Rent-A-Hitman: Murder, Interrupted

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Speaker 9 This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 10 She provided a picture of a three-year-old that she wanted to have murdered.

Speaker 10 It was her own three-year-old.

Speaker 11 Welcome to the Knife. I'm Patia Eaton.

Speaker 12 I'm Hannah Smith.

Speaker 8 This week, we have an unusual story for you.

Speaker 14 We are talking with a webmaster named Bob Innes all about his website, rentahitman.com.

Speaker 9 And yes, I am saying hitman.

Speaker 11 I actually came across this website a couple of years ago and reached out to Bob, but never heard back.

Speaker 11 We recently got in touch and sat down for an interview with him, and it was so much more wild than we expected.

Speaker 17 Let's get into the interview.

Speaker 10 Hey, thanks for having me.

Speaker 11 So, I first reached out to you a couple of years ago, didn't hear anything back.

Speaker 10 It's busy.

Speaker 11 It's okay. It's not the first time that's happened to me.
I didn't take it personally, but

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 15 Bob registered rentahitman.com in 2005.

Speaker 1 It was a tech startup that focused on IT security that he and a couple of his buddies created after graduation.

Speaker 15 The hit in Hitman actually refers to website clicks.

Speaker 10 HIT pertains to website hit traffic, network traffic, analytics, how many page views your podcast gets, for example, or that kind of thing.

Speaker 10 We wanted to start a post-graduation business that would test customers' networks, Wi-Fi networks, home networks. We would test it for vulnerabilities.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 Maybe they still do.

Speaker 10 You used to be able to click it and your problem would be solved.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And, you know, that was the whole idea behind our business plan.

Speaker 1 The internet in 2005 was so different than it is today.

Speaker 25 Just one year before in 2004, Facebook was launched for Harvard students and Google debuted a brand new app called Gmail.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 30 Rent a Hitman did not become the next staples.

Speaker 26 It didn't do much of anything at all.

Speaker 21 Bob and his friends moved on with their lives, getting jobs in different cities.

Speaker 22 And Bob was left with this domain.

Speaker 1 And for years, it just sat there doing nothing.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 yeah so initially um 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.

Speaker 10 She wanted a relationship with a hitman so that she could learn the trade.

Speaker 23 So these were people looking for hitmen.

Speaker 10 They were looking for hitmen and people to do their dirty deeds.

Speaker 11 As you're reading these emails, like what's going through your mind?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 Sure, you know, there's people out there that are so mad that are Googling how to hire a hitman.

Speaker 14 Bob didn't respond to any of the emails.

Speaker 13 It was strange, he thought, that he was getting them at all.

Speaker 14 At the time, the website didn't have much on it except a notification that it was for sale.

Speaker 15 But somehow, there still seemed to be people who believed rentahitman.com was run by an actual hitman, an assassin, a killer for hire.

Speaker 33 Were these real requests?

Speaker 22 Bob chalked it up to a few practical jokes, kids having a laugh on the internet.

Speaker 14 But But then in 2010, he got an email that sounded different, one that he could not ignore.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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 where she was in Canada and the whole thing.

Speaker 29 Bob did something he'd never done with prior emails.

Speaker 19 He decided to respond.

Speaker 30 There was something about this email that sounded real, like this woman, Helen, might actually want her family members killed.

Speaker 31 So he emailed her back, posing as the man who could arrange a murder.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 11 And you responded to her that way because you were like, this lady's serious. I need to see like how serious.

Speaker 10 Yeah, there was definitely, she was providing way more information than I had ever anticipated.

Speaker 10 If I didn't respond to the email, somebody else may have gotten it and, you know, results are going to be different probably.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 34 Who did she want killed?

Speaker 10 Aunt, uncle, and another family member.

Speaker 11 All over an inheritance.

Speaker 10 All over a family inheritance.

Speaker 32 Once Bob realized this murder for hire request was real, he felt the need to report it to authorities.

Speaker 10 There was an officer in Navato at the time where I grew up, and we had become friends over the years. And I had printed all this information out.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 He reached out to somebody that he knew in Canada who put him in contact with Niagara Regional Police Services, and they ended up doing the rest. But it was very serious.

Speaker 10 And she had fled the UK, ended up in Canada, lost her passport, had nowhere to go, and reached out to the website.

Speaker 10 And then when the authorities in Canada went to perform a welfare check on her, they obviously validated, verified the information.

