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Crime Story Episode 60: Carl Miller

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Carl Miller spent most of his career writing reports and giving lectures. The stuff most academics do. But a few years ago, he got a call that would change his life forever. The caller, an old colleague, had found something he needed Carl's help with. You see, Carl Miller is an expert on the digital revolution, and his old friend had stumbled across something on the dark web that scared him. A site where anyone who wanted to could hire a hitman. Suddenly, Carl was looking at a list with hundreds of names on it. A list of people that somebody somewhere wanted dead. After the police failed to take the list seriously, Carl realized that he was going to have to take matters into his own hands. And that's exactly what he does in his new podcast, Kill List. I'm Kathleen Goldhar, and this is Crime Story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Carl, welcome to Crime Story.

CARL MILLER: Hi, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Nice to have you. So let's take us right back to that moment when you first opened up that page and you saw this list. What did you see? What did you feel? What was that whole thing?

CARL MILLER: I mean, at first glance, it looks pretty innocuous. It was a Excel spreadsheet. And each row there was name and there was a link to a different file. And it was only with kind of slowly dawning fear we began to realize what was actually contained in each of those different kind of separate entries, often like quite long, clear messages and responses that had been sent over weeks or months where someone was quite coldly and quite forensically, but then also sometimes quite urgently and quite frenziedly, trying to arrange for someone else to be killed.

SOUNDCLIP

DISTORTED VOICE 1: How much bitcoin should I pay?

DISTORTED VOICE 2: Tell me the execution time in advance. I can't be there.

DISTORTED VOICE 3: I would just like this person to be shot and killed. Where, how, and what with does not bother me at all. I would just like this person dead.

CARL MILLER: And it took a while, honestly Kathleen, for that to emotionally really sink in. It takes a while, I think, for it to be translated into human targets rather than just names on that list.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, and I guess as like an academic who studies the dark web, studies like the evolution of digital stuff, you have to sort of move past the academic, I guess, at some point.

CARL MILLER: For sure. I mean, I spent-- I'm a very long in the tooth think-tanker. [Kathleen laughs] So I'm much more at home in the world of kind of concepts and ideas and data. And in fact, I've always been fascinated by tech, always by the internet, and I've tried to study it throughout most of my career. But I'm far more at home -- I was -- doing it in ways which was about evidence and about research and about arguments and about big ideas than it really was about crime, danger, urgency, or people. And so, yeah, I mean, it was an entirely new kind of thing for me to be doing. And it felt very, very unfamiliar.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But what did you see that you understood, and when did you understand that this was real, that you had to take it seriously? Because there is so much on the internet that's bullshit. So I'm just curious to know from your background and what you saw that made you say, no, this is actually something I need to move beyond just an academic look.

CARL MILLER: So. I mean, there was a small part of me that didn't really believe this was real until we saw the first wave of people being arrested.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Oh, interesting.

CARL MILLER: Because what we were being given were simply these documents with all these things on it. And, you know, they, they might not have been real. But what we did know, though, Kathleen, from the beginning, was that dangerous people had been using this website in the past. So already in our memory, and this is a story that we begin Kill List with, is Amy Allwine, who back in 2016 had been killed by a user of the website going by the name of Dog Day God, who turned out to be Stephen Allwine, her husband.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: On this first day of testimony, some chilling evidence introduced. The 911 call where Stephen Allwine calls police to say his wife has just taken her own life. And in the background, you can hear their eight-year-old son saying, 'Dad, does this mean you'll get married again?' For police and prosecutors, it was the first indication this was no suicide. It was first-degree murder.

CARL MILLER: And so we knew going into this in 2020 that when we saw these new kill orders, new people being targeted, the first person jumped into my mind was Amy. But, you know, there still was, in all honesty, a kind of little skeptical core of me all the way through to being informed that some of the people whose messages we were intercepting ended up being arrested.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And then you decide you're going to go to the police. Where did you even start? You know yourself, the internet is borderless. You're in one area. A lot of these orders were international. So how did you even decide who to call?

