Let me start by saying that stories about people conspiring to hire someone to kill a family member they don’t like isn’t funny. It happens too often.
However, a case which was reported in Las Cruces recently was just too full of ridiculously fragmented planning to pass up comment. Luckily, the hit job never happened and it also may have given us a new nominee from New Mexico for the Darwin Awards (click on darwinawards.com for more info).
A 32-year-old man went onto a fake website called “Rent-A-Hitman.com” to see if he could find someone to knock off his mother-in-law. The slogan for the website was “Your point and click solution.” I mean really, did the perp really think that someone could put up a dumb-sounding website like that without someone from the government noticing? And was he so dense he didn’t suspect it was a spoof? And how about the website operator’s slimy sounding name: “Guido Finelli?”
In fact, the website was the work of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which hoped to identify people seeking a source to commit a hit job and get them into jail before they did something rash.
At one point, the suspect told the website operator that he needed the hit done “as soon as possible and no evidence.” Well, duh, don’t you think that “no evidence” would be the “core value” of a “hit for hire” business?
As negotiations for the hit began moving along with the fake website, the suspect said he didn’t have much money to pay for the contract and would have to ask his wife for an advance to get the job done. He assured the website operator, however, that he would not divulge the purpose for the financial request from his wife. Well duh, again.
“It’s my wife’s mom we are talking about, so I don’t want any evidence to come back to me or you,” he said.
And again, didn’t he think that writing something like that on the Internet would eventually be divulged?
When the wife said she could only afford to give her husband $53 for his unspecified need, the suspect wrote this gem to the operator of the website:
“Change of plans. She is only giving me $53 so let’s use a baseball bat.”
Federal ATF officials eventually arranged to confront the man when they sent an undercover agent to his home.
It turns out that the suspect was being monitored by a state appointed guardian for intellectual and developmental disabilities. The guardian was able to retrieve the man’s laptop and gave it to authorities to unravel the plot.
Following a hearing before a judge, the suspect was placed with a full-time caregiver and is being monitored full time.
I also don’t mean to make light of people with intellectual and development disabilities. But if the state was already taking care of this guy for his problems, don’t you think they could have figured out something was up much earlier? Maybe whoever was in charge of his case should be on the Darwin list too.
aero-cordero.com 