Speaker 10 She had a warrant out of the UK, so she was extradited after 126 days.

Speaker 11 When you got news of Helen's arrest, like, how did that make you feel about the website and all of this playing out?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And with little to no effort on my part.

Speaker 14 It is a federal crime to hire someone to commit murder, even if it's never carried out.

Speaker 29 And if money is exchanged, the maximum penalty is a fine and up to 10 years in prison.

Speaker 32 For Bob, the idea that he helped stop a potential murder was sort of exhilarating.

Speaker 15 It made him think totally differently about rentahitman.com.

Speaker 13 He no longer had hopes of selling the domain.

Speaker 12 Instead, he decided to build out a website.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 the intake form. can capture an IP address.
There's warnings on the page that the site is not real.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I want to like just for anyone who's not looking at the website right now, it is loud and clear that this is not real,

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 10 Yeah, so in 2010 with the Helen email,

Speaker 10 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 they're going through.

Speaker 10 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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Speaker 41 Increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur, like TB or other serious bacterial, fungal, or viral infections. Some are fatal.

Speaker 41 Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms, like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough, had a vaccine or plan to, or if IBD symptoms develop or worsen.

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Speaker 26 Bob describes his sense of humor as inspired by the Cohen brothers, and this appreciation for absurdist dark comedy is on full display at renttohitman.com.

Speaker 30 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 photo of Al Capone on the Contact Us page with the caption, one of our best field operatives.

Speaker 26 Bob said he's not trying to trick people into thinking that this is a real website to hire real hitmen.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 I mean, there's podcasts, there's news stories. I mean, people, please do your homework.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And then there's a friendly note from... the CEO, Guido Finelli.
Fictitious by all means, but anyway, it basically explains the website is fake. You know, thanks for checking in.

Speaker 10 And then, you know, we offer

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 We have customer testimonials, discount packages.

Speaker 11 Like, it is mind-blowing, right? That someone would take that seriously.

Speaker 10 Cool cats and kittens discount, 10% off. yeah customer testimonials let's see we have a gallery images can you read us one of the customer testimonials yeah

Speaker 10 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 squeezo and ran a hit man amazing yeah But I can see how if you are,

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 10 It is happening. It's happening more frequently than I can handle personally.
I'm just a one-man show.

Speaker 10 I've had to dumb the website down and turn it down so that it only receives a trickle of submissions.

Speaker 10 I mean, if I had funding, if I had people that work with me to create the nonprofit that I am aiming to create,

Speaker 10 then this would be a 24-7 operation.

Speaker 34 Because you're getting so many submissions.

Speaker 10 Yeah, every single day.

Speaker 34 Are you able to tell us like how many you're getting?

Speaker 10 Yeah, give me one second here let me pull up something

Speaker 10 just from april 1st i've had 28 submissions on one web form

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 You know, there's obviously people out there that are seeking assisted suicide.

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 I mean, I'm not in a position to dispense therapy. I'm not a therapist.

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 10 man you know what

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 11 You know, is there like a sort of procedure you follow, just even though you're a one-man show with those?

Speaker 10 Well, there's a couple of different things I look at. Number one,

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And the student, child, wanted to seek some kind of retaliation. That didn't go well.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 But some were real, from people who wanted someone in their lives dead and who were ready to take action on that plan.

Speaker 24 And now Bob, who isn't in law enforcement, is being told about these homicidal plans.

Speaker 14 And now he has to decide what, if any, responsibility he has in all of this.

Speaker 8 So there are cases that come through that he reports to law enforcement.

Speaker 14 And sometimes they even make the news.

Speaker 20 Like in 2023, when a young mother reached out to him.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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 kid or I'm done.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 this was the result.

Speaker 23 Wow.

Speaker 11 And so, can you tell us a little bit about how her case played out after you notified authorities?

Speaker 10 Well, yeah. So, notifying the authorities was really a bit difficult in this case.

Speaker 10 It took several, several phone calls for me getting through to the law enforcement agency in Miami before somebody would take this seriously.

Speaker 10 And during the course of trying to report it, hours had gone by.

Speaker 10 And I'm getting more and more kind of irritated. And I keep asking for a supervisor and they keep transferring me around.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 That's when they took it seriously, when she could verify that, hey, it's not just some random report.

