Melody Sasser’s Jealousy-Fueled Murder-For-Hire Failure
Melody Sasser/FacebookMelody Sasser became enraged and obsessed after her hiking buddy moved away to be with his fiancée.
It was a match made on, well, Match.com. In 2020, 47-year-old Melody Sasser matched with a man named David Wallace, and the two quickly became hiking buddies, walking the trails around the Knoxville, Tennessee area.
But Wallace eventually moved to Alabama to be with his fiancée Jennifer, and Sasser fell into a deep, loathsome rage. In the fall of 2022, she reportedly drove to Wallace’s new home in Alabama to meet the couple. According to an official criminal complaint, when she learned he and Jennifer were going to be married, she told him, “I hope you both fall off a cliff and die.”
It wasn’t the last Wallace and Jennifer heard from Sasser. After she left, the couple discovered that Jennifer’s car had been keyed, and they received a series of threatening phone calls, with the caller’s voice electronically disguised.
Then, in January 2023, Sasser took it a step further. The apparently tech-savvy Sasser visited the dark web hitman site Online Killers Market (OKM) and put out a hit on Jennifer.
Sasser, allegedly using the pseudonym “Cattree,” said the hit “needs to seem random or [an] accident. Or plant drugs, do not want a long investigation.” As is standard for these types of situations, “Cattree” also included personal information about Jennifer and David, including their places of employment and the cars they drove, along with photos of Jennifer.
“She recently moved in with her new husband. She works at home and in office in Birmingham,” Cattree wrote. “They have three dogs that bark and jump but nice dogs.”
A couple of months later, Cattree responded to OKM again in a frustrated message, writing, “2 weeks ago you said is 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 assigned hitman then declined the offer, deeming it “too risky,” after which “Cattree” began sharing Jennifer’s information from the Strava app, an exercise app that tracks mostly outdoor cycling and running activities.
By April 2023, a foreign law enforcement agency had informed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that Jennifer Wallace was the target of an attempted murder-for-hire plot. U.S. authorities notified the Wallaces — and Jennifer said she felt fairly confident she knew who the culprit was.
Authorities were quickly able to connect Melody Sasser to the “Cattree” username and arrested her on murder-for-hire charges on May 18, 2023.