CARL MILLER: Well, I just phoned the local police. [laughter] I mean, it sounds quite naive, but, you know, I mean, we're all trapped in our houses. It's 2020, it's lockdown. And so I genuinely just phoned the kind of non-emergency police number for the Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom. And before long, the police, like, physically arrive at my house. So there's a kind of police van that's kind of lurking. For some reason, do not know to this day why, the police van kind of sits outside of my house for a solid hour, as I'm kind of nervously peering through my window at it. And then finally, and these are the first people, I think, first strangers certainly, that I've spoken to in ages, knock on my door and are in my living room. And that really makes it begin to feel very real in a way it hadn't up to that point.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And how did they handle it?

CARL MILLER: They were very polite. They were very earnest. They were very young. So they were, they were both probably in their kind of mid-20s. Um. Being very struck that they were wearing quite formal uniforms. And they, they actually had those notepads that you see on crime dramas. You know, with the kind of like black leather--

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: With the black? [chuckles]

CARL MILLER: Yeah, they flipped it open and they were actually writing kind of earnestly in it. They did tell me one of the reasons that they were there was to do a mental health check on me. So there was definitely a aspect to the story which was so fantastical that there was a worry within the police that I was, I was just mad. But when they realized I wasn't mad, they did take it seriously. They did believe me. They believed that the danger was real. But what we realized in the weeks after -- and this was the great difficulty -- was that because none of the cases at that point were from the U.K., they simply did not know or did not think it was their problem to do anything about these international cases. And that's when we ran really into, I guess, the first brick wall, was, was then their proposal for how to handle this, which was to go via Interpol. And, you know, it quickly transpired to us that this was just not going to work, this wasn't going to be the way in which people could be made safe, properly warned, or investigations could be launched.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So you decide with your producers to take it on. What kind of a job were you facing?

CARL MILLER: Well, I don't think we had any idea what we were facing when we started. We were just convinced that going via Interpol wasn't going to be effective. And by the way, I just, I want to explain this point because I think it is unbelievably important if somewhat technical realization that we had. But it does explain why we took, I think, the rather unusual or even extraordinary decision of trying to reach the people targeted on the Kill List ourselves. Which I can imagine to some people listening to this might sound like a very, very strange or possibly even foolhardy thing to do.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

CARL MILLER: So when we gave information to the Metropolitan Police, they gave it to Interpol and Interpol gave it to the police forces around the world. So this chain was created. The problem was that those police forces, wherever they were in the world, they would not know who gave them the information. They wouldn't be able to ask us any questions and then we couldn't then pass additional information to them. And we were getting additional information every day -- new orders, new messages, updates to messages, and sometimes payment details. So that was the reason. That kind of breaking through that chain and directly going to the, to the targets, that was the reason why we decided to do it that way. Because we just did not think that going via Interpol was going to be effective. And then we'd spoke to some people who were-- who had gone through that kind of process and disclosed other internet threats via Interpol in that way. And they told us that in some cases the targets had never been warned. [KATHLEEN: Hm.] Like, literally it disappeared somewhere within a bureaucratic avenue within Interpol or the police. And so that all together kind of convinced us that we needed to then approach these people. And when we did approach, the big challenge we had wasn't really one that I anticipated. You know, I was really worried going into it that people were either going to enter a state of catatonic collapse, or become very angry and decide that they knew who would put them on the list and they were going to go out and sort them out themselves. And I thought, those two are terrible outcomes. I don't want anyone to have a panic attack and I don't want anyone to take matters into their own hands in a way which could be very dangerous in and of itself. Our difficulty was neither of those two things. Our difficulty was being believed.

SOUNDCLIP

[phone rings]

KILL LIST TARGET: Hello?

CARL MILLER: Just, I understand you don't want to work with me on the story. However, I'm actually duty-bound to say that the information that we have might relate to you being in danger. So I, I'm kind of duty-bound as a journalist to disclose it to you if you'd like me to.

