Kill List - Rockwood | 18

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

The website Rentahitman.com is run by a mysterious figure called Guido Finelli. Similar to Carl and his team, Guido has helped the police foil dozens of murder plots. When Guido and Carl meet to discuss a case, they discover that they’ve been tracking the same perpetrator: a user who goes by the name: Dark Princess.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. Hey, it's Karl here. Just letting you know that this episode contains allegations of child abuse. Out there on the regular internet, far away from the crevices of the dark web and all the places we've been investigating, sits the website called rentahitman.com. At first glance, it seems cheap, like it was made using one of those generic website templates. But when you actually start scrolling down, it takes on a much more sinister tone. I need her taken care of, because she won't leave.

There's a gallery of screenshots of jobs former customers have ordered. Pin her to the wall via knives through her wrists and ankles. Cut open her abdomen and let her bleed out. The order only gets more gruesome from there. The thing is, rentahitman.com is also a Murder4Hire website, but a very different one from what me and my team are used to. For one, Eura, the Romanian admin of the sites we'd been monitoring, for higher websites, but a very different one from what me and my team are used to. For one, Euror, the Romanian admin of the sites we'd been monitoring, has nothing to

do with it. The mastermind behind RenderHitman.com is someone very different. Hi, I'm Guido Finelli, webmaster of RenderHitman.com. Yeah, hey you. You're looking for a hitman? If you keep scrolling down the site, you'll see a TV ad in which Guido reassures you that the website is fully compliant with the entirely fictitious Hitman Information Privacy and Protection Act of 1964. Elsewhere you can buy field op gear which includes a tote bag. And apparently if you mention the discount code CALL CATS AND KITTENS you'll get an additional 10% off. The whole website sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous.

And that's because Rentahitman.com started as a joke. I laugh at it every day that I get a new submission. I get a chuckle out of it. But it evolved into something darker. It's distressing because there's a lot of troubled people out there. So far on Kill List, we've focused on one specific set of Hitman for Hire websites on the dark web. But there is a whole world out there of other, very similar sites, with many, many more perpetrators and potential victims.

Rentahitman.com is one of them. But unlike any other we've seen, this one is run by someone trying to do good, who uses it as a tool for catching potential murderers. 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. We could see every order being placed, real money being paid to have real people killed. The hitmen are fake, but the intentions of the people putting through those orders are as real as can be.

The tally of targets we've identified is now in the hundreds. We call it the Kill List. So far, we've managed to help law enforcement arrest or convict more than 30 people all around the world. And to do that, we've gone to extraordinary lengths. And we're not the only ones. Because in the wild west of fake online hitmen, there aren't just journalists like us, but also people like Guido Finelli, who is willing to take steps we never were

in his quest to stop potential killers. From Wandery and Novel, I'm Carl Miller, kind of, a unicorn. Usually it's impossible to track down people like him. They hide far away from the spotlight. But not Guido. Also, just like a unicorn, Guido is not real. Well, not technically. Behind that pseudonym hides a 50-something baseball cat wearing dad. My name is Bob Innes and I live in Northern California.

The journey to Rentahitman.com becoming this sort of sticky fly tape for potential killers started years ago. Bob's dream had been to become a police detective, but that didn't pan out. So instead, in the early 2000s, he enrolled in an IT security college course. At some point, he and some of his classmates started thinking about setting up an IT business.

Their first step? Coming up with a name for the company and its website. Occasionally we would go and play paintball on the weekends up in Calistoga. And one particular Saturday we started flipping around names for domains. As balls of paint flew and splattered all around them, Bob got his million dollar idea. They'd call the company Rent a Hitman. I thought, man, this is a cool play on words. Rent as in hire us, hit as in web hit, and men, well, there were four of us.

So I registered it that day. He paid less than $10 for the site, but despite the snappy branding, the company never got going and Bob was left with the domain. He let it live for a while, but when he checked back on the site's email inbox after a few years, he was in for a shock. 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?

