The Dark Web Killer - The Murder of Amy Allwine

December 23, 2024

In this episode, Payton and Garrett explore the mysterious murder of Amy Allwine, uncovering a shocking tale of deception, hitman websites, and a staged crime scene that changed everything.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on spotify

No items found.

Case Sources

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

You're listening to an Oh No Media podcast.

Hey everybody, and welcome back to our podcast. This is Murder with My Husband. I'm Payton Moreland.

And I'm Garrett Moreland.

He's the husband.

And I'm the husband. That was a little weird.

Why?

Oh no, I just said it differently than I normally do.

Well, Garrett and I prepared a little special something for you guys for the holidays, so here we go. Three, two, one—

What are you doing?

Jingle bell, jingle bell...

I was not informed about this. Nobody told me about this.

Oh, did I miss the memo?

No, I just thought about doing that right before we pressed record.

It was good, though. I thought you were going to stand up and do the Mean Girls dance for them.

Oh, I was going to, and then I got tired.

What's your favorite Christmas song?

Probably Jingle Bell Rock, to be honest.

Really?

I know it's so cliché.

I like that. I like, um, Here Comes Santa Claus.

Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane!

Yeah, like that one.

I don't know. Frosty the Snowman. I like that one too.

You’ve got weird ones.

Those are very normal! What are you talking about?

What is yours? Or what are yours?

Mmm, Silent Night.

See, that makes me depressed.

I don't even know if that's my favorite. I just really wanted to sing that. Um, what's my favorite? What's my favorite? What's my favorite? What's my favorite?

Little Drummer Boy.

Oh, Little Drummer Boy! That one's good too.

That's a good one. That one hits you right in your feels.

Happy holidays if you're celebrating holidays. If you're not, happy murder day!

Happy murder day!

Happy Murder with My Husband day.

If you're watching on YouTube, I'm sorry the lighting is off. We usually have blackout curtains right there. They are not there right now, so our set looks different. It doesn't look great, but we're getting it fixed as quick as we can. Thank you for being here.

Payton and I are probably just at home next to the fireplace hanging out while you're listening to this, and we love you all.

Okay, you have 10 seconds for this amazing, beautiful episode.

Honestly, I don't have anything crazy. I think for the most part, I hope everyone's having a good holiday. I hope that you feel loved today, and if you don't, Payton and I love you.

Hopefully, you are loved.

You are loved. Hopefully, that is good enough.

Daisy has not been a great dog today, so that's been kind of making me a little angry, but that's okay. We all have bad days. That's what I got for my 10 seconds. I don't really have anything crazy.

Oh, I do have something crazy. Payton doesn't know it yet, but in two days, I'm giving her a gift.

Two days? Why two days?

No, two days from when this comes out, I will be giving her a gift.

I think she's going to be really excited about it. I think you guys are all going to love it as well.

What? I'm so confused about what it is.

Payton has no idea. I can't say. There is more I can say, but I can't say anything more than that because I don't want to give it away.

It's nothing bad, right?

It's nothing bad. It's something amazing.

Something amazing?

There is somebody else that knows in my family.

You will never, ever in a million years guess.

You're scaring me.

It's not going to be bad. It's going to be great.

Is it a dog?

I'm excited for you guys to see it.

It's not a dog.

And on that note, let's hop into today's episode.

Okay, leave us all hanging.

I will. I have to.

Our sources for this episode are:

newser.com, startribune.com, cointelegraph.com, thetimes.com, metro.co.uk, twincities.com, fox9.com, caselaw.in, law.com, cbsnews.com, republicaneagle.com, thesun.com, securitynewspaper.com, and oxygen.com.

You can find absolutely anything on the internet nowadays—from old video games dating back to your childhood to that obscure song you heard once and never thought you'd find again. And, of course, more nefarious things like weapons or drugs.

Honestly, on the internet, you can even find murder-for-hire. The wild and scary thing about the internet, especially thanks to the help of unregulated currencies like Bitcoin and crypto, is that it can all remain pretty anonymous.

