Kill List – Investigating Murder for Hire.

Carl Miller asks you to imagine the following scenario: You’re sat in your home when you receive a call from an investigative journalist. He reveals to you the reason for the call: you are on a ‘kill list’. Someone has paid thousands of dollars in bitcoin equivalent to have you killed, kidnapped or tortured. Throughout his podcast Kill List, Miller investigates the murky network of murder-for-hire websites on the dark web. On these sites perpetrators ,using pseudonyms, pay vast sums of money to hitmen to target people.

“It should seem like an accident”

Miller’s involvement in this investigation began in 2020, when his associate hacked and managed to gain access to this murder-for-hire website. This site contained a spreadsheet with over 100 names, contact details, addresses and plans for their intended murder. Messages from the perpetrators concerning the murders included the following: “it should seem like an accident”, “hit with a car and ensure fatality.’’

This particular site was a scam – the owner was pocketing the money without actually conducting any hits – but the risk was very real, as Miller tells us at the beginning of the podcast. For one intended target, Amy Allwine, it was too late by this point. Her body was discovered by police in November 2016 and her death was initially ruled as a suicide. However, the truth quickly became clear: her husband, Stephen Allwine, had paid for a hitman to kill her on a murder-for-hire site, and when this hitman had not materialised, Stephen Allwine had murdered her himself.

Upon gaining access to this site, Miller immediately reported it to the Metropolitan Police, who passed the investigation to Interpol, but police involvement quickly dried up. What followed was a journalistic ethical nightmare: Miller had to decide whether – and how – to warn hundreds of people with very real death threats against them.

”His series of cold calls are met with scepticism at best and complete disbelief at worst.”

Thrillingly, the podcast takes us step-by-step through Miller’s attempts to warn the victims whilst navigating the absurdity of the situation within which he finds himself. His series of cold calls are met with scepticism at best and complete disbelief at worst. Miller’s obvious nerves, and clear attempts to conduct the investigation empathetically, make him an endearing narrator. The brilliancy of this podcast is its willingness to draw us so close to the investigation. Miller alternates between the disappointment of when he cannot properly warn victims, and the joyous moments when cases are finally taken seriously by the police.

When Miller finally manages, via a freelance journalist, to approach Elena, a victim living in Switzerland, the listener is shocked to hear that she is unsurprised about the hit taken out on her. She has an immediate suspect in mind: her ex-husband. The Kill List does not shy away from the reality of violence against women; most perpetrators on the murder-to-hire site are either current or ex male partners, paying vast amounts of money to kill their current or previous female partners.

”kidnapped, tortured and injected with heroin”

Some of the orders are not simply murder. One man has asked for his estranged wife, Jennifer, to be kidnapped, tortured and injected with heroin. This man had been periodically attempting to drug her with sedatives and introduce another woman into their marriage. The psychological torture he asked the hitman to enact was intended to render her completely pliable. In this case, the FBI were able to trace the payments, capture the perpetrator and charge him with attempted kidnapping.

Ultimately, the podcast leaves the listener with a mix of hope and despair. On the one hand, Miller has potentially saved countless lives. He has disclosed 175 names to the police, who in turn have secured 28 convictions. Yet, the podcast reveals the lengths that people will go to violently rid themselves of people in their lives, and in turn reveals a danger within human nature that is much greater than the dark web.