KILL LIST TARGET: Well, I can't -- actually, I don't have time for this even. Even if you're asking me for a survey that has something to my relationship to, to, to the job or to professional--

CARL MILLER: No, it's not, it's not a survey...

CARL MILLER: Because, like, everyone thought I was a scammer. I mean, and looking back, now it seems rather obvious that people wouldn't believe me. At the time, I didn't really think that that was going to be the big problem.

SOUNDCLIP

KILL LIST TARGET: I'm in danger?

CARL MILLER: Yes, poten--

KILL LIST TARGET: Thank you for trying to protect me. Keep me to face my dangers. Thank you.

CARL MILLER: Okay.

KILL LIST TARGET: Thank you. Bye.

CARL MILLER: Goodbye.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You do such a good job in it, because I didn't think it either until I heard you on the phone. And then I was like, if I got that phone call, I would think you were trying to get money out of me. It made total sense to me at the time. And you did such a wonderful job. You didn't just tell us, you actually have us making the call and you hear the awkwardness in the conversation. And how do you have that first conversation with somebody and say like... Yeah, it's such a weird thing to hear on the phone. But you did have some people who took you seriously. You did actually get through to some people and you specifically tell us about some of them. Elena is one of them. Can you tell me about her?

CARL MILLER: Yes. Well, we only really got taken seriously when we changed up our strategy. So we then decide to do something a bit different, which is to send local journalists out on the ground to kind of, to physically meet the people on the list. And it's really only when we do that, and I think that is something that scammers would not do. It's only really then when there's a journalist knocking on their door saying, we have information that we need to give you. It's only then that I think we began to be believed around the world. And yet people were listening to those cold calls. I mean, I think some people were very... I mean, are kind of, are frustrated by it. And believe me, no one was more frustrated by those cold calls than me. It was really, really horrible to try and give this warning to people and to not be believed. [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] If people will listen to it, they'll also notice, there's a slightly kind of-- we'd actually been quite careful in thinking about how to do this. And I've written this script to the psychologist. And the script is a somewhat angular approach. I don't just phone people up and say, You're on the Kill List. And the reason I don't is actually because we did not know who would be sitting next to them when we were making these calls.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Oh, yeah.

CARL MILLER: And we were really afraid that the person that had put them on the Kill List would be someone quite close to them in their lives. You know, spouse, former spouse, member of their family. It turned out in many cases that was who had put [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] the people on the Kill List. And so, what we were actually doing by trying to be slightly non-specific or vague, is we're actually trying to arrange -- not that this ever worked -- we're trying to arrange a separate follow-on call where we can be more confident that person is alone. So I can give them the news alone. That, that was the plan. So that's why when people are hearing it, they're like, why isn't he telling them directly that they're on the Kill List? It's because that was more dangerous to do it in a context where we didn't know who they were with.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, well, that makes total sense, doesn't it? But let's get to the journalists that you hire. And you hire them all over the world. Tell me where some of the journalists, where some of the doors were that were knocked on.

CARL MILLER: Oh, gosh. Kathleen, yeah, all over. I mean, the first was in a suburb outside of Zurich in Switzerland. The second was in the kind of verdant countryside of Galicia in Spain. We then moved over to Washington State, quickly followed by Spokane County, and in Wisconsin as well. I think there's probably 11 countries around the world we ultimately intervened to disclose cases in.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay. And let's get back to Elena, because she was one of the first, at least in terms of the way the podcast unrolls. And she right away knows who wants her dead.

CARL MILLER: She does. Elena was the first. She was the first person that I came face to face with. It was a surreal experience, you know, actually. Because you've been... Alongside the orders, there were always photos of the target. Nice photos. Photos where they look relaxed, happy, often glamorous. They're always Facebook profile pictures. Which actually made the whole thing a bit more haunting to see these figures staring back at you that seem so completely unaware of any kind of danger that they might be in. And it was the case with Elena as well. So I'd been staring at this photo and trying to learn as much about Elena's life as I could for weeks. And then suddenly to have her come up on a Zoom call in front of you was like meeting someone famous.

