Moment woman arrested for trying to hire hitman to kill colleague
Moment mother-of-five, 43, is arrested for trying to hire dark web hitman to kill Linda McCartney factory colleague who spurned her advances is revealed as she is convicted of soliciting murder
- Helen Hewlett, 43, was found guilty of soliciting the murder of Paul Belton, 50
- The pair met while working at the Linda McCartney factory in Norfolk
This is the moment a spurned mother-of-five is arrested for trying to hire a hitman to kill an ex-lover factory colleague who rejected her advances.
Yesterday Helen Hewlett, 43, was found guilty of soliciting the murder of Paul Belton, 50, after a brief fling turned sour.
Hewlett, from King’s Lynn, Norfolk, paid Bitcoin worth more than £20,000 to a website called Online Killers Market to try and get Mr Belton murdered, saying she wanted it to look like an accident.
She denied soliciting murder, but a jury found her unanimously guilty following two days of deliberation after an 11-day trial.
The married mother-of-five was remanded in custody until sentencing on April 5, with Judge Katharine Moore warning she ‘must ready herself to receive a custodial sentence.’
Paul Belton, 50, was the target of an intended hitman job solicited by his ex-colleague Helen Hewlett, who was yesterday convicted of soliciting murder at Norwich Crown Court
They also found her not guilty of stalking causing alarm or distress, but guilty of the lesser charge of stalking.
Inside the dark web site ‘Online Killers Market’ which had a price list for arson attacks, beats and poisons
Prosecutors said the married mother-of-five used a browser called Tor to search the dark web and found the website ‘Online Killers Market’ which purported to provide hitmen.
The online dark webs site boasted of being ‘the number one hitmen market place’ with hundreds of hitmen drawn from gangs or former military personnel on its books.
It even provided a price list in US dollars, detailing a sniper shooting as costing between $20,000 and $60,000, an arson attack for up to $20,000 or a simple beating for as little as $2,000.
The website also claimed it could arrange deaths from undetectable poison or even snake bites, saying it had ‘a 100 per cent job completion rate’, said Mr Stratford
It promised to activate hitmen on payment of fees into a so-called Escrow intermediate account, saying it would not actually take the money until authorised by the client after it had been proved that a hit had been carried out.
After exchanging messages with a username called ‘Marksman’, Hewlett arranged for more than £20,000 worth of Bitcoin to be placed into the so-called escrow intermediate account linked to the website.
However, Norwich Crown Court heard that the website appeared to be an ‘absolute sham’ designed to steal money from people who wanted someone killed, and that the cryptocurrency paid over by Hewlett had landed up in an account in Romania.
The court heard police linked her Bitcoin payments to the site where she had placed an order titled ‘Job in Norfolk UK’ stating: ‘Need someone killed in Norfolk – vital it looks like an accident’.
During the trial, jurors were told how Hewlett and Mr Belton had flirted with each other when they were both working at the Linda McCartney vegetarian food factory in Fakenham, Norfolk.
The pair had had a brief sexual encounter in her car in the factory’s overflow car park which Mr Belton who was also married with children is said to have immediately regretted.
The court heard how she became ‘utterly fixated’ with him and repeatedly send him emails begging to see him again, as well as nude photographs of herself, but he backed away from her attempts to start a relationship.
Mr Belton was made redundant and got a new job at the Kinnerton Confectionery factory in Fakenham which supplies chocolate products to Tesco, but she also got a job there in order to pursue him.
She called him a ‘coward’ for not wanting to speak to her and posted comments on Facebook, saying that he ‘needs shooting in the bollocks’.
Hewlett left her job as a mixer in the ‘nut’ department at Kinnerton in August 2021, saying that she was quitting due to bullying by Mr Belton and his sexual harassment of women.
Management rejected her claims as ‘malicious’ after Mr Belton showed them emails she had sent him.
Hewlett was also suspected of making an anonymous whistleblower complaint to Tesco last April, claiming that Mr Belton had made homophobic slurs.
Bosses at the firm suspected that Hewlett had made the complaint and dismissed it after advising Mr Belton to go to the police to report he was being harassed.
The court heard how investigations had revealed that Hewlett had set up a Coinbase account to buy cryptocurrency in January last year.
She transferred £22,601 into it from her current bank accounts in 35 transactions which included paying in money, using savings, an overdraft and loans for £7,000 and £5,000 taken out with the Royal Bank of Scotland.
She placed Bitcoin worth £20,547 into a so-called escrow intermediate account linked to the website before posting the order.
Prosecutors said she used a browser called Tor to search the dark web and found the website Online Killers Market which purported to provide hitmen.
Video shows the moment Helen Hewlett, 43, was arrested by police on suspicion of soliciting murder and stalking her ex-colleague
She posted a message under the user name ‘Horses5’ in a forum, saying: ‘Need someone killed in Norfolk – vital it looks like an accident’ before exchanging messages with a member of the site called ‘Marksman’.
In on the order tracked by police, Hewlett had included the Mr Belton’s name, his home address, work address and a photo of him.
