(CNN) — A Tennessee woman was sentenced to 100 months in prison after allegedly attempting to hire a hitman to kill the wife of a man she met on a dating site.
Melody Sasser, 48, of Knoxville, pleaded guilty to the federal charge of using interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She was sentenced Wednesday, Sept. 18.
According to court documents, Sasser was upset when she found out “DW” was engaged – and she later sought to have his new wife killed using the “dark web” site Online Killers Market.
In messages from January 2023 to an administrator of the site — which “purports to offer ‘hitman for hire’ type services,” according to the federal complaint — a user under the name “cattree” specified how the murder was to be handled.
“It needs to seem random or accident. or plant drugs, do not want a long investigation,” the user wrote, according to the complaint.
The user uploaded a photo of the intended victim, who then was married to DW and living in Prattville, Alabama, and gave details of her home, vehicle, work schedule and favored hiking routes — the latter apparently taken from the fitness tracking app Strava.
Sasser paid for the order through Bitcoin purchases totaling about $9,750 over the span of several months, the complaint states.
Two months later, she expressed frustration to the administrators of Online Killers Market: “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,” her message said.
The following month, April 2023, federal investigators began looking into a tip about a murder-for-hire plot. When they contacted the alleged victim, she speculated that the culprit might be Sasser, who had been a “hiking friend” of her husband’s when he was single and living in Tennessee.
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The husband, who is retired from the Air Force, said he had met Sasser on Match.com and that she had helped him plan an Appalachian Trail hike. When he told her in fall of 2022 that he was going to move to Alabama and get married, she reportedly became angry.
She showed up unannounced at their Prattville home and made threats, telling them, “I hope you both fall off a cliff and die,” according to the complaint.
Sasser had faced a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, according to the US Attorney’s Office, and she received 8½ years. After her release, she is to be on supervised release for three years and must pay $5,389.31 in restitution to the victim.
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