Melody Sasser’s happy place was the Great Smoky Mountains. Her social media is full of pictures of sunset-amplified hills, majestic waterfalls and mossy boulders—the natural serenity near her home in Knoxville, TN. In one Facebook photo, Sasser, her cheeks flushed and short blonde hair damp from perspiration, stands on a rocky clearing atop a mountain, smiling for the camera. In another, she’s crossing a small stone bridge with two walking poles, snowflakes accumulating on the ground and swirling around her delighted face. Hiking was something she loved, it was her escape and release, and Sasser forged a community of fellow nature lovers in those hills.
Hiking was also at the heart of a relationship she developed with a man she met online — one whose wife she would later try to have killed.
The saga of Melody Sasser’s near-deadly situation-ship is outlandishly bizarre and yet reverberates with the very real losses, disappointments and frustrations of modern life and love. Based on exchanges with friends and hiking buddies, Sasser had been a nice person, good friend, dedicated employee and devoted daughter. But 48 and divorced, she was likely sick of being alone. One ill-timed experience that she may have considered a betrayal was enough to push her to the brink of violence.
Sasser grew up in Hamilton, AL, the daughter of a doctor. According to a friend, she had one older sister, Rhonda, and a brother who died as a baby before Sasser was born. Sasser was adored by her parents. “Melody was her mother’s heartbeat,” the friend told me. Sasser’s father died of heart complications related to diabetes in 1993 when Sasser was still in high school. Less than a decade later, Sasser’s mother was diagnosed with bone cancer. Sasser and her sister nursed their mother through her illness, until her death in about 2000. Sasser, both parents gone when she was just in her 20s, was left to spend the rest of her life carrying and trying to cope with those losses.
After graduating from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with a degree in Environmental Science, she got a job as a specialist in environmental compliance for a company that runs truck stops across North America. She drove a Hyundai Santa Fe, a sensible choice.
She didn’t have the best luck with men. “She sucks at picking partners,” her friend told me. Sasser had been married, but the relationship didn’t last. According to the friend, in the wake of divorce, she focused on rebuilding her life, getting in shape, being the best version of herself. That’s why she started hiking. Friends cheered her on, one commenting on an updated Facebook photo that Sasser hadn’t aged even a minute. “That is so sweet, thank you, I feel it though,” Sasser responded, adding a crying-laughing emoji.
When she wasn't working, Sasser’s beloved hiking took up a lot of her time. One fellow hiker told me that Sasser was “friendly and upbeat.” She met friends on the trail, each pushing the other to do a bit more, go a little further. In July 2022, when Sasser became a member of the “900 Miler Club” in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, she was feted on the trail, her hiking buddies lifting their walking poles into a makeshift canopy that she walked under as she laughed with pure happiness.
Sasser cultivated a full, rich personal life with meaningful relationships. She got regular exercise. She went bowling with girlfriends and attended University of Tennessee football games. She had posted, years ago, photos of little dogs: Dusty, and Shuler—smoosh-faced Pekingese, classic lapdogs. Sasser had dressed them up in an array of Halloween costumes— bumblebee, fireman and cop.
Then Sasser met a man, Mike*, she really liked on Match.com. He was also living in Knoxville; they both loved to hike. Sasser helped him plan an Appalachian Trail hike by making reservations for hostels and other rest points along the way, and she took care of his car while he was gone. But sometime after the big hike, Mike moved to Prattville, AL, more than 300 miles from Knoxville, and in the fall of 2022 he told Sasser he was engaged to be married to a woman named Jessica*. According to court documents, Sasser was furious. Her attorney and others hypothesized that her feeling of rejection brought back earlier feelings of loss she experienced when her father died. “I hope you both fall off a cliff and die,” she told him. Sasser then drove the five hours to Mike’s home in Prattville and showed up, unannounced.
According to court documents, also in the fall of 2022, Jessica noticed that someone had keyed the side of her car. And Jessica started receiving unpleasant phone calls from someone, later determined to be Sasser, using an electronic device to disguise their voice. They were threatening, alarming, and appeared to be from Voice Over IP (VOIP) or computer-generated phone numbers, which couldn’t be traced. “You know what would make the world a better place?” the anonymous caller asked. “You not in it.” Jessica eventually had to contact her cell phone provider and ask them to put a block on all VOIP calls. They installed a security system and bought a gun. And still, Jessica agonized, asking Mike to check every room in the house, every closet, to make sure there was no one waiting to pounce.
Mike and Jessica didn’t know that Sasser was also watching them.
Sasser had shed her permanent grin, her need to please. She was now a lion waiting in the cool, tall grass, observing her former love interest and rival with patience. Sasser recorded their habits, where Jessica liked to shop and which days she worked.
Sasser felt herself spinning out of control — it was no longer enough to just watch. She sat down at her computer. Sasser probably didn’t have a lot of experience on the so-called “dark web,” a hidden part of the internet that requires special software to access. The sites on this corner of the Internet were much different than hiking forums and Facebook. This was a place driven by shadowy secrets, anonymous posters, illegal activities. In other words, it was the perfect place to find a hit man to kill Mike’s wife.
The following section is mainly based on court documents.
By the end of December 2022, Sasser found an illicit site: Online Killers Market (OKM). The website had over 12,000 registered members from all over the world, giving it a sheen of legitimacy. The world of OKM was a dramatic departure from Sasser’s pastiche of tiny dogs and tailgating. There, you could find someone who would do almost anything—from computer hacking and kidnapping to extortion and acid attacks. But this dark underbelly, the right person with the ability to take care of a big problem, was what Sasser decided she needed. She plowed forward.
A couple of weeks later, Sasser placed an order on OKM. After choosing the username “Cattree,” one last nod to her wholesome existence, Sasser identified her victim and indicated that she could be found in Prattville, AL. She provided Jessica’s work and home addresses, and the details of the car she was likely to be driving. She uploaded a picture so the hit man would recognize her. Sasser also provided Mike’s car model and license plate. Mike worked part-time at Publix, she mentioned, and the couple had three dogs that might jump and bark. But they were nice dogs, she underscored, perhaps concerned about their being harmed. “It needs to seem random or accident,” she typed. “Or plant drugs. Do not want a long investigation.” A quote for the job popped up on the screen and Sasser paid it in Bitcoin—a virtual and less-easily traced currency—at a cryptocurrency ATM in Knoxville. Apparently, the total amount for killing the wife of a man Sasser spent time with in the Smokies was $9,750.
After Sasser paid the OKM fee and submitted her request, she continued to actively track Mike and his wife, uploading helpful information to administrators at OKM who were working on fulfilling Sasser’s order. Both Mike and Jessica used an app called Strava, which was networked with their Garmin watches—the kind of thing that counts steps and checks heart rate and other fitness and health-related concerns. Crucially, it also shared location data, which Sasser was able to access. In March, “Cattree” messaged OKM to inform them that Jessica had worked from home the day before, and that she had taken a 2-mile walk “by herself.” The implication was clear: It was the perfect opportunity to strike.
Sasser was starting to get impatient. She had forked over thousands of dollars to an anonymous website—which was a lot of money to not have someone killed. On March 22, “Cattree” sent a desperate message to the OKM administrator: “I have waited for two months and 11 days and the job is not completed. 2 weeks ago you said it was being worked on and would be done in a week. The job is still not done. Does it need to be assigned to someone else. Will it be done. What is the delay. When will it be done.” The administrator informed Sasser that the first hit man assigned had deemed it too risky, and that the second hit man wanted more money. Sasser agreed and headed back to the cryptocurrency ATM. She fed another $2,500 into the machine to kill a woman she didn’t even know.
Life Imitates Art?
Hit men are having a bit of a moment, culturally speaking. There have been several recent stories about middle-aged women doing exactly what Sasser did: going on the dark web and trying to have a lover, ex-lover or love rival killed. In 2023, a 38-year-old woman in Nevada was sentenced to five years after she sent Bitcoin through a dark web hit man website in an effort to have her ex-husband whacked. Yue Zhou, a 42-year-old woman in New York, is alleged to have offered cash and sexual favors through another dark website, hoping to have her lover’s wife killed; she was charged in summer 2024. And in May 2024, Michelle Murphy, a 58-year-old woman in Texas, was sentenced to nine years in prison for trying to hire a hit man to kill the woman that Murphy’s boyfriend was having an affair with. Murphy’s attorney told reporters that Murphy was a good and kind lady, who had been affected by “ongoing mistreatment by men in her life.”
Hit Man, the 2023 movie starring a very chiseled Glen Powell, told the real-ish story of Gary Johnson, a college professor who moonlights as a fake hit man for local police, hoping to entrap people looking for just such services. As in the movie, many of the services that advertise online, even on the dark web, aren’t legit murder-for-hire operations. Many are just scams, willing to take money from desperate people. After all, who are you going to complain to when you send crypto to have someone killed and they don’t come through? Some of these sites are sting operations, either run by law enforcement or feeding information to them.