These people thought Rent-a-Hitman was a portal to a world of actual hitmen, abductors, mobsters. Bob didn't take the emails too seriously though. They unsettled him, sure, but he also had no idea what to do about them. I wasn't ready for it. Wasn't prepared to deal with it. This was not what I had in mind. So he let the inbox be for another few years and didn't pay much mind to the strange messages he was receiving. But then, in 2010, he got an email that he couldn't ignore.

An email that changed the course of his life. I was down in LA at the time, helping my brother pack a U-Haul van to bring back up to Northern California. And I get an email, she told me she was from the UK, stranded in Canada, lost her passport, had no money, and she wanted three of her family members murdered because they had stolen her inheritance. She had nowhere to go, no other options.

Bob doesn't reply at first. Only later that day, the woman emails again. With urgent in the subject line, and more detail, and names and addresses. Just very identifiable information. It seems like the woman was stepping harder on the gas pedal. Bob wants to check. Is she actually for real? I sent her a message asking her, do you still require our services? And would you like me to put you in contact with the field operative? She gets back to him saying, yes I do. The woman specifically asks

Bob about the cost of having three people killed. She names them all and gives Bob their locations. She is determined. This time Bob can't just let it go. His conscience won't let him. 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. I left LA at about 6 o'clock that night, driving this U-Haul 400 miles up I-5, get home, kiss my wife, and immediately get on

the computer, which she wasn't happy about. I printed out about 20 pages of documents. Bob is convinced lives are in danger. In what seems like a pivotal stroke of luck, Bob has a friend who's a local police sergeant, Dave. Bob gives him the messages and in huge contrast to our own early cases, Dave, and therefore the police, take the case seriously straight away. They make contact with police in Canada who realise the woman actually already has a warrant out for her arrest in the UK. She gets extradited there and goes straight to prison.

This success changed everything for Bob. This $9.20 website had just saved the lives of three individuals. That's when I came to the realization that this website could be used for positive change. I just knew I had to do something. Bob essentially decides to run a sort of well-intentioned fraud. He sits down at his computer and redesigns the website to basically what it looks like today. Although the site is a spoof, Bob never said so explicitly. Instead, he sprinkled jokes all over the site that scream at you that surely none of this can be real. For example, there's a list of awards RenterHitman.com has supposedly won.

One of them is a WTF Man award. When people see the level of creativity and audacity we bring to our hits, they can't help but exclaim, WTF man! But in spite of the ridiculous branding and the stupid jokes, Bob's unexpected side hustle starts thriving. Business was literally booming. People were sending in a lot of emails. Bob comes up with a whole process for dealing with the genuine inquiries. He emails with the perpetrators back and forth, making them believe he can connect them to

a hitman anywhere in the world. I'll be their matchmaker. I'll help them out. Well, he passes them off to the police. Who then often start their own investigations into Bob's cases. Many of them leading to arrests and convictions. And just to be clear, Bob doesn't make any money off of the kill orders. People don't pay him for the hits. He says that's evidence the police need to get.

Over the years, Bob's kept a record of all of the emails that have come in. For example, just between January and August of 2023, there were over 1,700 service requests submissions received. That's more than 200 coming in every month. Of course, not all these people believe the site is real. But still, a scary amount of the messages seem serious. Bob says he reports about 5-8% of them to the police.

That's more than a thousand, since the inception of Rentahitman.com. Exactly like the sites we monitored. Bob's site has tapped into this scary, surprisingly widespread, if subterranean, demand for murder. It blows my mind, honestly, Carl. People I think are just at their wits end trying to solve a problem and are taken to the internet to try and get that solution. And they see the website and feel compelled. How do I say this? More educated folks would obviously see this.

