$1200 to Kill My Parents

Teenagers and Murder-for-Hire

In May 2015, a 14-year-old boy stood before Circuit Judge Charles Schwab in a St. Lucie County, Florida, courtroom, tears running down his face. He’d been convicted on three counts of felony solicitation to commit first-degree murder for writing a note offering a friend $1,200 to kill his father, stepmother, and stepbrother.

“The only thing more serious would’ve been the actual culmination of completion of the act, the most serious offense known to man,” Schwab told him.

The boy had insisted it was all a joke.

Judge Schwab wasn’t laughing. “At your age, jokes should start off ‘knock knock,’” he said, looking directly at the boy. “At my age, they might start off ‘a guy walks into a bar.’ In no setting does it ever start off with ‘will you kill my parents?’”

The judge sentenced the boy to 18 to 36 months in a maximum-security residential program. But what stayed with me about this case was the trajectory leading up to the note. The boy had stolen from his stepbrother, made false abuse allegations against his father to the Department of Children and Families, and brought a knife to school. All strategies aimed at a single goal. He wanted to go back to Pennsylvania, to live with his grandmother. When manipulation didn’t work, when lies didn’t work, when a weapon didn’t work, a 14-year-old landed on what he saw as the only remaining option: eliminate the obstacles.

The judge saw it clearly. “The manner in which he attempted to get back to Pennsylvania was, in fact, quite manipulative,” Schwab said. “He decided that the only way to get back was through eliminating his parents.”

A $1,200 murder-for-hire note, passed to a classmate during school, signed like a contract. The friend who signed it later testified that the boy was smiling when he handed it over.

The Number That Stopped Me Cold

My friend and colleague Bob Innes runs what may be the most unusual crime prevention tool in the United States: a website called RentAHitman.com.

Bob Innes, owner and operator of Rent-a-Hitman

If you’ve never visited it, you should. You’ll find a sleek landing page advertising “Your Point & Click Solution” with “nearly 18,000 U.S.-based problem resolvers.” There’s a service request form. There are fake testimonials. And there’s a proudly displayed compliance badge: the site adheres to “HIPPA,” the “Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964.”

It’s a parody. Innes bought the domain in 2005 for $9.20 while studying IT. The name was a play on words: “hit” as in web traffic, “rent” as in hire. The business never materialized. The website sat dormant.

Then the emails started coming in.

Real emails. From real people. With real names, real addresses, and real targets.

Innes gives every person who contacts him a 24-hour cooling-off period. Then he asks two simple questions: Do you still require our services? And would you like me to place you in contact with a field operative? If they say yes, he forwards everything to law enforcement. Any request involving a minor, either as the solicitor or the target, goes directly to the police. No cooling-off period.

To date, Innes believes the site has helped prevent approximately 150 murders. Around a dozen people have been arrested as a direct result of their submissions. He receives eight to ten new requests per month.

But it was a different number that stopped me cold when Bob and I were talking.

Of the 211 credible solicitations his website has received (the ones that passed his filter as genuine, not trolls or obvious hoaxes), 35 percent came from juveniles.

More than a third of the people who looked at a website advertising contract-killing services, filled out a service request form with their real information, and followed through when asked if they were serious, were under 18.

Why This Website Catches Teenagers

The overrepresentation of minors in Rent-A-Hitman’s data seems paradoxical at first. Teenagers are supposed to be digital natives, the generation most likely to spot a fake website, catch a scam, recognize parody.

That framing misses the point.

Think about what RentAHitman.com is, from a teenager’s perspective. It’s not on the dark web, accessible only through the Tor browser and requiring cryptocurrency and a level of digital sophistication that most adults don’t possess. It’s right there on the regular internet. You can Google your way to it. It looks professional. And while an adult with experience navigating the world might pause at “HIPPA” compliance or the offer of “group discounts,” a teenager who has never filed a HIPAA form, never hired a contractor, never parsed the fine print of a legitimate business may not register those tells at all.

