In the midst of attempting to hire a hitman to murder an ex-lover factory coworker who turned down her overtures, a scorned mother of five is apprehended.
After a short flirtation went south, Helen Hewlett, 43, was yesterday convicted guilty of encouraging the murder of Paul Belton, 50.
Hewlett, a resident of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, said she wanted the death of Mr. Belton to seem to be an accident so she paid more than £20,000 in Bitcoin to a website called Online Killers Market.
Despite her denials, the jury convicted her guilty of soliciting murder after two days of deliberation and an 11-day trial.
Judge Katharine Moore cautioned the married mother of five while remanding her in jail until sentencing on April 5, saying she “must prepare herself to face a custodial term.”
She was also found guilty of stalking, which is a lesser offense, but not of stalking that caused alarm or distress.
Police, according to the evidence presented in court, were able to trace her Bitcoin transactions to a website where she had ordered a “Job in Norfolk UK” with the instructions “Need someone murdered in Norfolk – important it appears like an accident.”
Hewlett and Mr. Belton flirted with one another when they were both employed at the Linda McCartney vegetarian food business in Fakenham, Norfolk, the jury was informed during the trial.
In the factory’s overflow parking lot, the two performed a short sex act, which Mr. Belton, who was also married with kids, is claimed to have quickly regretted.
The court heard how she became “utterly fascinated” with him and kept emailing him pleading to meet him again as well as sending him naked pictures of herself, but he turned down her advances.
She acquired a job at the Kinnerton Confectionery plant in Fakenham, which provides chocolate goods to Tesco, after Mr. Belton was laid off, in order to follow him.
She referred to him as a “coward” for refusing to talk to her and wrote in Facebook comments that he “needs shot in the bollocks.”
In August 2021, Hewlett resigned from her position as a mixer in the “nut” division of Kinnerton, citing Mr. Belton’s harassment of women and intimidation of others.
After Mr. Belton presented them with emails she had given him, management dismissed her charges as “malicious.”
Hewlett was also accused of reporting Mr. Belton’s homophobic remarks as a whistleblower complaint to Tesco in April.
After telling Mr. Belton to contact the police to claim that he was being harassed, company leaders discarded the complaint with the suspicion that Hewlett had filed it.
The court was informed that Hewlett had opened a Coinbase account in January of last year in order to purchase cryptocurrencies, according to investigations.
She made 35 transactions totaling £22,601 in transfers from her existing bank accounts, including deposits, withdrawals from savings, an overdraft, and loans of £7,000 and £5,000 from the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Before submitting the order, she deposited Bitcoin worth £20,547 into a website-linked “escrow intermediary account.”
She allegedly searched the dark web using the Tor browser and came upon a website called Online Killers Market that offered hitmen, according to the prosecution.
Before exchanging communications with another user on the website going by the name of “Marksman,” she placed a remark in a forum under the username “Horses5” that said, “Need someone murdered in Norfolk – crucial it appears like an accident.”
Hewlett had included Mr. Belton’s name, home address, job address, and a picture of him in the sequence that the police had traced.
The married mother of five revealed to authorities in an interview that she went on the dark web to seek “revenge,” but she denied having any plans to murder her former coworker Belton throughout the trial.
Hewlett claimed during a police interrogation that she had just planned to post on the site “to vent,” not with the intention of carrying out the murder.
You have to give your OK for someone to be done, she said, adding that she still felt she had authority over the money in the escrow account and that no one else had access to it.
There was no evidence that the account on the internet was a real Escrow account, Det Sgt Mark Stratford of the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit said in court.
The website stated it could send hitmen to kill victims or run them over with automobiles to make it look like deaths were unintentional, Det Sgt Mark Stratford of the police’s Eastern Region Special Operations Unit said before the court.
The website bragged of having hundreds of hitmen recruited from gangs or ex service members on its books, calling itself “the number one hitmen market place.”
Even a pricing list in US dollars was given, stating that a sniper shot might cost somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000, an arson attack could cost up to $20,000, while a simple beating may cost as little as $2,000.
According to Mr. Stratford, the website also said that it could arrange for deaths via poison that was undetectable or even snake attacks, and that it had a “100% task completion record.”
It said that it would not really collect the money until the customer approved it once it had been established that a hit had been carried out, and it offered to activate hitmen upon payment of costs into a so-called Escrow intermediary account, he continued.
When all parties were in agreement, a multi-signature wallet would have been used by real escrow accounts to authorize payment.
The website looked to be a “absolute hoax,” according to evidence presented at Norwich Crown Court, and the Bitcoin that Hewlett gave over ended up in an account in Romania.
Regardless of whether the webpage was bogus or genuine, the prosecution said that she intended to have him killed.
Hewlett said that she had no means of knowing if the user whose login was “Marksman” on the website would really go through with it.
Marti Blair, the prosecutor, said that after posting the advertisement, Hewlett looked for news stories concerning deadly car accidents, a corpse being discovered in a ditch in King’s Lynn, and a body being discovered on Norfolk’s Holkham beach.
She was detained on August 12 of last year after authorities were able to connect her to Bitcoin payments made to the website since she had done so through a regulated Coinbase account that had her name and personal information on file.
A marker was put on Mr. Belton’s home location and phone numbers after Hewlett’s arrest, indicating that emergency calls would be handled as a “urgent danger to life,” the court heard.
After being detained, Hewlett provided the police with her log-in information for the website, and they canceled her hitman order while claiming to be her. However, Hewlett never received any of the Bitcoin she had spent.
The court was informed that Hewlett had been warned by the police to cease contacting Mr. Belton and given “words of counsel” after she was thought to have made the untruthful whistleblower report against him.
Hewlett allegedly disregarded the advice and continued to deposit funds into her online account, which she then used to buy Bitcoin to execute the contract on Mr. Belton.
Even though she chose not to testify in court, she admitted to police that she hadn’t actually planned to have him murdered.
I made a post on a forum, Hewlett said. More than anything, I was just venting and expressing how I was feeling. It was less serious and more ridiculous. It was a means of boosting my mood.
She said that she didn’t think Mr. Belton would be hurt until she gave the go-ahead for a hit. You must give your OK before someone can finish, she added.
In his defense, Matthew McNiff called the website a “total farce” and referred to its boasts of offering hitmen as “palpable rubbish.”
According to him, she used her tweets about wanting to murder Mr. Belton as a “means to vent and feel that she was being heard and listened to.”
However, prosecutor Marti Blair warned that the website’s creators would be seen by the jury as “scam artists aiming to swindle the destitute.”
She said, however, “We do not know whether it was a hoax or if Paul Belton was really in danger, presumably the former, but the fact that it was probably a scam should not effect what her objective was.”
Judge Moore encouraged the jury to take into account Hewlett’s mental condition at the time she uploaded Mr. Belton’s information on the internet.
“Was Helen Hewlett a woman scorned, someone who was spiteful and intended to procure murder?” she questioned.
Or was she weak and dependent, more of a keyboard warrior, but without the will to kill?
Detective Inspector Paul Morton said the following after today’s sentencing: “We are extremely delighted that, after careful deliberation, the jury has found the defendant guilty on both charges.
There was a ton of material to take into account in this trial, which was quite technical and difficult. This unusual offense merely goes to prove that there are still no safe havens for criminals on the dark web.
We had to take precautions against that because even if it hadn’t been shown that this was a legitimate site, other individuals may have taken action on their own.
The maximum term for soliciting murder is life in prison.
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