Fallon woman sentenced to prison for hiring hitman

RENO (AP) — A Fallon woman who admitted to hiring a hitman on the internet for $5,000 in bitcoin to kill her ex-husband “and make it look like an accident” was sentenced to five years in prison.

Kristy Lynn Felkins, 38, pleaded guilty in March to a charge of murder-for-hire as part of a deal with federal prosecutors that avoided trial, court records show.

A U.S. District Court judge in California also ordered on Thursday that Felkins be released under supervision for three years after she serves her prison sentence.

Felkins began communicating with someone in 2016 on a dark web hitman website that claimed to offer murder-for-hire services, according to her September 2020 indictment. Felkins wanted her ex-husband killed while he was traveling in Chico, Calif., the indictment said.

Authorities described the website as a scam that simply took money from unsuspecting customers.

In a statement admitting her guilt that was entered into the court record as part of her plea deal, Felkins said she offered to pay an extra $4,000 to speed up the timeline of the murder plot in March 2016. She also admitted to saying she “did not care” if her ex-husband’s new girlfriend “was harmed during the murder.”

Felkins said she expected to receive a large life insurance payment after her ex-husband’s death, which she requested to be made to look like an accident. According to her statement, she asked the purported hitman if it was “possible to make it seem like it was a mugging gone wrong?”

Felkins, who has been out of custody, was ordered to surrender in September to begin serving her prison sentence.

This case was 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.