Tennessee Woman Tried To Hire Hitman To Kill Wife Of Man She Met Online

On Wednesday, Melody Sasser, a 48-year-old Tennessee woman, has been sentenced to 100 months in prison for attempting to hire a hitman to murder the wife of a man she met on a dating website.

According to reports, Sasser’s unhealthy obsession with David Wallace, a man she had befriended on Match.com, escalated into a sinister plot after he revealed his engagement to another woman.

Sasser and Wallace had met online and formed a friendship around their shared love of hiking, including exploring trails in Tennessee and hiking the Appalachian Trail together.

However, Wallace maintained that their relationship was limited to companionship. After Wallace moved to Alabama and married his fiancée, Sasser began to display increasingly alarming behavior.

Following his engagement announcement, Sasser made an uninvited visit to Wallace’s Alabama home and began threatening his wife. She also engaged in a campaign of harassment, including monitoring the couple’s activities through a fitness app and bombarding the wife with harassing phone calls.

In a chilling move, Sasser took to the dark web, using a site called “Online Killers Market” to arrange a murder-for-hire. She offered $9,750 in Bitcoin to arrange what she wanted to appear as a “random” or “accident” killing, providing details such as the couple’s license plate numbers and the wife’s workplace. Sasser wrote explicit instructions to the hitman, demanding that the crime not attract attention or lead to a prolonged investigation.

Frustrated by delays, she sent a follow-up message to the site’s administrator, expressing her impatience: “I have waited for two months and 11 days and the job is not completed. 2 weeks ago, you said it has been worked on and would be done in a week. The job is still not done. Does it need to be assigned to someone else?”

Despite her efforts, Sasser’s plan never came to fruition. During a search of her home, authorities discovered incriminating evidence, including a journal documenting her communications with the hitman website and a Bitcoin address under a sticky note. In June of last year, a federal grand jury indicted Sasser for using interstate commerce facilities to orchestrate the murder-for-hire plot.

Faced with overwhelming evidence, Sasser entered a plea deal and accepted responsibility for her crimes. On Wednesday, she was sentenced to 100 months in federal prison and ordered to pay over $5,300 in restitution to her intended victim.