Carl found hundreds of names on a 'kill list.' He spent the next 3 years warning them.

It was early 2020 when UK tech journalist Carl Miller found himself staring at a list of hundreds of names of people who had been ordered dead.

A hacker friend, Chris, who he'd worked with before, had managed to wriggle himself into the backend of a 'hitman for hire' website on the dark web, uncovering an enormous list of hit-orders that'd been requested from around the world.

Ordinary people, with ordinary lives, jobs and families — who someone wanted dead.

Listen to Carl Miller speak on Mamamia's True Crime Conversations. Post continues after podcast.

Miller expected the motives to be linked to organised crime, but he soon discovered they were mostly romantic relationships gone wrong — men (mostly) who wanted women dead because of money, revenge, control, jealousy or child custody.

"It was somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of the targets [that] were women… they were normal people apart from the fact that someone had determined that someone else should die," he told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations podcast.

The clincher was that the website was a scam. It would take people's money and then not deliver the hit, but that didn't mean the danger wasn't real.

There had already been one woman whose husband took matters into his own hands when the hit didn't come through. Stephen Allwine murdered his wife Amy in Minneapolis in 2016, and police worked out he'd paid the website $13,000 in Bitcoin under the username 'DogDayGod' before deciding to kill her himself.

Amy and Stephen Allwine. Image: 48 Hours.

Reading the conversations in the backend of the website, and seeing the large amounts of money being handed over, Miller was concerned it was going to happen again. So he went to the police.

"They came to my house in the middle of COVID. They did admit to me that one of the reasons they were there was to conduct a mental health check on me — they thought I was mad.

"Once they were convinced I wasn't, they did take it seriously, but because there weren't any British cases, they basically didn't think it was their problem.

"They kind of packaged up the cases, sent them off to Interpol [and] kind of washed their hands of it," he explained on True Crime Conversations.

But Miller knew that Interpol would simply send the threats to the local police stations and they'd go nowhere. They didn't know who he was, and had no way of doing a mental health check like the UK police had.

So he decided to take matters into his own hands.

"It was one of the most important and probably reluctant decisions of my life. It was somewhat born out of desperation, if I'm honest with you," he said.

"[My team and I were] sat there in the middle of COVID saying, 'Do we think, now these cases have gone to Interpol, we have done what we can do to keep these people safe?' And the answer was no.

"So the only thing that we then thought we could do was to begin to reach out to the people on the list, warn them directly they were in danger, and then work with them in whatever way they wanted to."

Miller and his small team of producers, hackers and journalists set about warning people on the hit list; a journey that would take them into the depths of a years' long investigation, which they've since shared on a podcast called Kill List.

They'd track down victims and phone them, but people mostly thought they were a scam and hung up. So — given the restrictions of the pandemic — they started to recruit journalists in the countries where the hits had been ordered, to personally warn these people in real life.

Watch: Carl explains his fears as he started to call people on the list. Post continues after video.

Elena* was the first person Miller spoke to face-to-face. She was living in Zurich, Switzerland, and as she digested the news over Zoom that someone had paid $33,000 in Bitcoin to have her killed, she reacted in a way Miller didn't expect.

She wasn't in the least bit surprised.

Elena was in the middle of a bitter divorce with her ex-husband, and had no doubt it was him. And her story ended up having a terrifying conclusion. Local police discovered her ex was renting a secret flat near her home, where he was keeping weaponry, zip ties, lock picks, masks and black bin bags.

Thankfully, he's now behind bars, but for Miller that case led to him having "recurrent nightmares for months".

Over the past four years, Miller and his team have intercepted a total of 175 kill orders, leading to 34 arrests and 28 convictions in 11 countries, resulting in more than 150 years of custodial time.

It included one case in Canberra, where a woman was plotting to kill her parents.

Miller alerted Australian police of the $6,000 that had been paid via the fake site, with the now-30-year-old still awaiting sentencing.

In 2021, Miller came across a particularly sinister order — someone in America had ordered their estranged wife Jennifer be kidnapped and tortured into dropping divorce proceedings against him.

The FBI became involved, and Robert Craig IIg — a well-known doctor specialising in the care of newborn children — was arrested, and eventually pled guilty to transferring more than US$60,000 to the site. He was sentenced to eight years in prison in early 2023.

From that case on, the FBI took over all the names on the kill list, but Miller says their team were still the only ones who had access to the backend, so were responsible for feeding information back to them.

With a huge part of the investigation now out of their hands, Miller and his team went after the website's administrator.

"He's someone that we managed to learn quite a lot about. We were very confident he was from Romania. We were confident that he was a financially motivated scammer. We thought that he was under the protection of the Russian state, and we thought we identified some members of his circle," he told True Crime Conversations.

In April 2022, there was a huge police raid in Romania.

"The site began to change immediately after this happened… we began to see this, like, technical rummaging around on the site. They tried to hire people in quickly… then by the end of the year, we were finally locked out and we could see no more messages.

"It was New Year's Eve into New Year's Day of that year it all stopped. It really was an end that didn't feel like an ending. It was very dissatisfying. We were locked out and we didn't know what happened, we didn't know who had done what. We didn't know if he [the administrator] was free or in prison, we didn't know whether the people on the kill list were being protected."

It wasn't until April 2023, when Miller saw a news story about an arrest in Alabama from the kill list.

"The only difference was it had nothing to do with us," he said.

"Then we got an email from the police basically saying, 'Hey, we hope you saw this, and we hope that you know that it was linked to the work that you've been doing.' So, [we felt] that was the police telling us that they had broken into the site, and they were running it."

It was a huge relief.

"This will never feel completely ended for me, because so many of the people on the kill list never saw any convictions. But at least I felt that we didn't hold the kill list anymore, but someone responsible did," Miller told True Crime Conversations.

The website still exists, and as far as Miller knows, it's still receiving kill orders.

"There is something very chilling about the capacity for some seemingly normal people to reconcile themselves with having someone else killed in secret. And not just anyone, someone very close to them.

"[It is] deeply, profoundly unsettling and scary," said Miller.

*Name has been changed to protect the person's privacy.

Feature image: Twitter/@carljackmiller