Hitmen, Bunkers & Bondage: Inside the Case of Washington Baby Doctor Ronald Ilg
By Emily Shugerman
Daily Beast
June 29, 2021
Dr. Ronald Ilg
The petition for a restraining order, from a woman in Spokane,
Washington, is straight to the point. She and the respondent, a man
named Ron Ilg, are going through a difficult divorce, and she is afraid
he will try to hurt her. Asked for evidence of any harassing behavior,
she writes simply: “Respondent ordered a hit on me through the dark web
to be kidnapped and drugged for 7 days in an effort to force me to
return to our marriage.”
“I believe he would hurt our son to get to me,” she adds later. “I believe we are both in imminent danger.”
Ronald Craig Ilg is a successful, 55-year-old doctor born and raised in the Willamette
Valley of Oregon. From a small town of fewer than 4,000 residents, Ilg
moved to Portland for his medical training, then to Orchard Prairie, an
unincorporated community outside Spokane. He served as a neonatologist,
caring for preterm infants, and worked his way up to chief medical
director of a multistate neonatology management group. In 2007, he ran
an unsuccessful campaign for the school board in Orchard Prairie’s
70-student school district, where he described himself as a “moderate
conservative.” (He received 38 votes; the top vote-getting candidate got
127.) He married and divorced a local woman, then remarried an
esthetician 15 years his junior. Their son was born in 2018.
But
behind the bucolic, almost tedious normalcy of Ilg’s life lay a dark
interior. Approximately two years ago, the doctor entered a secret BDSM
relationship with another woman, who would later claim Ilg trapped her
in an underground bunker and forced her to sign a sex slave contract in
blood. He placed tracking devices on his second wife’s car and
cellphone, according to affidavits she submitted in court, and
threatened to take away her belongings if she refused to acquiesce to
his sexual demands. (Confronted about the tracking devices, his wife
claims, he told her they were for her own protection.)
In the
spring of 2019, according to a lawsuit Ilg filed, the neonatology group
where he worked received two complaints about his behavior—one alleging
harassment and one about his scheduling practices. While Ilg claims the
complaints were entirely unsubstantiated, news of them spread quickly
through the office. Several co-workers said they were so horrified by
the questions asked during his HR investigation that they could not
look him in the eye. Rumors started spreading that he was bringing a
weapon into the NICU. His higher-ups eventually asked him to step down
as medical director and, when he did not, eliminated the position
entirely. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.)
Ilg’s
second wife filed for divorce in June 2020. In December, as tensions
increased at work, the neonatology group let him go. Jobless and
desperate to reconcile with his ex, Ilg sent his estranged wife hundreds
of text messages in the weeks following, begging her to stay and even
offering to pay her if she dropped the divorce proceedings. Her attorney
emailed his lawyer, asking for him to limit contact to conversations
about their son, but he refused.
“Ron is spiraling and continues to get worse, to where now he is
threatening to come to my home despite my opposition,” his wife wrote in
an application for a restraining order on Dec 21. “This has to stop.”
(Ilg’s attorney, Carl Oreskovtich, told The Daily Beast his client had
“made some mistakes” in terms of contacting his wife, but that any
suggestion that he had stalked or injured her was “just frankly not
true.”)
In a reply brief on Dec 30, Ilg claimed he was in a “raw
emotional state” from his firing and his ex-wife’s rejection. He claimed
he had learned his lesson and would not bother her again. But in the
weeks following, she claims in court filings, he parked outside her
workplace, sent her dozens of text messages, and pretended to drop a
lengthy, typewritten letter in front of her in hopes that she would pick
it up.
“I do love you, more than words can describe, more than
actions can show,” he wrote in the letter. “Every fiber of my body,
every ounce of my life energy calls out for you.”
Three months later, he would be in FBI custody.
The first messages from the account called Scar215 came in February.
Sent to an unnamed site on the dark web offering murder-for-hire
services, they requested that a hit man visit a woman’s home and give
her a “significant beating.” (The hired assailant should “injure both
hands significantly or break the hands,” the messages said.) The account
owner provided the target’s name and home address, and placed nearly
$2,000 in Bitcoin in escrow to be released when the job was done.
Experts
who study these websites, which offer confidential, untraceable
services in exchange for cryptocurrency, say they are almost entirely
scams. Not a single murder has ever been tied back to them, according to
The New York Times.
It appears Scar215’s initial request was unsuccessful. But a month
afterward, he messaged the same website with another assignment, this
one almost impressive in its deviousness: to kidnap and torture another
woman, in hopes of convincing her to return to her husband.