The tongue-in-cheek tone may actually function as a kind of permission structure. The playfulness of the site makes filling out the form feel less real, less consequential, more like placing an online order than commissioning a murder. For a teenager whose prefrontal cortex is still years from full maturation, that distinction matters enormously. The gap between violent ideation and violent action is supposed to be bridged by executive functions: impulse control, consequence forecasting, and moral reasoning in real time. A website that lowers the threshold of apparent seriousness effectively removes a guardrail that was already shaky.

The decision to hire a killer rather than be one is itself a tell. It represents what researchers call instrumental detachment: the reframing of lethal violence as a transaction, a service to be purchased, a problem to be outsourced. Psychologist Abraham Rutchick and colleagues at California State University, Northridge, designed an experimental paradigm using ladybugs to test whether technologically mediated distance changes killing behavior. Participants who operated the machine remotely via videoconference killed more ladybugs than participants in the same room as their targets, and reported fewer negative emotions about doing so. The study was designed as an analog rather than a direct measure of human violence. But the principle transfers: the further you are from the act of taking a life, the easier the act becomes (Rutchick et al., 2017).

For a teenager, typing a name into a web form creates an ocean of distance between intention and consequence. The target becomes a data point. The murder becomes a service request. The killer becomes a “field operative.” Language does the dehumanizing.

The $100,000 Insurance Policy

Not all teen solicitation cases remain confined to notes and web forms. Some end with someone dead.

On the evening of October 22, 2021, Tazewell County sheriff’s deputies in Illinois responded to a call about shots being fired at a home on American Legion Road in rural Mackinaw. They found 15-year-old Dahlia Bolin standing outside.

She told them she’d been in the basement when she heard footsteps, then gunshots. Inside, deputies found her mother, Rebecca Bolin, 51, dead. Her father, Douglas Bolin, 52, had been shot multiple times but was still alive.

fifty-one-year-old Becky Bolin

It took investigators less than 48 hours to unravel the truth. Dahlia hadn’t been a bystander. She was the architect.

According to prosecutors, Dahlia had recruited her boyfriend, Nathaniel Maloney, along with Andre Street and Sage Raeuber, to murder her parents. Both Dahlia and Street were juveniles at the time. The plan was mapped out over group texts and FaceTime calls. Dahlia would provide her father’s guns. She would disable the home’s Wi-Fi so the surveillance cameras wouldn’t record. The shooters would enter through the basement, kill her parents from behind as they sat on the couch, then rough Dahlia up to make it look like a botched robbery. In exchange, she promised them $100,000 from her parents’ life insurance.

The motive was never fully disclosed in court proceedings. Prosecutors said only that Dahlia was “having troubles” with her father and that the plan initially targeted just him before expanding to include her mother.

What was disclosed was the detail that chills me most as a forensic psychologist: when Maloney and Street entered through the basement and encountered Dahlia before heading upstairs to kill her parents, she appeared, in the words of her co-defendants, “happy and almost jolly, like on Christmas Day.”

The plan went sideways. The shooters killed Rebecca and wounded Douglas, but fled before staging the fake robbery. All four were in custody by the next day. In January 2024, all four pleaded guilty. Dahlia, by then 17, received a 60-year sentence. Maloney got 66. Street got 55. Raeuber, the getaway driver, got 30.

Dahlia Bolin appeared in court wearing a pink hoodie and leading a service dog. She said almost nothing during the 45-minute hearing. She will be held in juvenile detention until she turns 18, then transferred to adult prison, where she will likely serve just over 54 years.

Her father survived. He later identified the two firearms used in the attack as weapons he owned, the same guns his daughter had given her co-conspirators to kill him and his wife.

“Anything From Strippers to Murder”

A teenage girl, a rural home, parents shot from behind on their own couch. But in the taxonomy of juvenile murder-for-hire, it represents one of the most common patterns. The child who wants to eliminate a parent.