You never know who's soliciting these services. It's hard to find out who's buying them, and most of the time, people have no idea they are the target. If you piss off the wrong person, all it takes is a few clicks of the mouse and a quick Bitcoin transaction to put a bullseye on your back.

Which brings us to the case today.

Can I just say, I do have a decent knowledge of cryptocurrency. That is true, but also kind of not true at the same time. Let me sum it up really easily. Everyone has a wallet, basically, right? That wallet has an address. If you figure out who owns that address, you can then track transactions from there.

What if it's sent to another address?

It can’t be a fake address—it’s got to be a real address. So, it can go to another address, and then you track where it came from and where it goes. Then from there, and from there again, and so on.

I’ve worked with cryptocurrency quite a bit. Granted, I’m still learning. There are a lot of things I might have wrong, so if someone wants to correct me, go ahead. But it is interesting. It’s true that if nobody knows whose address it is, then yes, it can stay hidden. But that address can still be tracked.

For example, someone has to send it. That address is still linked to whoever sent it. If they figure out whose address that is—game over.

Interesting. Anyways, just thought I’d let everybody know that.

Okay, this is very off-topic, and I’ll say it really fast. I just don’t understand the concept of cryptocurrency.

There’s a lot to it.

It just doesn’t even make sense to me.

There’s a ton to it, but I guess we do the same thing with money, kind of. We just print more money. Isn’t that what they’re doing with Bitcoin? They just mine more Bitcoin.

Welcome to the United States of America.

It’s confusing because, like… yeah, it’s confusing.

We created another currency.

We’ll do an episode another time all about cryptocurrency.

No, if you want to find out about cryptocurrency, go ahead and watch our Twitch livestreams on Thursdays at 5:30 PM PT. Garrett will be talking all about that.

Not true, but yes. Yes, I will. Come watch me.

So, anyways, all that to say, you could possibly hire someone to kill someone in your life, pay them in Bitcoin, and it might not be able to be tracked 100%. And that is seemingly what happened to the victim in today's case: 43-year-old mother Amy Allwine.

At least, this is what everyone thought happened at first glance. But we're going to, obviously, get into it.

The year is 2016. We are about a 30-minute drive southeast of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's a suburban area known as Cottage Grove, which is the cutest name for a little city, you know? It's where 43-year-old Steven and Amy Allwine have called home for some time now.

The couple actually married 20 years prior, back in 1996. They were college sweethearts who met and fell in love at a Christian university. To most people, as life went on, they seemed to live a pretty typical middle-American lifestyle: quiet, content, happy.

Steven was a freelance IT expert. Amy owned her own dog training business, so there were always tons of furry friends in this couple's orbit. Both were deeply involved in their local church, the United Church of God. So much so that Steven actually became a church elder—someone who gave sermons and offered guidance to other members of the congregation, like counseling couples in their marriages during times of need.

The Allwines were seen as good people. They had even adopted a little boy back around 2006, whom they named Joseph. Now, in 2016, Joseph was 9 years old, and he was everything to Amy. Those who knew Amy said she lit up like a Christmas tree anytime there was a mention of her adopted son. She would go to the ends of the earth for Joseph and the family she had built.

But in November of 2016, the Allwines faced the absolute unthinkable.

November 13, 2016. That morning, Steven was working from home in his basement office, like he often did. Around noon, he went upstairs for his lunch break and ate with Joseph and Amy. During lunch, Amy told Steven that she wasn’t feeling well, so she was going to head upstairs to lie down, maybe take a nap and rest for a bit. Steven said okay, and he told her he’d wrap up his workday so he could watch Joseph.

Around 1 p.m., Amy’s dad came over to help them finish a project they had been working on in the house. Then, around 2 p.m., Amy asked her dad, "Hey, can you take Joseph over to your house for a bit so Steven can take me to the doctor?" Her dad said, "Of course," and added, "We’ll be by to pick Joseph up no later than 5:30 p.m. for dinner."

When 5:30 p.m. rolled around, Steven was the one who swung by Amy’s dad’s house—alone—to pick up Joseph. When her dad asked, "Hey, how did the doctor visit go? What did they say?" Steven replied, "Oh, um, Amy changed her mind about going and just stayed in bed."