Speaker 10 But once they got in there and investigated, I believe they made an arrest within six hours.

Speaker 26 The Miami-Dade Police Department opened an investigation after Bob sent in the tip.

Speaker 14 An investigator posed as a hitman for hire and texted with Jasmine Paez.

Speaker 15 She moved forward with an attempt to hire him, agreeing to pay $3,000 $3,000 to have her three-year-old child killed.

Speaker 14 Jasmine Paez and her boyfriend, Gamaliel Soza, were both arrested in 2023.

Speaker 1 Jasmine has lost custody of her child and is charged with first-degree solicitation of murder and unlawful use of a communication device.

Speaker 29 Soza was charged with first-degree murder conspiracy and unlawful use of a communications device.

Speaker 20 This joke website had actually turned into a tip that potentially saved the life of a three-year-old.

Speaker 22 And Bob gets messages like this all the time from different people in different counties run by different law enforcement departments.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And please take this seriously. Do you get a lot of pushback of like, you know, this can't be real?

Speaker 10 I do. I get a fair amount of pushback.
I've had some agencies basically laugh and say, ha ha, you know, whatever.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 You know, fortunately, there's U.S. Department of Justice press releases out there, which reference the website.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 22 It makes sense that it would be difficult to communicate the situation to law enforcement.

Speaker 28 As much as Bob is trying to help and is helping, he's not in law enforcement.

Speaker 14 He's not a government official.

Speaker 32 He's not even an incorporated nonprofit with guidelines or operating procedures.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 28 He needs to know that the person who submitted it is a real person.

Speaker 33 It's not that hard to verify.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 10 If they respond back with, ha ha, I was just kidding. Have a nice day.
Okay, that gets filed one way.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And, you know, the ones that they arrest are the ones you hear about in the news.

Speaker 23 Wow.

Speaker 34 I mean, that's a lot of work. Like, how many hours are you spending on this a week?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 I mean, literally, it would fill every hour of every day. It's just that crazy.

Speaker 10 There was a time when I 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.

Speaker 10 My wife wouldn't like it, but you know, that's kind of sorry.

Speaker 33 Bob says he gets murder for hire requests from literally all over the world.

Speaker 27 A while back, he received hundreds of emails from Indonesia after an Indonesian YouTuber posted about rentahitman.com on the dark web.

Speaker 31 And the lengths that Bob went to in order to report these requests is surprising.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So I decided to take this information to the Indonesian consulate in San Francisco, and I gave them the information.

Speaker 10 And the reason I did that was five of the requests were for assassination of their president, Joko Widodo.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 34 With the case of like these Indonesian requests, you know, you have been told by multiple governmental agencies, you know, the U.S.

Speaker 34 consulate, that essentially they don't care or maybe they care personally, but they're not going to put resources and time into this.

Speaker 34 And you hit multiple 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?

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 10 Yeah, you know,

Speaker 10 I just don't want to see anybody get hurt. And, you know,

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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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Speaker 39 Hey, I'm Frank, and I I have hydrodonitis superativa, HS. Before starting Cosentics, I was so uncomfortable with my symptoms, like not being able to sleep on white sheets or wear white clothes.

Speaker 39 Now I can appreciate the little things.

Speaker 41 Cosentic secukinumab is prescribed for adults with moderate to severe hydrodonitis superativa, HS. Don't use if allergic to Cosentics.
Get checked for TB before starting.

Speaker 41 Increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur, like TB or other serious bacterial, bacterial, fungal, or viral infections. Some were fatal.

Speaker 41 Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough, had a vaccine or planned to, or if IBD symptoms develop or worsen.

Speaker 41 Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-COSENTIX or COSENTIX.com.

Speaker 39 You're stronger than H is.

Speaker 4 Ask your dermatologist about COSENTIX.

Speaker 42 So, you're telling me that the AI that's meant to make everyone's job easier to manage just adds more to manage on top of the thousands of apps the IT department already manages.

Speaker 42 Funny how that works.

Speaker 42 Any business can add AI. IBM helps you scale and manage AI to change how you do business.
Let's create Smarter Business, IBM.

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 11 have her ex-husband killed. Yeah.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 11 That's like the moment you're like, okay, this person's really serious.

Speaker 10 Yeah, Wendy is a very unique situation, by the way,

Speaker 10 because

Speaker 10 yeah,

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 After verifying the information and sending her an email, you know, do you still require our services and that kind of thing?

