30 January 2023 , 14:42
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A mum used a dark web site dubbed "an absolute sham" to hire a hitman to kill a man she was "obsessed" with, a court heard.
Helen Hewlett is on trial accused of paying more than £22k in Bitcoin to a man she found through a site named "Online Killers Market" in an alleged bid to kill former colleague Paul Belton.
The 43-year-old is charged with soliciting murder and stalking Mr Belton, 50, between Jan 2021 and Aug 2022. She denies the charges.
The married mum of five was arrested after police linked the dark web payments to her.
The court heard that police then logged onto her account and cancelled the hitman order, pretending to be her.
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She was not refunded for the deposit which would supposedly only have been taken after the kill was carried out, the jury was told.
Paul Belton, who Helen Hewlett is accused of stalking and arranging to kill (East Anglia News Service)However Hewlett's lawyer Matthew McNiff described the website as an "absolute sham", adding that its claims to provide a hitman willing to kill someone was "palpable nonsense."
Jurors heard over the course of the trial which started last week that Hewlett had become infatuated with Belton whilst working at a Linda McCartney vegetarian food factory together in Fakenham, Norfolk.
The court heard that after a brief kiss and fumble in a car outside the factory Belton had immediately regretted the exchange.
The jury heard that Hewlett had then become "obsessed" with Belton, sending him sexually explicit emails containing nude photos of herself.
The pair had met while working at a Linda McCartney food factory in Norfolk (Alamy Stock Photo)The police investigation into Hewlett found she had set up a Coinbase account to buy cryptocurrency in January 2022.
The court heard that Hewlett used two loans totalling £12,000, an overdraft and her savings to pay in £20k in 35 transactions on an anonymous browser called 'Tor'.
Police found she had transferred Bitcoin worth £20,547 to the hitman website along with Mr Belton's name, home and work addresses and his picture.
It is alleged that she then told the would-be hitmen: "It's vital it looks like an accident."
Det Sgt Mark Stratford, of the 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.
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Paul Belton, left, met Helen at a Linda McCartney factory (East Anglia News Service)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 claimed it could arrange deaths from undetectable poison or even snake bites, saying it had "a 100 per cent job completion rate".
It promised to activate hitmen on payment of fees into a so-called Escrow intermediate website.
Mr Stratford said there was no indication that the account on the website was a genuine Escrow account which would have had a multi-signature wallet to authorise payment when all parties were in agreement.
He added: "We have researched some of the claims and we do not believe them to be genuine."
Hewlett denies the charges of stalking and soliciting murder as the trial continues.