The
plan—according to messages allegedly sent by Scar215’s and obtained by
the FBI—was to kidnap the woman while her children were away, take her
to a secure location, and inject her with heroin twice daily for a week.
She would be taught to administer the injections herself and videotaped
doing so, “for bribery later.” Drug needles and paraphernalia
containing her DNA would be scattered around her house.
Her
release from this nightmarish prison would be conditioned on four
promises: that she return to her husband, drop all court proceedings
against him, and be physically intimate with him at least three times in
the weeks that followed. And she could never tell anyone about what
happened.
“She should be told that her families[sic] health,
including her father and her kids, depend on her completing these
rules,” Scar215 wrote. “It would be unfortunate if her older boy became
addicted to heroin. Or her dad be severely beaten or her dog be
slaughtered.”
By early April, Scar215 had reached out to yet
another dark-web site, hoping to have his request completed by the
second weekend of the month. He told the site he had put $5,000 in
bitcoin for them in escrow, and that another $10,000 would be coming to
them the next day. He promised an extra $40,000 if all of his goals were
achieved in the allotted time frame.
“Please have your man begin
this weekend and send a timeline AND pics and videos the day he starts
as verification,” he wrote. “I will do my best to answer any questions
in a timely manner.”
On April 8, the day before Scar215’s plot was set to take place, Ilg
was vacationing in Mexico with his mistress. She had been in touch with
his estranged wife before—mainly to plead with her to drop the
protective order against Ilg—but this time she had a more frightening
message. “Some strange stuff has happened while we have been here,” the
mistress texted. “I need to talk to you asap when we get back.”
The girlfriend would later tell the FBI that, much as he had wanted
his estranged wife to do, Ilg required her to call him “sir” and submit
to various punishments he devised—including sitting alone for hours in
an underground bunker outside his home. At one point during the Mexico
trip, according to a criminal complaint, she took Ilg’s cellphone and
threw it into a pool. The couple fought and, according to FBI agents who heard recordings of the incident,
she begged him to stop hurting her and struggled to breathe. Afterward,
she says, he forced her to sign a contract requiring her to
“unconditionally accept what [Ilg] would like to do.” The document,
presented in a court hearing in April, was stamped with both of their
fingerprints in blood.
The mistress also told agents she had
previously noticed Ilg using the dark web. When she confronted him, she
said, he claimed he only used it for gambling. But she knew from a
previous trip to Vegas that her boyfriend was not a gambler.
”You
hired someone from the dark web to hurt [your estranged wife],” she
wrote to him in text messages provided to the FBI. “Leave me alone
forever. I’m scared of you.”
On April 11, when Ilg and his
mistress returned from Mexico, they were met at the Spokane airport by
FBI agents. Unbeknownst to Ilg, a team of BBC journalists had unearthed
the messages sent by Scar215 through a confidential source. They
identified the targets as one of Ilg’s former co-workers and his
estranged wife. (The co-worker, whose hands Scar215 wanted broken, told
the FBI Ilg might have believed she was involved with the workplace
complaints against him.) The journalists notified his wife, whose
attorneys brought it to the attention of the FBI.
On April 9,
while Ilg was still in Mexico, FBI agents requested records from a
cryptocurrency platform called Coinbase.com. The records showed that all
of the funds associated with Scar215’s bitcoin transactions originated
from a Coinbase account in the name of Ron Ilg, which was also connected
to Ilg’s phone number, email address, and social security number. In a
raid on his home that day, agents found a fingerprint-operated safe
containing a sticky note with the name “Scar215” and an apparent
password. They also found two concrete holes in the ground that required
ladders to get out—holes that looked a lot like underground bunkers.
Ilg’s
estranged wife provided the FBI with a history of their relationship
and the text messages she had received from his mistress. She also
handed over screenshots of text messages Ilg had allegedly sent their
son’s nanny, describing a sexual fantasy that involved kidnapping his
wife. He described it as a way to “get the adrenaline flowing” and asked
her to help him open the car doors during the abduction.
At the
airport that day, according to a criminal complaint, Ilg requested a
lawyer but continued talking without one. He allegedly confessed to
trying to use the dark web to hire a hitman under the name
“Scar2something,” but insisted the intended target was not his former
coworker or estranged wife, but himself. He wanted to die by hitman and
make it look like an accident, he claimed, so that all of his assets
could flow to his mistress. Asked whether he had updated his will to
reflect this, however, he told officers he had not. According to the
FBI, the websites he used have a policy against performing suicides.
