One of the crypto bros charged with torturing an Italian businessman in a SoHo house of horrors allegedly held his ex-fiancée captive — and threatened to kill her — months before his sensational Manhattan arrest, a new report reveals.
John Woeltz – who was recently sprung from Rikers Island on a $1 million bond pending trial – descended into “paranoid, cultlike behavior” alongside fellow accused crypto kidnapper William Duplessie, his ex alleged in a Kentucky restraining order first reported by New York Magazine Monday.
“I am afraid this person is extremely unhinged and severely mentally ill — and completely unpredictable as he reacts violently in fits of rage,” Woeltz’s gal pal wrote in the restraining order application. “He is armed and dangerous.”
The terrifying breakup came a couple of months before Woeltz and Duplessie were arrested on accusations they held Italian crypto trader Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan captive and tortured him — including with a chainsaw — for his Bitcoin password.
Carturan’s alleged captivity ended in May when he left the Prince Street townhouse barefoot and ran up to an NYPD traffic cop.
Lawyers for Woeltz and Duplessie have argued that Carturan’s weeks-long ordeal was part of a bizarre, but consensual party atmosphere in the townhouse, likening it to a “long running frat party” in which the businessman was essentially being hazed.
But the debauched duo had similarly held people captive before in Kentucky, where Woeltz hailed from and cultivated a similar twisted party atmosphere 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 magazine clip for him, New York Magazine 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 hole dug to bury me in,” she wrote in a restraining order petition, according to the magazine.
In an eerie echo of accusations Woeltz and Duplessie would face later, the sadistic pair allegedly locked her in a bedroom and refused to let her leave for several hours, the report said.
The fiancée, Kayla Barbour, broke up with Woeltz, and later discovered that her Mazda – which was still parked at his Kentucky house – had been shot up, with its windows blown out.
Barbour — described in the article as an aspiring actress who owns a small business in Lexington, KY — and Woeltz had dated for two years and had planned to marry in Hawaii during late 2024, the magazine reported.
The Post confirmed through Kentucky court records that Woeltz faces a restraining order in a domestic violence case.
Woeltz, between boasts that he was a crypto vigilante wanted in Russia and China, used photos of his ex’s shot-up car as his phone background, the magazine reported.
She couldn’t be reached for comment.
The pair had also allegedly held a German CEO — Michael Mauer — captive in the mansion around this time.
Mauer was one of three targets, along 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 will take crypto and bitcoin from evil people that are using it to fund terrorism… It is our belief that people need to use their coin,” they allegedly wrote, prosecutors said.
Woeltz’s and Duplessie’s respective lawyers didn’t return requests for comment.
Duplessie, 33, remains jailed in Rikers Island, while Woeltz has posted his $1 million bail. They both have pleaded not guilty and are due back in court Oct. 15.