Parents and guardians are, overwhelmingly, the most frequent targets when teenagers solicit murder. And the motives, while they sometimes resist neat categorization, tend to cluster around two poles: escape and acquisition. The kid who wants out of a household, out of a custody arrangement, out from under the authority of an adult they resent. And the kid who wants in to something: money, status, autonomy.

Nicolas Shaughnessy was the second type.

nineteen-year-old Nicolas Shaughnessy and his wife, Jaclyn Edison

In March 2018, Theodore “Ted” Shaughnessy, a well-known Austin jeweler who owned Gallerie Jewelers, was shot to death in his home just before dawn. His wife, Corey, heard multiple gunshots and saw shadowed figures enter her bedroom. She fired at the intruders until she emptied her revolver, then hid in a closet and called 911. The shooter escaped.

Investigators quickly turned their attention to the couple’s 19-year-old son, Nicolas, who was living in College Station with his wife, Jaclyn Edison. The two had married secretly the previous July; even Nicolas’s parents didn’t know. Nicolas was the sole beneficiary of a $2 million life insurance policy in the event of his parents’ deaths. He owed his mother $30,000 (money she’d loaned him to start a day-trading business), and he and Jaclyn had almost nothing in the bank between them. He’d been trying to recruit people to kill his parents for months, with all the subtlety of a teenager who has never been told no.

The digital trail was staggering. Nicolas had texted a friend “plastic gloves ski masks,” and when the friend replied “no no no,” had responded: “Fine fine. Just walk in, shoot a family, steal all their s--t.” He’d approached a woman who worked at his apartment complex, asking if she wanted to make extra money. When she asked what she’d have to do, he replied, “Illegal activities. Anything from strippers to murder.” He offered her “$20,000 a head” with a $15,000 incentive, punctuated with skeleton emojis. She stopped responding.

He eventually found a willing participant in Johnny Leon, offering him $10,000 for the job. Nicolas remotely accessed his parents’ home security system three times on the night of the murder from his College Station apartment. He left his childhood bedroom window open for the intruder’s entry. Surveillance video was deleted. And the day after his father was killed, he asked the same friend who’d turned him down if he wanted to see crime scene photos, then joked about being “demoted” from a person of interest.

Nicolas pleaded guilty to murder in 2021 and was sentenced to 35 years. In a post-sentencing interview with FOX 7 Austin, he was asked why. His answer was revealing: “Especially with the status that my parents held in Austin... it was something that we both wanted.” He clarified that it wasn’t just about the money. It was about the life. The business, the status, the position in the community. He wanted what his parents had. He didn’t want to wait for it.

He also admitted that he and Jaclyn had driven to Austin to attempt the murder themselves, but that he was “too cowardly” to do it. So they outsourced.

The willingness to commission the act but not perform it. The cognitive sophistication to plan a murder and the developmental immaturity to recruit co-conspirators using skeleton emojis.

The Bullying Best Friend

Not every teen murder-for-hire plot targets a parent, and not every motive is financial. In Calgary in 2022, a teenage boy tried to hire an adult to kill his best friend, the same friend who had been bullying him.

Between May and June of 2022, the boy (who cannot be named under Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act) approached an adult male known in court as D.S., first asking to buy a firearm, then inquiring if D.S. “knew anyone who does hits.” D.S., who had a criminal history of his own, contacted police on May 13.

“He did not want a dead 16-year-old on his conscience,” he told investigators.

Police made D.S. a police agent and instructed him to stall the boy. The following day, D.S. texted the teen that he had “a Mexican who could do the hit for $5,000.” The investigation continued until the boy’s arrest in late June.

The defense argued that the boy came from a violent home and didn’t trust authorities to protect him from the bullying. His lawyer told the court, “This is a young person who found himself in a very difficult situation.”

He was sentenced to the maximum youth term: three years, split between two years in custody and one year of community supervision. Had he been sentenced as an adult, the consequences would have been dramatically steeper. The sentencing judge encouraged him to take advantage of his time at the Calgary Young Offender Centre. “This is your opportunity to get it together,” the judge said (Martin, 2023).

