On a breezy day in March 2016, Stephen Allwine walked into the Wendy's in Minneapolis. Smelling old cooking oil, he looked for a man in dark jeans and a blue jacket. Alwine, who worked in IT help desk, was a skinny nerd with wire glasses. He had $6000 in cash with him - he collected it by taking silver bars and coins to a pawnshop to avoid suspicions about withdrawing money from a bank account. He found the right person in one of the booths.
They arranged a meeting at the LocalBitcoins site, where people who want to buy or sell cryptocurrency near their place of residence gather. Alwine opened the Bitcoin Wallet app on his phone and handed over the cash, while the man scanned the QR code to transfer bitcoins. The transaction went through without problems. Then Alwine returned to the car and found that the keys to it were left inside, and the door was locked.
It was his birthday, he was 43, and he was supposed to meet Michelle Woodard for lunch. Alwine had met Woodard online months before. Relations developed quickly, for some time they exchanged dozens of messages daily. Since then, their passion has faded, but they still sometimes slept together. While waiting for the locksmith to arrive, he texted her that he was in a meeting to buy bitcoins and was running late. When the door was opened, he managed to meet Woodard at a burger joint called the Blue Door Pub, intending to enjoy the rest of the day.
That evening, he gave himself another gift. Using email address [email protected] he wrote to one person whom he knew under the name Yura. “I have bitcoins,” he said.
Yura ran the Besa Mafia website, which worked for and was only accessible using anonymous browsers like Tor. For Allwine's purposes, it was important that Besa Mafia, according to her, had connections with the Albanian mafia and advertised the services of hitmen. The site's home page featured a picture of a man with a gun and a marketing slogan: "If you need to kill someone or beat someone up, you've come to the right place."
Yura promised that the user's money is kept in an escrow account and paid out only upon completion of the work. However, Alwine was worried that when he sent the money, it would simply end up in someone else's wallet. But he wanted Yura's statements to be true, so, despite his instincts, he transferred bitcoins. “They say that Besa means trust, so please justify it,” he wrote to Yura. "For personal reasons, the explanation of which would reveal my identity, I need this bitch to be dead."
"That bitch" was Amy Allwine, his wife.
Stephen and Amy Allwine met 24 years earlier at Ambassador University, a religious school in Big Sandy, Texas. Stephen came to his freshman year with a group of his friends, religious youth from Spokane, Washington. Amy was from Minnesota and didn't know a lot of people at school. She quickly became friends with the Washingtonians. She was positive and easy to talk to, and she and Stephen began to dance regularly - these activities brought them closer, but not too much. They belonged to the Worldwide Church of God, which promoted a strict Sabbath on Saturdays, rejected pagan holidays like Christmas, and opposed too much physical contact on the dance floor.
In 1995, while they were still at university, the United Church of God broke away from the Worldwide Church of God. Steven and Amy went to a new cult that used the Internet to spread their doctrine. For Steven, who was fond of computer science, this was a logical choice.
After college, they got married and moved to Minnesota to be closer to Amy's family. Amy was able to tame the most violent animals and taught at a dog training school for several years before starting her own business, Active Dog Sports Training. The couple adopted their adopted son and brought him home when he was only a couple of days old, after which in 2011 they moved into a house in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, an enclave of farmers and people who worked elsewhere, located in the Mississippi Valley, near the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area. Amy converted a large shed on the property into a dog training arena, and their home soon became a cozy mess, with Newfoundland and Australian Cattle dog hair covering the furniture and a few unfinished Lego projects in the kitchen.
From the outside, everything looked normal. Stephen rose to the rank of elder in the United Church of God, and Amy became a deaconess. The church lived according to the Jewish calendar, on Fridays the family dined with Amy's parents, whom Stephen called mom and dad. On Saturdays they went to services. Every year they traveled, attending the fall church festival held in different places around the world. Amy's business grew and she often traveled the country with friends attending dog competitions. In their spare time, the family maintained the Allwine.net website, where, for example, one could find lists of proper songs and dance instructional videos showing how to have fun without touching your partner too much. One video shows Amy wearing khakis and hiking boots, while Steven wears a polo shirt and loose jeans, and the pair dance to "We Go Together".
