There has long existed a rumour that deep in the crevices of the dark web you can hire a hitman. Indeed this was the service being offered on a site which cyber expert Chris Monteiro stumbled upon in 2020. Encountering what ostensibly looked like a ‘kill list’ of people with a target on their head, he contacted journalist Carl Miller to ask what he thought could be done with this information. Their resulting actions led to the podcast Kill List, a wild, heart-stopping, 18-episode ride which sees Miller grapple with the responsibility of being the only person in the world potentially able to halt a planned murder.

‘We had no idea what to do,’ says Miller over Zoom. ‘There was no manual. There was no precedent.’ Both Miller and Monteiro twigged early on that the website was a scam, in the sense that the shady figure who ran it (under the moniker Yura) had no intention of ever dispatching an assassin. However, Yura was willing to take money from his ‘clients’, and as the list demonstrated, people were willing to pay. Miller was aware of a 2016 case where a US man had been convicted of murdering his wife after attempting to hire a hitman. Now he could see before him the woman’s name on the list, along with a down payment in bitcoin made by her husband. The site may have been a scam, but the individuals who attempted to use it were deadly serious. Miller decided he had to find a way to let the people on the ‘kill list’ know.

‘For me, the most anxiety-provoking thing was having to make some very hard decisions around triaging all these cases,’ he notes. ‘We thought that payment was going to be a crucial piece of evidence.’ Out of 500 names on the list, 175 had down payments on them and these became Miller’s priority. In the podcast’s first six episodes, he tries to contact the potential victims, first personally, then through journalists in various countries. He involves the police with limited success, until finally the FBI agree to meet him and take the ‘kill list’ off his hands.

‘It was totally surreal, you know, these serious, suited FBI agents,’ recalls Miller. ‘But it was a huge relief.’ Handing over the cases meant the weight Miller had been carrying was finally lifted. ‘Just knowing that someone is trying to kill someone else, and that you are among the only people in the world who know this, is a horrible thing. It’s a horrible power to hold.’

New episodes of Kill List are available every Tuesday on Wondery.