After a little longer conversation, Steven and Joseph got in the car and went home. They arrived at their house around 6:50 p.m. When they went inside and got to the master bedroom to check on Amy, they found her on the floor.

She was in a pool of her own blood, with a gun beside her. She had been shot on the right side of her head.

Steven, the husband, calls 911 and tells the dispatcher, "Hey, I'm pretty sure that my wife has died by suicide." Now, this call is pretty disturbing and also memorable to the operator for a few reasons.

One reason is that Joseph, his 9-year-old son, is heard in the background asking his father why his mother would do that to herself. It's horrible. Obviously, we're not going to play the call. Joseph then asks Steven another odd question during the 911 call.

I’m not going to speculate too much, but wouldn’t you take your child out of the room in a situation like this? It seems like common sense that a 9-year-old shouldn't witness something like that. Of course, in the heat of the moment, you’re not always thinking clearly. Perhaps Steven thought it was more important to call 911 right away to try to save her. Still, it's heartbreaking that a child was exposed to this.

Another strange detail on the 911 call is that Joseph asks his dad, "Are you going to remarry?" Kids say weird things, especially at 9 years old and in moments of distress. But what really stuck with the operator was Steven’s reaction. He laughed at the question and casually replied, "I don't know, buddy."

Meanwhile, Sergeant Gwen Martin hears the dispatch call come over her radio. When she hears the address and learns that a woman has died by suicide, she gets a sinking feeling in her stomach. She knows that address and the people who live there. In fact, Sergeant Martin knows Amy pretty well.

Recently, she had taught Amy in an 8-week course designed to teach civilians about emergency services and law enforcement. This was a topic Amy had become interested in, and Sergeant Martin had literally seen her just two weeks earlier. To Gwen, Amy had seemed like someone who was planning for the future, a person who would do anything for her child.

Sergeant Martin thought Amy showed zero signs of struggling with suicidal thoughts. Of course, we can never truly know what someone is dealing with behind closed doors, but Gwen was stunned, as most of us would be. Still, in this line of work, she knew to keep an open mind.

Unfortunately, Sergeant Martin was one of the first people to arrive at the crime scene. What she saw that day only deepened her suspicion that this wasn’t a suicide. When she first saw Amy, she was lying face-up on the floor, and her pants were partially unzipped. Then, Gwen noticed a smell coming from the kitchen. Something was cooking in the oven—Amy had a pumpkin roasting.

The Sergeant wonders, “who puts dinner in the oven and then decides to go upstairs and die by suicide?” That’s understandable, but there isn’t a guidebook for something like that.

The suspicions make sense, especially with how strange the 911 call was. Something feels off. It’s also part of the job to question everything while investigating, which is important.

Once forensics gets involved, even more details don’t add up. The gunshot wound to Amy’s head is on the right side, but the gun is resting on her left arm. There’s also no blood spatter or gunpowder on her hands, which she would have if she had pulled the trigger herself.

Then, the cops notice a few drops of blood in other parts of the primary bedroom, which raises the question: did someone move her body and clean up the actual crime scene? Sure enough, when they perform a luminol test, they discover that the room had been recently cleaned but was covered in bloodstains and footprints. The footprints lead from the primary bedroom to the mudroom, the bathroom on the main floor, and finally to Joseph’s bedroom.

The question comes up: how do you hide something like that? Is it just lots of bleach? Is there a specific chemical to mask it so it doesn’t show up under luminol? There’s some speculation that if grout is recently sealed, blood won’t seep into it. However, when it’s hardwood floors, luminol still reveals blood splatters and pools. Even if the scene is cleaned, the randomness of blood splatter patterns makes it extremely hard to erase every trace.

Sometimes, there’s just one tiny drop that gets missed. It’s safe to assume that detectives are thinking, you can’t die by suicide and then clean up your own crime scene afterward.

By the following day, the autopsy report on Amy’s body reveals she died around 3:15 p.m. that day. The report also uncovers evidence inconsistent with suicide. Amy had scopolamine in her system, a drug used to treat nausea. However, not only was it present in her system at 20 times the regular dose, but Amy didn’t even have a prescription for it. This raises the question: how did such a large amount of this drug end up in her body?