The Calgary case illustrates something that gets lost in the more spectacular murder-for-hire plots. Many of these teenagers are not budding sociopaths. They are kids in crisis, kids who perceive their options as having narrowed to a vanishing point. The bullied boy in Calgary didn’t want status or money. He wanted to stop being afraid. And in his adolescent calculus, a $5,000 contract on his tormenter made more sense than going to the adults who had already failed him.

This is not an excuse. It is a diagnostic observation. And it should terrify us in a different way than the Dahlia Bolins of the world, because it suggests that the pipeline from desperation to solicitation can be terrifyingly short.

The Digital Trap

The internet has reshaped how teenagers attempt to hire killers and how they get caught.

In the pre-digital era, commissioning a murder required connections. You had to know someone who knew someone. That requirement alone served as a natural barrier for teenagers, who typically lack criminal networks. The dark web initially seemed like it might lower that barrier, and sites like “Besa Mafia” and “Camorra Hitmen” emerged as apparent marketplaces for contract killing.

But cybersecurity researchers like Chris Monteiro established that these dark web hitman-for-hire sites are scams. Every single one. They use stock photos, fake reputation systems, and demands for Bitcoin payments that create a permanent, traceable ledger. They exist to extract money from desperate people, not to provide a service. For the teenager who manages to navigate the Tor browser and find one of these sites, the likely outcome is losing money and leaving a digital trail, not successfully commissioning a murder.

The real danger for adolescents lies on the surface web and social media. Sites like RentAHitman.com, whose entire purpose is to intercept and report, are found through simple Google searches. Encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, Signal, and Snapchat create an illusion of privacy while generating recoverable evidence. Group texts become conspiracies. FaceTime calls become planning sessions. Browser histories become probable cause.

The platforms that make solicitation feel private and effortless also generate the evidence that gets these kids caught.

The detection pattern is consistent across cases: a teenager reaches out through a digital channel, believing the conversation is secret. The recipient, whether it’s Bob Innes, a would-be hitman with a conscience, a confidential informant, or an undercover officer, contacts law enforcement. Digital forensics recovers the evidence. The arrest follows.

The teenagers who solicit murder online are caught by the same developmental limitations that drive them to solicit in the first place. They overestimate their own sophistication and underestimate the permanence of a text message. They lack the criminal networks that might, in a grimmer version of events, connect them with someone who would actually follow through.

The Hardest Question

The legal system has never figured out what to do with these cases.

The U.S. Supreme Court has established through a series of landmark decisions, Roper v. Simmons (2005), Graham v. Florida (2010), and Miller v. Alabama (2012), that “children are different” for purposes of criminal punishment. The adolescent brain is not the adult brain. The prefrontal cortex is still under construction. Impulsivity, susceptibility to peer pressure, and an underdeveloped capacity for long-range consequence forecasting are features of the developmental stage, not defects of character.

But the act of soliciting a murder is, by definition, premeditated. It requires planning, negotiation, strategy. It is not impulsive. When a 15-year-old disables the home Wi-Fi, provides her father’s guns to the shooters, and coordinates the attack over FaceTime, the “children are different” framework collides with evidence of cold, calculated intent.

Judge Schwab’s knock-knock joke captures this tension. The boy is a child, but the note is not a child’s prank. The motive is juvenile (he wants to go back to Grandma’s), but the method is adult. And the law has to reconcile these realities within a system that was not designed for them.

For the Port St. Lucie boy, the answer was a maximum-security residential program, capped at age 21. For the Calgary teen, it was three years. For Dahlia Bolin, it was 60 years in adult prison.

The range tells you something important: the system is working case by case, without a coherent framework, because no coherent framework exists for a 14-year-old who signs a murder contract or a 15-year-old who watches her co-conspirators head upstairs to kill her parents and feels jolly.