The day after buying the bitcoins, Stephen uploaded a photo of Amy to Allwine.net. The photo was taken while on vacation in Hawaii, and Amy is wearing a blue-and-green T-shirt with a wide smile on her tanned, freckled face. About 25 minutes after posting the photo, Steven went to his dogdaygod email to send Jura a link. “Her height is a little less than 1 m 70 cm, weight 91 kg,” he wrote. He clarified that it would be best to kill her during the upcoming trip to Moulin, Illinois. If the killer manages to make her death look like an accident - say, ramming her Toyota Sienna minivan from the driver's side - he will add more bitcoins.
Yura confirmed the details of the deal shortly after the letter, using broken English. “He will wait for her at the airport, follow her in a stolen car, and when the opportunity arises, he will cause a fatal accident.” He added that if the accident didn't work out, "the hitman will shoot her." He later reminded dogdaygod of the need to create an alibi for himself: "Make sure you are surrounded by people most of the time, spend time in stores or other public places where there is video surveillance."
Usually Stephen was not surrounded by people. He and Amy lived on an 11 acre lot on a dead end street. The house was a simple one-story portable building set on a foundation. It had four bedrooms, a spacious living room and an open kitchen. Steven fitted the roof with solar panels and boasted that they provided so much energy that he could pump it back into the grid. He spent most of his time in an office in the basement, fixing glitches in the call center system. At home, he could work two jobs at once - one was at the IT services company Optanix, the other at the insurance company Cigna. Employees often approached him with particularly difficult problems.
The pastor the Alwyns went to preached abstinence from carnal desires, and Stephen himself counseled couples in his congregation who were having marital problems. However, when he was alone, he allowed himself to dream, and visited sites like Naughtydates.com and LonelyMILFs.com. On the closed site Backpage, he picked up a girl from an escort service, and twice went to Iowa to have sex with her. During the consultation process, he learned about a dating site intended for married people. There he met Michelle Woodard.
On their first date, Stephen accompanied Woodard during her visit to the doctor. She traveled with him on business trips for several weeks. Woodard liked how unusually calm Stephen was. One day, their connecting flight from Philadelphia was cancelled. Stephen had an 8:130 a.m. meeting in Hatrford, Connecticut, and rented a car without any fuss, which they drove the remaining XNUMX km.
A month before Steven "ordered" his wife, he told Woodard that he would try to mend his relationship with Amy. In fact, his affair only increased his desire for a new life.
Theoretically, with his discipline and knowledge of computers, Steven was the perfect criminal for the dark web. He covered his tracks with anonymous remailers, which remove identification information from messages, and Tor, which masks the IP address by passing data along a random path through a network of anonymous nodes. He gave himself a complicated backstory: that dogdaygod was a rival dog trainer who wanted to kill Amy because she slept with her husband. To create his virtual identity on the dark web, he transferred his infidelity to his wife.
Members of the United Church of God met at the local Methodist church
Steven scheduled the kill for the weekend of March 19, when Amy was supposed to be in Moulin for a training competition. But by the end of the weekend, he wrote Yura a letter complaining that he had not received any news about her death. Yura explained that the killer had not yet caught the right moment: "He needs to arrange everything in such a way as to hit her car from the driver's side, to carry out a side collision in order to guarantee death." The administrator of the Besa Mafia seemed to understand that it was important to dogdaygod that Amy be killed on the road. “We are not interested in why people are killed,” he wrote. “But if she is your wife or family member, we can do it in your city,” he said, adding that the client can leave the city on the appointed day. He offered to kill Amy at home and agreed that they could then burn down the house for an additional 10 bitcoins, or $4100.
