investigations.

I can't do it by myself.

I'm unfunded.

The biggest thing that anybody could do to help at this point in this mission, in my mission, is help with funding.

There was a case out of Las Cruces, New Mexico, involving a subject by the name of Lee Trajillo.

He had filled out the submission form.

He wanted to take out his mother-in-law because she was like interfering with his relationship.

I had reported it to the Las Cruces Police Department.

It fell through the cracks.

Nothing happened for a number of weeks.

I spoke to a sergeant in Las Cruces who said, oh yeah, it fell through the cracks.

We had a homicide last week or a couple of days ago.

We've been working on it.

I'm like, that's your answer.

So I didn't like that.

This guy's mother-in-law is still in jeopardy and y'all haven't worked this case.

Wow.

I guess just my last question that I have is like, when you think back about creating this website and how it's impacted your life, what do you think of that?

Are you glad that you made it?

Like, what do you think about your position and how has this experience sort of affected how you interact and see the world?

Seeing it full blown in my inbox every day, it really kind of,

it kind of hardens me a little bit.

I scrutinize things a lot more than

probably the average joke, but I do know there's good people out there.

And I do know that not everybody is a nefarious, malicious POS.

And just some people make mistakes.

Some people say or do things online that they probably will take back.

Is there ever this thought for you about kind of towing the line where you're glad that the website has been reported on journalistically so that people take you seriously when you call and you have something to send?

But also, maybe it's not as well known that it becomes no longer

overkill.

Yeah.

I had initially thought that, you know, the more podcasts or the more traffic or the more news stories would hamper the analytics, the visitor.

That's not the case.

These people,

I mean, it's busier than ever.

I don't get it.

Bob wants everyone to know that he has a new website.

This time, he's focused on people trying to sell stolen catalytic converters.

The website is webuycatconverters.com.

Patia and I wrapped up the interview, stopped the recording, and then Bob mentioned something to us that had not come up in the interview.

So we hit record a second time.

We're back.

Hannah and I ended the interview.

And then...

Amateur mistake.

Amateur mistake.

And then Bob brought up something and we are hitting record again.

Yeah, so we've covered a few things, but we haven't covered the individuals that are seeking employment through the website.

As in aspiring hitman.

As in aspiring hitman.

Aspiring field operatives.

Field operatives.

Do they send resumes?

Yeah, upon request.

Yeah.

Tell us about some of these applications that you've gotten.

So there's an individual out of Tennessee.

This is an adjudicated case.

His name is Josiah Garcia.

His sentencing is like in a couple of weeks, by the way.

But he applied to the website.

He was in the Tennessee National Guard.

He claimed his nickname was the Reaper for not missing any of the targets.

And he had indicated that he had an expanding family and wanted to make money, you know, for his family.

He had sent in a picture of himself, a headshot, his ID as requested, and a resume, at which point multiple email exchanges were conducted.

He had indicated many times that he was ready to move forward and wanted an interview with our onboarding team.

After thoroughly vetting all of his information, that's when I passed the information on to an agency in Tennessee, and they ultimately met with the Reaper,

offered him a fictitious kill packet, an envelope with like $2,500 in it and a target.

He ended up taking the money and then immediately kind of regretted his decision and said he was trying to put the money back, but he was arrested.

During his interview with the onboarding field agent,

he had said that he had no problem taking ears and fingers as trophies and that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, he was good to go.

I have never

wanted to be a hit woman, but I would not send my picture.

No way.

I don't want anyone to know what I look like.

Yeah, you would think in Hitman 101 that they would teach you not to leave any kind of trail.

Yeah, published on justice.gov September 25th, 2024, says Garcia pleaded guilty to using interstate commerce facilities in the commission of a murder for hire.

Yeah, he agreed to carry out a contract killing for $5,000 and accepted $2,500 down.

What are the people that are applying for this job?

Is it all because they're in some sort of like desperate financial need or are there other reasons why people are applying?

Honestly, I don't get into that with them unless they voluntarily bring it up.

And in Josiah's case, He had mentioned that he had a growing family and was just trying to, you know, earn money for his family.

His intent is is fine, but his means of carrying it out is pretty screwed up.

I'm not a fan of that.

But yeah, do what you do to take care of your family.