In cases like this, the first person to suspect is typically the husband. However, this case becomes more complicated. Steven kept insisting he wasn’t home at the time of Amy’s death. While it’s unclear where he claimed to be, other witnesses reported seeing an unidentified vehicle speeding away from the house shortly after her estimated time of death.

The husband claims he wasn’t home at 3:15 p.m., and neighbors also reported seeing an unknown vehicle leaving the area around that time. Plus, Steven seems cooperative—he’s willing to go down to the station for questioning.

Not to mention, there’s something else the police have to consider once they start learning more about Amy and her past. Amy had actually been approached by the FBI the previous spring. She was already on law enforcement’s radar, but why the FBI?

The FBI had been conducting an unrelated investigation and discovered Amy’s name on a dark web hit list.

That’s terrifying. Imagine having the FBI show up at your door and tell you someone put a hit out on you.

So, back on May 31, 2016, about five months before Amy’s death, she was called into the Cottage Grove Police Department to speak with local officers and the FBI. They asked her the one question no one ever wants to hear: Do you know of anyone who might want you dead?

Do you think she told her husband about this, or do you think she kept it to herself? That’s rhetorical for now.

The FBI had just uncovered a murder-for-hire site on the dark web called the "Besa Mafia." They had obtained a large cache of data, including email exchanges between the site operators and their clients. Essentially, the FBI discovered this dark web marketplace where people could hire hitmen. The clients used fake names, but the people on the hit list were real individuals.

And Amy Alwine was one of them.

The FBI also had the username of the person who had ordered the hit on Amy: someone calling themselves "dogdaygod."

Something surprising about this case is that you can’t just access the dark web through Google. It requires special software, like Tor, to reach sites like the Besa Mafia. Interestingly, the technology behind this software was originally created by the military to hide sensitive information on secure backdoor websites.

It’s ironic that the military’s creation is now being used for so much illegal activity. But the Besa Mafia takes it to a whole new level. The site claims to be run by an Albanian mafia, but it seems more like it’s operated by a man known as "Yura."

Yura and his website recruit anyone willing to "audition" for the job. They literally post invitations for prospective killers, asking them to send in video submissions to become hitmen for the site.

One chilling quote from a video on the website says: “If one searches online for ‘shot dead on street,’ one will find plenty of news about people being shot dead in the street by unknown people that shoot and then leave. Those are our hitmen. We will be waiting for you to come place your orders and then get rid of your problems.”

It’s unbelievable that something like this exists.

On this website, there is a menu of item options ranging from $4,000 for a basic killing to $10,000 for a shoot-and-run, and as high as $50,000 for a high-profile sniper murder. They say it depends mostly on how challenging the job will be to pull off. For example, if the target has a bodyguard, they’re going to charge more.

By the way, on this website, you cannot pay with a Visa card. The only currency they accept is Bitcoin because of its anonymity, meaning it isn’t tied back to anyone’s name or IP address.

By the time the FBI discovered the Basa Mafia, they already had a list of 282 hits ordered across 60 different countries. I mean, there are 17-year-old girls in Canada looking to kill ex-boyfriends on this website. Literally anyone can log on, and with a few clicks of the keyboard, it’s boom—revenge at your fingertips.

Oh my gosh, what? But Amy—this woman is seemingly harmless. She’s been happily and faithfully married for the last 20 years. She’s a working mom who makes YouTube videos dancing with her church elder husband. Who would want this woman dead, and for what?

Well, it turns out the FBI got those answers through a leak. There were 60 pages worth of correspondence between “Dog Day God” (the username that placed the hit) and the Basa Mafia.

This all started back in February of 2016—actually, Valentine’s Day, to be exact. That’s when Dog Day God first reached out to the Basa Mafia, saying, “I am looking to hire you for a hit, but what is the recommended way to convert cash to Bitcoin anonymously?” After a few more emails were exchanged, negotiating a price, Dog Day God agreed to send over $12,000 in Bitcoin for the hit job. They finally revealed their target: a woman named Amy Allwine.

