Dad sought hitman on dark web to kill the parents of 5 children he adopted, feds say
After adopting five children, a man wanted their biological parents dead and arranged for their killings on the dark web, according to federal court documents.
In visiting a website “dedicated to arranging contract killings,” Christopher Pence sought a hitman who could make the New York couple’s deaths look like an accident or “a mugging-gone-wrong” in the summer of 2021, court documents say.
“I have a couple targets husband and wife that I am needing removed,” Pence wrote to the website’s administrator in July 2021, according to his messages shared in court by his defense attorney.
“However, it is known that they and I (don’t) quite see eye-to-eye on something,” Pence’s message continued.
Pence provided the names, address and photos of the couple to the site administrator, and asked that three children who remained under their care not be harmed, according to federal prosecutors.
The images he shared were photos the couple gave him for a “baby book” for their five children that Pence adopted, according to an affidavit.
Pence paid the website’s administrator $16,000 in Bitcoin in late July to contract the killings, court documents show.
But then he tried canceling his “order” days later, prosecutors said.
After a tip from a confidential source alerted the FBI about Pence’s plot, according to the affidavit, FBI agents arrested him in Utah, where he lives, on Oct. 27, 2021, according to prosecutors.
Following his arrest, Pence revealed his motive to investigators: his relationship with his adopted children’s parents had become “fraught” after the adoptions, according to prosecutors.
Now, Pence, a 43-year-old Cedar City resident, has been sentenced to seven years in prison for using the Internet to solicit and pay for the couple’s murders, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York said in an April 8 news release.
The intended targets weren’t harmed, officials said.
In December, Pence pleaded guilty to one count of the use of a facility of interstate commerce in connection with murder-for-hire, court records show.
Ahead of sentencing, prosecutors wrote in court filings that “although (Pence) now appears to understand the gravity of the offense, it was not one committed in the heat of the moment.”
“Rather, the murder-for-hire scheme hatched by the defendant required extensive planning,” prosecutors said.
Eric K. Schillinger, Pence’s defense attorney, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from McClatchy News on April 8.
Court papers detail how ‘tension grew’ after adoption
In a sentencing memorandum submitted on Pence’s behalf, Schillinger described how Pence and his wife met the New York couple several years ago in an online group for parents.
In 2019, the wife of the couple messaged Pence’s wife, saying she “was concerned for the safety of her children and needed a reprieve from parenting,” the sentencing memo says.
Afterward, the Pences met the family, which lived in Massachusetts at the time, and decided to care for the couple’s children temporarily, according to the memo.
Eventually, the Pences, who were living in Texas, adopted five of the couple’s children and learned of accusations that their father was suspected of abuse, the memo says.
“By all accounts the Pences took wonderful care of their five adopted children, but tension grew between the (couple) and the Pences after the adoption was completed,” Schillinger wrote in the memo.
The couple is accused of trying to move onto Pence’s land in Texas in a trailer — leading to the Pences moving to Utah, according to the memo.
Schillinger wrote that as the couple “continued to pressure their way directly into the Pences’ lives,” the “pressure became too much for Christopher.”
“His judgment failed, and he began to explore an option that he acknowledges now, no one should ever do. He went on the internet, he logged into the ‘dark web’ and reached out to a purported hitman,” the sentencing memo says.
In concluding the court filing, Schillinger argued in support of a sentence of two years in prison, followed by three years of supervised relief, for Pence.
Meanwhile, prosecutors argued in their sentencing memo that Pence knew the couple’s three children “could be hurt in the process” of the couple’s intended killing, but “that concern did not dissuade him from paying for the killing.”
They described how Pence had told the “would-be-hitman” that having the couple’s 13-year-old son witness the killing could “help him avoid detection if the child’s description of the killing led the police to the false conclusion that it was a botched robbery.”
“(Pence) meticulously planned the cold-blooded murder of two people with whom he admittedly had deep disagreements without regard for the collateral consequences. ... It is difficult to comprehend a more serious offense that did not result in actual death and/or destruction,” prosecutors wrote.
On April 4, Pence filed a notice to appeal his conviction and sentence, court records show.
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