Kill List - Pontevedra | 17

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

A young woman in Spain is harassed, threatened and terrified of a man that lives only a few minutes away. She goes to the police - several times - but they are unable to intervene until someone gets hurt. Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletterFollow the Kill List on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting www.wondery.com/links/kill-list now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Kaolist early and ad free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Anna, hello. Can you hear me Anna? Yes, yes, I'm here with my dogs as always. Is it Jack Russell? I love the kind of little faces that they have, they're so cute. It's a cold rainy afternoon in March, but Anna Garcia is in good spirits. Oh my god, look at that.

Unfortunately, the reason I got her on the phone forces me to bring down the tone of our call. Let me move to some questions. So can she just tell us what's happened on the case? Back in 2020, I broke the news to Ana that someone paid more than 20,000 euros to have her killed. In the time since, her case, her life have gotten stuck in a sort of stasis. Ana doesn't speak English, so you're hearing an actor voice her words. Even though time has passed, I still feel unsafe and small. That's what happens when

you know that someone wants to hurt you. Whoever wants an adept, it's still out there. When I'm driving, I'm looking through the mirror, which car is coming in which direction. I get scared and write down the license plate of the car that approached me. Years ago, someone was arrested for ordering Ana's murder on the dark web. The Spanish Civil Guard gathered enough evidence against their suspect to be convinced they'd got the right person. They even charged them with the crime. But today, the suspect is still free, and they live just minutes away from Anna.

Something can happen again. And the civil guard says, well, don't worry if something happens to you. We already know who is guilty for it. According to Anna, there's nothing the civil guard can do for her, unless someone is guilty for it. According to Ana, there's nothing the Civil Guard can do for her unless someone tries to have her killed again. Hearing all this leads me back to one huge question.

How is it possible that Ana has been waiting more than four years to get justice, even though the police say they know who tried to murder her. My name is Karl Miller. Since 2020, I've been part of a team working in secret to stop people getting murdered. We broke into a scam murder for hire website on the dark web. Watching from the inside, we observed with horror all the orders being placed.

Real people being targeted, real money being paid. Hundreds of people have appeared on this website as targets. We call it the Kill List. So far, we've managed to help law enforcement arrest or convict more than 30 people for putting someone they know onto the Kill List, with over 150 years of prison time being handed down. You may remember hearing about Ana Garcia's case from earlier episodes, but what you heard back then was just a small part of a much bigger story. A story

about how law enforcement agencies and legal systems all around the world are struggling to come to grips with this strange new kind of crime. And for Anna, it means she fears that the law won't be able to act unless she actually comes to harm. From Wandery and Novel, I'm Carmilla, and this is Kill List. The The city's port opens out into the Atlantic Ocean. The hills surrounding Ponta Vedra are green and lush. The city's port opens out into the Atlantic Ocean. The entire bay moves to the rhythms of the sea and the creatures living in it. Even before we came into her life, things weren't easy for Ana. I got married when I was 16 years old with a man that mistreated me and did psychological violence to me.

Ana says she married him to escape her very strict Catholic parents. And after seven years I wanted to get divorced. But my father said, no way, they didn't allow me. So those seven years were like hell to me. Her family didn't support divorce for religious reasons. I finally got divorced and I don't talk to my brothers or to my parents anymore. I have a kid who is 25 years old now. So I left that house without anything.

All that I had was 350 euros and that was when I bought my house. Buying this house was a huge deal for Ana. It meant independence, being able to decide for herself what her life looks like. For a year I was working without any holidays. I was cleaning houses of different families. I was working every day because I had to get to 22,000 euros to buy the house. The house she could afford was modest.

A small gray box with a rusty iron gate and peeling wooden windows. No flooring, no kitchen. I just had a mattress and then a shower and a toilet and nothing else. So I was working on the house. I put in the floor and everything and that's when I started to work for Javier.