The words they used were, “I need this b---- dead, so please help me.” The message continued, alleging that Amy had stolen clients from this person’s dog training business. It also suggested the betrayal went far beyond that, implying Amy had been sleeping with a business competitor’s husband.

So, it sounds like there may be another wife involved. But let’s see. They even offered up the perfect opportunity for the hit to happen. They told the Basa Mafia that Amy had an upcoming business trip to Moline, Illinois. (We’ve actually been to Moline, Illinois, in the podcast before, and I pronounced it ‘Moline.’ Everyone told me, ‘It’s Molen, little Payton.’ So, I’d like everyone to know it is Molen, Illinois.)

They even provided the hotel Amy was going to stay at, a description of her car, and the route she would likely take. On top of that, they specified how they wanted Amy to be killed. They wanted it to look like an accident, and they didn’t want her son or husband to be harmed in any way.

Clearly, nothing happened to Amy during this business trip, as you know. However, the exchange continued for the next four months as Dog Day God worked with the Basa Mafia to coordinate other options for the hit. They provided daily updates on Amy’s movements—when she was at the grocery store, the gas station, or heading out of town. Amy essentially had a full-time stalker who was now trying to have her killed.

When the police sat down with her in May of 2016, they uncovered all of this. They pulled Amy in and were like, “Lady, you are in trouble.” She was, of course, shocked by the whole thing. She told the FBI, “I’ve never had an affair.” She even offered the FBI a couple of names of people it could possibly be. But she said, “I don’t know anyone in my life who fits this description.”

Stephen, her husband, even asked the police, “Is there any way they might have gotten the wrong Amy?” But apparently, Dog Day God had even sent the Basa Mafia pictures of Amy, so there was no confusion—they had the right Amy. This is why the FBI told the Allwines, “We think you should take these threats seriously.” And they had to, because the threats didn’t stop once the FBI got involved.

In July of 2016, five months before her death, Amy received two anonymous emails, presumably from Dog Day God. The emails said, “Amy, I still blame you for my life falling apart. Here is what is going to happen: I will come after everything else that you love. Here’s how you can save your family—commit suicide. So why not do it now and save them?”

Oh my gosh, that’s terrifying. It’s horrible. That would be so scary to get that kind of email.

Amy did the right thing—she shared these emails with the FBI, who began interviewing suspects, including some of Amy and Stephen’s work colleagues. They didn’t find anything, mainly because the email from Dog Day God was untraceable. So the FBI told the Allwines that the best thing for them to do was to get a home security system, install a few cameras, and buy a gun.

But Amy was living in absolute fear at this point. She was afraid to even be in her own home, worried that someone was going to come in during the night and kill her.

Now, you can see why all of this was especially scary when, in November of 2016, Amy Allwine died by suicide.

Naturally, her friends and family were furious with the FBI and local police. They said, “You were warned that she was going to be killed, and you did nothing.” Amy was alone in her house, even though the police claimed they had increased security patrols in the area to keep a closer eye on her. She still ended up dead.

To many, the hired hitman theory made a lot of sense. Not only did people report cars fleeing from the neighborhood that day, but the mastermind of the Basa Mafia—the guy known as Ura—actually released a video on the site after her death.

In the video, he masked his voice and face and said, “Hey, this website should be taken seriously because we are responsible for Amy’s death. We took that hit out.”

Okay, but even if the Basa Mafia carried out the hit, it still didn’t answer the question of who ordered it. So far, many of the names Amy had given the police didn’t check out, which is why they haven’t totally ruled out the possibility that maybe Stephen, the husband, was somehow involved.

This suspicion stems partly from how Stephen acted the day his wife died. Not only did he have that odd conversation with his son on the 911 call, where he laughed and they talked about remarriage, but he also seemed a bit too calm when he came in for questioning.

As police dug further into Amy’s case over the following days, they found one really incriminating detail. Remember how Dog Day God had to pay for the hit using Bitcoin? Well, in order to do that, the user had to send a 34-character wallet code to make the transaction. This is something Garrett was talking about earlier. That exact same wallet code was later found on Stephen’s computer.

