Why Did a Father of 16 Hire a Dark-Web Hit Man?

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One weekday in the summer of 2021, Christopher Pence entered his home office in Cedar City, Utah, and plugged a USB stick into his computer. He booted up Tails, an operating system designed to optimize privacy, and used it to access the dark web — a marketplace teeming with illicit goods and services like child pornography, weapons, and drugs. Christopher, who was 41 and worked for Microsoft as a systems engineer, wanted to hire a hit man to kill a young couple he had met on only a handful of occasions.

Christopher was an unlikely client in the murder-for-hire trade. He was not violent and had no criminal record. When he wasn’t logging ten-to-12-hour days working, often while listening to one of his favorite Christian rock bands, he was helping his wife, Michelle, raise their 11 biological and five adopted children. The entire family, along with Christopher’s retired parents, lived in a 5,800-square-foot home on the northern edge of the Mojave Desert, surrounded by wind-raked brushland and snow-capped mountains in all directions. They were building greenhouses on the property and had plans to buy cows.

Christopher and Michelle Pence hadn’t planned on having an enormous family. They met as teenagers in a community just north of Seattle and married in 1999, when Christopher was 19 and Michelle was 20. The next year, Michelle gave birth to twin girls. Christopher’s dream was to make a fortune in finance and real estate and live in a penthouse in downtown Seattle. He imagined Michelle would have her own high-powered career. After she became pregnant with their fourth child, he had a vasectomy.

Even as they continued to have children, the Pences wanted to accelerate the growth of their family through adoption. They were motivated in part by religion, believing that the process was a form of “making the same commitment to a child (or children), that God made to us … to take us in our filth, our sin, our depravity, and bring us to a place of being a beloved child.” But the choice was also deeply personal. Michelle came from a troubled home. She had met her father only three times. She was one of six half-siblings, all from different fathers, who were split up by the foster-care system. “I know all too well what loss, abandonment, neglect, and abuse do to a child … because I was that child,” Michelle wrote around the time she and Christopher began submitting applications. They hoped to adopt an entire “young sibling group, who are having trouble staying together because of size,” she wrote on one listings website, adding that they would not mind remaining in contact with the children’s biological parents.

The ad hoc nature of the arrangement drew the attention of the child-welfare system. According to police records, soon after the Pences returned to Washington, a deputy with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office performed a welfare check at the request of the Massachusetts DCF. “All were healthy and appeared happy … home is large and very clean … Michelle is researching how to obtain financial aid for kids as she has been paying out of pocket for their care,” the deputy wrote in his report.

It is not entirely clear why Christopher Pence wanted the Corderos dead. In Utah, he quickly convinced the family’s new pastor, Jeffcott, that both Christina and Cisco loomed over their household like specters. “They really were creating problems for the children,” Jeffcott told me. “I mean, wetting the bed — just really bad consequences from exposure to the birth parents.” But the Pences’ concern was vague. It also did not seem to involve fears of sexual abuse. Christopher considered Cisco a Lothario but did not think his behavior in that regard involved the children.

Six thousand miles away from Cedar City, somewhere in Romania, a small band of internet scammers got a payday. Since at least 2016, the group had run a stable of sites on the dark web, including Sicilian Hitmen and Yakuza Mafia, offering bogus murder-for-hire services. They took money from users who wanted people killed, but they never acted on the jobs. The mastermind behind the operation was a fraudster who went by the name Yura. In 2022, at the urging of the United States, Romanian authorities reportedly arrested Yura and his crew, but it’s unclear if they were ever prosecuted.

On October 27, exactly three years after picking up the Cordero children in Massachusetts, Christopher Pence’s alarm went off, as always, at 5:55 a.m. Lights flicked on, first in his en suite bathroom as he left Michelle in bed to nurse their infant daughter, then in the rest of the house as he woke his children in turn. He gathered most of them on the first floor for Bible study. (The three oldest Pence daughters were spending the year at Jackson Bible College in Wyoming.) They took a moment to sing “Happy Birthday” to one of the children and said an opening prayer. Twenty minutes later, there was a loud bang on the front door. At the same instant, the house was flooded by emergency lights.

In late 2023, Christopher Pence pleaded guilty to one count of soliciting murder via the internet. Christina told me that since Christopher’s arrest, Michelle has refused to allow her or Cisco to have any contact with their biological children. In April, however, the Corderos got a brief glimpse at Christopher’s sentencing. Their kids were seated with Michelle as if in support of the man who’d tried to have their biological parents killed.