"Not a wife," said Stephen, "but the same thought came to my mind." The next day he raised money. When he was sending bitcoins to Besa Mafia, the page refreshed and he did not recognize the 34-character code that appeared. In a panic, he became worried that the cryptocurrency he had worked so hard to obtain would disappear without a trace. He quickly copied the code and saved it in his iPhone notes, and then sent the code to Yura in an email with the subject “HELP!”. Less than a minute later, he removed the code from his notes.
A few hours later, Yura replied, assuring that the transaction was successful, but the days went by, and nothing happened. In the weeks that followed, Steven's messages to Yura went from frustrated and laconic to very detailed instructions. “I know her husband has a big tractor, so she must have gas cans in her garage,” he wrote. "But eliminate only her, do not touch the father and the child." Yura, like a friendly devil, responded with messages that strengthened the client's mood. “Yes, she is a real bitch, and deserves to die,” he wrote. After an hour and a half, he added: "Keep in mind that 80% of our hitmen are members of gangs involved in drug trafficking, beating people, and sometimes murder." For an additional fee, dogdaygod could order a performance from a more experienced killer, a former Chechen sniper.
Stephen spent no less than $12 on the hitman venture. Instead of giving up or contemplating his fall, he only became even more determined. He registered on the dark web site Dream Market, better known for drug trafficking, where he could choose other methods of murder. Common sense dictated the use of different usernames, but he again used the name dogdaygod as if he had already become a character of his own making. He had to recoup his expenses: Amy's insurance payment was $ 000.
In April 2016, about two months after Steven first ordered a wife, and Yura's correspondence with clients - including dogdaygod - were uploaded to pastebin. From the data it became known that users with nicknames like Killerman and kkkcolsia were paid tens of thousands of dollars in bitcoins for killing people in Australia, Canada, Turkey and the United States. These orders soon made their way to the FBI, and the agency sent instructions to local offices to contact the alleged victims. FBI Special Agent Asher Silky, who worked in an office in Minneapolis, learned that someone under the name dogdaygod wanted Amy Allwine dead. He was assigned to warn her of the threat.
Tuesday, right after , Silky enlisted the help of Terry Raymond, a member of the local police, and together they drove to the Alwine house. Cottage Grove is a quiet suburb for wealthy people, but, like across the country, online threats have increasingly been reported to local police. Raymond, an introverted man with angular features accentuated by a trimmed beard, served in the police force for 13 years and was a computer crime specialist.
When Silky and Raymond arrived, Stephen Allwine invited them in. He informed the two law enforcement officers that Amy was not at home, and they stood silently in the room while he called her on the phone. Steven seemed to Raymond a man who felt uncomfortable in the presence of others, but he did not attach any importance to this. In his work, he had to deal with everyone.
The police returned to the station, and soon Amy arrived. They met in the lobby, where an oil painting of the squad's service dog, Blitz, hung, and took her to an interrogation room with little to no furniture. With the FBI in charge of the investigation, Raymond mostly listened while Silky explained to Amy that someone who knew her travel schedule and daily habits wanted her dead. Amy was amazed. She became even more confused when Silky mentioned allegations that Amy had slept with the trainer's husband. She could not understand who could consider her an enemy. “If you see anything suspicious, give us a call,” Raymond told her at parting.
A few weeks later, the Allwines installed a motion-detection video surveillance system at their home, and placed cameras at various entrances. Stephen purchased a pistol, a Springfield XDS 9mm. She and Amy decided to keep him on her side of the bed, and went to the shooting gallery as a date.
Cottage Grove Police Officers, L to R: Captains Gwen Martin and Rande McAlister, Detectives Terry Raymond and Jared Landkamer
On July 31, Amy called Silky in dismay: she had received two anonymous email threats in the past week. Silky drove over to the Alwine house, where Stephen printed out the emails and listened as Amy explained to the agents what had happened.