SOUNDCLIP

CARL MILLER: How are you doing?

ELENA: Oh, is he -- Are you talking, are you talking to me?

CARL MILLER: I am. Can you hear me?

CARL MILLER: You know, it was this kind of, uh, this moment that kind of made me pause and become even more nervous than I was. Which, if that's even possible. [Kathleen laughs] Yeah, and so after kind of some spluttering and hesitations, finally [indistinct] get out to Elena. Elena is one of the most unshakably cool and unflappable women I have ever met in my life.

SOUNDCLIP

CARL MILLER: Do you, do you feel in danger?

ELENA: No, I actually don't feel in danger. You know, I'm not, you know, that kind of, kind of type. [laughs]

CARL MILLER: She doesn't need any convincing. She pauses for a moment and then says, Well, there's only one person this can be. I'm going through a messy divorce. There's a lot of money at stake, and my husband doesn't want me to have it. And so it must be him. She doesn't have any other enemies. Her husband, it turns out, lived in a neighbouring town. I was desperate for Elena to leave the house that night. I wanted her-- we were going to put her up in a hotel. Not only does she not do that, she doesn't even change her plans for the evening.

SOUNDCLIP

ELENA: I'm going to meet a friend later on, and she will be very interested in hearing that. [laughs] Because she lives next to him. [laughs]

CARL MILLER: That is how unshakable Elena was. I actually went away from that call, worried in a slightly different way because she accepted-- you know, she, she thought it was real, she thought she knew it was, and yet she still wasn't taking any steps to make herself safer in that moment. And that also made me actually quite anxious.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I mean, her case really gets to you. You talk about having nightmares about it. This lives with you.

CARL MILLER: It does, yeah. It's not actually just Elena, actually. It was, it was what we learned next. So, we speak to her again a few days later. I'd phoned her in the middle of the night. We'd seen a lot of more money come into the order. It had gone from about 70,000 up to about 30,000 from memory in bitcoin.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I was going to say, let's just -- just one quick interruption. This is all bitcoin, right? So it's all, that's the money that's being used.

CARL MILLER: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's all, it's all bitcoin. That's how all these transactions are occurring. And a lot more bitcoin had been loaded on. There were more messages. The messages had become more urgent. They were talking about a kind of an immediate deadline by which she needed to be killed. I phoned her up with this information. I didn't feel like we could wait any time at all before we told her all of this. I think it was also beginning to sink in a bit more to her then, a few days later. But then, the next time we spoke to Elena, it was after her husband had been arrested by the Swiss police. And what really gave me nightmares was that he'd been renting this kind of secret flat near her house that she didn't know about, I don't think anyone knew about. And when the police kind of found it and broke into it, they found that there was like Uzis and submachine-guns and zip ties and masks and lockpick materials, and just this kind of horrifying armory and cachet of equipment that really implied that he was seriously thinking about killing her. And that was quite difficult to handle.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So how do things end up for Elena?

CARL MILLER: So Elena does see her day in court. So her estranged husband is arrested and then ultimately prosecuted and convicted for putting her on the Kill List. And I then meet Elena in London right at the end of the first six episodes of the Kill List. And she is going to back-to-back high teas at the Dorchester and the Ritz. She's just been to see Phantom of the Opera. She tells me that she's going down the Amazon later in the year, and is genuinely ticking off things on her bucket list and has genuinely moved on. Like she genuinely has healed, she's getting on with her life. And like, she doesn't care that much about him or about anything that happened anymore. And I wish I could say that that's the case for most people on the Kill List. I suspect it probably isn't. But Elena does show us that being put on the Kill List isn't a life sentence.

[dramatic music fades out, fades in]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You're telling me that you're getting all this updated information, every day you're seeing new stuff, how are you doing that? What kind of access? Why do you have access to that stuff?