Yeah, so here’s the thing—it’s possible to hide yourself if no one ever finds out you own the wallet. There’s no name attached to it. But if someone does find out? Game over. Obviously, they’re going to search the husband’s computer, and that’s exactly what happened.

So, they learn all of this, and they’re like, “Okay, the husband, Stephen Allwine, was Dog Day God.” The question at this point was: why would this church elder want his wife dead?

Here’s a little detail about Stephen and Amy’s church. Not only did they not believe in divorce, but if a church elder was ever found committing adultery, they would be asked to leave the congregation.

Stephen was cheating on his wife.

This was something deeply problematic for Stephen, who had been seeking out affairs online for the past two years. He was actually using the site Ashley Madison, to be exact—which, ironically, he learned about while offering marriage counseling to one of the couples at his church.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Ashley Madison is a popular website that rose to fame in the mid-2000s. It specifically encourages extramarital affairs. It’s not a dating website in the traditional sense—you get on, create an account, and it’s literally designed for people to cheat on their spouses.

I literally thought it was a dating website. That’s crazy.

Yeah, so it’s kind of like how, when I was younger, I thought GoDaddy sounded like a porn website. Later, I learned it was just about domain names.

Anyway, there was a huge leak from Ashley Madison’s database in 2015. And let’s just say, that’s not the website you want to see hacked. The leak threatened millions of users, ruining countless lives and marriages.

Whether or not Stephen was affected by the leak, I actually have no idea. But it’s very possible the leak scared him into making some rash decisions. This had just happened a year earlier—a bunch of people using the site were exposed. And Stephen was still using it at the time.

I’m not sure if Amy knew about the at least three different affairs Stephen was having. But I do know that Stephen realized there was no way for him to actually be with any of these women if his church didn’t allow divorce. So maybe Stephen had to come up with a different plan.

Maybe he decided he needed to have his wife killed so he could go on and be a free man. It’s possible he then took to the dark web and stumbled upon the Basa Mafia. Maybe he thought it was an easy way to walk away with his hands clean. So, perhaps he forked over the Bitcoin—around $12,000, to be exact—and then waited, and waited, and waited, communicating with the website.

But there’s also the possibility that he was met with every excuse.

They kept making new plans, one after another. Steven would send more money. But, obviously, nothing was coming of it. That’s probably why, in July of 2016, Dog Day God emailed Amy directly, threatening to kill her entire family if she didn’t kill herself.

When Amy went straight to the FBI with those emails, maybe Steven realized his plan wasn’t working the way he expected. It seemed like the Basa Mafia—the website he had paid—was never going to follow through. And Steven wasn’t wrong.

You know why? The entire website was a scam.

This so-called dark web hitman site was actually a con to make money off pathetically desperate people who wanted to get someone out of their lives for good. Honestly, for once, it’s almost a relief that they were scammers. First, they weren’t killing people, and second, they were scamming people who wanted to kill others.

Here’s the twist: Amy’s death may have actually promoted the website. In 2016, after she died, the site released a video saying, “Look, we took a hit out on her, and we did it. She’s dead.” But it wasn’t even true. It was all a marketing ploy. Why wouldn’t they take the credit? It legitimized their fake business.

Now, I guess it never occurred to Steven that $12,000 for a hit was suspiciously cheap. I mean, it does seem very cheap. But it was low enough for the scammers to rope him in, and since he paid in Bitcoin, there was no way he was ever going to see that money again.

Once Steven finally figured out he’d been scammed, he was already so committed to the idea of having Amy killed that he chose a new path. He decided, “I’ll just do it myself.”

Oh my gosh.

This time, he actually used the dark web as a tool again. When Steven realized the Basa Mafia wasn’t going to kill his wife, he went online and began searching for drugs. He found a site called Dream Market. For one reason or another, he decided to purchase a large amount of scopolamine.

Now, scopolamine is an anti-nausea medicine, but in large doses, it can make people loopy, disoriented, or even compliant. Remember, Amy had 20 times the normal amount in her system when the coroner conducted her autopsy.