But he wasn't the only one.

There's individuals around the country that have applied to become Hitman, and they have filled out the information.

I send them a little questionnaire just for further information, just to kind of find out what's in their head.

What is their favorite tools of the trade?

Do they carry their tools with them by chance?

Are they available to disappear if needed?

And that kind of thing.

Some of the responses are pretty wild.

There is

a couple of ongoing cases right now around the country involving potential applicants, some of which are absolutely just

these people need to be off the streets like yesterday.

There is a case out of South Africa that is very interesting.

It involves a South African police service officer who wants to be a hitman.

Oh.

And he wants to clean up his neighborhood down in Cape Town, where he's at.

Yeah.

Try reporting that one.

Yeah.

Wow.

That is so.

So I don't know what you would do

there.

No.

Yeah.

Anyway, if there's a will, there's a way.

People want a job.

Wow.

Thank you so much, Bob.

What an interview.

What an interview.

Worth the wait.

Yes, totally worth the wait.

You have been trying to get him to interview for like over a year.

I honestly think it was multiple years because it was when we worked on our other show and I thought, like, I don't even know that this is right for our show, but I just really want to interview this person.

And he never got back to me.

And then I actually think on the website at the time, it was saying I caught like a form response that he wasn't doing interviews.

And so I just kind of cataloged it.

What was it like to send a request on the website?

Yeah.

Well, I was like, okay, if I write him, I need to be very clear.

I'm not looking for a hitman.

I get that this is like a parody, okay?

But I do want to talk to you about it.

So I think I wrote like five times in my initial outreach.

Like, I'm just a podcast producer.

To be clear, I don't want to have anyone killed.

Yeah, I don't want the FBI coming after me.

But yeah, that interview was

so different than any other interview we've ever done.

Yeah, it really was.

Just the way that it consumed his life.

Yeah, that was really surprising that he said at one point he was going to his 40-hour a week job and then spending like 20 to 40 hours additionally working on these cases.

You could tell that he really has, you know, he cares a lot.

He gets very wrapped up and consumed with this sometimes.

Yeah.

There's so many cases really that were mentioned in this episode.

And there was just a couple that I wanted to follow up on quickly.

Bob mentioned this case out of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

This is from justice.gov.

A man was sentenced to the statutory maximum of 10 years in federal prison for trying to hire an undercover ATF agent to murder his girlfriend's mother for $200.

This is the case that Bob was saying, like he reported this and then followed up and was concerned because there had been no investigation or no follow-up.

And he kind of left it off in the interview as like, the mother is still at risk.

So I just wanted to look it up and see if anything happened to her, but they ended up following through with it.

And according to court records, between April 10th, 2022 and May 11th, 2022, Leaf Heyman repeatedly solicited a hitman to murder his girlfriend's mother through the website rentahitman.com.

It's like $200.

You think that, I mean, there are so many things wrong with trying to hire a contract killer, especially through a website that's so obviously a joke.

But the $200, I'm like, who's believing that?

I don't know if that was like a down payment or what.

I mean, yeah, that's really wild.

I don't know if that was just like a number who threw out there.

It's enough to get him on that.

Like that shows some serious intent.

And for me, listening to Bob tell that story and others of requests that have come through that he's then been able to get law enforcement involved was this every single time having to say, okay.

Here's the situation.

I have this website.

I mean, that is like to get somebody on the phone to sort of listen and take it seriously because no one wants to go to their colleagues and law enforcement and say, there's a website, rent a hitman.

You know, it's a lot of explaining.

Yeah.

Which sort of feels like as it should be.

You know, if you're just a random person

calling in like tips, like there should be some sort of skepticism or like looking into it.

Yeah.

It was just, it was such an interesting interview.

It made me think of so many things.

But one of the things I did think about, like I kept thinking about that movie, Minority Report.

Did you see that movie?

Yeah.

Tom Cruise.

Yeah.

It's like a sci-fi futuristic movie where he's a cop and he works for this organization that's figured out how to predict crimes, right?

They have like, I don't remember, like psychics or something they're working with.

And so they get these visions of the crimes and then they send out people to arrest everyone before the crime happens.

And obviously things go awry.

I think Tom Cruise ends up getting framed or something.