And so, what Sasser didn’t know—as her impatience and upturned sense of injustice grew—was that she wasn’t the only one watching. The Online Killers Market wasn’t a genuine hit man referral service. It was run by fraudsters. And in late April, after Sasser complained about the website’s slow service and paid additional money to bring in a second hit man, the case landed on the desk of Gregory Martin, a Special Agent with the United States Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations. (I reached out to Martin but did not receive a response.)
The information provided to Homeland Security didn’t include Sasser’s identity, but it did include details about the intended victim. According to court documents, local law enforcement then headed to Mike and Jessica’s home to warn Jessica about the threat to her life. Jessica immediately suggested a suspect: Melody Sasser. Sasser’s unannounced visit, not long before the trouble started, had left them uneasy, and it seemed possible that she was behind the anonymous threatening phone calls.
When police analyzed Sasser’s cell phone account, it matched up with some of the calls Jessica received. They learned that Sasser’s Santa Fe had made multiple trips to Prattville, her license plate pinging on traffic cameras. And that wasn’t all; the crypto ATM has a camera that captures an image of anyone facilitating a transaction. When police searched the records, there she was: Melody Sasser, trying to pay a hit man in Bitcoin.
According to court documents, on May 18, 2023, law enforcement showed up at Sasser’s home with a search warrant. They found a treasure trove of inculpatory evidence: a journal in which Sasser recorded a list of hit man websites, the username she used on OKM, a handwritten account of her communications with OKM and a full accounting of her payments to the site. Sasser kept a stack of cash with a sticky note listing a Bitcoin address. Next to the cash, she kept a list of Jessica’s personal details. Finally, on her laptop, police found the thumbnail photograph of Jessica that had been sent to OKM.
Sasser was arrested and when interviewed by law enforcement, she confessed. She must have been desperate to spill the beans, all the secretive plotting and malice she had been holding in for months. In a mug shot released to the public, Sasser looks exhausted. She had kept up the highlights in her short blonde hair, but she has deep puffy bags underneath her eyes. (I reached out to Sasser directly and through her lawyer but did not hear back.)
In December 2023, Sasser, who had no prior record, pled guilty to using the Internet in the commission of murder-for-hire. Her attorney told the judge that she was remorseful and apologized to Jessica. Sasser said she had been abusing alcohol, that she had never really recovered from the losses in her life, including her parents’ deaths. Sasser’s attorney offered that she was accustomed to pretending she was OK, being a rock for others but not wanting to burden even her closest friends with her struggles. “And it caught up,” he told the court.
He also pointed to her otherwise unblemished record and work in the community, including delivering flowers to people in assisted living and being involved in the United Way. But it all just seemed to complicate the bigger picture of an otherwise average woman living a very dark double life. Annie Svolto, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, told me that she’s still unclear on why Sasser wanted Jessica dead. “I don’t think Sasser knows why she wanted her dead either,” she says.
Sasser was sentenced to 100 months—a little over eight years—in prison. Friends have been left to reconcile the sunshiny woman they knew with the one now living in a federal penitentiary. An old friend of Sasser’s told me that the fact that Sasser pleaded guilty “proves to me she is honest and realized she went too far.” “I believe Melody is trying to make a wrong right again.” No one I spoke to condoned Sasser’s actions, but many empathized with her. “I’m 46 and sometimes I feel at the mercy of my hormones,” one of Sasser’s hiking acquaintances told me. Everyone expressed relief that no one was physically harmed.
When released in June 2030 (her present date of release, which considers time served in custody prior to sentencing), she will be supervised for three additional years. She was also ordered to pay $5,389.31 in restitution, but an additional fine was waived when the court determined Sasser doesn’t have sufficient funds. The Court also recommended that she receive 500 hours of substance abuse treatment in prison.
Sasser now resides at FCI Tallahassee, a low-security federal prison with over 1,200 inmates. She spends her days in a khaki uniform, likely working a menial job and participating in counseling. Perhaps she has joined an intramural sports team like softball, basketball or volleyball. Hiking in Sasser’s beloved Smoky Mountains will be off the menu for a while. Over the coming years of confinement, she’ll have to find another way to clear her head and figure out why her life so suddenly fell off a cliff—and if she can ever get it back.
*Names have been changed
The details of this account are based in large part on public court documents, the sources linked in the story and exchanges with members of Melody’s hiking community. We reached out to Melody Sasser and her attorney multiple times, but they did not respond. We attempted to contact Mike and Jessica, but were not successful.
Imagery: Getty Images.