Speaker 10 And after she responded, well, that's when it got passed off to Michigan authorities. And you know that the rest of that story.

Speaker 11 But for those who don't know, can you tell us?

Speaker 10 But for those who don't know, she actually met up with Undercover who played the part of a field operative or the hitman. Apparently, there was some money exchanged.

Speaker 26 It was July of 2020 when Wendy Wine found rentahitman.com.

Speaker 23 According to reporting from CNN, Wendy wrote, quote, it's kind of weird that your company isn't on the deep or dark web.

Speaker 21 She then went on to offer to pay $5,000 to have her ex-husband killed.

Speaker 14 The Michigan State Police sent a trooper in plain clothes to meet with Wendy in Detroit.

Speaker 25 She reportedly provided her ex-husband's home address and work schedule and handed him $200 as a down payment.

Speaker 10 She was ultimately arrested. She was ultimately convicted.
She

Speaker 10 is serving her time

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 There's something about the Wendy thing that I 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 yes she did

Speaker 10 she had actually gone to the dark web she had gone to a dark web website and she had basically provided her name and uh 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.

Speaker 10 So she had actually reached out to the dark web seeking services and didn't get the results there that she was after.

Speaker 34 Potentially, or do you know, like actually getting in contact with someone who could render Hitman services on the dark web?

Speaker 10 Yeah, she had tried.

Speaker 34 And failed in some way and then went to your website.

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 9 It's a lot for him to do after he signs off from his paid job.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 33 So he has spent sleepless nights fielding emails and following leads.

Speaker 14 He hopes to change that by creating a nonprofit.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 I can't do it by myself. I'm unfunded.
The biggest thing that anybody can do to help at this point in this mission, in my mission, is help with funding.

Speaker 10 There was a case out of Las Cruces, New Mexico, involving a subject by the name of Lee Trajillo.

Speaker 10 He had filled out the submission form.

Speaker 10 He wanted to take out his mother-in-law because she was like interfering with his relationship i had reported it to the las crucias police department it fell through the cracks

Speaker 10 nothing happened for a number of weeks i spoke to a sergeant in las crucias 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 i'm like that's your answer So I didn't like that.

Speaker 10 This guy's mother-in-law is still in jeopardy and y'all haven't worked this case.

Speaker 23 Wow.

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 34 Like, what do you think about your position and how has this experience sort of affected how you interact and see the world?

Speaker 10 Seeing it full-blown in my inbox every day, it really kind of,

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But also, maybe it's not as well known that it becomes no longer

Speaker 10 overkill.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 10 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,

Speaker 10 I mean, it's busier than ever. I don't get it.

Speaker 29 Bob wants everyone to know that he has a new website.

Speaker 33 This time, he's focused on people trying to sell stolen catalytic converters.

Speaker 1 The website is webuycatconverters.com.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 32 So we hit record a second time.

Speaker 6 We're back.

Speaker 11 Hannah and I ended the interview and then amateur mistake. Amateur mistake.
And then Bob brought up something and we are hitting record again.

Speaker 10 Yeah, so we've covered a few things, but we haven't covered the individuals that are seeking employment through the website.

Speaker 34 As in aspiring hitman.

Speaker 10 As in aspiring hitman, aspiring field operatives.

Speaker 34 Field operatives.

Speaker 11 Do they send resumes?

Speaker 10 Yeah, upon request. Yeah.

Speaker 34 Tell us about some of these applications that you've gotten.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 for his family. He had sent in a picture of himself, a headshot, his ID

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 During his interview with the onboarding field agent,

Speaker 10 he had said that he had no problem taking ears and fingers as trophies and that kind of thing.

Speaker 6 Yuck.

Speaker 10 Yeah, he was good to go.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 10 Yeah, you would think in Hitman 101 that they would teach you not to leave any kind of trail.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 10 Yeah, he agreed to carry out a contract killing for $5,000 and accepted $2,500 down.

Speaker 34 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?

Speaker 10 Honestly, I don't get into that with them unless they voluntarily bring it up.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 His intent 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.

Speaker 10 There's individuals around the country that have applied to become hitman. And they have filled out the information.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 There is

Speaker 10 a couple of ongoing cases right now around the country involving potential applicants, some of which are absolutely just

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 Oh, and he wants to clean up his neighborhood down in Cape Town, where he's at. Yeah.
Try reporting that one.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Wow.
That is so.