What Bob’s Data Tells Us

The overrepresentation of juveniles in RentAHitman.com‘s credible solicitations is not evidence that teenagers are disproportionately homicidal. The overall data on juvenile crime tells a different story: between 1995 and 2019, juvenile arrests for serious violent crimes declined by 67 percent. Even with post-pandemic upticks in certain categories, the vast majority of young people never come close to criminal behavior.

What the Rent-A-Hitman data reveals is something narrower and, I think, more troubling: the barrier to entry for murder solicitation has collapsed for teenagers. The distance between “I want my parents dead” (a thought that is, developmentally, not as rare as we’d like to believe) and “I have submitted a service request to have my parents killed” has been reduced to a Google search and a web form.

The site is a parody. The joke is obvious to most adults. But to a teenager in crisis, a teenager with an underdeveloped capacity for skepticism and an overdeveloped sense of grievance, the joke isn’t obvious at all. The web form looks like a solution.

Bob Innes knows this. It’s why he forwards every juvenile case directly to police, without the 24-hour cooling-off period he grants adults. A teenager filling out that form may be engaging in a kind of emotional venting that, with intervention, never escalates further. Or they may be 48 hours away from finding someone who means business.

One pattern connects all of these cases. The Port St. Lucie boy was caught because his father found the note. The Calgary teen was caught because the man he approached went to the police. Dahlia Bolin was caught because her co-defendants talked. Nicolas Shaughnessy was caught because the people he tried to recruit became informants. In every single case, someone else saw it and said something.

The moment when another human being chose to intervene.

The stepmother in the Port St. Lucie case broke down crying after the sentencing. The prosecutor noted that despite everything, despite the note, the $1,200 price tag, the three counts of solicitation, she still cared about the boy who’d tried to have her killed.

“Even though he solicited murder,” the prosecutor said, “she wants to know that what was done was in his best interest.”

The grievances behind these cases are ordinary teenage grievances. A boy who wants to live with his grandmother. A bullied kid who can’t find an adult he trusts. A teenager who wants to be somebody. And a 15-year-old who was jolly on the night her parents were shot.

None of those are unusual adolescent experiences, except the last. What is unusual, and what the digital age has made newly possible, is the speed with which they can escalate from fantasy to form, from grievance to Google search, from “I wish they were dead” to “services requested.”

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

A kid who needs help.

If you know a young person who is expressing violent ideation or who may be in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or local law enforcement. If you become aware of a credible threat, report it immediately.

Bob Innes maintains RentAHitman.com at his own expense. If you’d like to support his work, he accepts donations via PayPal (paypal.me/punchline67) and CashApp ($RENTaHITMAN).

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References

Blandford, L. K. (2015, May 5). Teen sentenced in murder-for-hire case. The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News, p. 4.

CBS News. (2024, January 18). 4 plead guilty in Illinois girl’s murder-for-hire plot that killed her mother and critically wounded her father. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dahlia-bolin-murder-for-hire-plot-parents-4-sentenced-pekin-ilinois/

Martin, K. (2023, September 8). Foiled murder-for-hire plot lands Calgary teen maximum youth sentence. Calgary Herald. https://calgaryherald.com/news/crime/teen-pleads-guilty-murder-for-hire-plot-best-friend

RentAHitman.com. (n.d.). RENT-A-HITMAN: Your point & click solution.

https://rentahitman.com/

Rutchick, A. M., McManus, R. M., Barth, D. M., Youmans, R. J., Ainsworth, A. T., & Goukassian, H. J. (2017). Technologically facilitated remoteness increases killing behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 73, 147–150. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.07.003

Shaughnessy, N. (2023, September 26). Interview by M. Aldis [Television broadcast]. CrimeWatch, FOX 7 Austin. https://www.fox7austin.com/news/crimewatch-exclusive-interview-nicolas-shaughnessy-austin-texas

As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. I’m so grateful to all of you for passing it along; our readership has almost doubled in two months! See you next time.