Investigating an online murder for hire ring (Part One): ‘Lake City Quiet Pills’

The internet has brought about a new age in communication, and with it came a whole slew of new and old businesses intent on using the global connectivity offered through the web to improve their business practices.  Thanks to the internet, you can buy groceries online, pay your utility bills, and if some are to be believed, hire a contract killer to conduct covert assassinations on the other side of the globe.

Reddit, which uses the motto, “front page of the internet,” offers many a home away from home in the digital wilderness of the World Wide Web.  No matter your interest, you can find a community of like-minded folks sharing pictures, memes, and written content about it, and anonymously join in on the fun for free.  It stands as a haven for political debate, unabashed fan-boying (or girling), trolling, and in many cases, the dregs of society that might otherwise have been forced wash their hair and interact with real human beings.  You can find anyone on Reddit, from the middle-aged businessman to the pre-teen Ariana Grande fan – and that inherently means a certain percentage of them are going to be creepy, ignorant… or even downright terrifying.

Enter the Reddit user ReligionOfPeace.  When browsing through his post history (which ends abruptly a little over seven years ago) you can quickly determine a few things: first, he was a creep, serving as a moderator and admin for a sub-Reddit called “Jailbait” that specialized in pornography featuring under-aged (looking?) women.  Second, he presents himself fairly clearly as someone with a good deal of military experience – often participating in conversations that involve CIA operations and occasionally mentioning his time in the Navy during World War II.  Third, he makes common references to the phrase, “Lake City Quiet Pills.”

Finally, if you dig a little deeper into the history of the user, you’ll also find that he died browsing Reddit in 2009, as reported by someone claiming to be a close friend that went by the screen name “2-6” – who according to adjoining accounts on other sites and forums, may have the real name “Kim” and also regularly went by “AngelTwo-Six.”  Like ROP, 2-6 posted about some interesting things – such as torture interrogation techniques, on Reddit and FARK.  Kim explains that he or she intends to “dump” ReligionOfPeace’s ashes (who may have gone by the name Milo, but I’ll refer to as ROP) on the grounds of a strip mall that was being built on the land that once was ROP’s family farm.  According to the post, he was seventy-nine years old at the time of his death, though some have countered that fact as not quite lining up properly with ROP’s claims of being a World War II veteran:

I’m the person who provided ReligionOfPeace the space for “That Old Guy’s Image Host.”

Milo died today. He was 79 years old. He died at his desk lookin at your site. Milo was a mean old fucker. Mean and onery. He hooked me up with my first gig when I got out of the Army. I did’nt like findin him like that. Milo don’t have any living relatives and no real friends, and other than his landlady and a few people where he worked, he did’nt talk to anyone about much of anything. Me he just tallerated. As I said, he was mean. I think he used that as a shield to keep people away from him.

Milo thought god was some kinda con game thought up by some lazy sons-a-bitches who didn’t want to work everyday. So he’s going in to the fire on monday without a service just like he wanted. I’m planning to dump his ashes in the woods in PA near where he was born. Can’t put them right there cause theirs a mall there now.

I gave the girl next door his raggedy old cat and most of his books. His computers and tronic shit he tagged for the disabled vets and VVA. All the rest of the stuff is for the salvation army. All those years and everything he owned fits in the trunk of my car.

The internet has brought about a new age in communication, and with it came a whole slew of new and old businesses intent on using the global connectivity offered through the web to improve their business practices.  Thanks to the internet, you can buy groceries online, pay your utility bills, and if some are to be believed, hire a contract killer to conduct covert assassinations on the other side of the globe.

Reddit, which uses the motto, “front page of the internet,” offers many a home away from home in the digital wilderness of the World Wide Web.  No matter your interest, you can find a community of like-minded folks sharing pictures, memes, and written content about it, and anonymously join in on the fun for free.  It stands as a haven for political debate, unabashed fan-boying (or girling), trolling, and in many cases, the dregs of society that might otherwise have been forced wash their hair and interact with real human beings.  You can find anyone on Reddit, from the middle-aged businessman to the pre-teen Ariana Grande fan – and that inherently means a certain percentage of them are going to be creepy, ignorant… or even downright terrifying.

Enter the Reddit user ReligionOfPeace.  When browsing through his post history (which ends abruptly a little over seven years ago) you can quickly determine a few things: first, he was a creep, serving as a moderator and admin for a sub-Reddit called “Jailbait” that specialized in pornography featuring under-aged (looking?) women.  Second, he presents himself fairly clearly as someone with a good deal of military experience – often participating in conversations that involve CIA operations and occasionally mentioning his time in the Navy during World War II.  Third, he makes common references to the phrase, “Lake City Quiet Pills.”

