– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

Alright, well, everyone, good morning.

So I’m Carl Miller,

and I spent years watching people trying to have someone murdered.

They thought they were doing it in secret,

but they weren't.

So the year was 2020.

COVID had descended

and just like everyone else, I was spending a lot of time online.

But I was going on a bit of the internet

that I think probably fewer people here have actually been on:

the darknet.

A bit of the internet that, thanks to clever technology encryption,

basically ensures your anonymity.

And rumors have swirled around the darknet for years

that you could buy anything on the darknet.

That you could buy drugs,

you could buy guns, that you could buy uranium.

And also that you can buy murder,

on websites like this.

This is what the website looked like

when I first laid eyes on it all those years ago.

I mean, it looks like a website from the 1990s.

It looks like someone trying to make clip art as scary as possible.

But the offer that the website makes is a serious one.

This website is saying, "Hey, we're the Mafia,

and now you can deal directly with us thanks to the darknet."

So you go on to this part of the internet,

you load in your alias,

you type in the message,

and then it says you can directly transact to have someone killed.

And so it was that in 2020,

a hacker that I was working with, a man called Chris Monteiro,

he was looking at this website.

He was probing it, he was scanning it.

He was seeing what he could learn.

And then in discovery, which changed,

I think, both Chris and my life forever,

momentously, Chris found a little vulnerability

with the way in which this website worked.

A kind of little technical gap, if you will,

that he could kind of, in a weird way, wiggle through

and get into the back end of the website.

And there Chris could see all the kill orders being placed.

He could see names, addresses, pattern-of-life information,

bitcoin payments

and all the messages trying to have someone killed.

So he phoned me.

So suddenly these were flying in.

These are, by the way, the literal actual kill orders

we're intercepting on the site.

I'm not mocking up anything today.

These are all real.

So suddenly we were seeing

that there was a hit to kill someone in Amsterdam.

"A simple, easy person, but high risk of putting me in jail."

They paid almost 2,000 dollars.

There was a hit to kill someone in Paris for 1,000 dollars.

A person that needs to go away,

her apartment needs to be set on fire.

A large order to kill someone in Slovakia.

"I need you to take down one guy," they say.

14,000 dollars.

There was an order in Hyderabad, in India.

There was an order in Berlin

to kill someone probably working from home,

21,000 dollars for that one.

Now some of these kill orders were short and curt and clipped.

Others were long,

offering lurid justifications as to why it was the right thing

that this person had to die.

And others still, they would log in almost every day,

almost providing real-time updates.

Oh, the target's just left the house.

This is the car they're driving.

This is how they're going to get to work.

But put together,

we called all of these orders the “Kill List.”

It is the single most grotesque, disgusting, horrible,

frightening thing I've ever had to read in my entire life.

And it was getting longer all the time.

So I did what any sane person would do.

I phoned the police.

And so it was in the middle of COVID,

the first two strangers that I'd seen for months

were two somewhat nervous uniformed police officers

from the Metropolitan Police stood in my kitchen,

and I laid it all out for them.

I took them through the website,

I took them through the hacks, I showed them the orders,

we'd drawn this diagram of how the website worked.

And they looked at it

and they looked at me and they looked at each other

and they were unfortunately, genuinely quite concerned I was insane.

(Laughter)

And it's a bit of a longer story, but ultimately,

the Metropolitan Police decided

not to take up an active investigation in the site.

But we knew we couldn't step away.

Like these people,

these people whose images we could see,

who we knew where they lived, these people being targeted,

they might be in terrible danger.

You know, they might not know that someone out there,

on the darknet, was trying to have them killed.

So we took a decision.

Maybe the most difficult decision I've ever had to make,

certainly professionally.

And the decision was that I would go

and reach the people on the Kill List myself.

Directly.

That I would tell them that someone was trying to kill them.

And so we sculpted a script.

We worked with a psychologist,

we worked out how we would try and soften the blow

of being told that someone was trying to kill you,

and I had to also emotionally brace myself for this, I dreaded it.

The idea that I was about to throw this emotional hand grenade

in someone's life, it was absolutely awful.

Anyway, this is the call.

(Audio) No, I don't want any information.

I'm trying to give you information.

Person 1: I don't care.

No, sir.

Carl Miller: OK, well, thanks for your time anyway,

do give me a phone back if you'd like more information.

This is the second call.

