Marin County man snags would-be killers on fake hitman-for-hire site

Bob Innes, of Novato, Calif., runs the website RentAHitman.com. He started it with college friends in 2005 as an IT help site, but it quickly took on a life of its own. Bob Innes, of Novato, Calif., runs the website RentAHitman.com. He started it with college friends in 2005 as an IT help site, but it quickly took on a life of its own. Photo: Courtesy Bob Innes Photo: Courtesy Bob Innes Image 1 of / 18 Caption Close Marin County man snags would-be killers on fake hitman-for-hire site 1 / 18 Back to Gallery

It started with an IT help website and a cheeky domain name.

RentAHitman.com. "Rent" implied hire. "Hit" referred to website clicks. And "man" implied the team of professionals behind the site, a few buddies who'd recently graduated from a California business school with IT degrees.

"We wanted to do risk analysis, network penetration testing, basically white-hat hacking," said Bob Innes, a father of three from Novato.

Innes registered the domain in 2005 with the tagline, "Your Point & Click Solution!" It sat on the web collecting dust until Innes decided to check the website's email address one day in 2008.

"This is when things got really ugly," Innes, 47, said. Over the three years the site sat idle, Innes said the catch-all domain email received multiple inquiries from people looking to hire hitmen — and not the kind that get your website clicks.de

Some of the inquires were explicit or disturbing, but Innes felt compelled to keep reading. In 10 years, he says he's turned about two dozen potential solicitation-for-murder cases over to authorities and fully converted the site into a "honey pot" intended to catch potential criminals.

"I'm not a hitman," Innes said for clarification. "I simply play the part of matchmaker between the solicitor and field operatives."

One such instance of matchmaking involves the case of Danae Wright, of Oakley, Kansas, who sent Innes a request to kill three people.

Innes assumed the alias "Guido Fanelli" and, after a one-day waiting period, asked Wright if she still "required his services" to confirm the veracity of the email address and the request. After going back and forth by email, Innes handed his correspondence to police.

"We developed an investigation from there," said Dan Shanks of the Oakley Police Department, confirming Innes' involvement in the case.

Wright was sentenced to 34 months probation in February after admitting criminal solicitation to commit murder in the second degree.

To more discerning eyes, the website, which is still running, clearly looks fake. For one, the inquiry request form touts the company's compliance with HIPPA: the "Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964," a play on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 that protects personal health information. Note: There is no Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964, or any year for that matter.

"This form is valid for one individual only," the site says. "If you have multiple targets, please submit multiple forms for processing."

Also of note is a fake ad offering to check if your credit card number has been stolen. Clicking on the advertisement leads one to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Internet Crime Complaint Center.

Still, the inquires continue to flood in. Innes estimates he's received more than 800 emails since 2005, including one young man from Canada looking for a hit job, and multiple requests seeking the assassination of the president of Indonesia.

There was also the case of Helen Kaplan, a British woman who lived in Ontario, Canada. Kaplan allegedly filed a request on RentAHitman to murder her mother, aunt and uncle in the Cotswolds.

Innes said he turned his exchange with Kaplan over to a pal with Novato law enforcement, who passed it on to local authorities.

"It started with Bob," Mark Di Egidio of the Niagara Police Department confirmed to SFGATE on Thursday.

Kaplan pleaded guilty to soliciting to commit murder and spent 126 days in custody before she was extradited to the United Kingdom.

After running the site for almost a decade, Innes said he's running out of steam.

"I'm tired of waking up to these emails," he said, citing a recent inquiry requesting a hitman to slice a woman's wrists, ankles and abdomen, and to hang her from her intestines. The request asked that the victim's heart be left in the room — "on ice."

Innes is "numb" to such solicitations at this point: "Emails saying, 'I want to have somebody killed,' well, that gets old."

After a particularly gruesome request earlier this year, Innes says he's facing a moral dilemma. Innes claims the solicitation came from a 20-year-old man from Virginia, who allegedly requested three people be killed and his infant child kidnapped and delivered to a different state.

The Augusta County Sheriff's Office would not confirm Innes' involvement in the case of Devon Fauber, 20, who faces three counts of solicitation to commit first degree murder. Officials confirmed to the DailyMail Wednesday that "Innes worked with law enforcement to get Fauber to discuss the hit with an officer, who posed as a field operative."

Fauber was arrested in February and will stand trial in October.

The Fauber case threw Innes for a loop. "It involved a child," he said. "That doesn't bode well with me."

But he's not sure what to do with site. Multiple task force agencies, including the FBI, didn't bite at Innes' offer to turn over the domain to their jurisdiction, and, in the meantime, the inquiries continue to appear in his inbox — often one to two a week.

"The simple fact that it has saved lives, well, I have to keep it going until I figure out what to do with it," he said.

RentAHitman may also provide fodder for Innes' future endeavors."I'd like to get into writing books, screenplays, movies," he said.

His intended topic? True crime.

Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.