July 24, 2025 • 49 mins
Bob Innes never set out to stop murders. But when his satirical website, RentAHitman.com, started attracting real requests for contract killings, he found himself in an unusual predicament. What, if anything, should he do about it? Now, he spends most of his spare time trying to intercept murder-for-hire plots, including an entire family wanted dead over an inheritance. But it turns out trying to stop a murder before it happens is tricky, especially when you aren’t in law enforcement.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
She provided a picture of a three year old that
she wanted to have murdered. It was her own three
year old.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm patient eton. I'm Hannah Smith.
This week, we have an unusual story for you. We
are talking with a webmaster named Bob Innis all about
his website rent a hitman dot com. And yes, I
am saying hitman.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Let's get into the interview.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hey, thanks for having me So.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I first reached out to you a couple of years ago,
didn't hear anything back, Busy, It's okay, 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
(01:28):
we ought to introduce you, or that you would like
to be introduced.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Sure. My name is Bob. I'm the webmaster of rent
to Hitman dot com your point and click solution. It
is a parody website. It's safe to go to. Please visit.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Bob registered rent to Hitman dot com in two thousand
and five. It was a tech startup that focused on
it security that he and a couple of his buddies
created after graduation. The hit in hit Man actually refers
to website clicks.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Hit pertains to website hit traffic, network traffic analytics, how
many page views your podcast gets for example, or in
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
(02:22):
let them know what they need to do in order
to tighten their security of their network. If you remember
back in the eighties nineties, I guess Staples had an
easy button, a little red easy button maybe they still
do it. Used to be able to click it and
your problem would be solved. Well, our little catchphrase was
rent a hit man your point in click solution with
(02:44):
a little image of a speedy click mouse kind of
a thing. And you know that was the whole idea
behind our business plan.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
The Internet in two thousand and five was so different
than it is today. Just one year before, in two
thousand and four, our 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
(03:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
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 two thousand and eight, and I
decided to go in and check the inbox and I'm shocked.
There's about two hundred and fifty to three hundred emails.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
What kinds of emails were you getting?
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, so 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
(04:21):
a hit man so that she could learn the trade.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
So these are people looking for hit men.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
They were looking for hit man and people to do
their dirty deeds.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
As you're reading these emails, like, what's going through your mind?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
You know, I was not equipped at that point to
kind of take in comprehend their 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 hit man.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
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 runt a
Hitman dot Com was run by an actual hitman, an assassin,
a killer for hire? Were these real requests? Bob checked
(05:18):
it up to a few practical jokes, kids having a
laugh on the internet, But then in twenty ten he
got an email that sounded different, one that he could
not ignore.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
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 murder. 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,
(05:51):
her reason, where she was in Canada, and the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
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 murderer.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
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 3 (06:25):
And you responded to her that way because you were like,
this lady's serious. I need to see, like how serious?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
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
(06:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Who did she want killed.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Aunt, uncle and another family.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Member all over an inheritance.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
All over a family inheritance.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Once Bob realized this murder for higher request was real,
he felt the need to report it to authorities.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
There was an officer in Nevado 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 twenty 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 somebody that
(07:48):
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, and she had fled. The
youth ended up in Canada, lost her passport, had nowhere
to go, and reached out to the website, and then
(08:08):
when the authorities in Canada went to perform a welfare
check Honor, they obviously validated verified the information. She had
a warrant out of the UK, so she was extradited
after one hundred and twenty six days.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
When you got news of Helen's arrest, how did that
make you feel about the website and all of this
playing out?
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Oh? Wow, Yeah, it was a kind of an awakening experience.
I mean, it was a nine dollar and twenty cent
website had just basically saved the lives of three people,
and with little to no effort on my part.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
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 ten
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 rent Hitman dot com. He
(09:07):
no longer had hopes of selling the domain. Instead, he
decided to build out a website.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
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
(09:35):
issue that they have. And there's web forms that people
can utilize to fill out the who, 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.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
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. But it has saved
lives and it has worked. You created this intake form
where people really sort of stay out themselves as wanting
to have someone killed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so you
(10:18):
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?