Javier is the owner of a family fish shop, one of many in the bustling fish markets of Pontavedra. He's in his 60s, seemingly always smiling through his rectangular glasses, with short white hair at his sides and back. He looks gentle and kind. For Anna, the work at Javier's fish shop was tough. Early mornings and hard physical labor day after day. And from the start, there were tensions. From the beginning, Javier's wife and Javier's son were against me. She's very, very jealous, that wife.

So for the first year I was working there, the wife was saying he allegedly was already in love with me. Ana says there was nothing romantic between her and Javier at this point. They had a good relationship, yes, they were growing closer, and she felt she could trust him. There may even have been an attraction between them. But Javier was still technically married, even though his marriage was rocky. Anna says she'd never crossed that line. So for a long time she remained just his employee. But Anna alleges that regardless Javier's wife and son launched a sort of campaign

against her because she believes they suspected her of wanting Javier, his money and the family shop, for herself. Anna's allegations about what Javier's family did are really serious. We put them to Javier's now ex-wife, his son Alberto, and Javier's daughter-in-law, Veronica, who Ana says was also involved in the feud. But none of them responded to us or commented on Ana's allegations. Nor has it been possible, as you might expect with a private family feud, to independently corroborate what Ana says. None of the allegations have been tested in court. So you need to bear all of that in mind when listening to Ana's account of what she says

happens next. They always tried to make Javier fire me. And as Alberto is a child, although he's 39 years old, he's used to having what he wants when he wants it. He couldn't deal with the fact that Javier wasn't fighting me. So Alberto put dog shit in my bag, threw ice in my face, scratched my car. According to Ana, the hostility didn't just come from Alberto.

She claims Javier's then-wife also verbally abused her. She used to insult me, called me a cunt or a bitch or a slut. It was the thing that she did the most. Her way to say good morning. Ana says the alleged abuse from Javier's wife also escalated beyond insults. One day I was cleaning the van and she appeared and grabbed me by the hair.

As she tells me the story, Anna racks out how she says the scene unfolded. And then I said, I'm going to call Javier to tell him what happened. And she said, if you call Javier, I'm going to stab you with a knife. And she went to grab the knife and And in that short period of time, I escaped. Anna didn't report any of this to the police at the time. She said she was scared to lose her job. She needed to be able to afford the mortgage on her house. But then, in early 2020, things shifted.

Javier finally left his wife and came to live with Anna during lockdown. Things developed quickly from there on. I don't know how to explain it to you. It was fast. You know when you start with someone unexpectedly and suddenly one day he's sleeping in your bed? Just like that. Wow. Soon Ana and Javier were dating. I love him. I love him very madly. We love each other and he's my teddy bear. He's my teddy bear. My little boy.

Eight months after Anna and Javier begin dating, in October 2020, we intercept the kill order against Anna from a user called Johnny25. I prefer car accidents. A week is good. I tell you when you can begin to work. She sells fish in market at Pontevedra. She lives alone in ****. She goes to job at 5.40am every day except Monday. We send a reporter from Barcelona, Esperanza Escobano, to jump on a plane and find Anna on the other side of the country.

Over a single frantic nerve-freying day Esperanza races between the fish markets of Ponta Vedra to track Anna down. And then, finally, as the sun goes down, Anna, Esperanza and Javier are all sitting on the terrace of a local bar having a video call with me. Hi, there's Brianza. Hi. Are we good to begin? Am I coming through? Yes, and Ana's boyfriend is with us as well.

Well, Ana Garcia, firstly, thank you. As I explained why we've gotten in touch with her, Ana starts to giggle nervously. Vale. Oh, my God. Can you ask if there's anything that she can tell us about anyone that she knows that might be using a website in this way? Does she know who might want to harm her?

That's when Ana stops laughing. She looks into Javier's eyes, silently communicating with him. Then, turning back to me, she tells us the only names that come to her in that moment. Oh, Veronica, Alberto. Javier's son, Alberto, and Veronica, the partner of Javier's other son. Anna and Javier can't think of anyone else who sees Anna as an enemy and who can afford to spend more than 20,000 euros to kill her. But right now all Anna and Javier have are suspicions.

