Murder for Bitcoin: Woman Pays Hitman to Assasinate her Husband
The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that a Mississippi woman has been sentenced to spend a maximum of 10 years behind bars for her role in a failed assasination plot.
Fourty-year-old Jessica Leanne Sledge pleaded guilty in February to hiring an alleged killer on the dark web and paying him in BTC to kill her now ex-husband in Mississippi.
U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves sentenced Sledge to 120 months in federal prison followed by three years of supervised probation and a $1,000 fine.
Pelahatchie Woman Pleads Guilty in Murder-for-Hire Plot: Jessica Leeann Sledge of Pelahatchie pleaded guilty to using interstate commerce facilities in the commission of a murder-for-hire. https://t.co/yBTShaqlhv
— FBI Jackson (@FBIJackson) February 9, 2022
Sledge admitted to the court that between September and November last year she contacted a hitman via Whatsapp in an attempt to kill her husband.
The alleged “killer” turned out to be an FBI agent
According to prosecutors, a Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent was the “hitman” she paid to carry out the murder.
She scheduled an in-person meeting with the hitman on November 1, 2021 in Brandon, Mississippi to convey additional payment and details of the target.
Bitcoin payments totaling approximately $10,000 were made by Sledge for the murder of “Victim 1” on October 4, October 9, and October 10, 2021.
READ MORE: Tesla Sold 75% of its Bitcoin Holdings.
Between October 22 and 26, Sledge provided the FBI agent with specific details about her husband. Based on court documents, this contained various photographs of her husband as well as photographs of the vehicles he typically drove, including license plates.
Investigations show that the intended target was left unscathed. After her arrest, Sledge waived her rights and disclosed her involvement in the murder-for-hire scheme.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