This isn't real. As Bob himself admits, he attracts people who are easily fooled. It's the low-hanging fruit. It's a nice house, but nobody's home. I want to understand what makes someone gullible enough to fall for Bob's ruse. Who are these would-be killers, he catches. One thing I've learnt dealing with hundreds of our own cases is that there isn't one neat answer to that question. What drives people is always complex and very individual.

But there is one case of Bob's that I think might provide at least some of the answers. It's a story that unfolded in Rockwood, Michigan. A case in which, at first glance, it wasn't just a perpetrator who seemed dangerous, but the victim too. Bob is sitting at a pool, catching some sun, surrounded by his family, when a notification pops up on his phone. He glances at it and sees that it's another email into the Rentahitman.com inbox from someone called George Harris.

So George Harris wrote, I prefer not going to jail. The email immediately stands out to Bob. George is claiming that his target is a child abuser. And while Bob has no way of knowing whether there's any truth to that, it obviously still worries him. My first thought was how to keep any other children from falling victim to this guy. Bob needs to find out more. He asks George to fill out a standardized form on the website, what he calls a service request form.

Two days later, the form comes through. But not in George Harris's name. The service request form asked for her name. She wrote Miss Georgina Harris. The person, now going by Georgina, gives Bob more to work with. She sends him the name of her target, his email address. As well as a verified physical address where he lives. When asked what the reason for contacting the website was, she wrote, I have a problem.

He preys on special needs kids who cannot speak. We're not going to name Georgina's target for several reasons. The most important being that he denies his allegations outright. He says they were investigated and found to be entirely unsubstantiated. And we'll get into this in more detail later on, but there are also some serious reasons to question Georgina's motivations

for making these claims in the first place. All that to say that from now on, we'll call her target by a pseudonym, Frank. Bob gets pretty spooked by Georgina's messages. She has provided Frank's address, attached several photos of him. She's also given Bob his phone numbers. She claims she's already spent $20,000 trying to resolve her quote-unquote problem.

And as far as Bob can tell, she has what seems like a powerful motive to kill. She struck me as somebody that was desperate for a solution. Georgina wants Frank dead. So Bob does what he's done hundreds of times before. I just made a call and spoke with the Michigan State Police at that point. Bob hands over the phone number Georgina has submitted

and all of the information he's pulled together over the last few days. Based on his work, Michigan State Police decide to launch an undercover investigation into Georgina Harris. As Georgina sits in her gray SUV in the parking lot of a local 7-Eleven, a police officer pretending to be Guido's associate rides in on a Harley Davidson to meet with her. He looks menacing, like the member of a violent biker gang. He gets into Georgina's car and sits next to her, and they start hashing out the details

of the proposed hit on Frank. I knew it was going to come to this, Georgina tells the officer quietly. Later on, she hands him $200 in cash as a deposit for the murder. The cop takes the money, and both of them drive off. That's when, as she's driving, Georgina is pulled over by Michigan State Police and taken into custody. A few hours later, Georgina sits in the corner of a drab, cramped police interview room.

The tips of her hair are a faded, dyed ginger, the roots her natural grey. She's slumped in her chair, looking down in her lap, where her hands fiddle with the straps of a face mask. A detective strides into the room. By now, the police have found out that the woman's name isn't actually Georgina, it's Wendy. The detective sits down and leans over to Wendy in the same kind of way that a teacher might when they want to get through to a kid who's been acting out. He introduces himself. Wendy looks up at Detective Peterson.

Her face sags with resignation. You're the Ranger, the pirate. Anything you say can. We'll be easy to get you for a mock. Wendy is 52 years old. She lives in South Rockwood, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. It's a classic American suburb. Wide roads lined with lawns and pickup trucks. Wendy lives in one of these houses with her mother and her adopted son.

They seem to be the center of her universe. Thanks to Bob Innis, aka Guido Finnelli, Detective Peterson knows what Wendy's been up to online. But by the end of this interrogation, he wants to understand why. And to get to that answer, he begins with a kind of left field question. Who do you least admire in life? Who does Wendy least admire in life? At one time, he used to be the nicest person I ever met.

