Inset: Cynthia Hoffman (Anchorage Police Department). Background: Caleb Leyland at his sentencing hearing for her murder (KTUU/YouTube)
An Alaska judge sentenced a 24-year-old man to 40 years in prison with 10 suspended for his role in the murder-for-hire killing of a woman set up by a catfisher living in his grandmother’s basement.
Caleb Allen Russell Leyland pleaded guilty in November to second-degree murder in the death of Cynthia Hoffman, who was bound in duct tape and shot to death near a waterfall just north of Anchorage in 2019. Leyland was one of six people, most of whom were teenagers at the time, to be charged in the plot, though two were processed through the juvenile courts. Daren Schilmiller, 26, posed online as a man named “Tyler,” offering Denali Dakota Skye Brehmer $9 million to kidnap and kill her friend Hoffman and send photographic proof.