During the earliest days of the pandemic, the British tech journalist Carl Miller was clued into an incredible story.
A hacker and IT expert named Chris Monteiro had discovered a page on the dark web featuring a “kill list,” where clients from all over the world had posted details of people they wanted dead, along with how much they were willing to pay to have the job done. The page was a scam, with the person behind it pocketing the Bitcoin and having no intention of following through with the killings. Nevertheless, Monteiro took his findings to Miller, and they both concluded that anyone willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to murder someone would not be put off by the hurdle of encountering a scam artist. It may have been a fake website, but the people on the list were in very real danger.
Miller tried to alert the police, but they failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation, even seeming to doubt his sanity. Desperate, Miller set about warning those on the list himself. With the global nature of this endeavor, COVID-imposed travel restrictions proved prohibitive, so he assembled a crack team of multi-continental freelancers to help him warn those at risk before it was too late. That mission is the premise for Kill List, and it’s a tremendous one. But there’s one major problem: Miller’s hosting style.
If you’re overseeing such a mammoth operation, which has consumed your every waking thought for years, with literal life-and-death stakes, it’s natural to want to talk about what that experience was like for you. And within reason, as a listener, I want to hear about it.
Within reason. But, early on especially, Miller’s habit of centering himself at every juncture is off-putting. He talks far too often of how anxious he is to be cold-calling the people in imminent danger, and the bad job he does at imparting this potentially life-saving information. Again, there’s certainly a place for that, but in those first couple of episodes, far too much time is taken up with his nineties-Hugh Grant style bumbling self-effacement.
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These tendencies aren’t helped by Miller’s gratingly florid descriptions; it’s the sort of show where a man’s “light blue eyes twinkle with a deep and joyful pride.” In addition, Miller frequently exhibits a baffling grasp of both human nature and common sense, seeming shocked that a person getting a call from a bungling stranger wouldn’t immediately believe everything that stranger said, and responding in English to answering machines with voicemails in French and Mandarin.
To a large extent, however, Kill List’s central premise is just so gripping, so very much like the plot of a nail-biting movie, that it’s able to survive Miller’s less-than-ideal narration. And, as the season progresses, it helps that the world of the podcast grows ever larger. We hear from more victims, the freelance journalists tasked with finding them, and – eventually – some helpful law enforcement officers. The fact that, after the opening six episodes, the remainder of the show will be dedicated to following through on individual stories of those on the list is a definite positive step; the recently released episode 7, the tale of a teenager required to fake her own death by the FBI in order to catch her potential killer, has already been a highlight.
Depressing trends emerge throughout. Most people on the list are women, mostly put there by abusive ex-partners, hoping to avoid a hefty divorce payout, or to punish them for having the audacity to leave. The details of the planned crimes are shocking, but perhaps even more so is how generally unsurprised the women are to learn about the extent of the vindictive cruelty aimed at them. Though each has their own personal horror stories, the portrait that their collective experiences paint is truly bleak.
Additionally, Miller and the team’s interactions with police forces around the world imply that, with a few exceptions, law enforcement just isn’t ready for the massive dangers posed by the dark web. Across the season, when ardently seeking help, the journalists are laughed out of the offices of police, ignored, gaslit — and on one occasion, officers inform a perpetrator of their would-be victim’s accusations, endangering them further. If there’s one lesson learned from Kill List, it should be that those meant to protect us have to be better prepared for these deadly new technological threats.
Along those lines then, ultimately, the most important thing about Miller’s podcast is that it’s done genuine, life-saving good. It’s raised vital alarms, led to numerous arrests made off the back of his investigation, and prevented numerous murders. Miller has a right to be proud of himself.
Yet the gravity of the investigation and all it has accomplished make the uneven listening experience all the more surprising. A story of this magnitude surely deserved a better delivery.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.