GoKawiilChristopher 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
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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.
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.
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