Finally, if you dig a little deeper into the history of the user, you’ll also find that he died browsing Reddit in 2009, as reported by someone claiming to be a close friend that went by the screen name “2-6” – who according to adjoining accounts on other sites and forums, may have the real name “Kim” and also regularly went by “AngelTwo-Six.”  Like ROP, 2-6 posted about some interesting things – such as torture interrogation techniques, on Reddit and FARK.  Kim explains that he or she intends to “dump” ReligionOfPeace’s ashes (who may have gone by the name Milo, but I’ll refer to as ROP) on the grounds of a strip mall that was being built on the land that once was ROP’s family farm.  According to the post, he was seventy-nine years old at the time of his death, though some have countered that fact as not quite lining up properly with ROP’s claims of being a World War II veteran:

I’m the person who provided ReligionOfPeace the space for “That Old Guy’s Image Host.”

Milo died today. He was 79 years old. He died at his desk lookin at your site. Milo was a mean old fucker. Mean and onery. He hooked me up with my first gig when I got out of the Army. I did’nt like findin him like that. Milo don’t have any living relatives and no real friends, and other than his landlady and a few people where he worked, he did’nt talk to anyone about much of anything. Me he just tallerated. As I said, he was mean. I think he used that as a shield to keep people away from him.

Milo thought god was some kinda con game thought up by some lazy sons-a-bitches who didn’t want to work everyday. So he’s going in to the fire on monday without a service just like he wanted. I’m planning to dump his ashes in the woods in PA near where he was born. Can’t put them right there cause theirs a mall there now.

I gave the girl next door his raggedy old cat and most of his books. His computers and tronic shit he tagged for the disabled vets and VVA. All the rest of the stuff is for the salvation army. All those years and everything he owned fits in the trunk of my car.

I don’t know what else to say. I’ll miss him. Miserable bastard.”

If that was the end of that, this would just be a story about an old veteran with a thing for young girls.  The thing is, this story actually gets quite a bit stranger.

Prior to his death, ROP established an image hosting site to deposit pornographic images on.  The site, which had the title “That Old Guy’s Image Host,” was at the domain www.LakeCityQuietPills.com – though the site went offline in 2014, just about five years after ROPs announced death.  By viewing the site via “internet wayback machine” (a tool that shows what was hosted on sites on certain dates in the past) it doesn’t present anything too out of the ordinary, as far as creepy old guy porn stashes go… but prior to the page going down, some clever folks thought to look, or accidentally stumbled upon, the HTML coding that structured the site… and they found something rather interesting.

Hidden amid the HTML coding were short statements littered with jargon, acronyms, and sometimes geographical coordinates.  The added lines look a lot like requests for specific personnel, almost like job postings:

Other postings include hotel room numbers and other types of specific locations.  By tying this strange discovery to the Reddit and FARK.com posts of ROP and his mourning friend 2-7, a picture begins to develop; the website appears to host requests for contract killers.

This brings the focus back around the to the domain name and frequent mentions of “Lake City Quiet Pills” on various internet platforms.  On more than one occasion, what seems like a motto of sorts is shown in the HTML, or even posted publicly by ROP, that says, “Dispensing Lake City Quiet Pills to lousy bastards in need of permanent rest since 1968.”

If you decide to google “Lake City Quiet Pills,” you may notice that Google’s autocomplete will attempt to fill in the rest of the search term before you’re able to finish typing.  It doesn’t autocomplete the phrase you intended to search (or the band that recently surfaced by the same name) – rather it autocompletes to the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant, on Lake City road, in Independence, MO.

According to the factory’s website, the Lake City Ammunition Plant “is the world’s leading producer of high-quality ammunition and links for the military at its Lake City plant in Independence, MO. Small Caliber Systems is also a leader in the global defense-systems marketplace supplying the U.S. government and its allies with quality, cost-effective non-standard (non-NATO) ammunition.”

To recap, ROP’s frequent references to Lake City Quiet Pills seems to refer to ammunition, making the motto, “Dispensing Lake City Quiet Pills to lousy bastards in need of permanent rest since 1968,” pretty logical.  The man who frequently posted on Reddit about his military experience in World War 2, who claimed to participate in “operations” until he was too old to continue, was also the elderly moderator of a sub-Reddit (or forum) dedicated to sharing pornographic images of young women.  On the site he built to host said images, he also stuck hidden “job requests” that seemed to identify targets and require specific skill sets.

Although the pieces start to seem to come together, that doesn’t mean the whole thing isn’t just one big hoax.  All of the posts, codes, and logical leaps thus far amount to little more than circumstantial evidence surrounding an old man’s creepy hobby… right up until a Reddit brought the whole thing up prior to the website going down.  Almost immediately, the hidden HTML messages were switched to using a form of encryption, despite ROP already being dead, suggesting that his old buddy 2-7, or someone else, continued to maintain it.

Stranger still, at least one of the old HTML job requests appears to tie the site and ROP to the very real assassination of a senior Hamas military commander in 2010… who was drugged, electrocuted, and suffocated to death in Dubai.  Although images of suspects were released, the assassination remains unsolved.

To be continued in Part 2.

 

Image courtesy of CVLTNation