upon which prosecutors would balance Paul Le Roux’s story— because it would be Le Roux, not the defendants, who would dominate the trial.

With a twelve-member jury in place, consisting of ten women and two men, Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Egan stood up to deliver his opening remarks. “On February 4, 2012, Catherine Lee was riding in the back seat of a van,” he began. With her were two men she barely knew: Samia and Stillwell, who had contacted her under the guise of seeking real estate and now intended to murder her. But the story, the prosecutor said, “started long before Cath- erine Lee got into the van that night.”

The narrative that Egan wove together began with Samia, an old friend of Dave Smith’s, working alongside Hunter at Echelon, a front group for Le Roux’s mercenary teams. For years, Egan said, Samia had been asking Smith and Hunter for “wet work”— assassination missions. In 2011, after Le Roux murdered Smith and elevated Hunter to head the kill teams, Samia’s opportunity finally came. He in turn recruited his buddy Stillwell, a weekend warrior type who often falsely told people he’d worked as a mili- tary sniper. And the two of them, directed by Hunter, flew to the Philippines for a salary of $10,000 a month plus $25,000 in “bonus money” for each job. “These guys had one purpose: to murder,” Egan said. He described the van they’d done it in, and the key found in Samia’s house. He told the jurors that they would see video of Hunter—from the DEA’s sting operation—describing the murder in detail. “And then you will hear from Paul Le Roux,” he concluded. “He will tell you in his own words how his criminal organization worked.”

The defense attorneys’ openings consisted primarily of remind- ers to the jury that the government had to prove their allegations beyond a reasonable doubt. “Well, Mr. Egan was pretty dramatic, wasn’t he?” Samia’s attorney quipped. “His drama is not evi- dence.”

To me their task seemed herculean. Stillwell had confessed and pointed to Samia as the triggerman. Hunter was caught on tape