There's no evidence whatsoever tying Alberto or Veronica to the hit. We report the kill Veronica to the hit. We report the kill order to the local Civil Guard who interview Anna and Javier. They tell the police all about the alleged feud and their fear that it could have something to do with the kill order. The Civil Guard promises to investigate. Throughout December 2020, Anna and Javier go on with their lives as best they can. They rise early every day to sell the catch pulled out of Pontevedra Bay. But they're both terrified.

I'm still scared. We still don't know anything new. What we have changed now is that I'm not remaining at home alone. Daily Anna is scared of having to face Javier's family. She believes that they want her dead. They live in another village, 15 minutes away. But there's nothing she can do other than just wait for the Civil Guard to step in. Then one day, about a month later, just before Christmas, Anna's lawyer walks into the fish shop and tells her that the Civil Guard have finally arrested someone for paying to have her killed.

But the suspect isn't Javier's son, his daughter-in-law, nor his estranged wife, or indeed anyone from Javier's family. He told me it's Juan. I was shocked. I told him, but how? How can it be Juan? Juan is an ex-boyfriend of Ana's, who she hasn't even spoken to in four years. I started crying because I was thinking, what did I do to you? I remembered all the years that I was with him, everything, like a flash of all the moments that I was with him. And I said, but why?

Before, Anna was scared. But now, she's also profoundly disorientated. Any idea she had about where the danger is coming from has just been completely upended. The police blocked the street where Juan lives. Special forces of the police came to arrest him, going through the roof with these super big guns in the middle of a village of about a thousand people. And then they took him to the police station. This is the story Ana hears about Juan's arrest. It throws everything she thought she understood about her situation out the window. I started to wonder why. It's been four years since we don't

talk anymore. When I learn about the arrest, I'm just as confused as Ana. The Civil Guard clearly consider Juan the lead suspect in the kill order, but Ana can't think of any reason why he'd want her dead, especially now, all these years later. Ana tells me that she's known Juan since they were kids. Their families live near each other. Years later, after she got divorced from her first husband, Ana and Juan reconnected. Then they started dating. During the first two years, everything was alright. He was charming, he was very nice to me, but then he started to be very unstable.

Ana says that Juan's instability had to do with his growing obsession with online poker. One day he was saying, I love you. And the day after he was throwing me out of the house. And at some point when we were still having a good relationship, I got pregnant. We were both happy with the idea of having a family. But then one day he changed his mind and said, well, you need to have an abortion. And then I had a miscarriage. And after that, everything was going worse and worse and worse, to the point that one day we were maybe having

lunch at 2 p.m. in a good mood and two hours after, he was throwing me out of the house again. And I was out of the house with the suitcases. So on one of these occasions, I said, no more. And that's it. That's why I left. After their relationship ended is when Ana bought her house and ultimately ended up working in Javier's fish shop. We did put Anna's claims about the relationship to Juan, but he declined to comment. But in her telling, it sounds like an extremely tough experience for Anna. A volatile relationship and the loss of a pregnancy so soon after Anna says she got out of an abusive marriage. But the confusing thing is, none of it seems to point to a clear motive for Juan.

On top of that, Anna also doesn't understand where Juan could have gotten enough money for the order. In the last few days I've been told about Juan that he has a lot of trouble with money. So I started to wonder, how can he have 20,000 euros? Often when we tell someone that they've been targeted by a kill order, they can quickly make sense of it in the context of their lives, either because of a breakdown in a romantic relationship or maybe the presence of some sort of feud or vendetta. And that's what we thought we had here too with Javier's family. But now, with Juan being arrested, the puzzle we were carefully piecing together,

well, it doesn't make any sense anymore. But the thing is, the Civil Guard clearly think they have found strong evidence against Juan. It feels crucial that we learn what that is. And so Esperanza, our Spanish reporter on the ground, starts reaching out to the lead investigator, a man called Thomas Garcia, for an interview. But with the case still being open, he doesn't want to share anything on the record. But we do keep the lines of communication open.

