On a typical day, Stephen was not surrounded by people. He and Amy lived on 28 acres on a dead-end street. Their house was a simple one-story, double-wide trailer on a basement, but it had four bedrooms, along with a spacious living room and an open kitchen. Stephen had rigged up the roof with solar panels, which he boasted generated so much energy that he was able to feed power back into the grid. He spent much of his time in his basement office, handling glitches in call center technology. Working from home allowed him to hold down two jobs, one with the IT service company Optanix and the other with Cigna, the health insurer. Coworkers often went to him with particularly thorny problems.

The Allwines' pastor preached about conquering carnal desires, and Stephen himself counseled couples in the congregation who were struggling with marital problems. When he was alone, though, his attention strayed. He ventured onto Naughtydates.com and LonelyMILFs.com. He found an escort on the classified site Backpage and twice drove to Iowa to have sex with her. Through his counseling work, he learned about Ashley Madison, the dating service that caters to married people. It was there he met Michelle Woodard.

On their first date, Stephen accompanied Woodard to a doctor's appointment. Within a few weeks, she was joining him on work trips. Woodard appreciated Stephen's extraordinary calm. On one trip their connecting flight out of Philadelphia was canceled. Stephen had an 8 am meeting the next day in Hartford, Connecticut, and without fuss he rented a car and drove them the remaining 210 miles.

A month before Stephen ordered the hit on his wife, he told Woodard that he was going to try to make things work with Amy. In truth, the affair seemed to intensify his desire for a different sort of life.

Disciplined and computer-savvy, Stephen was in theory the perfect criminal for a dark-web crime. He covered his tracks by using anonymous remailers, which strip identifying information off messages, and Tor, which cloaks an IP address by randomly bouncing communications through a network of relays. And he concocted an elaborate backstory: dogdaygod was a rival dog trainer who wanted Amy dead because Amy had slept with her husband. In his dark-web persona, he transferred his own infidelity onto his wife.

The United Church of God met in a local Methodist church. Alec Soth

Stephen scheduled the murder for the weekend of March 19, when Amy was going to be in Moline for a dog-training competition. But at the end of the weekend, he wrote to Yura, complaining that he hadn't yet seen any news of Amy's death. Yura explained that the hit man hadn't found the right moment to strike: “He needs to be in a position where he can hit her car to the driver door, lateral collisin [sic] to make sure she dies.” The Besa Mafia administrator seemed to sense that it was important to dogdaygod that Amy be taken out while traveling. “We are not interested in the reason for why the people are killed,” he wrote. “But if she is your wife or some family member, we can do it in your city as well,” he said, adding that his client could leave town on the appointed day. He suggested that Amy could be killed at home and agreed that her house could be burned to the ground—for an additional 10 bitcoin, or $4,100.

“Not my wife,” Stephen replied, “but I was thinking the same thing.” The next day he scraped together the money. When he transferred the bitcoin to Besa Mafia, however, his screen refreshed and he didn't recognize the 34-digit code that popped up. Panicking, he worried that the cryptocurrency he had labored so hard to acquire had now disappeared without a trace. He hastily copied the code and pasted it into a note on his iPhone, then emailed the code to Yura under the subject line “HELP!” Less than a minute later he deleted the note.