Inside the criminal investigation of an IT support technician who ordered his wife's murder on a dark web site, which was a scam, and then killed her himself
ON A BRISK day in March 2016, Stephen Allwine walked into a Wendy's in Minneapolis. The smell of old fryer grease hung in the air … Tweets: @c0up , @deardara , and @marahvistendahl Tweets: Abhilash / @c0up : This is an insane story, and I hate that my mind goes to the inevitable TV show about it http://twitter.com/... Dara Grumdahl / @deardara : DROP EVERYTHING and read this Minneapolis true crime story of an ULTRA CHURCHY SELF APPOINTED MARRIAGE COUNSELOR ordering a hit on his wife after dining at @bluedoorpub I came for the Alec Soth photo in the hed but OMG OMG http://www.wired.com/... Mara Hvistendahl / @marahvistendahl : This is the tale of a murder involving the dark web, assumed identities, and a few tenacious Minnesota detectives — a sort of ‘Fargo’ for the internet age. I wrote it, and now it's in print. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This Wired investigation sits at the intersection of two patterns the related coverage maps out: the rise of dark web murder-for-hire sites and the myth of untraceable payments. As later reporting showed, the vast majority of these murder-for-hire marketplaces are schemes to pilfer money from gullible users — which is exactly what Stephen Allwine encountered when he tried to buy his wife's death online.
The case also lands amid a string of stories where ordinary people weaponized internet infrastructure against specific victims, from the UGNazi hackers who deceived and murdered one member's girlfriend to the eBay executives whose alleged cyberstalking campaign showed how easily corporate tools become instruments of harassment.
First-order effects
- Minnesota detectives opened a criminal investigation into Allwine over his wife's death — an inquiry that turned on connecting him to the failed hit order after he killed her himself.
- Allwine lost both the money he paid the site and any cover of anonymity: the 'hitman' service took his payment and delivered nothing, leaving digital evidence of intent behind.
Second-order effects
- Law enforcement's ability to follow the money is the hinge here — the same traceability shown in the takedown of the largest child sex abuse site, where investigators used Chainalysis to prove bitcoin was traceable, applies directly to dark-web hit orders.
- Prospective customers of such sites now face a double exposure documented across this coverage: they are defrauded by the marketplace itself and simultaneously generate the payment trail that convicts them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — fraudulent hit sites on one side, blockchain forensics on the other — the dark web's murder-for-hire economy functions less as a crime service than as a honeypot that monetizes intent while feeding prosecutions, reshaping how prosecutors argue premeditation in cases with no physical middleman.
The trend: Dark web markets promising illegal services are increasingly exposed as scams whose transaction records do more to convict their customers than to serve them.