I was optimistic that Juan's arrest meant that Ana's case is nearing a resolution. But I was wrong. that Anna's case is nearing a resolution. But I was wrong. I was with Javier in the car on the way home from Marin. And suddenly the civil guard called me to notify me that Juan had been released. The civil guard has found incriminating evidence against Juan.

Despite that, it seems that the judge presiding over the case has decided that he isn't a big enough threat to Anna to be investigated behind bars. He's released from police custody straight away, although the investigation into him continues. Sitting in a car, Anna tries to process the news. I felt very disappointed and afraid. The Civil Guard don't seem happy either. Ana says that the officer on the phone encourages her to file for a protection order against one.

Ana agrees. The next day, on Christmas Eve, Ana shows up at court to give a statement to the judge. The judge asked me if he was contacting me and I said no. If he called me, if we crossed paths, if he was harassing me. But I said no at the time. And that's why I wasn't given the restraining order. It sounds like, because Juan hasn't directly threatened Ana, the judge doesn't consider her to be at risk from him. Without yet knowing the truth of Juan's innocence or guilt,

over the next few weeks, Ana is too terrified to even leave the house. When I go out from the market, I look around, I'm afraid. I don't have the calm I used to have in my life. I feel like things are not getting better, but worse. And I'm just tired of this. Then Ana tells me something extremely unsettling happens. Just a few weeks after Juan is arrested, Ana is on her own in the fish shop.

It's the first time she's worked by herself in weeks. At a quarter past two in the afternoon, her phone rings. I got a call and a woman's voice said, What's your back? I'm coming for you. I was super frightened and I just turned off the phone. It's a terrifying moment for Ana. What's especially chilling really is that it was done at the moment when Anna was alone. It's really suggesting that this person knows that Anna is alone for that hour. After Juan's arrest, I hoped that with law enforcement being involved, Anna would more

or less be protected. That if nothing else, anyone wishing Anna harm might keep their distance from her. Then Anna tells me something that makes the whole case seem even less clear. Immediately I called the police and today they have told me that the call came from Veronica. Veronica, Javier's daughter-in-law. Veronica is a big part of the alleged feud over the fish shop. And for Anna, this looks like proof of what she's long suspected,

that the conflict with Javier's family and the dark web threat must be connected in some way. Veronica was close to me in the past, so she knew about Juan. She knew he's addicted to poker online and that he was struggling with money. And Javier's ex-wife is from the same village as Juan. So I have the theory that Juan is the weapon, the scapegoat. Because if I'm dead, Juan is not gaining anything. But Javier's family think they would

gain something. Ana thinks this could all be a complex plot woven against her by Javier's family, that they convinced Juan to order her murder on their behalf using their money. But there's no evidence to support that theory. We reached out to Javier's daughter-in-law, Javier's son and his ex-wife for comment about Anna's suspicions, but we never received a response from them. As the months roll on, there's no new information about the case. At least, not from the police, because it's Anna's partner, Javier, who uncovers a big lead that causes the case to swerve again.

One evening, a few months after the threatening call, Ana is at home when Javier gets back from a meeting. He's clearly upset. Javier comes and tells me, sit down, sit down, you're going to be amazed. I sit down and I say to him, what happened? Javier has just learned a fact that has remained hidden for many years. It turns out that the kill order we uncovered is not the first time someone tried to plan Ana's murder. Hi there Raquel, how are you doing? Hello, how are you?

Oh yeah, good thanks, thanks for joining us. Hola Raquel, como estas? Ana put us in touch with Raquel, a private investigator Javier hired to gather information about his ex-wife and the other family members involved in the feud. All to prepare for his divorce proceedings, which are still going on at this point. We were speaking in his car,

he will show me the locations for the new investigation. He told me, well Raquel, there's something that Ana and me are worried. I'm telling him, okay, come on. You're an investigator, you want to know. Javier tells the impatient PI the story of the dark web kill order. He tells her that Ana's ex-boyfriend, Juan, has been arrested for it. And that's when I make the link between the two cases.

