(Credit: Rikard Larma/Metro.)
The FBI has charged two local men in a plot to kidnap, torture and kill women.
FBI Assistant Director George Venizelos said today that the agency arrested two people who planned to kidnap and torture women.
The FBI charged Richard Meltz and Christopher Asch in the plot.
“Both of these defendants took affirmative steps to carry out the conspiracy to kidnap and torture women,” Venizelos said. “Their actions were not confined to talking about these ghoulish plans.”
He said the men had obtained a taser and chemicals to anesthetize their victims.
“They made detailed plans to use these instruments – plans that were foiled by the FBI’s intervention,” Venizelos said.
The case developed from another investigation against Gilberto Valle, a former NYPD cop accused of trying to kidnap, kill and eat women, according to The New York Times.
Prosecutors say that the Meltz and Asch conspired from 2011 and 2013 and met an undercover FBI agent in March.
They discussed killing a specific woman over the phone, prosecutors said, and Asch traveled to Allentown, Pa., to get a taser at a gun show.
They spoke about “snuffing” women, children and babies, according to court documents.
Agents released email excerpts where Asch allegedly spoke to a co-conspirator about how to rape and kill his wife.
“You’d need to have an alibi, like being at work,” Asch said, according to the complaint. “Have you thought it through and will you feel any guilt if she disappears?”
The co-conspirator suggested Meltz could break in posing as a repair person and “choke her out.”
They also said Asch had a number of items he thought were necessary for a kidnapping: a ski mask, hypodermic needles, handcuffs and leather ties.
Asch is a former librarian at Stuyvesant High School who was previously arrested and later exonerated for inappropriately touching male students, according to the Daily News.
Meltz is the chief of police at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Massachusetts.
