How an evil neonatal doctor paid dark web criminals to have his estranged wife kidnapped, tortured and injected with heroin  – before his plot was thwarted by a British journalist

An evil neonatal doctor put a hit out on his estranged wife asking criminals he found on the dark web to kidnap and torture her until they agreed to get back together – before his plot was thwarted by a British journalist. 

Dr. Ronald Ilg, 57, from Spokane, Washington, paid a hitman  more than $55,000 to kidnap and beat his beautician wife Jennifer, with whom he had a son with in 2018. 

He also asked for her to be injected with heroin until she agreed to get back together with him.

Jennifer was notified about the hit by journalist Carl Miller who found messages on the dark web to a murder-for-hire service with her name, picture and address on it, as well as a detailed list of instructions on how to torture her. 

Carl, 38, from London, and his team embarked on a four-year mission to warn others on the list after initially being dismissed by police, eventually the FBI, the Metropolitan Police and Interpol would all get involved.

Scorned lovers and debt-ridden exes were among the 175 people who took out hits, the majority being men targeting women, often wives or girlfriends, according to Carl’s podcast Kill List from Wondery and Novel.

The case that frightened Carl ‘more than any other’ was Ronald Ilg, a celebrated neonatal doctor, from Washington, who was jailed for eight years in 2023. 

In March 2020, Ron’s request listed Jennifer’s name and address as the intended target, under his username Scar215, he offered $55,000 in Bitcoin for the job. 

The message read: ‘The target destroyed two families and walked away as if she did nothing. 

‘I want the target kidnapped for seven days. While being held, she will be given injections of heroin at least two times per day. 

‘She will be taught to do it herself and pics and videos of her doing on her own should be collected.’

The request goes on to say ‘all means necessary’ must be done to get her to drop all her court proceedings, return to her family, and promise to tell nobody about the kidnapping.

‘She should be told that her family’s health, including her father and her kids, depend on her completing these rules.’

Adding: ‘It would be unfortunate if her older boy became addicted to heroin. 

‘Or her dad be severely beaten or her dog be slaughtered.’ 

Eerily Ron also devised a ‘bonus structure’, suggesting the attackers could break her father’s hands and kill her dog in a bid to get Jennifer to stop divorce proceedings and return to him. 

They read: ‘1. Stop all court proceedings immediately $10,000, 2. returns back to her husband immediately for reconciliation of their marriage and relationship, 3. Keep her mouth shut and tell nobody.’

He offered a total of $30,000  in bonus payments to the hitman if the requests were all met.    

However all was not as it seemed, despite receiving more than £400,000, no murder was arranged by the hitman, because it was all a money scam.

But Carl and his team still believed the targets were in perilous danger. 

The risk was that if some of those bad actors realised they had been scammed they might, in anger, be willing to do the job themselves.

Jennifer met Ron online in 2011 after recently separating from her first husband, who she had two young children with.

She said: ‘At first I wasn’t that interested because he wasn’t my usual type and quite a lot older than me.’ 

Finally she decided to give him a change after months of messaging online and all seemed perfect at the beginning. 

The pair soon moved together and eventually married in 2016, but that’s when Ron began to change. 

First he told Jennifer that he was into BDSM and eventually he requested she call him ‘sir’ everyday, he installed cameras, cages and ropes in their house and put a GPS tracker on her car.

One day he handed her a ‘cloudy drink’ which looked like a pill had been dissolved in it but Jennifer refused to drink it.

After giving birth to their son in 2018, Jennifer found out Ron was having a BDSM affair with a mistress, which involved a sex-slave contract signed in blood and a sex-dungeon bunker buried on his property. 

Jennifer said: ‘He was trying to force her into our marriage saying I have to except her and I have to be her friend, he was saying that he can be in love with more than one person. 

‘It just became a fantasy at that point, he was delusional.’

Jennifer even ended up reaching out to Ron’s mistress, she said: ‘She was definitely an enemy for awhile, but then the more I talked to her and heard what she was going through I was trying to help her and trying to tell her she needs to get out of this situation. 

Finally, one day in the spring of 2020 the women actually sat down together to compare notes. 

Jennifer said: ‘She said he put her in a hole in the yard, like a septic tank thing in his yard, he put her down in there and put the top on and was threatening to leave her in there for hours.’ 

Ron told his mistress that he was trying to divorce Jennifer, all while telling Jennifer he was trying to let the mistress down gently to end the relationship. 

The women challenged Ron together which angered him even more and made him unravel even further. 

While Ron was away on a work trip Jennifer seized the opportunity to move out of their home, when he arrived back she was gone. 