Raquel, the private investigator, speaks some English, but she talked to us mostly in Spanish. So you're hearing an actor voice her words. My face changed completely. Javier, he stared at me and he said, what, do you know him? And I said, yeah, yeah, I know him. I know who he is.

The private investigator tells us that back in 2017, after Juan and Ana had broken up, Juan hired her for an investigation. And you will not believe who he wanted investigated. Ana. He explained that he's thinking about starting a private investigation, about 200,000 euros that suddenly disappeared from his parents. Apparently, Juan's parents kept 200,000 euros

hidden in the basement, and it went missing. According to the detective, they suspected Anna of stealing it because Juan Huan said, there was no one else who could have known about the money. But once she started looking into Anna, the PI could quickly tell that she obviously didn't have 200,000 euros. So she told Huan she didn't think Anna was a thief. But five months later, Juan got in touch with the detective again, this time to ask her for some advice. They met at a bar to discuss it.

He tells me he is convinced that Ana stole the money. He doesn't want her to get away with it. And he's thinking how he can settle the score without the evidence pointing to him. So I ask him what he means and he tells me what is meant by settling the score. Justos de cuentas. How serious is it that Juan used this specific phrase, justos de cuentas? Well it's quite serious. Just as the Spanish journalist who has worked with us from the very beginning on the story. She's become really close with Ana throughout this whole ordeal and now she's helping me

understand just what this new revelation really means. Ajusto de cuentas means settling the scores and in Spanish you would only use this phrase to mean that you want to kill or harm someone. It's like if you're facing an ajusto de cuentas, oh my god, you're really in danger. I don't remember him saying the word hitman, but it was what he was talking about. The detective was convinced that Juan was asking her for advice about how to have Ana killed. Panicked, she extricated herself from the conversation and left the bar. The detective says that she took the threat from Juan so seriously that for the next few months she regularly checked newspapers for news of Anna's death.

Now she never went to the police about any of this, which seems surprising to me, but she says that when she asked her official association of private investigators for advice on what to do, they told her not to report Juan, saying it might put her in danger as well. After a while, she moved on and forgot about the whole thing until she met with Javier years later, who in turn tells a story to Ana. For Ana, it felt like a second news about someone trying to kill her. It was like the whole horror story repeating itself all over again. I wonder how many times he tried to get me. I feel like I'm still in the nightmare.

After we speak to the private investigator, it feels really important that we connect her with the Civil Guard. I mean, she is alleging that Juan tried to plan Ana's murder years before her name ever showed up on the kill list. Esperanza has been trying to get in touch with Tomas Garcia, the Civil Guard captain, for months by this point. Now it starts to feel even more urgent. Tomás Garcia is a hard man to pin down, but luckily Esperanza is very persistent. They started calling him every week until he understood that he had to talk to the detective. had to talk to the detective.

Finally, the Civil Guard interviewed the private investigator and included her story as evidence in the case they're building against Juan. Okay, so let me try and unravel the most tangled case of the whole Kill List. We have a vicious family feud over a fish shop, an ex-boyfriend with an alleged poker obsession who suspects that Anna has been stealing an enormous amount of his parents' money. We have a private investigator that alleges that said ex-boyfriend, Juan,

has actually tried to plan Anna's murder before. And we also have Anna believing throughout the whole case that Juan is actually merely acting on behalf of the family involved in the family feud. What a tango. I mean, how on earth does a civil guard go about unraveling all of that? Well, the good news is that I finally have

some answers for you. My name is Tomás García and I am the captain of the Policía Judicial de Pontevedra. It seems that Tomás and the Civil Guard are confident that Juan is the unique person responsible for the kill order. His defense is going to be very difficult. He could set very little to avoid the blame. Their case seems to come down to the Bitcoin transfer to the Marder for Hire website and the crypto wallet where the money came from. When they traced the email and phone number linked to the wallet, they both turned out to be Juan's.

