A Garmin smartwatch helped nab a hitman

We know that Alexa is listening and phone carriers are selling your location data. But until now, we didn’t know your fitness tracker was cluing the authorities in about your history of organized crime.

Runner’s World–a one-stop shop for all things running, and now some things mob-related–writes about a British runner and cyclist named Mark “Iceman” Fellows, who was just found guilty of killing two organized crime associates near Manchester–two incidents that happened three years apart from each other. It seems that Fellows, beyond being a fit bloke, was also a hitman. It’s unclear if his “Iceman” nickname was due to his cold, chiseled abs or for his icy demeanor when he’s wantonly killing people.

According to the report, Fellows was suspected for killing a man named John Kinsella last year. He reportedly biked up to the man last May, shot him four times, and then biked away. Being the avid fitness aficionado he is, Iceman was obviously wearing “both commando gear and a hi-vis safety vest while toting a gun,” notes Runner’s World. Thus, it seems he was pretty easily spotted by witnesses.

But enterprising detectives, while investigating Fellows’s involvement with this 2018 murder, got an idea. They noticed a picture of him wearing a Garmin Forerunner smartwatch and thought to themselves, “Hey, wait a minute, doesn’t that thing track location data?” Indeed, it does and did, and the authorities were able to look at his Garmin device and discover that he was at the very location of an unsolved murder that took place three years ago. This victim, Paul “Mr. Big” Massey, was a gang member associated with Kinsella. All the pieces were coming together–or, I should say, all the pieces of GPS data.

Thanks to these clues from Garmin, the authorities were able to see definitive proof that Fellows did a test run of the escape route from the scene of Massey’s murder back to his house in 2015. He reportedly did this two months before the murder occurred. (It seems Massey’s people perhaps knew Fellows was involved, as he got shot three weeks after Massey; he obviously survived.)

Now Fellows is sentenced to life in prison. He likely won’t be able to bike there, so he may have to find a new athletic outlet–hopefully one less deadly.

You can read the full Runner’s World story here, which was sourced from the Manchester Evening News.