Speaker 2 (10:30):
So in twenty ten 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
(10:50):
in the it sense, but it attracts people that have
nefarious things in mind.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Bob describes his sense of humor as inspired by the
Cohen Brothers, and this appreciation for absurdist dark comedy is
on full display at rent to hitman dot 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
(11:25):
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 a real hitman. 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 2 (11:45):
This is registered with go Daddy. It is one hundred
percent safe and secure. We have disclaimers on the page.
You can google the web page and read Wikipedia articles
and People magazine or Rolling Stone. I mean, there's podcasts,
there's news stories. I mean, people, please do your homework
(12:07):
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 you 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.
(12:31):
We have over seventeen nine and eighty five US based
field operatives. That's the same number of police departments in
the US in twenty sixteen. By the way, we have
customer testimonials discount packages like it.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Is mind blowing right that someone would take the seriously.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Cool cats and Kittens discount ten percent off. Yeah, customer testimonials.
Let's see, we have a gallery of images.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Can you read us one of the costs testimonials.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
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
Squeedo and Rena Hydman.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
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, Like, yeah,
(13:41):
I mean, you could click and just write and this
is who I want killed. I guess is that happening.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
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 people that work with me
to create the nonprofit that I am aiming to create,
(14:10):
then this would be a twenty four to seven operation.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Because you're getting so many submissions.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, every single day.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Are you able to tell us, like how many you're getting?
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, give me one second here, let me pull up
something just from April. First, I've had twenty eight submissions
on one web form.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
We talked to Bob in mid April. That means in
about two weeks he had twenty eight submissions to the
site requesting the service of a hitman.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
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 murdered for higher solicitations. Some of
them are pries 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.
(15:03):
You know, there's obviously people out there that are seeking
assistant 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.
(15:27):
I mean, I'm not in a position to dispense therapy.
I'm not a therapist.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
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 2 (15:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
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
(16:49):
eedu at 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 see some
(17:15):
kind of retaliation that didn't go well.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
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,
(17:42):
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 twenty twenty three when a
young mother reached out to him.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Jasmine Pyez This is a woman out of Florida, eighteen
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
(18:23):
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
(18:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Wow, And so can you tell us a little bit
about how her case played out after you notified authorities?
Speaker 2 (19:08):
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, ours had gone by,
(19:29):
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 explained the situation.
I told them, Hey, this isn't a prank. You know,
I've been in people in Rolling Stone, and I kind
(19:50):
of referenced some news stories and the ladies like, oh, 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.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
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 Piez. She moved forward
with an attempt to hire him, agreeing to pay three
thousand dollars to have her three year old child killed.
Jasmine Piez and her boyfriend Gamaliel Sosa were both arrested
(20:31):
in twenty twenty three. 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.
(20:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
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 to 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?
Speaker 2 (21:30):
I do. I get a fair amount of pushback. I've
had some agencies basically laugh and say aha, 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,
(21:52):
there's US Department of Justice press releases out there which
reference to 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.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Then that's when I'll send a message back, do you
still require services? Would you like me to place in
contact with the field up earth? If they respond back
with haha, 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
(23:32):
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
(23:54):
are the ones you hear about in the news.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Wow, I mean that's a lot of work. Like, how
many hours are you spending on this a week?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Well, like I said, I've had to tone it down
to maybe twenty 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
(24:24):
in a forty hour work week somewhere else and I'd
come home and do this, you know, for forty or
sixty hours. I'd be up all night. My wife wouldn't
like it, but you know, that's kind of sorry.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Bob says he gets murder for higher requests from literally
all over the world. A while back, he received hundreds
of emails from Indonesia after an Indonesian YouTuber posted about
rent a hitman dot com on the dark web, and
the links that Bob went to in order to report
these requests is surprising.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
I had contacted the US State Department. They're like, yeah,
we don't care. I reached out to the US 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
(25:18):
for assassination of their president Joko with Dodo. 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 1 (25:33):
With the case of like these Indonesian requests. You know,
you have been told by multiple governmental agencies, you know,
the US 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
(25:54):
then your response is to go in person to the
Indonesian Consulate Inza Recisco. Why do you think you're so
driven to do that when even these governmental agencies are like,
we're gonna kind of wash our hands of this. What
do you think it is that makes you want to
follow through with this?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
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 the scary,
(26:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
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 rent a Hitman in July
of twenty twenty, and she wanted to have her ex
husband killed. Yeah, and you know this is like all
(27:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, Wendy is a very unique situation, by the way,
because yeah, when she 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
(27:55):
a beef with her ex and wanted him taken out.
She made it very clear verifying the information and sending
her an email, do you still require services? And that
kind of thing, 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 3 (28:14):
But for those who don't know, can you tell us?
Speaker 2 (28:17):
But for those who don't know, she actually met up
with undercover who played part of a field operative for
the Hitman. Apparently there was some money exchanged.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
It was July of twenty twenty when Wendywine found rent
a hitman dot com. According to reporting from CNN, Wendy wrote, quote,
it's kind of weird that your company isn't on the
deep or dark web. She then went on to offer
to pay five thousand dollars to have her ex husband killed.
The Michigan State Police sent a trooper in playing clothes
(28:52):
to meet with Wendy in Detroit. She reportedly provided her
ex husband's home address and work schedule and handed him
to hundred dollars as a down payment.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
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 old thing started, and I wish him well.
There's something about the Wendy thing that I think needs
(29:24):
to be pointed out, and this was never brought out
in trial. However, that's because she kind.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Of took her deal, right, Wendy, you pled guilty, Yes,
yes she did.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
She had actually gone to the dark web. She had
gone to a dark web website and she had basically
provided her name and or alias rather and the name
of her target, Wendy Georgina Harris. Harris was there. Aelius
had gone to the dark web days before going to
(29:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Potentially or do you know, like actually getting in contact
with someone who could render hitman services on the dark web.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah, she had tried.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
And failed in some way and then went to your website.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Yeah, I don't know what the result was. Of her
from getting help on the dark web. But I only
imagine that I had intervened before things could get to
that stage.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
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
(30:53):
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 higher requests,
(31:14):
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 2 (31:23):
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,
an investigator, you know that kind of thing. What I
(31:46):
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 can do to help at this point in this mission,
(32:07):
in my mission, is to help with funding. There was
a case out of Las Crucius, New Mexico, involving a
subject by the name of Lee Trehillo. 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 Crucius police department.
(32:30):
It fell through the cracks. Nothing happened for a number
of weeks. I spoke to a sergeant in Las Crucius
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
(32:52):
is still in jeopardy and y'all haven't worked this case.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Wow, I guess just my last question I have is like,
when you say, 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 2 (33:09):
Like?
Speaker 3 (33:09):
What do you think about your position? And how has
this experience sort of affected how you interact and see
the world.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
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 show.
But I do know there's good people out there, and
I do know that not everybody is a nefarious and
malicious pos and just some people make mistakes. Some people
(33:41):
say or do things online that they probably will take back.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
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 we buycatconverters dot com. Patient.
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.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
We're back, Hannah and I ended the interview and then
amateur mistake, amateure mistake, and then Bob brought something and
we are heading record again.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah. So we've covered a few things, but we haven't
covered the individuals that are seeking employment through the website.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
As in aspiring hitman.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
As in aspiring hit man, aspiring field operatives.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Field operatives. Do they send you resumes?
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Yeah? Upon request?
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Yeah, tell us about some of these applications that you've gotten.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
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
(35:51):
not missing any of the targets, and he had indicated
that he had an expanding family and wanted to make
money for his family. He had sent in a picture
of himself, a headshot, his ID as requested, and a resume,
(36:11):
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 onto an agency in Tennessee and they ultimately met
(36:31):
with the Reaper offered him a fictitious kill packet and
enveloped with like twenty five hundred dollars 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
(36:55):
said that he had no problem taking ears and fingers
as trophies and that kind of thing. Yeah, he was
good to go.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
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 2 (37:12):
Yeah, you would think in hit Man one oh one
that they would teach you not to leave any kind
of trail. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
Published on Justice dot Gov September twenty fifth, twenty twenty four,
says Garcia pleaded guilty to using interstate commerce facilities and
the commission of a murder for hire.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, he agreed to carry out a contract killing for
five thousand and accepted twenty five hundred down.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
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 2 (37:49):
Honestly, I don't get into that with them unless they
volunteerily 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 fine, but his means of carrying it out
is pretty screwed up. I'm not a fan of that,
but yeah, I do what you do to take care
(38:10):
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 a chance? Are they available to disappear
(38:34):
if needed? In 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
(38:55):
of South Africa that is very interesting and involves the
South African Police Service officer who wants to be a
hit man. Oh and he wants to clean up his
neighborhood down in Cape Town where he's at. Yeah. Try
reporting that one.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Yeah. Wow, that is so so. I don't know what
you would do do? Yeah there no.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah, anyway, if there's a will, there's a way people
want a job.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Wow, thank you so much, Bob. What an interview? What
an interview? Worth the weight? Yes, totally worth the waight
you have been trying to get him to interview for
like over a year.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
So I think I wrote like five times in my
initial outreach like I'm just a podcast producer, to.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Be clear, I don't want to have anyone killed.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Yeah, I don't have the FBI coming after me. But yeah,
that interview was so different than any other interview we've
ever done. Yeah, it really was the way that it
consumed his life.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Yeah, that was really surprising that he said at one
point he was going to his forty hour a week
job and then spending like twenty to forty 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
(40:55):
there was just a couple that I wanted to follow
up on quickly. Bob meant, this case out of Las Crucis,
New Mexico. This is from Justice dot Gov. A man
was sentenced to the statutory maximum of ten years in
federal prison for trying to hire an undercover ATF agent
to murder his girlfriend's mother for two hundred dollars. This
(41:17):
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 tenth, twenty twenty two and
(41:39):
May eleventh, twenty twenty two, Leif Hayman repeatedly solicited a
hitman to murder his girlfriend's mother through the website rent
to hitman dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
It's like, two hundred dollars you think that? I mean,
there's so many things wrong with trying to hire a
contract killer, especially through a website that's so obviously a joke.
But the two hundred dollars, 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
(42:08):
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
(42:30):
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't a 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
(42:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
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. 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
(43:18):
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 being a good movie. I have to
rewatch it, but consider that Irec. Yeah, yeah, there you
got Minority Report coming in hot recommendation. But there's something
(43:40):
about this whole like predicting a crime it'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 Fouber in nineteen. He was a twenty one
(44:02):
year old man living in Virginia and he contacted rent
to hitman dot com and requested to have his ex
girlfriend and her parents both killed. And you know, when
you first hear about that on the service, 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.
(44:25):
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
(44:47):
out of my mouth, I don't mean to say, Like,
there's clearly some issues and some confusion. And when you
think about rent hitman dot 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 rent a hitman
(45:09):
dot 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
(45:32):
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 ten 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
(45:54):
to have some people killed. But at the same time,
like sending him to prison for ten years, Like, how
is this helpful? Yeah, I just have to wonder. It's like,
that's totally separate from Bob and Rent a hit man.
We do have an issue about how we react to
mental health issues in our justice system, and Bob is
(46:14):
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 Tennis and 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.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Yeah, here's something we need to talk about. These people
applying to be a hit man.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Never had that cross 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 the 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.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
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
(47:33):
someone to kill like Wendy Win, 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 Josia Garcia, who had applied to be
a hit man and then there was a sting operation.
He had entered into all these conversations about I would
take thoses and ears as prizes or something, took money
(47:56):
from what he believed was like a hitman or recruiter
or sooner, and then tried to give the money back immediately,
but still had incriminated himself. He was sentenced in late
April twenty twenty five to five years probation.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
That seems right to me.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
See you next week. If you have a story for us,
we would love to hear it. Our email is The
Knife at exactly rightmedia dot com, or you can follow
us on Instagram at the Knife podcast or a Blue
Sky at the Knife podcast.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
This has been an exactly right production, Hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me paysia E.
Speaker 3 (48:46):
Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Samarosi. This episode
was mixed by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport Artwork
five and SA Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgareth Georgia
Hardstark and Danielle Cramer.
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
She provided a picture of a three year old that
she wanted to have murdered. It was her own three
year old.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm patient eton. I'm Hannah Smith.
This week, we have an unusual story for you. We
are talking with a webmaster named Bob Innis all about
his website rent a hitman dot com. And yes, I
am saying hitman.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Let's get into the interview.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hey, thanks for having me So.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I first reached out to you a couple of years ago,
didn't hear anything back, Busy, It's okay, 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
(01:28):
we ought to introduce you, or that you would like
to be introduced.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Sure. My name is Bob. I'm the webmaster of rent
to Hitman dot com your point and click solution. It
is a parody website. It's safe to go to. Please visit.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Bob registered rent to Hitman dot com in two thousand
and five. It was a tech startup that focused on
it security that he and a couple of his buddies
created after graduation. The hit in hit Man actually refers
to website clicks.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Hit pertains to website hit traffic, network traffic analytics, how
many page views your podcast gets for example, or in
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
(02:22):
let them know what they need to do in order
to tighten their security of their network. If you remember
back in the eighties nineties, I guess Staples had an
easy button, a little red easy button maybe they still
do it. Used to be able to click it and
your problem would be solved. Well, our little catchphrase was
rent a hit man your point in click solution with
(02:44):
a little image of a speedy click mouse kind of
a thing. And you know that was the whole idea
behind our business plan.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
The Internet in two thousand and five was so different
than it is today. Just one year before, in two
thousand and four, our 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
(03:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
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 two thousand and eight, and I
decided to go in and check the inbox and I'm shocked.
There's about two hundred and fifty to three hundred emails.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
What kinds of emails were you getting?
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, so 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
(04:21):
a hit man so that she could learn the trade.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
So these are people looking for hit men.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
They were looking for hit man and people to do
their dirty deeds.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
As you're reading these emails, like, what's going through your mind?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
You know, I was not equipped at that point to
kind of take in comprehend their 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 hit man.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
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 runt a
Hitman dot Com was run by an actual hitman, an assassin,
a killer for hire? Were these real requests? Bob checked
(05:18):
it up to a few practical jokes, kids having a
laugh on the internet, But then in twenty ten he
got an email that sounded different, one that he could
not ignore.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
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 murder. 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,
(05:51):
her reason, where she was in Canada, and the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
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 murderer.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
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 3 (06:25):
And you responded to her that way because you were like,
this lady's serious. I need to see, like how serious?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
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
(06:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Who did she want killed.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Aunt, uncle and another family.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Member all over an inheritance.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
All over a family inheritance.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Once Bob realized this murder for higher request was real,
he felt the need to report it to authorities.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
There was an officer in Nevado 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 twenty 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 somebody that
(07:48):
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, and she had fled. The
youth ended up in Canada, lost her passport, had nowhere
to go, and reached out to the website, and then
(08:08):
when the authorities in Canada went to perform a welfare
check Honor, they obviously validated verified the information. She had
a warrant out of the UK, so she was extradited
after one hundred and twenty six days.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
When you got news of Helen's arrest, how did that
make you feel about the website and all of this
playing out?
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Oh? Wow, Yeah, it was a kind of an awakening experience.
I mean, it was a nine dollar and twenty cent
website had just basically saved the lives of three people,
and with little to no effort on my part.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
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 ten
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 rent Hitman dot com. He
(09:07):
no longer had hopes of selling the domain. Instead, he
decided to build out a website.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
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
(09:35):
issue that they have. And there's web forms that people
can utilize to fill out the who, 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.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
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. But it has saved
lives and it has worked. You created this intake form
where people really sort of stay out themselves as wanting
to have someone killed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so you
(10:18):
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?
Speaker 2 (10:30):
So in twenty ten 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
(10:50):
in the it sense, but it attracts people that have
nefarious things in mind.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Bob describes his sense of humor as inspired by the
Cohen Brothers, and this appreciation for absurdist dark comedy is
on full display at rent to hitman dot 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
(11:25):
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 a real hitman. 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 2 (11:45):
This is registered with go Daddy. It is one hundred
percent safe and secure. We have disclaimers on the page.
You can google the web page and read Wikipedia articles
and People magazine or Rolling Stone. I mean, there's podcasts,
there's news stories. I mean, people, please do your homework
(12:07):
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 you 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.
(12:31):
We have over seventeen nine and eighty five US based
field operatives. That's the same number of police departments in
the US in twenty sixteen. By the way, we have
customer testimonials discount packages like it.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Is mind blowing right that someone would take the seriously.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Cool cats and Kittens discount ten percent off. Yeah, customer testimonials.
Let's see, we have a gallery of images.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Can you read us one of the costs testimonials.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
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
Squeedo and Rena Hydman.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
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, Like, yeah,
(13:41):
I mean, you could click and just write and this
is who I want killed. I guess is that happening.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
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 people that work with me
to create the nonprofit that I am aiming to create,
(14:10):
then this would be a twenty four to seven operation.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Because you're getting so many submissions.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, every single day.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Are you able to tell us, like how many you're getting?
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, give me one second here, let me pull up
something just from April. First, I've had twenty eight submissions
on one web form.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
We talked to Bob in mid April. That means in
about two weeks he had twenty eight submissions to the
site requesting the service of a hitman.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
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 murdered for higher solicitations. Some of
them are pries 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.
(15:03):
You know, there's obviously people out there that are seeking
assistant 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.
(15:27):
I mean, I'm not in a position to dispense therapy.
I'm not a therapist.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
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 2 (15:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
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
(16:49):
eedu at 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 see some
(17:15):
kind of retaliation that didn't go well.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
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,
(17:42):
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 twenty twenty three when a
young mother reached out to him.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Jasmine Pyez This is a woman out of Florida, eighteen
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
(18:23):
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
(18:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Wow, And so can you tell us a little bit
about how her case played out after you notified authorities?
Speaker 2 (19:08):
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, ours had gone by,
(19:29):
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 explained the situation.
I told them, Hey, this isn't a prank. You know,
I've been in people in Rolling Stone, and I kind
(19:50):
of referenced some news stories and the ladies like, oh, 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.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
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 Piez. She moved forward
with an attempt to hire him, agreeing to pay three
thousand dollars to have her three year old child killed.
Jasmine Piez and her boyfriend Gamaliel Sosa were both arrested
(20:31):
in twenty twenty three. 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.
(20:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
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 to 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?
Speaker 2 (21:30):
I do. I get a fair amount of pushback. I've
had some agencies basically laugh and say aha, 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,
(21:52):
there's US Department of Justice press releases out there which
reference to 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.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Then that's when I'll send a message back, do you
still require services? Would you like me to place in
contact with the field up earth? If they respond back
with haha, 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
(23:32):
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
(23:54):
are the ones you hear about in the news.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Wow, I mean that's a lot of work. Like, how
many hours are you spending on this a week?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Well, like I said, I've had to tone it down
to maybe twenty 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
(24:24):
in a forty hour work week somewhere else and I'd
come home and do this, you know, for forty or
sixty hours. I'd be up all night. My wife wouldn't
like it, but you know, that's kind of sorry.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Bob says he gets murder for higher requests from literally
all over the world. A while back, he received hundreds
of emails from Indonesia after an Indonesian YouTuber posted about
rent a hitman dot com on the dark web, and
the links that Bob went to in order to report
these requests is surprising.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
I had contacted the US State Department. They're like, yeah,
we don't care. I reached out to the US 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
(25:18):
for assassination of their president Joko with Dodo. 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 1 (25:33):
With the case of like these Indonesian requests. You know,
you have been told by multiple governmental agencies, you know,
the US 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
(25:54):
then your response is to go in person to the
Indonesian Consulate Inza Recisco. Why do you think you're so
driven to do that when even these governmental agencies are like,
we're gonna kind of wash our hands of this. What
do you think it is that makes you want to
follow through with this?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
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 the scary,
(26:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
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 rent a Hitman in July
of twenty twenty, and she wanted to have her ex
husband killed. Yeah, and you know this is like all
(27:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, Wendy is a very unique situation, by the way,
because yeah, when she 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
(27:55):
a beef with her ex and wanted him taken out.