Jennifer said: ‘He was doing everything he could to get me back, promising counselling, promising he would get rid of our prenuptial agreement if I agreed to stay.’

Jennifer filed for divorce but Ron continued harassing her and blowing up her phone with calls and messages. She went to court for an anti harassment order. 

Jennifer wrote in the restraining order application: ‘Ron is spiralling and continues to get worse, to where now he is threatening to come to my home despite my opposition, this has to stop.’

Ron responded to the restraining order proceedings by saying he was in a ‘raw emotional state’ from the recent tumult in his life, and that he would leave his wife alone. Despite that promise, he soon sent her a letter professing his love.

He wrote: ‘I do love you, more than words can describe, more than actions can show, every fibre of my body, every ounce of my life energy calls out for you.’

However Ron didn’t stop and began stalking her, even showing up outside her work place one evening. 

Jennifer spotted large amounts of money going out of their joint bank account, including one transaction of $10,000 to MoonPay, a site to buy cryptocurrency.

Eventually the FBI got involved and looked into the evidence that Journalist Carl had collected. 

Ron was on holiday in Mexico over the dates he had planned for Jennifer to be kidnapped, possibly a deliberate allaby. 

As he arrived back in the US, the FBI were waiting for him in the airport and pulled him into an interrogation room. 

While speaking to the investigators Ron admitted to being on the dark web but claimed he was contacting hitmen to murder him, as a way of killing himself.

He claimed he was doing this to ‘protect’ his girlfriend, the woman he was having an affair with, so she would receive his life insurance, however Ron was unaware that the FBI had access to the messages between him and the hitman. 

In April 2021, Ron’s house was searched and computers seized, however he wasn’t yet arrested. 

A few days later a family friend went to check on Ron and he was found unresponsive on the kitchen floor, he had taken an overdose of Xanax pills and had a black eye. 

He left a suicide note mentioning Jennifer an his mistress and asking for forgiveness.

Ron was placed in the intensive care unit for a couple of days to recover and for 24 hours a day FBI stood outside his hospital room keeping watch. 

Jennifer said: ‘He actually had the nerve to call me from the hospital…it was creepy, I was angry because I felt he was taking the easy way out. 

‘He didn’t say anything about his kids, he didn’t say sorry or anything. I think he did it to get under my skin. I hung up on him.’

Ron was arrested at the hospital and charged with attempted kidnapping and sentenced to eight years in prison. 

It was the highest sentence available under the terms of Ron’s plea agreement. In addition, Judge William Fremming Nielsen ordered him to pay more than $25,000 [£19,248] in restitution and a $100,000 [£76,993] fine. 

Ron will also spend three years on federal supervision following his release from prison.

According to court documents and information from the sentencing hearing, Ron also sent dozens of messages in early 2021 through the dark web as part of a plot to injure a former professional colleague.

For years, Ron lived a seemingly normal life, he was a successful neonatologist and ran for a local school board but in 2019, two co-workers at his office filed behavioural claims against him, one saying he had harassed them and another complaining about his scheduling practices.

According to the Daily Beast, employees were so revolted by the claims many said they felt they couldn’t look him in the eye and rumours began to swirl that he was bringing a gun into the office.

The doctor was asked to resign from his job but refused to. He was subsequently fired in December 2020.

The previous spring Jennifer had filed for divorce, and after he lost his job he became increasingly erratic.

In the months after he was fired, Ron tried pay hitmen on the dark web to give a ‘significant beating’ to a former co-worker as well as the kidnap request for Jennifer. 

Scar215 posted on a dark web murder-for-hire website in February of 2020 requesting that somebody break into his colleagues home to deliver a ‘significant beating’ to her, specifically asking they ‘injure both hands significantly or break the hands.’

Scar215 said about $2,000 in Bitcoin had been placed in an escrow account and would be paid out upon completion of the attack.

Though the job was unfulfilled, a month later Scar215 posted another request on the same website asking for the kidnapping and torture of Jennifer. 

Journalist Carl learned of the ‘hits’ through Chris Monteiro, a British vigilante hacker, who discovered a ‘backdoor’ into the site that allowed access to messages between the site and those soliciting murder.

Chris previously claimed in 2018 that the Romanian group believed to be behind it, known as Yura, had boasted about earning £4.6million from the scam.  

Out of the 175 ordered hits, so far there have been 34 arrests and 28 convictions in 11 countries and prison sentences exceeding 150 years.   

Kill List, from Wondery and Novel, is available now on Wondery+ or wherever you get your podcasts.