The first letter came from an anonymous remailer from Austria. There, in particular, was the following:
Amy, I still blame you for ruining my life. I see that you have installed a security system, and people on the Internet told me that the police were interested in my previous letters. I was assured that the letters could not be traced and that I would not be found, but I cannot attack you directly while you are being followed.
And here's what's next. Since I can't get to you, I will get to everything you hold dear.
The email lists contacts for Amy's relatives based on information available through Radaris.com, which provides subscribers with contact information for individuals and organizations. The author also pointed out details known only to Amy's close people - the location of the gas meter on the Olwine house, that they changed the place where they put their SUV, the color of the T-shirt that their son wore two days ago. “Here is how you can save your family,” the letter said. "Commit suicide." The author went on to list various suitable methods.
A week later, a second anonymous letter arrived, scolding her for not following the recommendations. “Are you so selfish that you are willing to put your families at risk?”
Amy gave the police her computer, hoping that its contents would help agents track down her would-be killer. Steven gave the agents his laptop and smartphone. The FBI made copies of the devices, including apps, processes, and files, and returned them a couple of days later.
Amy gave Silky the names of the people who trained in her arena, the owners of the animals she worked with, her best friend. The agent interviewed four of them and examined the credit histories of several of them. Few people benefited from Amy's death, however, since dogdaygod paid several thousand dollars to kill her, there was a personal motive involved in the case. Moreover, the customer gave Yura instructions not to kill her husband. It was logical as a result to investigate the spouse. Silky interrogated Steven, but it's unclear if he did anything else besides this and a copy of his computer with the phone. The FBI declined to comment on the case, and the Cottage Grove police had little understanding of the bureau's work. In addition, to take Raymond with him to the first interrogation and send him copies of threatening emails, the bureau no longer involved the local police.
Meanwhile, Amy struggled to deal with terrible threats. She entered the Civil Academy courses, where citizens are told in detail about the work of the police department. In her statement, she wrote that she "wants to learn about the work of the police department, what they do there and how everything works." Sgt. Gwen Martin, the course leader, was unaware of the death threats Amy had received, and Amy herself did not share it with any of the other participants while they practiced at the shooting range and fingerprinted soda cans. Amy asked to be assigned to a K-9 officer [working with service dogs; by consonance K-9 / canine - canine / approx. transl.] on his patrol, and spoke with great enthusiasm about how the policeman shared with her advice about raising dogs and training to take the trail. At the end of the program, she celebrated with the rest of the group with a small party.
However, Amy still felt helpless. Periodic headaches became more frequent, she began to have problems with memory. While teaching, she behaved confidently, but she herself was worried that her aggressor might be among her students.
One summer evening, she sat in the yard with her sister and thought about who was responsible for the gloomy atmosphere that enveloped her life. Years ago, when her sister started college, Amy sent her postcards every week to keep her from being homesick. Now her sister was doing the same thing in response, quoting the Bible in every postcard.
One Saturday afternoon in November, Stephen and Amy went to church with their son. The road ran across the floodplain east of the Mississippi, through yellowing farm fields, patches of auto parts, and hollows full of trees that had already shed their leaves. The United Church of God rented a red brick building from the local Methodist congregation. There was something befitting the moment in the asceticism of the setting, as if architectural minimalism alone could keep the devil at bay.
In the chapel, the family sat with men in jackets, women in modest dresses, and children with freshly combed hair. Pastor Brian Shaw, standing under daylight streaming through a glass roof, recited a New Testament warning about people who have "eyes full of lust and continual sin." He spoke of Job training not to lust after women. The payoff for not following Job's example is serious: "When we don't control our sinful nature, it controls us."
On Sunday, Steven woke up just before 6 am as usual and went down to his basement office, where he logged into the Optanix system to get started. At noon he went upstairs to have lunch with Amy and his son. Amy, like an avid cook, has baked some of the pumpkin left over from the dessert she made a couple of days ago in a slow cooker. Soon after, she felt weak and dizzy.