She made it very clear verifying the information and sending
her an email, do you still require services? And that
kind of thing, 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 3 (28:14):
But for those who don't know, can you tell us?
Speaker 2 (28:17):
But for those who don't know, she actually met up
with undercover who played part of a field operative for
the Hitman. Apparently there was some money exchanged.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
It was July of twenty twenty when Wendywine found rent
a hitman dot com. According to reporting from CNN, Wendy wrote, quote,
it's kind of weird that your company isn't on the
deep or dark web. She then went on to offer
to pay five thousand dollars to have her ex husband killed.
The Michigan State Police sent a trooper in playing clothes
(28:52):
to meet with Wendy in Detroit. She reportedly provided her
ex husband's home address and work schedule and handed him
to hundred dollars as a down payment.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
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 old thing started, and I wish him well.
There's something about the Wendy thing that I think needs
(29:24):
to be pointed out, and this was never brought out
in trial. However, that's because she kind.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Of took her deal, right, Wendy, you pled guilty, Yes,
yes she did.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
She had actually gone to the dark web. She had
gone to a dark web website and she had basically
provided her name and or alias rather and the name
of her target, Wendy Georgina Harris. Harris was there. Aelius
had gone to the dark web days before going to
(29:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Potentially or do you know, like actually getting in contact
with someone who could render hitman services on the dark web.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah, she had tried.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
And failed in some way and then went to your website.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Yeah, I don't know what the result was. Of her
from getting help on the dark web. But I only
imagine that I had intervened before things could get to
that stage.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
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
(30:53):
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 higher requests,
(31:14):
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 2 (31:23):
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,
an investigator, you know that kind of thing. What I
(31:46):
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 can do to help at this point in this mission,
(32:07):
in my mission, is to help with funding. There was
a case out of Las Crucius, New Mexico, involving a
subject by the name of Lee Trehillo. 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 Crucius police department.
(32:30):
It fell through the cracks. Nothing happened for a number
of weeks. I spoke to a sergeant in Las Crucius
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
(32:52):
is still in jeopardy and y'all haven't worked this case.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Wow, I guess just my last question I have is like,
when you say, 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 2 (33:09):
Like?
Speaker 3 (33:09):
What do you think about your position? And how has
this experience sort of affected how you interact and see
the world.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
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 show.
But I do know there's good people out there, and
I do know that not everybody is a nefarious and
malicious pos and just some people make mistakes. Some people
(33:41):
say or do things online that they probably will take back.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
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 we buycatconverters dot com. Patient.
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.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
We're back, Hannah and I ended the interview and then
amateur mistake, amateure mistake, and then Bob brought something and
we are heading record again.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah. So we've covered a few things, but we haven't
covered the individuals that are seeking employment through the website.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
As in aspiring hitman.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
As in aspiring hit man, aspiring field operatives.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Field operatives. Do they send you resumes?
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Yeah? Upon request?