It has no sense in which any other person uses his data to create a wallet. So the only person who has the password and everything. It's him. What does Thomas say about Anna's theory? That it was always Javier's family behind the order and that Juan was kind of working on behalf of them and therefore presumably would have received the money from them for the order? Thomas was very clear on this point. He said that the civil guard investigated every suspicion Ana had and they found nothing to suggest that Javier's family was behind the killer or had anything to do with it or Juan. There is no evidence that they are together in that. The only thing that they have in common is that they don't like Ana. All right, so the civil guards don't sound ambiguous

at all. In fact, I've actually never heard a police force sound so definitive before a conviction. Me neither. And in May 2021, that's five months after they arrested Juan, they passed the case over to the prosecutors because they were confident about the evidence they found. But for months, we didn't have sign of Juan facing a trial anytime soon. For almost two years, nothing seemed to be happening with the case at all. But then, in spring 2023, finally something does happen. And it was something quite shocking. In April 2023, Juan's lawyer requested the dismissal of the case.

That's something I can understand from her. But what seems shocking to me is that the prosecutor decided not to dispute the motion, and then the judge decided to grant the dismissal. And so just like that, the case suddenly seemed to be finished. Ana told me that on the same day as the dismissal happened, almost two and a half years since Juan's arrest, she was working in the fish shop as usual. The door has a little window through which you can see the pavement

and it was a total coincidence. I turned around and saw him. She told me she saw Juan outside. He was walking, pushing his bike alongside him along the street, slowly, and looking inside. He didn't say anything or make any gestures. He just looked at me. We exchanged glances. We looked at each other and I started feeling nervous. Ana thinks Juan went there on purpose, on the day of the dismissal, to send her a message. We haven't been able to independently confirm that Juan did appear outside her shop. We went through his lawyer and she just said that the statements about him in this story are, and I quote her, totally untrue. But the

lawyer also declined to explain what Juan contests isn't true while the case remains open. So what actually happened then with the case? Like, why did the judge agree with this motion to dismiss it? It's incredibly frustrating and disappointing for Ana and not just Ana. I mean, I felt like, like, what is this? How it's going to end? As far as we can tell, there were at least two issues converting over Anna's case.

The first that the prosecutor and the judge didn't feel the evidence against Juan was conclusive. How so? The problem is that just because the crypto wallet is in Juan's name doesn't actually prove that he made the transactions and paid for the kill order. Because they can't trace the Bitcoin used to pay for the order all the way back to Juan's non-bank accounts.

What that shows is this very, very important link that catered around the world has struggled to make between the individual and the order. To show a court conclusively that it is the person that has written the order and that they mean it. That has time and again, I think proven to be the most important and yet sometimes the most vulnerable part of a prosecution. And here that's what sounds like really fell apart. Well, there's still one other maybe more fundamental hurdle. What Anna's lawyer says is that the people handling Anna's case don't understand the stakes of the case, that it still doesn't seem like the prosecutor nor the judge believe that whoever put through the kill order was a real danger to Ana because they consider the site

was a scam and there was never a real hitman. That's completely mad because if there's one thing this investigation has actually revealed it's that regardless of the fact that the website is a scam, the intent to the people putting the kill orders on there, entirely real. And sometimes those people will go out and try many other ways of having people killed. It's a dangerous misconception that actually caused us to embark on this whole crazy kind of investigation

that we've been doing for the last four years. I know, and what strikes me about this is that it's just down to one judge or one prosecutor who may not consider a case like this serious and then Anna suddenly has no protection from the system. And so the person who tried to have Anna killed, whether that's Juan or someone else, is obviously still out there, years later. And it looks like any formal efforts to actually hold them accountable and therefore to actually protect Anna, ultimately, well, that formal effort has now ended.

How has Anna been coping then with all of this? It's been hard for her, but she's a positive person and she's been trying to move on with her life. And in August, 2022, she and Javier actually got married. Anna said to me, she just wanted to put an end to all the bad things that have been happening in the last years. It was an ideal wedding. The place was just perfect and so beautiful. I cried when I saw the people I wanted to be there.

