Helen Hewlett was arrested while hiring a hitman through the dark web to take revenge on a man she had an affair with in the past, Metro UK reported. The man, Paul Belton, 50, was a former colleague of Hewlett.
After her hearing, a marker was placed at Belton’s address indicating that police should interpret any emergency call as an urgent threat to life.
Who is Helen Hewlett?
Helen Hewlett is a 44-year-old mother of five, according to Metro UK.
The prosecutors at her hearing said that after her fling with Belton took a wrong turn, she transferred over £20,000 in bitcoins to a site called Online Killers Market. Detectives investigating the case were also able to trace her payments to an order titled ‘Job in Norfolk UK’. Metro says, there was a subtext to the order which said: “Need someone killed in Norfolk – vital it looks like an accident.”
Hewlett argued that she was trying to vent her frustrations by posting on a ‘forum’ and her act was not intended to cause Belton any harm. ‘I put a post on a forum,’ she said. ‘It was to vent more than anything and to say things that I was feeling. It was more stupid than serious. It was a way of making me feel better.’
The police also investigated Hewlett’s search history in the days after making the payments on Online Killers Market and they found that she would search Belton, his address, ‘fatal road accidents’, ‘a body found in a ditch in King’s Lynn, Norfolk’, and ‘someone found dead on a beach’.
At the end of her trial, Judge Katharine Moore said: ‘The defendant must ready herself to receive a custodial sentence.’