Amy's father came to her place to install a dog door in the garage. Steven told him that Amy was not well and she was resting in the bedroom. Her father left without ever seeing her. Five minutes after he left, Stephen called him and asked him to come back to pick up his grandson, as he allegedly wanted to take Amy to the clinic.
At sunset, Stephen went to gas, picked up the boy from his wife's parents and took him to the chain family restaurant Culvers. It was their Sunday tradition to have dinner at the Culvers while Amy taught training. They sat in a brightly lit room eating chicken and smoked cheese.
Upon returning home, the boy jumped out of the minivan and ran into the house, to the bedroom of his parents. There, in an unnatural position, lay Amy's body, and a pool of blood had accumulated around her head. Next to it was a Springfield XDS 9mm.
Steven called 911. “I think my wife shot herself,” he said. "There's a lot of blood here."
Cottage Grove City Hall, where the police station is located
Sergeant Gwen Martin arrived at the house a few minutes after the 911 call. When she saw Amy's body on the floor, she remembered teaching her in the Civic Academy program and burst into tears. Another sergeant took over, and Martin returned to the car. Once she regained her composure, she turned to the laptop on the dash and launched a search for police calls at that address. She was startled to find a report in which Terry Raymond described threats to Amy's life from the dark web. Martin picked up the phone and called Detective Randy McAlister, who led the Cottage Grove investigation.
McAllister was a 47-year-old owner of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a very young face. He often participated in office pranks. His coffee mug read "Due to the confidentiality of my job, I have no idea what I'm doing." However, his cheerful demeanor masked a meticulous nature. About ten years ago Macalister was investigating a murder in a nearby town; the wife's ex-partner killed a married couple at their home while their children were hiding in the house. Shortly before this, the woman told the police that her jealous ex had made contact with her in violation of a court order. McAlister was frustrated that the system could not help the woman and began his own program to protect potential victims from stalking and targeted violence. After hearing Raymond mention the threats Amy received from the dark web, he offered to compare them to the threat database held by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit; this could help them build a profile of a potential intruder. But he had no authority in this case.
Now he hurried to the Olwine house. As he entered through the garage, he immediately smelled the slow-cooker squash being cooked. This seemed strange to him; usually people don't start cooking before they kill themselves. There were other inconsistencies: bloody footprints on both sides of the bedroom door. And although the floor in the hallway was strewn with dog hair, the adjoining hall was clean.
While McAlister waited for the medical examiner and criminal investigators to arrive, a police officer drove Stephen and his son to the station. Raymond took Steven to the same interrogation room where he and Silky had met Amy five months earlier, while his colleague was babysitting the boy in the break room. Raymond took out a pair of latex gloves and took a DNA swab from Stephen's mouth. “Are you going to take this from your wife’s parents too?” Stephen asked. “No, just you and your son,” Raymond said. He asked Stephen to tell how he spent the day.
Stephen cooperated with the policeman, but Raymond felt that he behaved somehow unnaturally for a man who had just lost his wife. He reminded the detective that Amy had a file with the FBI; he said her computer was behaving strangely. "As a member of the IT industry, this annoys me because I know how things should work in the legal world," he said, adding, "I don't know anything about hacking or anything like that."
Over the next three days, investigators combed the crime scene. Technologists sprayed luminol on the floor and turned off the light. Where luminol interacted with blood or purifiers, it glowed bright blue. The glow showed that the corridor was being cleaned. He also illuminated several footprints leading to and from the laundry room in the bedroom.
The Cottage Grove police enforced a warrant to search the house. Macalister sat down at a table in the dining room, transcribing the evidence. Raymond went down to Stephen's office in the basement. When he entered, he saw that all surfaces were filled with junk: folders, tangled wires, external drives, SD cards, as well as a voice recorder and Fitbit. There were hard drives of the kind that had not been used for ten years. There were three monitors on Stephen's desk and a MacBook Pro, not the one he gave to the FBI.