CARL MILLER: So we broke into the site. So Chris, the hacker, the colleague that you mentioned right at the beginning, he had found... what started all of this wasn't simply the discovery of the sites. The sites are fairly well known and openly advertised themselves. That's how they get customers. So they're not-- by no means secret. They do sit on the dark web, but they-- there's lots of people that go there and there's lots of people that look at them. But the difference was that Chris had found a vulnerability in the way that the site worked. Basically, to cut a long story short, finding this vulnerability allowed him to exploit it in a way that gave him, and therefore us, kind of access to the back end of the site as if we were an admin. So the site isn't really a forum. People aren't discussing any of these things out in the open. What they're doing is they think they are sending, in secret, a kill order to the Mafia. And what they're doing is sending an online order form essentially to the people running the site, who turn out to be Romanian cyber criminals, probably not the Mafia. But he could then intercept all of these. So he was sat there every day, basically scraping these new messages, bringing them out, and then packaging them up and then sending them to us. So we would often get, you know, several updates a day of new messages being added to current cases. So these were live orders. It wasn't one list. It was a constantly changing series of targets and messages attached to those targets.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So this is a scam, right? There weren't actual hitmen at the end of this. What do we know about who was running the site?

CARL MILLER: Ah, yes. All right. Well, the kind of kingpin of this operation goes by the name Yura. He is someone that we know something about. Chris managed to, at the beginning of all of this, also hack into Yura's email. And Yura, thinking that Chris was law enforcement, began to actually communicate with him. Yura is very likely a cybercriminal, financially motivated cybercriminal. Probably-- And what we realize is that some materials which we discovered were actually of Yura taking screenshots, believe it or not, of his own desktop. And it turned out that everything that he was taking photos of was from Romania. So we had a good idea that he was in Romania. We had a good idea that he'd set the site up. He'd seen, he told us, this niche in the hitman for hire market, where he thought that he could create a website that looked more legitimate than the others, could invest a bit more money into it. And the important thing to know about Yura is that he had no interest in actually killing anyone. So he never sent out any hitmen. He never tried. What he was doing was simply taking the money from all the people that were ordering these hits. And what he was telling us was, hey, I don't know why you're coming after me. I'm just taking the money from serious criminals. I'm doing a good thing. If anything, you should be thanking me. You know what I'm doing is like taking away their trust in these hitman-for-hire sites. And they won't try again and they won't find a real hitman because they'll think that everyone's trying to scam them. So that was, that was Yura. Sometime later -- I don't know if you want us to jump forward in this story, [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] Kathleen, but we then do and see a series of raids in Romania sweeping up not just one person, but actually a whole gang of people who were running a hitman-for-hire site. And that happens right at the moment where the site changes and we get locked out. And so we think that that was, if not Yura, then people connected to Yura.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How much money do you think could possibly have been made in this scam?

CARL MILLER: Oh, well, I mean, possibly millions upon millions. The crucial factor is like did Yura change his bitcoin into money, [chuckles] into [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] fiat currency.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That's always the question.

CARL MILLER: That's the, that's the big question. So if he did, it's probably in the low millions, like two million. If he didn't, if he sat on that bitcoin till today, Yura is a seriously rich individual.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do you have any idea where Yura is now?

CARL MILLER: Um. I think Yura is probably still in Romania. I don't-- we've never seen him being convicted, so he's likely free and possibly running the site for law enforcement.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Oh, interesting. So he's flipped. Did it make you feel better that it was a scam? I mean, it's interesting that he gave Chris that information, but was there any relief in you when you realized that this long list, nobody was actually ever going to be killed, at least from that list?

CARL MILLER: Well, two things were really clear to us at the beginning. Number one, yes, of course. I mean, not actually having to contend with an international cartel of hitmen flying around the world, it was a relief, because we had enough problems of our own at that point to not have to deal with that as well. But that never made me feel that these people were safe. You know, I mean, remembering Amy Allwine, you know, she was killed by someone that put her onto the marketplace. Elena might well have been killed by someone who put her onto the marketplace. There were plenty of other people that when we intervened and found-- and learned more about their lives, we found in like desperately dangerous situations of one kind or another. Sometimes desperately trying to raise the alarm and no one listening to them. So, you know, it was really clear to us from the very beginning, the people placing the orders were really, really dangerous.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you met one woman who never does figure out who wanted to kill her.