(Call 2) Would we be able to arrange a time to be able to talk to you

at greater length about that?

Person 2: No, no, thank you, thank you, thank you.

CM: OK.

So you don't ...

(Line breaks)

Hung up on me.

I mean, I wasn't an emotional hand grenade

going off in these people's lives,

I was awful, I mean, no one believed me.

You know, I spent a week,

the story was so unbelievably fantastical.

Darknet assassins, you know, kill orders,

that I just kept getting hung up on for a week.

So we knew we needed to evolve our strategy and quickly.

So we got local journalists on the scene.

They believed us to go

and directly meet the people on the Kill List face to face.

And the first place we tried to do this was to reach a woman called Elena,

here in Zurich, on the outskirts of Zurich.

I spoke to the local journalist,

she drove up to where Elena was living,

she took a deep breath,

she got out her car and knocked on Elena's front door.

And five minutes turned into 10, 10 into 15.

And then at last, after an agonizing wait,

there was Elena on a Zoom call,

a woman whose face I'd only seen on a kill order,

was there speaking to me.

And this was the warning I delivered her.

(Audio) Sorry, there's no easy way of really saying this.

We've come across some information

which might mean that someone

had put some information regarding you on the site.

Elena: I'm actually not really surprised.

CM: Really? In what way?

Elena: I'm having an ugly divorce.

It's going on for about three years now.

So ...

And, you know, there's money involved.

Quite a lot of money.

And my husband ...

Actually doesn't want to pay it, so ...

You know, I'm not really surprised.

CM: She took it unbelievably well.

(Laughter)

Now an important thing to know is that it wasn’t just messages

going into the site.

The shadowy people running the site were also replying.

Some of these conversations would go back and forth

for weeks or months, and we could read all of those as well.

And what we realized when we were reading all of those

was that if there were hitmen out there,

these were the most incompetent hitmen on the face of the planet.

They kept losing their weapons, or they kept getting lost.

It would build up to the hit,

and suddenly the target would be too well protected

they'd have to pull out, new teams have to come in,

and every single time the price would go up.

It became really obvious that there were no shadowy hitmen out there.

The site had no interest in killing any of these people.

They were just trying to extort as much money as they could

from the people placing the orders.

But the people placing the orders,

they, of course, did not know that.

They were deadly serious

when they were trying to have these people killed.

And nowhere was that lesson starker than actually with Elena herself.

So after we spoke to Elena, we spoke to the police.

And sometime after that,

the Swiss police did arrest her husband.

And only then did we realize

that he'd been renting a secret room next to her flat.

And in this room there was a flip knife,

a telescopic baton, a submachine gun,

a Glock 9mm pistol,

an AK-47, zip ties, a black bin bag,

black rubber gloves, GPS trackers, lock picks.

That was a lesson to us if we needed it.

The people writing these orders could be just as dangerous

as any darknet hitman.

So who are these people?

Who are the people writing these orders?

Who is paying 2,200 dollars here

for a five-foot-five male with blue eyes to be killed?

Who?

This is who's doing it.

She's Kelly Harper.

Kelly Harper is a go getter, hospital administrator,

one-time college sweetheart of the target of the order,

who'd been locked with him in a bitter, years-long custody battle

that had raged across the courts and the schools and the hospitals

of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.

Who's paying 16,000 dollars to have a couple removed?

Someone that they don't "quite see eye-to eye-on something with,"

which sounds like the understatement of the century.

(Laughter)

This is a man that's done that, Christopher Pence.

Forty-year-old Microsoft IT security technician.

The biological father of 11 children.

The adoptive father of five more children.

A deeply religious man, actually,

who from a large, solitary house in a valley in Utah,

secretly plotted to have the biological parents

of his five adoptive children killed.

This order didn't want the target actually killed.

This order wanted the target kidnapped and forcibly addicted to heroin.

The orderer went by the darknet moniker "Scar 215,"

and they actually laid out a bonus structure.

So "an additional 10,000 to permanently withdraw all court motions.

An additional 10,000 to keep her mouth shut and tell no one.

The husband does not know this is happening,"

writes the order.

Any guesses?

The husband definitely did know this was happening.

This is a husband, Dr. Ronald IlG.

A neonatologist, a doctor,

A man who ran a clinic for vulnerable women with addiction issues.

A man who went from a poor rural upbringing in Oregon

to a senior city clinician,

and a man obsessed with controlling all the people in his life,

especially the women.