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Yeah, tell us about some of these applications that you've gotten.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
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
(35:51):
not missing any of the targets, and he had indicated
that he had an expanding family and wanted to make
money for his family. He had sent in a picture
of himself, a headshot, his ID as requested, and a resume,
(36:11):
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 onto an agency in Tennessee and they ultimately met
(36:31):
with the Reaper offered him a fictitious kill packet and
enveloped with like twenty five hundred dollars 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
(36:55):
said that he had no problem taking ears and fingers
as trophies and that kind of thing. Yeah, he was
good to go.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
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 2 (37:12):
Yeah, you would think in hit Man one oh one
that they would teach you not to leave any kind
of trail. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
Published on Justice dot Gov September twenty fifth, twenty twenty four,
says Garcia pleaded guilty to using interstate commerce facilities and
the commission of a murder for hire.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, he agreed to carry out a contract killing for
five thousand and accepted twenty five hundred down.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
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 2 (37:49):
Honestly, I don't get into that with them unless they
volunteerily 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 fine, but his means of carrying it out
is pretty screwed up. I'm not a fan of that,
but yeah, I do what you do to take care
(38:10):
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 a chance? Are they available to disappear
(38:34):
if needed? In 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
(38:55):
of South Africa that is very interesting and involves the
South African Police Service officer who wants to be a
hit man. Oh and he wants to clean up his
neighborhood down in Cape Town where he's at. Yeah. Try
reporting that one.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Yeah. Wow, that is so so. I don't know what
you would do do? Yeah there no.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah, anyway, if there's a will, there's a way people
want a job.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Wow, thank you so much, Bob. What an interview? What
an interview? Worth the weight? Yes, totally worth the waight
you have been trying to get him to interview for
like over a year.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
So I think I wrote like five times in my
initial outreach like I'm just a podcast producer, to.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Be clear, I don't want to have anyone killed.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Yeah, I don't have the FBI coming after me. But yeah,
that interview was so different than any other interview we've
ever done. Yeah, it really was the way that it
consumed his life.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Yeah, that was really surprising that he said at one
point he was going to his forty hour a week
job and then spending like twenty to forty 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
(40:55):
there was just a couple that I wanted to follow
up on quickly. Bob meant, this case out of Las Crucis,
New Mexico. This is from Justice dot Gov. A man
was sentenced to the statutory maximum of ten years in
federal prison for trying to hire an undercover ATF agent
to murder his girlfriend's mother for two hundred dollars. This
(41:17):
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 tenth, twenty twenty two and
(41:39):
May eleventh, twenty twenty two, Leif Hayman repeatedly solicited a
hitman to murder his girlfriend's mother through the website rent
to hitman dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
It's like, two hundred dollars you think that? I mean,
there's so many things wrong with trying to hire a
contract killer, especially through a website that's so obviously a joke.
But the two hundred dollars, 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
(42:08):
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
(42:30):
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't a 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
(42:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
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. 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
(43:18):
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 being a good movie. I have to
rewatch it, but consider that Irec. Yeah, yeah, there you
got Minority Report coming in hot recommendation. But there's something
(43:40):
about this whole like predicting a crime it'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 Fouber in nineteen. He was a twenty one
(44:02):
year old man living in Virginia and he contacted rent
to hitman dot com and requested to have his ex
girlfriend and her parents both killed. And you know, when
you first hear about that on the service, 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.
(44:25):
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
(44:47):
out of my mouth, I don't mean to say, Like,
there's clearly some issues and some confusion. And when you
think about rent hitman dot 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 rent a hitman
(45:09):
dot 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
(45:32):
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 ten 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
(45:54):
to have some people killed. But at the same time,
like sending him to prison for ten years, Like, how
is this helpful? Yeah, I just have to wonder. It's like,
that's totally separate from Bob and Rent a hit man.
We do have an issue about how we react to
mental health issues in our justice system, and Bob is
(46:14):
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 Tennis and 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.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Yeah, here's something we need to talk about. These people
applying to be a hit man.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Never had that cross 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 the 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.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
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
(47:33):
someone to kill like Wendy Win, 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 Josia Garcia, who had applied to be
a hit man and then there was a sting operation.
He had entered into all these conversations about I would
take thoses and ears as prizes or something, took money
(47:56):
from what he believed was like a hitman or recruiter
or sooner, and then tried to give the money back immediately,
but still had incriminated himself. He was sentenced in late
April twenty twenty five to five years probation.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
That seems right to me.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
See you next week. If you have a story for us,
we would love to hear it. Our email is The
Knife at exactly rightmedia dot com, or you can follow
us on Instagram at the Knife podcast or a Blue
Sky at the Knife podcast.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
This has been an exactly right production, Hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me paysia E.
Speaker 3 (48:46):
Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Samarosi. This episode
was mixed by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport Artwork
five and SA Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgareth Georgia
Hardstark and Danielle Cramer.
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