One of many crypto bros charged with torturing an Italian businessman in a SoHo home of horrors allegedly held his ex-fiancée captive — and threatened to kill her — months earlier than his sensational Manhattan arrest, a brand new report reveals.
John Woeltz – who was lately sprung from Rikers Island on a $1 million bond pending trial – descended into “paranoid, cultlike habits” alongside fellow accused crypto kidnapper William Duplessie, his ex alleged in a Kentucky restraining order first reported by New York Journal Monday.
“I’m afraid this particular person is extraordinarily unhinged and severely mentally unwell — and utterly unpredictable as he reacts violently in suits of rage,” Woeltz’s gal pal wrote within the restraining order software. “He’s armed and harmful.”
The terrifying breakup got here a few months earlier than Woeltz and Duplessie had been arrested on accusations they held Italian crypto dealer Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan captive and tortured him — together with with a chainsaw — for his Bitcoin password.
Carturan’s alleged captivity led to Might when he left the Prince Avenue townhouse barefoot and ran as much as an NYPD visitors cop.
Legal professionals for Woeltz and Duplessie have argued that Carturan’s weeks-long ordeal was a part of a weird, however consensual social gathering ambiance within the townhouse, likening it to a “lengthy operating frat social gathering” by which the businessman was basically being hazed.
However the debauched duo had equally held individuals captive earlier than in Kentucky, the place Woeltz hailed from and cultivated an identical twisted social gathering ambiance in his 10,000-square-foot mansion, prosecutors argued.
The 37-year-old, seemingly mild-mannered Woeltz’s simmering violence in Kentucky boiled over in January, when he allegedly blew up at his fiancée for not loading a firearm’s journal clip for him, New York Journal reported.
Woeltz grabbed his paramour by the throat, put a gun to her head, “screaming that he was going to kill me and that he had a gap dug to bury me in,” she wrote in a restraining order petition, in keeping with the journal.
In an eerie echo of accusations Woeltz and Duplessie would face later, they the sadistic pair allegedly locked her in a bed room and refused to let her go away for a number of hours, the report mentioned.
The fiancée, Kayla Barbour, broke up with Woeltz, and later found that her Mazda – which was nonetheless parked at his Kentucky home – had been shot up, with its home windows blown out.
Barbour — described within the article as an aspiring actress who owns a small enterprise in Lexington, KY — and Woeltz had dated for 2 years and had deliberate to marry in Hawaii throughout late 2024, the journal reported.
The Put up confirmed via Kentucky courtroom information that Woeltz faces a restraining order in a home violence case.
Woeltz, between boasts that he was crypto vigilante needed in Russia and China, used images of his ex’s shot-up automotive as his telephone background, the journal reported.
She couldn’t be reached for remark.
The pair had additionally allegedly held a German CEO — Michael Mauer — captive within the mansion round this time.
Mauer was one in every of three targets, together with Carturan, allegedly named in a “manifesto” that prosecutors alleged Woeltz and Duplessie wrote detailing their whacko plans to steal foreigners’ cryptocurrency in a delusional spy operation.
“We are going to take crypto and bitcoin from evil individuals which can be utilizing it to fund terrorism… It’s our perception that folks want to make use of their coin,” they allegedly wrote, prosecutors mentioned.
Woeltz’s and Duplessie’s respective attorneys didn’t return requests for remark.
Duplessie, 33, stays jailed in Rikers Island, whereas Woeltz has posted his $1 million bail. They each have pleaded not responsible and are due again in courtroom Oct. 15.
