Parents play dead to trick son who planned to 'assassinate his own family'

Someone planning the murder of their parents to get to their riches is a familiar story. Not because it happens all the time, but because there are so many plays, novels and movies made about the subject. While it's a compelling story to follow in fiction, we don't expect that anything like it plays out in real life.

So if you've got incredibly wealthy parents, a desire to claim your inheritance early, and no qualms about ending a human life, what exactly do you do? In the case of this man, living in Sochi, Russia, he made a plan and hired a contract killer to do the dirty work for him. At least, that's what he thought was happening...

While the 22-year-old thought he was going to pull off the scheme, his plans were foiled when an undercover police officer posed as the hitman in question. After they were alerted to the threat, the police enlisted his parents to pose for photos, staging crime scenes to convince the son he had been successful in his goal.

An undercover policeman played the role of the hired assassin, who was 'hired' to bump off his father, mother, and 10-year-old sister. The son drew a floor plan for the 'assassin', indicated where the security cameras were and how to avoid the guard dogs. The deal was that he demanded photo evidence of the bodies before he would give any money over, which is why they chose to orchestrate the 'deaths'.

The parents, devastated that their son would do this, agreed to help the police, posing with fake blood as if they had been shot by the hitman. After the 'assassination' took place, the officer showed him the photos, at which point he agreed to pay him a sum of $53,000, which he said he would pay as soon as he collected the inheritance.

It was at this point that he was detained by armed police. He immediately confessed to the crimes, at which point it was revealed he had actually attempted this to kill his parents twice before.

A police source said:

"He wanted to get rid of his parents because they were not giving him money. Before looking for a killer he tried to get rid of his relatives twice.

"He was looking on the internet to find out how to carry out the murders. The criminal wanted to put pills in the kettle to poison his parents but his father found out something was wrong.

"Then the son planned to break a thermometer in his parents' car so that they were poisoned with mercury vapours. But he got cold feet."

Once he had been detained he confessed to planning the killings far in advance. "I had been planning it for several months," he told the officers. "I'm so done with them, they didn't understand me, so I found a contract killer."

He faces 15 years in jail if he's convicted of plotting the contract killings.