A man so devoid of contrition,

that after his conviction,

he's been trying to sell the book rights to his life

by describing it as "50 Shades of Gray" on steroids.

And it wasn't just here.

This was a "Sports Direct" love triangle in Milton Keynes.

This was a woman trying to kill her two parents in Canberra, Australia.

We saw orders in Nevada,

we saw orders in Tampa,

we saw orders in Spain,

we saw orders in Italy.

We saw orders almost everywhere.

Now we started working in secret with the FBI,

and we were passing all of our orders to the FBI.

To give you a sense of the scale,

over the years that we were doing this,

we disclosed 175 paid-for

kill orders around the world.

Thirty-two arrests so far,

28 convictions so far,

around 180 years of prison time has been sentenced

as a result of the investigation so far.

There's probably more to come.

(Applause)

Thanks.

And in case anyone's wondering,

no, we're not still doing this.

So there's a whole other investigation that we did

into the people running the site.

It turns out very likely that they were a group of Romanian cyber criminals.

And some years ago,

they were then arrested in a rash of raids across Romania.

We were then locked out the site.

And yet convictions have continued that we had nothing to do with.

And that is the only reason I can stand on this stage today

and tell you about any of this.

This is, by the way, not a story

I really thought I would ever be on a stage and able to tell anyone about.

So it's a spectacular moment for me

to be able to finally, kind of, talk to the world

about what we were doing all those long years ago.

But where are we left with?

That's, I think, the final idea I want to leave us with.

What does all of this actually really mean?

When I first started doing this,

I thought the kinds of cases that we were going to be dealing with

were going to be to do with maybe organized crime,

big drug deals gone awry.

And I think the reality is somewhat more unsettling than all of that.

What this website seems to do,

in the eyes of the orders, at least,

is to make taking out a hit on someone

convenient and clean and safe and easy,

whereas it was once difficult and dangerous and scary.

It's essentially lowered the barriers to entry to ordering an assassination.

And I think that that brings us face-to-face with something

that is quite disconcerting.

The people on this list, the Kill List,

and the people that put them there

are normal people.

The perpetrators are basically normal people.

They have jobs, they have friends.

They go about living their lives just like you and I, you know,

and they were going about holding all of that down

basically at the same time

that they were plotting in secret, constantly, coldly often,

to have someone killed.

I think that if there's one thing that unites them all,

it was often intimate partner violence, by the way, spiraling out of control.

And I think the one thing that unites them all

is a desire for control,

a need to have it,

an inability to lose it.

Control of a thing,

control of a relationship, of a family,

and a willingness ultimately, of course, to kill, to get it back.

But I think that's where we are.

And if there's one thing

that I've come away from this whole lurid,

crazy journey, really thinking:

we might all be just a little bit closer to being on a kill list

we might like to think.

Thanks very much, everyone.

(Applause)

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
murder /ˈmɜːrdər/ B2	noun - the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another verb - to kill (someone) intentionally
internet /ˈɪntərnet/ B1	noun - a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities
technology /tekˈnɒlədʒi/ B2	noun - the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes
anonymity /əˈnɒnɪməti/ C1	noun - the state of being not identified by name; the state of being anonymous
rumors /ˈruːmərz/ B1	noun - a currently circulating story or report of an uncertain or doubtful truth
drugs /drʌɡz/ B1	noun - illegal drugs
guns /ɡʌnz/ B1	noun - firearms
vulnerability /ˌvʌlnərəˈbɪləti/ C1	noun - the state of being susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm
scanning /ˈskænɪŋ/ B2	verb - to examine closely
intercepting /ˌɪntərˈseptɪŋ/ B2	verb - to interrupt the course of something
orders /ˈɔːrdərz/ B1	noun - an authoritative direction or instruction
payments /ˈpeɪmənts/ B1	noun - the act of paying someone or something
intercepting /ˌɪntərˈseptɪŋ/ B2	verb - to interrupt the course of something
grotesque /ɡroʊˈtesk/ C1	adjective - repulsively ugly or distorted
disgusting /dɪsˈɡʌstɪŋ/ B2	adjective - causing a feeling of revulsion or strong disapproval
horrible /ˈhɒrəbl/ B2	adjective - causing horror
frightening /ˈfraɪtnɪŋ/ B2	adjective - causing fear