A mum has been jailed after she tried to hire a hitman to kill a colleague she had had a fling with.
Helen Hewlett, 44, was jailed for seven-and-a-half years after she paid Bitcoin worth over £20,000 to a website on the dark web called ‘Online Killers Market’, all in an effort to get Paul Belton, 50, murdered in what would appear to be an accident.
It came after the pair had a brief fling, before Mr Belton spurned the married mum-of-five’s advances.
Hewlett was also given an extended five-year license period on top of her custodial sentence, after a judge ruled she was a “dangerous offender”.
She denied soliciting murder and stalking, between January 1, 2020, and August 13, last year, but was found unanimously guilty on both charges following an 11-day trial.
The trial heard how the website Hewlett used was an “absolute sham” designed to steal money, and the Bitcoin ended up in a Romanian account.
But prosecutors argued that despite that, she had intended to have the married dad-of-three killed.
Hewlett of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, who was given a concurrent three-month sentence for stalking, was earlier cleared of a more serious offence of stalking causing alarm or distress.
Jurors were told how she and Mr Belton had flirted with each other when they were both working at a food factory in Fakenham, Norfolk.
The pair had had a single sexual encounter in her car in the factory’s overflow car park, which Mr Belton was said to have immediately regretted.
Judge Katharine Moore told Hewlett today: “You were angry and upset when Paul Belton did not wish to pursue a relationship with you.
“Your response to that rejection was to embark on a course of action which began with attempts to engage him in communication, progressed into stalking and culminated in solicitation to murder.”
The trial heard how Hewlett became “utterly fixated” with Mr Belton and repeatedly sent him emails begging to see him again, as well as nude photographs of herself, but he constantly made it clear he did not want anything to do with her.
Even after Mr Belton was made redundant and got a new job, Hewlett got a job in the same factory to pursue him.
She called him a “coward” for not wanting to speak to her and posted comments on Facebook, saying that he “needs shooting in the bollocks”.
Hewlett then later quit at the factory in August 2021, claiming she had been bullied by Mr Belton and that he had sexually harassed other women.
Management rejected her claims as “malicious” after Mr Belton showed them emails she had sent him.
The trial heard how in January last year Hewlett set up the crytocurrency account and transferred £22,601 into it from her own accounts across 35 transactions, using savings, an overdraft and two loans from the Royal Bank of Scotland.
She then used a browser to search the dark web before she found the sham site.