During the trial, the court heard the married mother-of-five admitted to police during an interview that she went on the dark web to seek ‘revenge’ but denied she intended to kill her ex-colleague, Belton.
READ MORE: Website that mum-of-five, 43, used to ‘order a £20,000 hitman to murder an ex-colleague she had become infatuated with’ had price list including £16,000 for arson attacks and £1,600 for ‘a simple beating’
During a police interview, Hewlett insisted she had not intended for the killing to go ahead but had posted on a forum ‘to vent’.
She stated that she still controlled the funds in the escrow account and believed no one else had access, adding: ‘You have to give your OK for someone to be done.’
Det Sgt Mark Stratford, of the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit, said to the court that there was no indication that the account on the website was a genuine Escrow account.
Det Sgt Mark Stratford of the police’s Eastern Region Special Operations Unit told the court that the website claimed it could provide hitmen to shoot people or hit them with cars to make it appear deaths were accidental.
The website boasted of being ‘the number one hitmen market place’ with hundreds of hitmen drawn from gangs or former military personnel on its books.
It even provided a price list in US dollars, detailing a sniper shooting as costing between $20,000 and $60,000, an arson attack for up to $20,000 or a simple beating for as little as $2,000.
The website also claimed it could arrange deaths from undetectable poison or even snake bites, saying it had ‘a 100 per cent job completion rate’, said Mr Stratford
It promised to activate hitmen on payment of fees into a so-called Escrow intermediate account, saying it would not actually take the money until authorised by the client after it had been proved that a hit had been carried out, he added.
Real Escrow accounts would have had a multi-signature wallet to authorise payment when all parties were in agreement.
Norwich Crown Court heard that the website appeared to be an ‘absolute sham’ designed to steal money from people who wanted someone killed, and that the cryptocurrency paid over by Hewlett had landed up in an account in Romania.
But prosecutors argued that she had an intention to have him murdered, regardless of whether the website was fake or real.
Hewlett admitted not knowing whether the person she was communicating with on the site who went by username ‘Marksman’ would go ahead anyway.
Prosecuting Marti Blair said that after placing the advert Hewlett had searched for news articles about fatal road accidents, a body being found in a ditch in King’s Lynn and someone being found dead on Holkham beach in Norfolk.
She was arrested on August 12 last year after police linked Bitcoin payments made to the website to her as she had paid out the cryptocurrency from a regulated Coinbase account which had recorded her name and personal details.
After Hewlett’s arrest a marker was placed on Mr Belton’s home address and phone numbers meaning that emergency calls would be treated as an ‘urgent threat to life’, the court heard.
Helen Hewlett, 43, paid more than £20,000 in Bitcoin into an online account on a darkweb site called Online Killers Market
Hewlett gave her log in details on the website to police after her arrest and officers cancelled her hitman order pretending to be her, but never got back any of the Bitcoin she had paid.
The court heard how Hewlett had earlier been told by police to stop trying to contact Mr Belton and was ‘give words of advice’ after she was suspected of making the malicious whistleblower complaint about him.
Hewlett is said to have ignored the warning and carried on putting money into her online account which she used to purchase Bitcoin to take out the contract on Mr Belton.
She did not give evidence in court, but told police that she had not really intended to have him killed.
READ MORE: Stalker ‘moved into a hotel to be near his fashion model victim after bombarding her with inappropriate messages and emails’
Hewlett said: ‘I put a post on a forum. It was to vent more than anything and to say things that I was feeling. It was more stupid than serious. It was a way of making me feel better.’
She claimed that she believed that Mr Belton would not be harmed until she gave her consent for a hit to go ahead. She said: ‘You have to give your OK for someone to be done.’
Matthew McNiff, defending, described the website as an ‘absolute sham’ and said its claims of providing hitmen as ‘palpable nonsense’.
He said her posts about wanting Mr Belton killed had been a ‘way for her to vent and feel that she was being heard and listened to’.
But prosecutor Marti Blair said that jurors might feel the people behind the website were ‘scam artists seeking to fleece the desperate’.
But she added: ‘We do not know if it was a scam or whether Paul Belton was genuinely at risk, probably the former, but the fact it was probably a scam should not impact on what her intention was.’
Judge Moore urged jurors to consider Hewlett’s state of mind when she posted Mr Belton’s details on the website
She said: ‘Was Helen Hewlett a woman scorned, someone who was vengeful and who sought to solicit murder?
‘Or was she vulnerable and needy, something of a keyboard warrior, but lacking the intention to kill?’
Speaking after today’s sentencing, Detective Inspector Paul Morton: ‘We are very pleased that, after careful consideration, the jury have reached a guilty verdict on both counts.
‘This has been a very complex and technical trial with a huge amount of information to consider. This is a rare type of offence and it just shows the dark web is still not a safe place for criminals to hide.
‘Even if it wasn’t proven that this was a real site, other people could have taken action themselves so we had to safeguard against that.’
The offence of soliciting murder has a maximum life sentence.
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