The police pulled the booty upstairs, and then in turn gave it to McAlister for logging. Damn it, he thought as he watched the equipment pile up. And then "Oh my God, as much as possible." However, the devices kept coming and coming. There were sixty-six in all.
Since the crime was related to a death within the city, the investigation was conducted under the direction of the Cottage Grove Police. Two and a half weeks after Amy's death, the FBI sent her file. Opening the documents, McAalister and Raymond saw - for the first time - the full correspondence with the Besa Mafia. It was then that they learned that the nickname of the person who wanted Amy dead was dogdaygod.
By that time, Stephen was already among the suspects, but there was no evidence linking him to the murder. That his DNA was everywhere was hardly surprising: it was his home. There was nothing unusual on the security video, although the footage was incomplete. Steven explained that he and Amy didn't turn on the camera over the sliding glass door because their dogs kept walking through it. Macalister hoped to find answers in the devices Raymond had brought from the Alwine basement.
As soon as the Besa Mafia files appeared on the pastebin, bloggers immediately decided that the site was a scam. One after another, Yura's clients complained that the murders they had ordered were not carried out. However, Macalister did not want to take anything for granted. She and Detective Jared Landkamer identified ten other targets from Besa Mafia orders in the US and contacted police stations in their area. It could give them new leads in their case, or perhaps save other lives.
McAlister distributed the electronics work. He sent the computers to a forensic specialist at a nearby police station. Landkamer received court permission to access the Olwine emails and spent many days reading them. Raymond started by extracting data from Steven's phones. In a windowless room lined with office monitors, he ran software that sorted data—applications here, call history there—and reconstructed the timeline of devices. On the phone Steven gave the FBI for copying, Raymond found Orfox and Orbot needed to access the Tor network. He also found text messages containing confirmation codes from LocalBitcoins. Either the FBI let them through or they didn't care.
Checking Amy's phone, he saw that on the day of her death, her consciousness gradually became more and more confused. At 13:48 p.m., she went to the Wikipedia page on dizziness. At 13:49 p.m., she typed the word DUY into a search engine. Then a minute later EYE. Then DIY VWHH. It looked like she was desperately trying to figure out why the room was spinning around her, but she couldn't write the words into the search engine.
Under interrogation by the state investigator, Stephen confessed to his affair with Woodard. Raymond found the contact "Michelle" on Steven's phone, and when investigators interviewed Woodard, she told them about her birthday dinner when Steven texted her that he had locked his car keys while buying bitcoins. Stephen's call history confirmed that he called for roadside assistance that day from Wendy's in Minneapolis. Detectives used text messages with verification codes to find his LocalBitcoins account. This led them to correspond with the seller about an exchange for $6000.
Landkamer found additional emails on Stephen's devices, from which the usernames under which he logged into Backpage and LonelyMILFS.com became known. It wasn't a crime in itself, but it suggested a possible motive.
Hiding most of the criminal activity, Stephen did not delete the search history. On February 16, minutes before dogdaygod's first suggestion to kill Amy in Moline, Steven Googled "moline il" on his MacBook Pro. A day later, he studied their insurance. In July, shortly before Amy received her first threatening email listing contacts from the Radaris website, he visited pages on the site that corresponded to her family members.
Murders were rare in Cottage Grove, and detectives, faced with circumstantial evidence and the evasive nature of the dark web, became addicted to the case. Lying in bed one evening after reading the FBI file on Amy, Landcamer Googled dogdaygod. Seeing the results, he called his wife. The search engine indexed several pages from Dream Market, an online drug store on the dark web.