And now, he just, he's alive. At one time, he used to be the nicest person I ever met, Wendy says. And now he's just a liar. She's talking about the man she wanted dead, Frank. How do you know him? I used to be married to him. I used to be married to him, Wendy says.

Then Detective Peterson guides the interview towards his crucial question. Your motivation is what? Wendy replies, saying that she did what she did because, quote, her and her children were molested. Here is where the interview gives us a peek into what may have made Wendy so susceptible to Bob's website. She keeps insisting child abuse is the reason for wanting Frank dead. But when Detective Peterson actually spoke to Wendy's ex-husband on the phone, Frank

told him that the allegations were false, that they'd been investigated by the State Bureau of Investigations and that he was cleared. And then he painted a very different picture of why Wendy hated him. Wendy and Frank had been married for about 11 years, but things didn't work out between them. Frank says that they'd both had affairs. On top of that, after they separated, Frank moved away from Michigan to another state

where he'd recently got engaged to be married again. That seems to have upset Wendy. Frank said that Wendy had threatened to kill him several times since they'd separated. Detective Peterson also spoke to Wendy's mum about Wendy's allegations against Frank. Despite the two seemingly having a very close relationship, Wendy's mum was very clear with the detective. She told him Wendy hates her ex-husband, and that Wendy, quote, did dirty shit to Frank a while ago. That once she rang his job and told them he molested someone to try and get him fired.

Wendy's mum says she doesn't believe Frank them he molested someone to try and get him fired. Wendy's mum says she doesn't believe Frank has ever molested anyone. She backed up his claim that the reason for Wendy's vengeful hatred is that Frank cheated on her. We can't see inside Wendy's head, but watching her interrogation, seeing her folded into herself as she talks to Detective Peterson, it looks like the allegations against Frank aren't just a ploy for the police. That the deception may begin somewhere deep within Wendy herself. When I was a kid I was in theicester and I ran away from home. I spent a lot of time being angry, self-destructive,

trying to kill myself, drinking too much, working in a timeless bar. Wendy says that when she was a kid, her dad abused her and her mum. That for years it made her angry and self-destructive. Suicidal. And that, for a long time, she resented her mum for not acknowledging what she had gone through. When I hear this, I can't help but wonder whether the abuse Wendy says she experienced

played a role in the allegations that she then made against her ex, Frank. After Wendy gave the undercover cop the $200 deposit outside that 7-Eleven, she thought she still owed him $4,800 for the murder. And you were under the impression that you'd be killed if you didn't pay that money in a few weeks. But you just also said that you didn't think you could come up with the money. So what did you think was going to happen? Probably end up dead, Wendy says. Did you care? Wendy replies, when you have the mental diseases I have, sometimes you care and sometimes you don't. She tells a detective that she suffers from bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and PTSD.

The main reason I wanted to look into Wendy's story was to understand what kind of person Bob is catching through his website. How can someone be gullible enough to be led towards murder by the site's paper thin illusion? With Wendy, the motivation seems to be rooted in pain and desperation more than anything else. It drove Wendy to wanting to have Frank killed so badly that she was willing to believe in Bob's obviously fake Hitman website. But it turns out that desire wasn't just a blip. Wendy had done even more to make the murder happen than Bob realised at the time. Because before she ever turned to Bob, Wendy went onto the dark web too.

Onto one of Euro's sites. Her username there? Dark Princess. Before I place an order, I want to know if you can legitimately help me. I've been ripped off two times in the amount of $15,000. My budget is $4,000 because I've been taken for so much money. On the 11th of July, 2020, just four days before she ultimately went to rentahitman.com, Wendy spelled out to Yura what she wanted done to Frank with a viciousness that wasn't there in her messages to Bob. Kidnapped, dropped in a warehouse,

locked in or beating me on fixing. Beating him like the animal he is, that's my plan. Tire irons come in handy. So what we realize is that there was Bob sitting at his computer in California, emailing with Wendy. And essentially, at almost the same time, here we were in London, unknowingly working on the same case, but using wildly different approaches.

