Melody Sasser (Facebook).
A federal judge sentenced a Tennessee woman who hired a hit man to take out her desired boyfriend’s fiancee to more than eight years in prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee.
Melody Sasser, 48, pleaded guilty to interstate commerce of facilities in commission of murder-for-hire, prosecutors said. She must also pay over $5,300 to the victim and serve three years probation after she’s released from prison.
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“Sasser admitted to using a dark web-hosted site known as the Online Killers Market for the purpose of hiring a hitman to murder an Alabama resident,” the prosecutors’ statement said. The target was the
As Law&Crime previously reported, the federal investigation into Sasser began in late April 2023, when authorities received information indicating that an adult woman had been named as a target in a murder-for-hire plot. The information, which came from a “foreign law enforcement agency,” allegedly showed messages from a person using the name “cattree” on the OKM website to solicit the murder of a woman married to an retired Air Force veteran.
The name of the alleged target in the deadly scheme is redacted from court documents.
OKM, a now-defunct scam site, claimed to have more than 12,000 registered members across the globe and purports to allow users to submit detailed “orders” for future murders, federal authorities say. The person submitting the “order” then receives a quote from an alleged hit man who can then be directly messaged.
Investigators say Sasser placed the order for a hit on the man’s wife on Jan. 11, 2023 in Prattville, Alabama. The hit “needs to seem random or an accident. [O]r plant drugs,” Sasser allegedly wrote, adding: “[D]o not want a long investigation.”
Sasser’s alleged murder order included a photo of the purported target, the location of her office, her car and license plate number, and details about the home she shared with him — including a comment about the couple’s dogs.
“[T]hey have three dogs that bark and jump but nice dogs,” Sasser allegedly wrote, perhaps to reassure the would-be contract killer not to fear the family pets.
By March 2023, however, the “job” had not been completed, and messages appear to indicate that Sasser was growing frustrated (typos in original):
i have waited for 2 months and 11 days and the job is not completed.2 weeks ago you said it was been worked on and would be done in a week. the job is still not done. does it need to be assigned to someone else. will it be done. what is the delay. when will it be done.
Sasser had allegedly provided an initial payment to the hit man in Bitcoin even before placing the order, the criminal complaint says. Authorities followed the money trail from the Bitcoin transfers and learned that Sasser had purchased the digital currency and transferred the funds to potential killers on OKM, per the affidavit.
Federal authorities traveled to the veteran’s home and interviewed his wife, who supposedly named Sasser as a potential person who might want her dead. She said that her husband and Sasser had met on Match when they both lived in Tennessee and became “hiking friends,” according to the criminal complaint. However, she said that Sasser became enraged when he informed her that he was engaged to be married and moving to Alabama.
His wife told authorities that after the move, Sasser allegedly showed up uninvited at the newlywed’s home in the fall of 2022 and issued various threats.
“I hope you both fall off a cliff and die,” she allegedly told him at the time, according to the criminal complaint. Also around that time, his wife reported having her car vandalized with a key. She also started receiving “unpleasant phone calls from a person utilizing an electronic device to disguise their voice,” the complaint says.
His wife also confirmed that she and her husband used a fitness tracking app called Strava. Authorities say that based on the information provided to the potential hit man, including exact times and locations of his wife, they believe that Sasser had been tracking her through the app.
During a search of the home, cops recovered a journal listing other hit man websites, a handwritten account of text messages with the OKM website and cash underneath a sticky note with a Bitcoin address on it.
Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.
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