And I remember it being being a good movie.

I have to rewatch it.

Consider that a wreck.

Yeah, yeah.

There you go.

Minority report coming in hot recommendation.

But there's something about this whole like predicting a crime that's going to happen.

Obviously, it is a federal crime to try to solicit murder, but there's something a little tricky about that for me.

You know, one of the cases that I found when I was looking up Rent a Hitman is the case of Devin Fauber in 2019.

He was a 21-year-old man living in Virginia, and he contacted rentahitman.com and requested to have his ex-girlfriend and her parents both killed.

And, you know, when you first hear about that on the surface, it's so horrible.

Like, how could anyone do this?

But when I started to look more into it, it's a little more murky.

Like, it turns out that he has mental health issues.

They didn't say what his diagnosis is, but they just mentioned that it's serious enough that he should be on medication.

He was off of his medication.

And his mother said that he had always had learning and behavioral issues.

And he even is quoted to have said, I say stuff out of my mouth, I don't mean to say.

Like there's clearly some issues and some confusion.

And when you think about renthitman.com, someone like that going to the website, it's like, is that clear to that person that this is a fake website?

And is there like an understanding of that or not?

But he did move forward.

He sent multiple requests to run to hitman.com.

He wanted his ex-girlfriend and her parents both killed.

His ex-girlfriend had a young child, a three-year-old child, and he requested for them not to harm the kid.

And he had these sort of delusions that he would become the father to this kid.

I mean, clearly there's so much going on there, right?

And there was a competency evaluation as part of the court proceedings.

And it was noted that his brain, this is what they said, his brain didn't develop normally, disrupting his development and language skills.

But still, he was given a 10-year sentence for this.

It just brings up so many bigger questions.

How much of a threat was he?

Maybe he was.

You know, I mean, clearly he tried to have some people killed, but at the same time, like,

sending him to prison for 10 years, like, how is this helpful?

Yeah, I just have to wonder.

It's like, like, that's totally separate from Bob and Renta Hitman.

We do have an issue about how we react to mental health issues in our justice system.

And Bob is bringing this information, but not making the decision.

And so it's like, yeah, it is sad.

And it is, I think, a little murky.

You know, it makes me think of the Tennyson Jacobson episode.

This man is having a mental health crisis, but also a real threat to their lives.

Doing something violent.

Doing something violent.

Yeah.

It's tricky.

So much more came out of that interview than I expected, especially when we turned the mic back on because we had never done that before.

I think in all of our interviews, turned it off and then like stopped recording and then like, wait a minute.

Yeah, here's something we need to talk about.

Yeah.

People applying to be a hitman.

Never had that crossed my mind and thinking of like thinking about the interview and questions.

And

yeah, that's also

just, I can't believe anyone looks at that website and thinks it's real.

But also, you know, there's a lot of stuff out on the internet.

I mean, they're finding this website, but what if they'd found something else?

Yeah.

I think the thing with like people not looking at it and not realizing it's real, that's the part where I struggle with, I wonder how many of these cases are people with serious mental health issues because they're not understanding that this isn't real.

And I don't know that.

I think that there's clearly some people who are understanding completely that this is, you know, they're trying to hire someone to kill, like Wendy Wine.

Wendy Wine.

It's complicated.

I did want to mention one thing at the end.

After we turned the mic back on,

Bob talked about the case of Josiah Garcia, who had applied to be a hitman, and then there was a sting operation.

He had entered into all these conversations about I would take those and ears as prizes or something.

Oh, yeah, gross.

Took money from what he believed was like a hitman

or a recruiter.

And then tried to give the money back immediately, but still had incriminated himself.

He was sentenced in late April 2025 to five years probation.

That seems right to me.

Yeah.

Well, cool.

What an interesting episode.

So glad that we talked to Bob.

So glad that you were persistent and finally tracked him down.

I can be a bit of a best.

We love it.

Yeah.

Thanks for listening.

See you next week.

If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it.

Our email is theknife at exactlyrightmedia.com, or you can follow us on Instagram at the Knife Podcast or Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

This has been an Exactly Right Production, hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith, and me, Patia Eaton.

Our producers are Tom Breifogel and Alexis Amorosi.

This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.

Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.

Artwork by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.