CARL MILLER: We, we did. Yeah, Anna.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Anna, yeah.

CARL MILLER: I mean, and that's just so sad. I mean, it's just, I just feel so horrible for Anna that she never got closure. And in fact, the vast majority of the people on the list didn't get closure. You know, 175 kill orders we ended up disclosing. I think 28 people have been convicted. So Anna's experience is most people's experience. She went for years... She believed it was one group, another person was arrested. But Anna hasn't seen her day in court yet.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you think now this list is being managed by the FBI?

CARL MILLER: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tell me more about that. What do you think they're doing and how do you know that?

CARL MILLER: So actually, we probably should first mention the FBI a bit more. So, we begin to have this success with Elena. We reach Anna, we reach Jennifer, who is in Spokane County in America. We begin to reach people on the list and these law enforcement investigations begin to roll out. But we really struggle, the investigation really struggles to scale, and we're dealing with all these cases around the world... sometimes quite hostile law enforcement agencies, actually, often disbelieving us, sometimes laughing us literally out of the police station, sometimes telling the targets that, you know, they thought that we were behind the website or that we were making it all up or that we were scammers. And just as it all feels like it's about to come apart at the seams, we actually get a call from the FBI, who had heard of what we were doing and they wanted to start to cooperate with us. And when we spoke to them, they were conscientious, polite. They didn't think that we were scammers. And crucially, they were really technically capable. They had specialists. They had people that understood bitcoin, they had people who understood the dark net. And they began to take all of our cases and both vouch for us abroad and investigate the ones in the United States. And then we really saw convictions begin to mount kind of one after the other. You know, going into the dozens of people who began to be caught. They were quite inventive. They would fake being the hitman. They would take proof of death photos. You know, they were quite proactive. They met one perpetrator at a parking lot, you know, as a guy who pretended to be a Harley Davidson driving, like, biker hitman. I mean, they'll do all kinds of crazy stuff. But it was working. But what we could not convince them to do was to break into the sites. And we're just sat there being like, why are we continuing to do this? This tiny little group of podcasters like two years in. Someone else should be taking control of the site. This shouldn't be endless. Like, how do we get out of this position that we're in? And so the only thing that we can really think of in the end is to gather as much information about Yura, take it to the FBI, and then try and convince the FBI to strike against Yura and to seize the sites. And so I fly to New York, I meet the FBI, weirdly, in a... for a secret meeting, I wouldn't have chosen Times Square as being the place to meet, but that's where we meet. We meet in this restaurant overlooking Times Square. We give them quite a lot of information that we've managed to find. And then silence, weeks into months. But then finally these raids in Romania. And then shortly after that, all these changes to the site happened. We got locked out. We couldn't see anything more about the site. But then, and this was maybe the most joyous moment of the whole investigation for me, we then saw another conviction. So we saw another legal case -- same evidence, same investigatory pattern, same crimes eventually being convicted of. But crucially, we never saw any of that. That had nothing to do with us. And so that led us to think, oh my God, finally, finally they're in the middle of this. Finally, you know, we can step back and we don't have to worry about the Kill List anymore.

[string instrumental]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How did you go from being an ivory tower, academic think-tank dude to Times Square and FBI agents? Um, how did it change you? How did it impact you beyond the emotional fear for these people? Which is a very human instinct, and thank God you have it because you, you know, you did help some people. But beyond that, tell me about sort of what it did to you and who you've become.

