A twisted Michigan woman has admitted to trying to hire a hitman on a fake website to kill her ex-husband for $5,000.
Wendy Lynn Wein, 52, faces at least nine years behind bars after pleading guilty to filling out a “service request form” on RentAHitman.com seeking help with “an issue” she had in July 2020, MLive.com reported.
Wein pleaded guilty to charges of solicitation of murder and using a computer to commit a crime on Nov. 12. A plea agreement caps her minimum sentence at 108 months and she will learn her fate in January, the outlet reported.
Michigan State Police said Wein reached out to the fictitious website that claims to “solve problems” and said her ex-husband was her intended target. The site’s owner then contacted cops, saying he was concerned the South Rockwood woman wanted her former flame dead, state police said.
An undercover trooper posing as a hitman later met Wein in a parking lot, where she offered to pay him $5,000 to kill her ex and provided him with a payment for travel expenses, authorities said.
The bogus website — which promises to be secure for those with a “problem that needs resolving” — claims it’s operated by someone named “Guido Fanelli,” but it’s actually run by a California man who sends any serious inquiries to cops, the Washington Post reported.
Up to 700 people have contacted Bob Innes since he launched it 16 years ago as part of a failed internet security business. Some 400 of them even filled out the “service request form” requiring them to leave their name and phone number.
“I don’t get it,” Innes told the newspaper last week. “People are just stupid.”
Prior to Wein, a Virginia man, Devon Barber, then 20, reached out to Innes in 2018 and said he wanted to hire someone to kill his ex-girlfriend and her parents while kidnapping the woman’s 3-year-old daughter to raise as his own. Barber was later sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Innes said he also received an email in 2010 from a woman named Helen who said she was from the United Kingdom but had been stranded in Canada. The woman claimed three people had bilked her out of her father’s inheritance and she wanted them dead.
After giving Helen a chance to back out, Innes reached out to a police sergeant who contacted Canadian authorities. Helen was later arrested for soliciting to commit murder and served about four months in prison before being sent back to Britain, Innes said.
“So those were the first three people that the site has effectively saved,” Innes told the Washington Post.
The website continues to fool people despite being featured in Rolling Stone last year, Innes said. Wein, for instance, gave the purported “hitman” a down payment of $200 and agreed to pay $5,000 when the job was done.
“She was hellbent on … seeking revenge to take out her ex-husband,” Innes said, adding “she never did her homework.”
Wein had accused her ex-husband, who lived in another state, of being a pedophile, and gave the investigator posing as a hitman his address and said where he worked, the Washington Post reported.
Wein appeared to have some doubt about the site’s authenticity in her first message to “Guido” at the site, which claims to have served “hundreds” of customers in more than 160 countries and boasts having 17,985 “field operatives” in the United States.
“This is kind of weird that your company is not on the deep or dark web,” Wein wrote, Innes told the Washington Post. “I prefer not going to jail. Thank you for your time.”
Wein is set to be sentenced on Jan. 13, the Monroe News reported. Prior to her conviction, she had no criminal record.