We just observed Wendy's messages and passed them on to the Metropolitan Police here in London. But we have no idea what, if anything, was done with our evidence in the end. While Bob took a much more proactive route, actually making Wendy believe he was a hitman, ultimately getting her arrested. When I piece together everything we know about Wendy, it seems clear that she was a serious

threat. Naive and gullible, sure, but desperate. And I think it's that desperation that makes her so dangerous. I mean, she told the detective she was willing to die herself if it meant having Frank killed. In the end, the case against Wendy was very strong. So rather than be tried in front of a jury, Wendy agreed to a no-contest plea bargain and was sentenced to at least nine years in prison for solicitation of murder.

Wendy is an example of how Bob and Rentahitman.com, despite everything, are capable of stopping serious violence, which might otherwise have slipped through the cracks. Exactly the kind of violence we have been trying to prevent as well. In this case, literally the same violence. But we can't get away from the fact that Bob was willing to cross lines we never were. And his methods have made me and my team reflect on something really fundamental to the kill list and our entire investigation. How far can you ethically go

to stop people from being murdered? The thing that's so interesting about Rentahitman.com and what Bob is doing, is that for the first time, we're running into someone else who has been trying to do something that is very similar to what we've been trying to do for the last few years. This is my producer Caroline, by the way. And looking at Bob's work and thinking about Wendy's case, all of this gives us quite a fascinating opportunity to compare our methods and to think about is there even a right way to do this. For me at least, thinking about Bob's work, it definitely helps to show just how ethically complex this

whole kind of thing is. Paul Anthony Indeed, ethically complex. But I think it's important to say right at the very beginning that Bob does catch people who are very dangerous on Rentahitman.com, people just like Wendy. I think that Bob, very similar to us, found himself in a position which was really, really difficult, maybe even impossible. One where he felt compelled to act, like he needed to help these people, he needed to catch the people that were using his site. Just like us felt so ignorant, had to act so urgently, kind of felt like he was trapped in that position where,

I mean, he needed to do something, but it wasn't always clear what. There's definitely a lot of parallels between what Bob is doing and what we have been doing for the last few years. And I don't doubt that he has genuinely helped to catch people who are genuinely dangerous. But I also think that there is a difference between what we've been doing and what he's been doing. That we didn't create the website that we've been investigating. You know, he's not just observing and reporting what he sees.

He also steps in messages with the users, and he's even designed the whole thing now, now that he knows that this is how people are using the site. I don't know, it's not a role I would want to take on myself. Tell me a bit about that because it's kind of difficult, I think, for me to understand being uncomfortable, but also recognizing that he's saving lives. I think there's a number of things. So one of them is the fact that he is operating

this site himself. And I know that the boundaries of what a traditional journalist would do have been blurred in our own investigation. I mean, profoundly blurred. Profoundly blurred, right? But that's not been easy. I mean, to be honest with you, that sense of the blurring of boundaries was actually one of my strongest and first memories of this whole investigation.

Yeah, you think you're reporting on something from the outside, and then we found ourselves having to make decisions that put us in the story and in the events in a way that in most journalistic activities you just wouldn't normally do. I think the boundaries began to blur for me when we reasoned that simply going through the police wasn't going to work. I felt like it was actually ethically incumbent upon us to step out of the ethical frameworks of being a journalist. Probably one of the biggest steps we took was when we decided to contact the victims. And in that moment, when we're trying to decide whether it's the right thing to do to knock on the door, that was scary.

And everything that we did with the police, pressuring them and trying to protect the targets that we came to increasingly know and care about, I don't think that's something that we could ever call classical journalism. That is a blurred boundary. And this for me, I think is part of the reason why Bob's site is interesting, because it makes me ask questions of ourselves and what we did and looking at what he did too. Because I still feel that I probably would not feel comfortable operating a site like Bob's.

