Musbach gets 6 years in prison for hit attempt on child porn victim

A New Jersey man who confessed to hiring a hitman to kill a teen girl with whom he had exchanged explicit images was sentenced Tuesday to over six years in federal prison.

John Michael Musbach, of Haddonfield, had previously confessed to paying approximately $20,000 in bitcoin to have his child-porn victim killed so she wouldn’t testify against him in his pending criminal case.

On Tuesday, during a court hearing in Camden, U.S. District Judge Joseph H. Rodriguez sentenced the 34-year-old to 78 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

He was also ordered to pay a $30,000 fine.

In the summer of 2015, Musbach exchanged videos and photographs with his victim, a 13-year-old girl from New York. After the teen’s parents found out about the inappropriate contact, they contacted local authorities.

Investigators were able to locate the then-Atlantic County resident and arrested him on child pornography charges in March 2016, according to court papers.

Officers with the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office also executed a search warrant at his residence in Galloway.

In May of that year, Musbach “repeatedly communicated with the administrator of a murder-for-hire website, which operated on the dark net, and which purported to offer contract killings or other acts of violence in return for payment in cryptocurrency,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey said in a news release.

After hearing from the website’s administrator that the girl’s age — who was then 14 — would not be a problem, he paid approximately 40 bitcoin (around $20,000 at the time) for the girl’s murder.

After he was pressed for an additional $5,000 for the hit, he decided to cancel his request and asked for a refund of the $20,000 he had already paid. The site’s administrator then revealed the website was a scam and threatened to reveal Musbach’s information to law enforcement.