On the afternoon of November 2016—or in the days leading up to it—Steven began slipping Amy large doses of the drug in her food or drink. That’s why Amy felt so sick that afternoon when her dad came over.

Once Amy’s dad left, taking their son Joseph with him, it seems Steven took advantage of the state he’d put Amy in. He grabbed the gun the family had bought to protect themselves from the supposed hitman. Then, Steven used that gun to kill Amy and staged her death as a suicide.

Some might think Amy decided to protect her family from those mysterious threats. But no—not with all the evidence showing she didn’t shoot herself.

Steven, of course, denies all of this. He insists, “No, no, no, no. I didn’t do this. It has to be whoever took the hit out on her.” He claims there was no way he would ever harm his wife and leave his son motherless.

However, as we know, there was a lot of evidence to suggest this was another lie. There are many things I find ironic in this case, but maybe one of the biggest is that Steven was an IT guy. He should have known how to cover his tracks—at least when it came to computers, right? And yet, his computer provided some of the best evidence against him.

For example, Steven had a browser set up on his computer that allowed him to access the dark web, as well as on his phone, so he was definitely accessing it. Dog Day God first contacted the Basa Mafia on Valentine’s Day. Shortly after sending that message, Steven’s computer showed him Googling how to use Bitcoin. Remember, the first message to the Basa Mafia was asking how to use Bitcoin.

The following day, he was looking up Amy’s itinerary for her business trip to Moline, Illinois, and figuring out what route she would take to get there. That same information was included in a message sent to the Basa Mafia.

On March 6th, Steven downloaded a picture to the family’s desktop. It was of Amy from their recent trip to Hawaii. Oh my gosh—and that’s the picture that was sent later. Days after, there’s an email from the Basa Mafia to Dog Day God explaining how to purchase Bitcoin and suggesting he report the money as stolen to his bank to cover his tracks.

Immediately after, Steven called the Cottage Grove Police and reported he’d been a victim of a scam. While police couldn’t directly trace Dog Day God’s IP address, detail after detail like this proved these actions were happening from Steven’s computer. Unless someone was repeatedly breaking into his home, accessing his computer, and maintaining this charade for months leading up to Amy’s death, it had to be him.

In January of 2017, Steven was finally arrested and charged with second-degree murder. However, once he appeared before a grand jury, those charges were escalated to first-degree murder, as everything pointed to premeditation.

During the 8-day trial, Steven maintained his innocence, saying, “I didn’t do any of this.” He claimed that plenty of Amy’s female friends had access to their home and computer, and suggested that someone else must have been using his computer. He also accused the police of doing a bad job, pointing out that there had been a hit ordered on Amy.

But, as we’ve learned after years of covering cases like this, the simplest explanation is often the most likely. After an 8-day trial, the jury deliberated for 6 hours before concluding that Steven Allwine was guilty of first-degree murder.

At his sentencing, the judge gave Steven an earful before handing down his punishment. The judge said, “You’re an incredible actor, a hypocrite, and a cold, calculating killer.” Steven was then sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

As for the Basa Mafia and their scam website, nobody knows who they are. The FBI has since traced the website to a location in Romania, and as of 2022, at least five members of the fraudulent organization have been arrested and are facing charges such as murder, organized crime, and money laundering. However, the website—and others like it—are still operating in corners of the dark web today. That’s just the reality we live in.

It’s so wild. And that is the case of Amy Allwine.

It’s so sad. Amy was just a good mom. All of this happened because they couldn’t get divorced. It’s so ironic.

And to me, the most ironic part is this: Steven was having three affairs because he didn’t want to be with his wife anymore, yet he wanted to remain a member of the church. He wanted to stay an elder in the congregation. His solution was to murder his wife—breaking one of the most important commandments. It just doesn’t make sense.

I know the reasoning for the murder was so he could stay in the church, but it’s so hypocritical. It’s crazy how often things like this happen.

All right, you guys, that’s our episode for this week. We hope you have an amazing holiday, and we’ll see you next time with another episode.

I love it.

I hate it.

Goodbye.

‍

Sorry, no sources available yet.