And you were one of the people there, Esperanza, weren't you? I was, I was, yes, I was part of it. I mean, after all these years, I felt like, well, I had to go. It was really comforting to see them happy, smiling, having a party with the people they wanted to have it. It was a very emotional day. So this bright spot is Denin Ana's personal life, but her experience of crime and justice here has been bleak and Kafkaesque. I mean, is this the end? After all these years, we

actually end up where we first began with nothing? No, that's the good news. Actually, quite recently, in April 2024, there's been a big new development. So after the case was dismissed, Anna appealed against the decision. And since then, the case has gone to a higher court and a new judge had overturned the dismissal. I mean, that is after everything Anna's been through, it is really wonderful to hear that this isn't the end of everything. Yes, yes, there is a stiller window for this case to go through. So this new judge seems to finally believe how serious the case is,

and seems to believe that Ana was in danger and is in danger, and that whoever is finally behind the order really wanted to kill her. These new jets has ruled that every possible avenue has to be exhausted in order to find the missing evidence and to do new research. So, for example, that could mean looking back through Juan's bank account to find out if there is evidence that can link him directly to the kill order, if there is evidence that

can prove that he actually bought the Bitcoin and used it to pay for the kill order if there is evidence that can prove that he actually bought the Bitcoin and used it to pay for the kill order. So this is all good news, but it doesn't mean that the case is going to court and it still can take years. The saddest part of it is that in all this time, Anna will still feel unsafe. But now, at least, there is a real sense that Anna can have some answers about her case. For years now, we've watched the stuttering, glacial progress of Ana's case as it slowly made its way through the Spanish courts and legal system.

Watching the really profound difficulties that like many other law enforcement agencies around the world the Spanish have had in coming to grips with this new kind of crime. This is the longest story either me or Esperanza has ever covered in our whole careers. And now, finally, we can make Anna's story public. And I really hope, four and a half years on, this isn't actually how Anna's story ends. Because there needs to be another chapter here. And that's the one where Anna actually sees a conclusion. And finally, finally gets the justice that she so utterly needs and deserves.

The moment when I get a bit of justice, even if it's just a bit, the moment I know the name of the people guilty officially, then maybe I get to live a normal life. On the next episode of Kill List, we track down the mysterious administrator behind yet another Hitman for hire site, Rentahitman.com. There was about 250 to 300 emails from people around the world saying, how much for asset extraction? What countries do you serve? How much for this? How much for that? I wasn't ready for it. I wasn't prepared to deal with it. This was not what I had in mind.

And he becomes willing to take steps we never were, in order to catch attempted murderers. I knew I absolutely had to act. If I didn't get that email, somebody else would have and results could have been a lot different. If you like Kill List, you can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondry and Novel, this is Kill List. Kill List is hosted by me, Carmilla. The reporter is Esperanza Escrabano.

This episode is produced and written by Jay Kutayevich. Our series producer is Tom Wright. Kill List is also produced by Caroline Thornton with additional production by Anna Sinfield. Our assistant producer is Amalia Sautland. And our researchers are Megan Oynke and Lena Chang. Additional research from Chris Monteiro. For Wandery, our senior producer is Mandy Gorinstein.

Fact-checking by Fendel Fulton. Our managing producers are Cherie Houston, Sarah Tobin and Charlotte Wolfe for Novel. Sarah Mathers is our managing producer and Callum Pluse is our senior managing producer for Wandery. Original music by Skyler Gerdeman and Martin Linebelle. Carolyn Plouz is our Senior Managing Producer for Wandery. Original music by Skyler Gerdeman and Martin Linebelle. Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander, Max O'Brien and Caroline Thornton. Sound design and mixing by Andy Partington. For novel, Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development.

Our executive producers are Sean Glynn, Max O'Brien, and Craig Strachan for novel. Executive producers for Wandery are Marshall Louis and Erin O'Flaherty.