The
agents allowed Ilg to return home after questioning at the airport. But
the next day, they received one more surprise: a call from the Spokane
County Sheriff’s Office telling them Ilg had attempted suicide.
Shaun Cross, the CEO of Maddie’s Place, a charity for drug-dependent
infants where Ilg volunteered for years, calls the doctor’s case a
“Jekyll and Hyde situation.” For four years, the team at Maddie’s Place
knew him as nothing more than an esteemed neonatologist who lent
valuable medical expertise and a dose of credibility to the fledgling
organization. They knew he was going through a divorce, they knew he had
been let go from his job, but these seemed—to Cross at least—to be more the result of misfortune than malfeasance.
“Here's
someone that was a highly trained, highly skilled, highly recognized
neonatologist working on a volunteer basis,” Cross said. “And then just
all of a sudden, this happens.”
In his apology letter to his
estranged wife—three pages, single spaced—Ilg comes across as a
heartbroken lover desperate to earn back her affection. He promises that
he’s changed, that he has cried with a grown man over Bible study and
cleansed his darkened soul. He offers to leave his mistress, wear a body
camera, sell his house, and buy a new one in her name—to “give
everything I have away,” just so they can have a fresh start.
“At
times, I have wanted to hate you,” he wrote. “That would be easier than
this emptiness and pain I feel inside without you. But I can't. I simply
can’t. I love you with a real and true love that will never end,
despite what happens.”
But in text messages, his manipulation and
need for control seeps out. He begs her to call him multiple times—in
violation of their no-contact order—claiming he just wants to talk
logistics. He calls her himself, then blames it on their son. He
threatens to take the 2-year-old out of state with him on a business
trip, rather than “spend the money having our lawyers work it out.”
By the time he wrote his suicide note, the “love that will never end” had turned to hatred.
“You
mocked my love. You made fun of it. Why??” he wrote in a portion of the
note addressed to her, before asking her to split his assets with his
mistress. “You laughed with your family + coworkers.”
Ilg was
taken into custody April 16, four days after his suicide attempt, and
charged with attempted kidnapping. In a court hearing in early April,
according to local newspaper The Inlander,
he was recalcitrant, shaking his head at the allegations and scrawling
notes to his attorney. The judge in his case, reviewing his petition to
be released on bail, made special note of his intelligence, his assets,
and his “willingness to be vicious and devious.”
Since being
arrested, Ilg has lost his position at Maddie’s Place and his lawyers in
the suit against the neonatology group. His wife and former mistress
have both asked for him to be held without bail, saying they fear for
their safety. (His first wife, whom he divorced in 2012, has volunteered
to let him live with her and to serve as a witness for the defense.) A
judge sided with the first two women last week.
Ilg has pleaded
not guilty, and his attorney has argued there is no concrete evidence
that he is Scar215. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Oreskovich
suggested that Ilg’s account had been hacked and the messages sent by
someone else. He also claimed that Ilg’s sexual relationships with both
his wife and mistress were consensual—though “different than, for a lack
of other terms, what the norm is.” He is filing a second petition to
have Ilg released on bond this week.
Ilg called The Daily Beast
from his jail cell last week, in an attempt to clear his name. He
refused to speak on the record but promised a statement from his
attorney. No such statement was ever provided.
His estranged wife,
meanwhile, finally received the order of protection she applied for in
April, after the BBC journalists approached her with the messages. As of
May 10, Ilg was barred from coming near or having any contact with both
his wife and their son.
But in her application for that
restraining order, his wife wrestled with the idea that she may never
feel safe. She did not know how long the investigation would take,
whether her husband would serve time, or what his charges would mean for
their divorce proceedings. She did not know if the hits he’d ordered
were real or fake. More concerningly, she no longer knew what the man
she married was capable of.
In a statement attached to the filing,
she revealed that Ilg called her from his hospital bed the day after
his suicide attempt—disregarding an emergency protective order and the
federal investigation against him—to ask her to deliver a message to his
mistress.
“The respondent already knew that he is under federal
investigation for trying to hire a hitman to harm me and has been served
with the protection order, and he still contacts me to ask me to give a
message to his girlfriend,” she wrote.
Noting that Ilg had “no issue violating court orders” she asked the court for every possible protection from him allowed by law.
She added: “The respondent is unstable and will clearly stop at nothing to hurt me and our son.”
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