But she says he was branded as a cyber-criminals by a legal system that rode roughshod over natural justice

In a revealing interview she described her 'gentle' son as an idylistic graduate with little money

To Lyn Ulbricht, her son was an idealistic graduate, a charity volunteer in shared digs who had so little money he didn’t even own a car.

Thirty-one-year-old Ross liked to spend time away from the trappings of the modern world, living for months at the family eco-tourism business in Costa Rica.

But to US prosecutors, Ross Ulbricht had a very different identity. To them, he was Dread Pirate Roberts, a criminal mastermind who created the notorious Silk Road website selling drugs and laundering money around the world using digital ‘bitcoins’ – a man so dangerous he had hired hitmen to kill rivals.

Thirty-one-year-old Ross Ulbright was jailed for life after he was accused of being Dread Pirate Roberts who ran the online black market site

And the courts agreed. In a sensational judgment last month Ulbricht, still protesting his innocence, was sentenced to life in prison. He might never come out.

Today, his mother is horrified, not just by the turn of events which has branded her yoga-loving son one of the greatest cyber-criminals the world has ever seen, but by a legal system that appears to have ridden roughshod over natural justice.

‘Ross is gentle and peace-loving,’ says Mrs Ulbricht, 66. ‘He’d never given me more than a moment’s worry. Where were the millions he was supposed to have made? They even subpoenaed our bank accounts looking for it.’

She says she had never heard of the Silk Road until his arrest, but remembers that a few years earlier her son mentioned that he was inventing a video game.

The ordeal, she says, started five years ago when Ulbricht created a free ‘open market site’, a digital bazaar with buyers and sellers using encrypted identities and bitcoin virtual currency. He insisted the Silk Road was an experiment in free-market trade and his involvement ended as others took over the site.

Ulbricht had made his living from a bookshop near his family home in Austin, Texas, before moving to San Francisco to try currency-trading. Two weeks before his arrest, the family enjoyed a reunion.

Lyn Ulbricht, pictured with husband Kirk, is fighting for her son's freedom after he was convicted of being the Silk Road founder

Ross Ulbricht was also accused of hiring an undercover FBI agent to kill two people although these charges were later dropped

Drug kingpin or innocent founder? Ross Ulbricht confessed to starting the Silk Road website but says he did not make $18 million off of it - and instead handed off control month after the site's creation

‘He didn’t mention a website and he was living as frugally as ever, wearing a pair of shoes I had bought him two years earlier,’ says Mrs Ulbricht.

‘He’s never broken the law and if I had any worries as a mother, it was about his career. I hoped he’d use his science degrees and I thought maybe he should have a more sensible job. But he was self-supporting and well-adjusted.

‘When he ran his book shop he gave away ten per cent of the profits to charity. He’s idealistic, a libertarian, and his passion is the free market. After his arrest, we talked about the Silk Road. He said it was a site like eBay, selling all sorts of things. He was 26 when he started it and the thing got out of hand.’

Federal agents infiltrated the site, trying to find out the real identity of a drug kingpin calling himself Dread Pirate Roberts. From the few bits of evidence scattered around the internet, they homed in on Ulbricht.

Weeks later, he was arrested as he worked on his laptop in a San Francisco library. He spent six weeks in solitary confinement before being shipped to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he was placed alongside accused murderers, rapists and hook-handed Finsbury Park hate preacher Abu Hamza.

Silk Road, park of the dark web, was an online black market, best known as a platform for selling illegal drugs

Time's up: The FBI has shut down Silk Road, an anonymous Internet marketplace for illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine and criminal activities such as murder for hire

Ulbricht was charged with seven counts of money laundering, computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. Prosecutors also claimed he had paid £500,000 to hire hitmen to kill six business rivals.

His trial began at the start of January and to Mrs Ulbricht and his father Kirk, who watched from the public benches, it appeared one-sided. Their son’s lawyer Joshua Dratel, who represented Hamza last year, found himself constantly overruled by Judge Katherine Forrest.

It later transpired that two federal agents who had infiltrated the Silk Road had high-level access to the site and could have manipulated data and messages. They had been arrested for allegedly stealing funds from the site. Yet the judge ruled that there could be no mention of the agents or their arrests. The murder-for-hire charges were dropped, but prosecutors introduced them into evidence regardless.

Defence claims that another man was the FBI’s main suspect and had set Ulbricht up a month before his arrest were also disallowed.

‘All the evidence in favour of Ross was suppressed,’ says Mrs Ulbricht, shaking her head sadly. ‘We sat at the back of the court every day and Ross turned around during breaks in the proceedings to smile at us.

‘Then he was barred from doing that – the jury wasn’t allowed to see that he had people there who loved and supported him.’

Standing by his innocence: Supporters of Ross William Ulbricht hold signs during the jury selection for his trial outside of federal court in New York

Supporters of Ross Ulbricht, the alleged creator and operator of the Silk Road underground market, protested his capture at Manhattan federal court house on the first day of jury selection for his trial

After a month of evidence, the jury took just three-and-a-half hours to find Ulbricht guilty on all seven charges. Mrs Ulbricht says she is convinced the panel did not understand many of the cyber references, but claims expert witnesses paid for by the defence were barred from explaining the finer points of virtual currency and the hidden side of the internet known as the dark web.

After telling Ulbricht that education and privilege did not make him above the law, Judge Forrest jailed him for life and ordered him to pay £115 million in restitution.

‘This is effectively a death sentence,’ says Mrs Ulbricht. ‘The prosecution recommended 20 years but the judge went further. She swept aside the 100 letters of support for Ross and his own plea for leniency, saying he didn’t show enough remorse.’ Ulbricht’s lawyers launched an immediate appeal against the verdict and sentence, which, as his mother says, is longer than cult leader Charles Manson’s for ordering seven murders.

Mrs Ulbricht, who is living with relatives in Connecticut to be closer to her son, says legal costs have ‘ruined’ the family.

She says that despite his portrayal as a cyber-criminal, Ulbricht happily ditched technology while out in the wilderness.