The Illinois police officer whose staged suicide set off a massive manhunt contacted a hitman to “plant something” on a Fox Lake village administrator in an attempt to kill her before she could fully discover his alleged embezzlement scheme, Lake County Detective Chris Covelli told NBC Chicago Thursday.

The administrator, Anne Marrin was auditing village finances in late August, including a youth-oriented program called Police Explorers that Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz had been embezzling from for seven years, authorities said.

He sent a text message to an unidentified recipient asking to contact a “high-ranking gang member to put a hit” on Marrin, Covelli said. The day before Gliniewicz’s alleged staged suicide on Sept. 1, Marrin sent him an email about the program’s inventory.

Authorities said they reviewed 6,500 pages of his text messages, many of which were deleted before his death.

Gliniewicz wrote in a May 13 text to an unidentified individual that Marrin “hates the explorer program and is crawling up my a– and the program, chief wont sign off to move it to American legion and if she gets ahold of the checking account, im pretty well [expletive] [sic].”

The officer’s death was originally considered a murder and prompted a manhunt for three supposed suspects. In recent days, authorities have said that he staged his suicide to look like a murder, and are now investigating his wife and son about their potential role in the alleged embezzlement scheme.

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