Michigan woman sentenced after trying to hire hitman for husband online
Wendy Lynn Wein sought to hire a killer from a bogus website whose owner then informed police
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A Michigan woman convicted of trying to hire an assassin through a website called "RentAHitman.com" to kill her ex-husband received a seven to 20-year prison sentence, according to local reports.
The website wasn’t real – and its owner sent 52-year-old South Rockford resident Wendy Lynn Wein’s request to state police instead of hired killers.
She was arrested in July 2020 and pleaded guilty to solicitation of murder and using a computer to commit a crime on Nov. 13, 2021.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Wendy Lynn Wein pleaded guilty on Friday to trying to hire a hitman to kill her husband last year through what turned out to be a fake murder-for-hire website. (Monroe County Jail)
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At her sentencing hearing Thursday, she said she’d lost eight family members but wanted to take full responsibility for her crime, according to FOX 2 Detroit.
"I am not making excuses for myself," she told the courtroom. "I simply wanted to let you know where my head was."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Judge Daniel White said he’d taken both the gravity of her crime and her mental health into consideration when deciding on a sentence.
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She will be given time-served credit for the 545 days she’s already spent behind bars.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Despite using a pseudonym, she entered real information at the bottom of her request, in which she accused the ex of stealing from her, according to authorities.
A detective posed as a potential hitman, prosecutors said, and Wein paid him $200 as a down payment on what she believed would have been a $5,000 murder-for-hire.
The website’s California-based owner Bob Innes told KGO-TV last year that he developed it as a class project in 2005 and has been forwarding the hitman requests to authorities for years.
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When he saw Wein’s message, he told the station, he posed as an assassin named "Guido Fanelli" and offered her a chance to get in touch with a "field operative."
"She said, 'Yes,'" he said. "So, that's when I contacted the Michigan State Police. That's when they started their investigation."