When the marriage of Stephanie M. Russell failed and the battle for custody of her two children intensified, the pediatrician from Louisville, Kentucky, contacted a hitman to “disappear” her ex-husband.
In a phone call in May 2022, the KidzLife Pediatrics administrator spoke on the phone with a man in Chicago about the murder of his ex-partner.
“You obviously want him killed, right?” the hitman asked in the recorded call, according to the plea agreement obtained by People.
“I want him to disappear completely from my life.”Russell responded.
As the conversation continued, the woman asked how the hitman planned to proceed. “I mean, do you like them to disappear? Do you shoot them on the road? What’s happening? Or should I just not know?”
Faced with such questions, the man on the other end of the phone responded: “The price dictates. Is that how it works. The more work you have to do, the more it will cost youbut it could be, do you want it to look like a suicide? Do you want me to do it?”.
“Yes,” Russell said. “That would be surprising.”
But the pediatric specialist was actually not talking to a hitman, but to an undercover FBI agent.
He agreed to pay him $7,000 for the “job.”
Russell, 53, pleaded guilty to federal charges of trying to hire a hitman to kill her ex-husband. She remains jailed pending sentencing scheduled for July 31, and could receive up to 15 years in prison.
In July 2021, Russell began asking several KidzLife employees if they knew anyone who would be willing to kill her ex-husband, according to the plea agreement.
The following spring, someone tipped off the FBI, and as part of the investigation, a cooperating witness gave the pediatrician the phone number of an alleged hitman in Chicago.
After several phone calls, Russell agreed to give the man $7,000 in exchange for killing her ex-husband.
On May 18, 2022, Russell was caught on surveillance video leaving $3,500 in a sample box outside the KidzLife building for the hitman to pick up. The FBI arrested the woman the next day.
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