Landkamer immediately sent a message about the finds to Macalister. Macalister launched Tor and opened a correspondence with the Dream Market. In one thread, dogdaygod asked if anyone had , a powerful medicine. Macalister was a paramedic, so he knew scopolamine was prescribed for motion sickness, but it could also make people compliant and cause amnesia, earning him the nickname "Devil's Breath." As he scrolled through the pages, he came across a comment from a user who thought dogdaygod wanted to use scopolamine for personal entertainment. “There is a salesman,” he wrote, “but you better forget that shit, buddy. It's bloody dangerous, and you can kill someone."
Later, analysis of the contents of Amy's stomach confirmed the presence of scopolamine. However, the most valuable evidence was obtained thanks to the peculiarity of creating safety copies of Apple devices. A forensic IT specialist from a nearby precinct found a message containing a bitcoin address in the archives of Steven's MacBook Pro, appearing on his iPhone in March 2016. This happened 23 seconds before dogdaygod wrote Yura the same 34-digit wallet code. 40 seconds after sending the message to Yura, the message from Steven's phone was received. But the deleted file does not disappear until other files take its place. A few months later, when Steven was backing up his phone via iTunes, an important piece of history was saved on the laptop.
Macalister was jubilant. Detectives have linked Stephen's offline personality, a church elder concerned about the acceptability of dance steps, to his online identity as a don Juan and would-be assassin. The enticing anonymity of the dark web that spurred Steven on to crime gave him a sense of omnipotence. He failed to understand that this ability did not transfer to the regular web and the real world.
Now Stephen Allwine is incarcerated in the Minnesota prison in the city of Oak Park Heights.
The trial of Stephen Allwine lasted eight days. County prosecutors produced a number of prominent witnesses: the manager of the pawnshop where Stephen sold the silver, an Iowa escort from Backpage, and Woodard. McAlister showed the murder weapon in court, and Jared Landkamer explained to the court the meaning of the acronym MILF, which later became an endless joke in the police station.
Prosecutors Fred Fink and Jamie Crowser used the testimony to build a theory that Stephen poisoned Amy with a large dose of scopolamine to either kill her or immobilize her. But although she was dizzy and not feeling well, she did not die. So Steven shot her with their gun in the hallway. He then carried the body to the bedroom and washed off the blood. When he drove to the gas station and took his son to the Culvers, he kept the receipts just in case.
The jury deliberated for six hours before finding Stephen guilty. On February 2, he was brought to the courtroom for the announcement of the verdict. Each of his family and friends present told the judge how much Amy meant to them. Stephen then rose to address the court.
Breathing heavily, he tried to dismiss the technical evidence associated with file backups and bitcoin wallets. Then he switched to his spiritual virtues. In prison, where he was held during the proceedings, he preached to drug addicts and child molesters. He said that he converted at least three unbelievers.
“Mr. Allwine,” said the judge, after listening to his speech, “my feelings will not change the verdict in this case. But I feel like you're an incredible actor. You can cause tears and stop them. You are a hypocrite and a cold person." The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment without the right to parole (the case has now been sent to the Court of Appeal). From the next room, Macalister watched Raymond and Landkamer through the window, listening with satisfaction to the judge's reprimand to the defendant. However, his feelings were clouded. McAlister understood why, during the FBI's investigation on the dark web, Stephen could not arouse suspicion. Steven's relationship with Amy seemed happy, with no history of violence or drug use. He knew that hindsight might influence the investigators' conclusions, but he also had a feeling that Amy's death could have been prevented. Threat experts use a list of four items to assess the likelihood that an anonymous attacker is a close person to the victim. In Amy's case, all four were true: the person followed her movements, apparently lived nearby, knew her habits and plans for the future, and spoke of her with disgust or contempt.
Within months of McAllister's trial, he was promoted to captain. He periodically advises police departments on crimes related to the dark web. No other deaths have been linked to Besa Mafia clients, however, Yura has reportedly opened other scam sites allegedly related to contract killings: Crime Bay, Sicilian Hitmen, Cosa Nostra. It was like Yura was the devil, watching from afar, and grinning at how the seeds he threw sprouted and turned into full-fledged evil.
Source: habr.com