And even if I did it accidentally, I wouldn't feel comfortable running it. Because to me, you are creating the thing that people are coming to, right? The experience of having these cases come in totally independent of us has been incredibly challenging. And I cannot even fathom the idea of like generating that in some way myself. I don't think Bob is generating this. I think he feels the emails coming into his inbox.

How is he not generating this? Like, I'm not saying that he's implanting the desire to place these orders in these people, but they're not sending these messages on this site unless the site exists and he's running it, and he's replying to them. So I think that's the step that's different. Like, I'm not saying he's making these people want to kill people, because that's like out there already.

And I held my hands up and say like, he's definitely doing good. So I don't think it's black and white. But the question is like, would I feel uncomfortable doing that myself? And the answer is yes. But we could have stopped at any point. So I think like Bob's decision to continue to respond to the messages and to run the site the way he's done is in many ways analogous

to us deciding to continue to remain in the site secretly and continue to deal with each case as it came in. We've decided to do that because we know that it saves lives and we know it catches very dangerous people. But we haven't messaged the perpetrators, Karl, and I think that's a line that I would not cross. And I think anyone will have their own lines that they draw about how they handle this. But Bob is also like a private citizen. And to me, what this tells us is maybe about the gaps that there are in our policing systems ability to develop their own systems to catch

them. You know, because why is Bob, who is not qualified at all to be doing this, the person who is having to think about how he messages people. But I mean, we weren't qualified either to investigate any of this. And I think that just is such a strong parallel with us and Bob. Both us and him kind of found ourselves in this impossible situation where we feel compelled to step in.

Like morally we had to. There was no way that we could ignore it. I see that. And I think that's a fair comparison. Us, Bob, we're all part of this spectrum of different people who are stepping in in different ways to intervene in what they see as gaps in the police's ability to deal with crime

that is happening in digital spaces. I can only hope there's just less need for people like Bob and people like us in the future. There's just less need for people like Bob and people like us in the future. What I find really scary is that Bob has received thousands of cases and there are thousands of people on the kill list as well. I think one of the thorniest questions to do with these sites is whether they are simply a window into murderous desires, or whether they somehow create murderous desires.

But I don't think that's what Bob does. I think that's what Bob argues as well, that nothing that he or his website is doing is actually encouraging people to explore murder if they hadn't already gotten there on their own. They're going to the internet anyway. They're looking for a hitman or somebody else to take care of and they just find the page. I don't think the website creates violence. I think it prevents violence because these people are already out there trying to figure out a way to have somebody hurt. Anyone who wants to can visit renderhitman.com. It's still up there on the web. But Bob has decided recently to take down the service request form. It has, he says, started to overtake too much of his life.

It's like a water faucet. I can turn it on or off. If I turned on a service request form today, I would have new leads in the inbox by the end of the afternoon. I mean, it's ridiculous. Bob's website has been exposed as an obvious con many, many times over now. He's been written about by a whole host of mainstream news organizations. It's no secret that Rentahitman.com is fake. Similarly, Eurus sites, the ones we've been monitoring, have long been identified as a scam. And yet, people still keep flocking to them.

The desire for murder, and the belief that it could only be a click away, is a fantasy that's seemingly impossible to destroy. 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.com. From Wondry and Novel, this is Kill List. Kill List. Kill List is hosted by me, Carmilla. This episode is produced and written by Jake Otayevich, with additional production by Megan Oyinke. Our series producer is Tom Wright.

Kill List is also produced by Caroline Thornton, with additional production by Anna Sinfield. Our assistant producer is Amilia 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 and Callum Plews is our Senior Managing Producer for Wandery.

Original Music by Skyler Gerdman and Martin Linebelle. Music Supervision by Nicholas Alexander, Max O'Brien and Caroline Thornton. Sound Design and Mixing by Daniel Kempson. 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.