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

Sixteen Kids and a Hit Man Christopher Pence kept adding to his family. Then he decided to remove two people from the mix. Christopher and Michelle Pence on the day of the adoption. The five new members of the family are smiling broadly — but within three years, Christopher would seek to end their biological parents’ lives. Photo: YouTube/@candmpence Christopher and Michelle Pence on the day of the adoption. The five new members of the family are smiling broadly — but within three years, Christopher would seek to end their biological parents’ lives. Photo: YouTube/@candmpence Christopher and Michelle Pence on the day of the adoption. The five new members of the family are smiling broadly — but within three years, Christopher would seek to end their biological parents’ lives. Photo: YouTube/@candmpence This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. 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. The Pences were committed Evangelical Christians, and on Sundays they would pile into their 15-passenger Ford Transit and drive north to worship at Valley Bible Church. Afterward, they’d invite church members to their home for fellowship. “

If you met them and saw the way that their house was run, it was a joyous, happy atmosphere,” says Tom Jeffcott, the senior pastor of the congregation. “There was a lot of love. It was a structured home, a model of learning, of support, of understanding.” The eldest Pence daughters sometimes harmonized while they washed the dishes. The Pences had arrived in Cedar City in 2020, and before long Christopher and Michelle confided something troubling to their new pastor. They said they were being hounded by Christina and Francisco Cordero, the biological parents of their five adopted children. The two couples had worked out an agreement that allowed the Corderos some contact with their kids — emails, one phone call a month, two in-person visits a year. But recently, in Christopher’s view, the Corderos had been pushing it. They’d even moved across the country to live closer to the children they’d given up. Jeffcott saw the toll the pressure was taking on his new congregants. To help them find a legal remedy, he introduced them to an attorney. At the same time, Christopher was looking into an extrajudicial approach. He learned about Tails while reading about Edward Snowden, who used the operating system to hide his activities from the National Security Agency. In July 2021, with the software running, Christopher called up Ahmia, a darknet search engine, and looked for a website offering to connect customers with assassins. He settled on a site called the Sinaloa Cartel Marketplace. Christopher created an extravagantly cryptic username, mjd210eKd69BxG4IsJD, and began messaging other users. “Good day Admin! I have a couple targets—husband wife—that I am needing removed,” he wrote. “However, it is known that they and I don’t quite see eye-to-eye on something. I am a couple days away from submitting the job as an ‘accident,’ but before I do, I was wondering, in your experience, even if it is an obvious ‘accident,’ what kind of investigation will be run against me, knowing that we are not on the best of terms?” Two weeks later, Christopher transferred $16,000 worth of bitcoin and submitted orders to kill the Corderos. 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. Christopher had been raised religious, and in his mid-20s he began to lean more on his faith for guidance on life’s biggest questions. He thought less about his career and more about his higher calling. “God changed my thinking about how a man is to be the leader of his family and how children are actually blessings and rewards,” he said in a speech at his church. “There are many biblical examples about how our dreams may not be what God wants for us. Job did not want his children to die or his storehouses to be destroyed or his health to be impaired, but God’s perfect will allowed this to happen. Jeremiah wanted to marry a nice girl and have a family, but instead God used him as a prophet of death.” Exactly one year after his vasectomy, Christopher had it reversed. Michelle documented the family’s life on a blog, and she described how her sense of self, and her role in her marriage, changed as she read books like Created to Be His Help Meet and The Power of Motherhood: What the Bible Says About Mothers. “I entered marriage thinking of it as an equal partnership, knowing but not understanding what it meant that my husband is my head,” Michelle wrote. “I had NO idea the importance of my role as a mother, and the significance God placed on motherhood. I had no idea that God called barrenness a CURSE, and children the greatest blessing he can bestow. I had no idea that God said so much about children in the Bible, they are heritage, a REWARD, a blessing, precious little lambs, arrows in the hands of a mighty warrior and so much more.” Michelle Pence used her blog and social-media accounts to portray her marriage to Christopher as happy and conventional. Photo: YouTube/@candmpence The Pences came to “trust God to open and close the womb as He sees fit.”

By 2017, Michelle had given birth to ten children. One died at five months from sudden infant death syndrome; there were also several miscarriages. Another child was born with cerebral palsy. Needing space, the family had gone to live with Christopher’s parents in a semi-rural town 25 miles northeast of Seattle. They turned their property into a homestead with gardens, beehives, dogs, chickens, turkeys, a lilac-crowned parrot, and a succession of cows named Steak, Dinner, Beef, Burrito, and Norman. The kids slept in bunk beds, and everyone traveled to appointments and church in a short bus. Michelle chafed when doctors advised her to stop having kids; when a social worker questioned her ability to effectively homeschool a child with a disability; when someone at the grocery store casually remarked on the size of her family. She was passionate about educating her children herself and valued, above all, the freedom to teach a curriculum focused on the Bible. The Pences considered the text a straightforward account of history, and every morning, before sunrise, Christopher led the family in studying Scripture. To Michelle, Christopher was “the handsome man who makes it all happen around here” and “a fantastic example of loving me as Christ loved the church, even when I am very much unlovable.” He was the breadwinner and had a succession of technology-related jobs, including managing a computer store and working as a network architect, before landing a job at Microsoft. Michelle described him with devotion as “a great priest, prophet, provider and protector for his family” who “truly lives out what it means to be a follower of Christ, to deny himself and live for his God, and his family.” 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 Pences worked with traditional agencies, submitting to hours of training, interviews with social workers, psychological reviews, and home studies. Opportunities in Colombia and Florida didn’t pan out. One organization blocked them from adopting a group of five siblings because the Pences already had children of similar ages — not optimal, in the agency’s view. After a few years of dashed hopes, Michelle gave birth again in 2018. That September, taking advantage of Microsoft’s six-week paternity-leave policy, the Pences packed into a motor home and headed east. They saw the Mammoth Hot Springs, worked a miniature Model T production line at the Henry Ford Museum, and stood on a beach in Acadia National Park while the Atlantic rushed over their feet. At some point along the journey, Michelle logged on to a message board for parents with large, homeschooled families. A mother of six in Massachusetts had posted that she and her husband were looking for someone to take care of their children temporarily while they worked through some marital issues. Michelle sent her a message. The woman, Christina Cordero, and her husband, Francisco, were struggling. They’d had a single-story, four-bedroom house in Chicopee, in Western Massachusetts, but had recently sold it and moved into an RV. Their oldest child was developmentally disabled, and finding adequate housing “proved impossible with such a large family,” Christina told me in a Facebook message. Cisco, as her husband was known, could only find work as a temp. “I was offering six months rent up front, but no landlord would consider us.” Cisco had personal problems that compounded their troubles. He admitted to the authorities at one point that his sexual behavior was a continuous challenge for his family. He had fought an addiction to pornography since he was a teenager, and the Massachusetts Department of Children & Families (DCF) had investigated him for looking at child porn and showing sexual images to his children. He denied the allegations, and the state took no action.