Speaker 6 So I don't know what you would do

Speaker 6 there.

Speaker 11 No.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 34 Anyway, if there's a will, there's a way.

Speaker 23 People want a job.

Speaker 14 Wow. Thank you so much, Bob.

Speaker 6 What an interview. What an interview.
Worth the wait.

Speaker 8 Yes, totally worth the wait.

Speaker 27 You have been trying to get him to interview for like over a year.

Speaker 11 I honestly think it was multiple years because it was when we worked on our other show.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And then I actually think on the website at the time, it was saying I caught like a 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.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I don't want the FBI coming after me. But yeah, yeah, that interview was so different than any other interview we've ever done.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it really was.

Speaker 8 Just the way that it consumed his life.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 8 You could tell that he really has, you know, he cares a lot.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 Bob mentioned this case out of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Speaker 12 This is from justice.gov.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And according to court records, between April 10th, 2022 and May 11th, 2022, Leif Heyman repeatedly solicited a hitman to murder his girlfriend's mother through the website rentahitman.com.

Speaker 11 It's like $200.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 14 I don't know if that was like a down payment or what.

Speaker 9 I mean, yeah, that's really wild. I don't know if that was just like a number he threw out there.

Speaker 11 It's enough to get him on that. Like that shows some serious intent.

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 9 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 run to hitman you know it's a lot of explaining and yeah which sort of feels like as it should be you know if you're just a random person Yeah, 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 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

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And obviously things go awry. I think Tom Cruise ends up getting framed or something.
And I remember it being a good movie. I have to rewatch it.

Speaker 6 Consider that a wreck.

Speaker 9 Yeah, yeah. There you go.
Minority report coming in hot recommendation. But there's something about this whole like predicting a crime is going to happen.

Speaker 9 Obviously, it is a federal crime to try to solicit murder, but there's something a little tricky about that for me.

Speaker 9 You know, one of the cases that I I found when I was looking up Rent a Hitman is the case of Devin Falber in 2019.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 He was off of his medication.

Speaker 12 And his mother said that he had always had learning and behavioral issues.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 12 And when you think about rentohitman.com, someone like that going to the website, it's like, is that clear to that person that this is a fake website?

Speaker 9 And is there like an understanding of that or not?

Speaker 27 But he did move forward.

Speaker 9 He sent multiple requests to rentohitman.com.

Speaker 14 He wanted his ex-girlfriend and her parents both killed.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 I mean, clearly there's so much going on there, right?

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 But still, he was given a 10-year sentence for this. It just brings up so many bigger questions.

Speaker 13 How much of a threat was he?

Speaker 9 Maybe he was, you know, I mean, clearly he tried to have some people killed, but at the same time, like

Speaker 9 sending him to prison for 10 years, like, how is this helpful?

Speaker 11 Yeah, I just have to wonder. It's 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 This man is having a mental health crisis, but also a real threat to their lives.

Speaker 9 Doing something violent.

Speaker 11 Doing something violent.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's tricky.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 I think in all of our interviews, turned it off and then like stopped recording and then like, wait a minute.

Speaker 9 Yeah, here's something we need to talk about is people applying to be a hitman.

Speaker 11 Never had that cross my mind and thinking of like, thinking about the interview and questions. And

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 I mean, they're finding this website, but what if they'd found something else?

Speaker 27 Yeah.

Speaker 9 I think the thing with like people not looking at it and not.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 11 Wendy Wine.

Speaker 9 It's complicated. I did want to mention one thing at the end.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 He had entered into all these conversations about I would take those and ears as prizes or something. Oh, yeah, gross.
Took money from

Speaker 9 what he believed was like a hitman

Speaker 9 or a recruiter, 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.

Speaker 11 That seems right to me.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 9 Well, cool. What an interesting episode.

Speaker 13 So glad that we talked to Bob.

Speaker 9 So glad that you were persistent and finally tracked him down.

Speaker 6 I can be a bit of a test. We love it.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 Thanks for listening.

Speaker 9 See you next week.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 9 This has been an exactly right production, hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith, and me, Patia Eaton.

Speaker 11 Our producers are Tom Breifogel and Alexa Samorosi.

Speaker 9 This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.

Speaker 11 Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Speaker 9 Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.

Speaker 11 Artwork by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 9 Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

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