Fallon woman indicted for hiring hitman

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Kristy Lynn Felkins, 36, of Fallon, was indicted Thursday for a murder-for-hire plot, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.

According to Eastern Court District documents, Felkins sent 12 bitcoin (valued at approximately $5,000 at the time) to a darkweb hitman website to have her ex-husband murdered. From February to May 2016, Felkins regularly communicated with the administrator of the site to pay and arrange for the murder of her ex-husband.

When her ex-husband was traveling to Chico, Felkins gave the administrator the specific location of her ex-husband in an attempt to have him murdered. The website turned out to be a scam, and Felkins was not refunded the bitcoin she sent to the site, which is no longer in operation.

This case is the product of an investigation by the Northern California Illicit Digital Economy (NCIDE) Task Force, consisting of agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Postal Inspection Service, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The NCIDE Task Force is focused on targeting all forms of darkweb and cryptocurrency criminal activity in the Eastern District of California. The HSI Reno Field Office also assisted in this investigation.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Grant B. Rabenn and Paul Hemesath are prosecuting the case.

If convicted, Felkins faces a maximum statutory penalty of 10 years in prison. Any sentence, however, would be determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of any applicable statutory factors and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables.