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A New York man has been sentenced to prison after plotting a gruesome murder scheme involving a hitman and a pig farm.
Jeal Sutherland, 58, from Colonie, New York, has been ordered to serve over seven years behind bars. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York announced the sentence on February 10, following the disruption of his murder-for-hire plot.
Sutherland sought the services of what he believed to be a hitman and a hog farmer from Pennsylvania. Unbeknownst to him, these individuals were actually a police informant and an undercover FBI agent. According to a criminal complaint obtained by Oxygen, Sutherland intended for them to kill his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend and dispose of the body on a pig farm, where it would be consumed by the animals.
One particularly chilling aspect of the plot involved Sutherland arranging for a dead Canadian goose, with a menacing note inserted in its beak, to be left on the doorstep of the intended victim’s mother. This was confirmed in the press release issued by the authorities.
The sinister plan began to unravel in November 2024, as detailed in an affidavit. During this time, a suspect being investigated for separate offenses revealed Sutherland’s involvement. The suspect, who eventually became a police informant, claimed Sutherland had instructed him to commit various crimes, including setting fire to the victim’s mother’s car and intimidating people who owed Sutherland money.
During that interview, the informant shared that Sutherland also asked him to kill the victim upon his expected prison release date in 2025.
The informant teamed up with authorities and recorded a conversation between him and Sutherland, in which they planned the murder: The informant would rent a van from a nun he knew and use it to deliver the victim’s body to a hog farm. The farmer would be paid in cash, read the affidavit, plus a bottle of bourbon.
As the informant suggested on the call, “Let the hogs eat him.”
Although Sutherland told the informant that he didn’t want to be present for the murder, according to a transcript from a recorded meeting included in the affidavit, he requested photographic evidence that the job was done.
Sutherland was arrested Jan. 27, 2025 and pleaded guilty to using an interstate commerce facility in a murder-for-hire plan. His victim was not harmed.
“He feels terrible and remorseful for everything that he did,” Andrew Safranko, who was Sutherland’s attorney, told Oxygen. “He was hoping for less [time] but he’s grateful that he didn’t get more.”
Sutherland will also pay a $15,000 fine, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and follow a three-year period of supervised release.
“Jeal Sutherland thought he could order up the murder of his romantic rival right from his cell phone,” First Assistant United States Attorney John A. Sarcone III said in the press release, adding, “Sutherland will now be dialing out from a federal prison for the foreseeable future.”