CARL MILLER: Well. I mean, I think it's an experience, both in terms of like... I don't know, like skill set or whatever it is. I think it does harden you. I certainly don't think I'm the naive, bumbling, nervous person I began this story as, if I'm honest with you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

CARL MILLER: I think you go through this. And they're really, really difficult moments telling someone that someone was trying to kill them. Being with someone in the moment of greatest despair where they're just sat there in a darkened room asking you, is there going to be a way out of this for me? And you not knowing what to say. Or facing down police officers that very unjustifiably and illegitimately hold a suspicion about you somehow being involved in the story. I think all of those things kind of put together mean that now I don't quite see, I don't quite feel the same [chuckles] nerves or the same pressure going about kind of normal life because, you know, going through all those things have kind of tempered me in a way. And I'm sure the other people on the, you know, on the investigative team as well. I also think, just from a kind of journalistic perspective, it's made me much more able to write and talk about people. I think as a think-tanker, as a researcher, talking about people's emotions and vulnerabilities and despairs and joys, how they become more resilient and heal or how they don't, all of that, it just isn't something that you learn how to do. It's not something you're comfortable doing. You want to talk about evidence and you want to talk about arguments. And actually, that wasn't ultimately what this story was about. This story was about people. Ultimately the people on the Kill List, really. Those are the people that we got to know the best. We can peer somewhat into the lives and the minds of the people that put them there, but the people that we really got to know well were the people that were targeted. And we got to know some of them really well. I mean, we were invited to one of their weddings. You know, for Jennifer, the woman from America, I spoke to her the first day after the perpetrator who put her on the list was arrested, and the first day after he was convicted. And those were moments I'll never forget of being able to share those with her, because they were moments, huge turning points in her life where she went from being in a place that was really terrible and really horrible and really scary to a place that felt a bit better each time. And that's just not something I think that... I don't know what job or background prepares you for any of that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Lastly, I'm just curious, too, I mean, you spent so much time of your life looking at the dark areas of the internet, and then you do this podcast that is this intersection of the dark areas of the internet and the darkness of humanity. Like, how have you even academically or intellectually sort of thought about that intersection and where does it leave you?

CARL MILLER: Right. Well, the, the slightly arid kind of research term we have for all of this is 'online harms,' which sounds like a bit of a euphemism, doesn't it--

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, yeah.

CARL MILLER: --compared to what we had to deal with. But I have not come away from this actually thinking the worst of humanity. [KATHLEEN: Hm.] Which I know is a kind of odd thing to say because I've spent a lot of time peering at the worst of humanity. And those... you know, I hope no one listening to this has to read anything as grotesque and disgusting as those kill orders. They are the worst things you could ever possibly imagine. And I actually stopped reading them for a long time because I just couldn't. But I haven't come away thinking that humanity's any worse. In fact, actually, there's so much in the experience of investigating and doing the Kill List that has made me think that humanity is actually more likely to be generous and brave. The local journalists... So it's COVID. The world has shut down. We phone up a local journalist wherever it was. They don't know me, they don't know anything. And we are asking them to go into a situation. The only thing that we know about that situation is that it's dangerous. They don't know who they're going to meet, they don't know who's put that person on the list, they don't know what dangers faced them. Every single time these people said yes. You know, the bravery that it took for these, you know, predominantly young journalists to travel across their city, to go and meet this person and deliver that warning to them, and to ultimately get them into a call so I could tell them more about the investigation, that, to me, like cancels out every single grotesqueness of the people that put them-- the targets on the Kill List. I mean, what acts of bravery that were, and what acts of generosity as well. Those are the ones that I think about more, actually, than the people that created the Kill List in the first place.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, I'm glad that's how it ended for you. And thank you for your work. I mean, it's a really great podcast and the investigation is spectacular. So thank you.

CARL MILLER: Thanks, Kathleen.

[Music: Series closing theme]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We release a new episode every Monday, so please remember to follow the show in your podcast app. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts' YouTube channel or by subscribing to CBC Podcasts' True Crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to early access, subscribers to our True Crime channel also listen ad-free. Crime Story is hosted by me, Kathleen Goldhar. Our producers are Nikky Manfredi and Mitchell Stuart. Sound design by Julian Uzielli and Mitchell Stuart. Media sourced from Novel and Wondery and from Fox News. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard, and our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is the Senior Manager of CBC Podcasts, and Arif Noorani is the Director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 60

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