On November 19, 2016, a man using the name "lilyachtrock" on the social app Tagged sent a message to Sarah Butler, a twenty-year-old college student from Montclair, New Jersey, asking whether she wanted to make money. They discussed a price for sex. Before they settled anything, she asked him a question, followed by the abbreviation for laughing: "You're not a serial killer, right?" He said no. She answered, "Okay, cool."
The meeting planned for that night did not happen. Three nights later, on November 22, Sarah Butler drove off in her mother's van and did not come home. Her body was found nine days later in a wooded reservation in West Orange. The man behind "lilyachtrock" was Khalil Wheeler-Weaver, a twenty-year-old security guard from Orange who came from a law enforcement family. Within weeks he was charged with her murder, then with two more, and in 2019 a jury in Newark convicted him of killing three women and trying to kill a fourth. He was found because Sarah Butler's sister and two friends opened her account, read the messages and set a trap for him with a fake profile of their own.
Little has been published about Wheeler-Weaver's early life. In 2016 he lived with his mother and stepfather in a house on Mosswood Avenue in Orange, in Essex County. Oxygen, reporting from the trial, described him as the stepson of a police detective, and said prosecutors told the jury he had researched becoming a police officer. Reports from the time describe him working as a security guard: at a hotel, according to Oxygen's trial coverage; at a ShopRite in the Union area, according to WHYY in 2017. He had no prior criminal record, a point the sentencing judge later weighed in his favor and gave "minimal weight." NJ.com's 2026 podcast on the case, "Someone's Hunting Us," describes him as a "nerdy-looking, polite young man" whom police never suspected.
Prosecutors said the women he chose were, in the words of Acting Essex County Prosecutor Theodore N. Stephens II, people he "mistakenly believed" were "anonymous people, people on the margins." Assistant Prosecutor Adam Wells told the sentencing court that Robin West, Joanne Brown and the surviving victim, Tiffany Taylor, had all been homeless at some point and had turned to sex work to survive. Sarah Butler, a student living with her family, did not fit that pattern, and her family's response is what ended the series.
Robin West grew up in Philadelphia. Her parents, Leroy West, a school police officer at Frankford High School and an assistant pastor, and Anita Mason, who sings in her church choir, divorced when she was a baby. She sang in the church choir too, and sometimes led it. She loved animals, especially dogs, and talked about becoming a veterinarian or working at the Philadelphia Zoo. Her cousin Zina Mason told WHYY about a sprinkler dance that ended with Robin falling off a porch and getting up laughing. Her childhood was not easy: she had ADHD, attended alternative schools and a residential treatment center, began running away after a close family friend died when she was fourteen, and moved out at eighteen. Her father told ABC7 she was "a free spirit" who was about to go back for her GED. "I miss her, I miss her a great deal," he said.
She was about to turn twenty, on September 5, 2016. Some days before, she told her parents she was going to North Jersey for a few days to celebrate early. On the night of August 31 she was on a street in Newark with a companion, Breniesha Patterson, when a car pulled up and the driver said he wanted Robin. She got in. Patterson wrote down the license plate.
On September 1, firefighters responding to a fire at an abandoned house on Lakeside Avenue in Orange found badly burned human remains. It took about two weeks and dental records to identify them as Robin West. The medical examiner found that she had died of asphyxia due to strangulation, and that there was no soot in her airways: she was dead before the fire was set. Her family, who had texted and called without an answer, had reported her missing after a week.
According to the 2024 appellate opinion, Wheeler-Weaver admitted to police that he had been with Robin West that day. He said he had dropped her off at an abandoned house, and he led officers to the wrong address. His phone records placed him near the house that burned. He was not charged then. The description of one episode of NJ.com's 2026 podcast puts it this way: "How do you make a serial killer? Let him go without checking his story."
Joanne Brown was thirty-three and lived in Newark, in supportive housing, and NJ.com's reporters describe her as a woman in recovery. Her friends told them she loved to dress up for a night out and sometimes styled herself like Marilyn Monroe. On October 22, 2016, she was near a fast-food restaurant at Frelinghuysen and Evergreen avenues in Newark with her longtime friend Amina Nobles. Later she called Nobles from another person's phone. Phone records would tie that number to Wheeler-Weaver. Nobles testified that Joanne seemed fine on the call and said she expected to be gone about an hour. She did not come back. Later that day Nobles got a call from the same number. No one spoke.
Her body lay for six weeks in an abandoned house at 354 Highland Avenue in Orange. A work crew found it on December 5, 2016. A jacket was wrapped around her face and neck, and duct tape covered her face. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death mechanical asphyxiation. In the days before she disappeared, prosecutors showed, Wheeler-Weaver's phone had been used to search for "homemade poison" and for which stores sell syringes.
Tiffany Taylor, then thirty-four, knew Wheeler-Weaver through a former friend. According to the appellate opinion, in April 2016 he had paid her for sex and she had left without returning. On November 15, 2016, she agreed to meet him again; the opinion says she had agreed to "con" him. He picked her up at a motel in Elizabeth and drove her to Linden, where he pulled over. She testified that he hit her, raped her, strangled her, handcuffed her and wrapped tape around her face. NorthJersey.com reported that she woke up handcuffed in the back seat with tape over her nose and mouth.
She talked him into driving back to the motel, the Ritz Motel in Elizabeth, to get her phone. There she slipped one hand out of the cuffs and kicked at a motel door. A resident let her in, and Wheeler-Weaver drove off. Phone location data later placed his phone at the motels and at a gas station that night.
Taylor told the Elizabeth police who had attacked her. She said they did not believe her and dismissed her as a prostitute. "They treated me like trash," she told The Record and NorthJersey.com. At trial, an Elizabeth officer, Billy Ly, testified that he had been wary of her story. Taylor said in court that Sarah Butler would still be alive if police had listened when she named him. Seven days after Taylor escaped, Sarah Butler disappeared.
Sarah Butler was twenty, a student at New Jersey City University, home in Montclair for the Thanksgiving break. She was an accomplished dancer and helped teach at a dance studio in Montclair. Her parents are Victor and Laverne Butler; she had a sister, Aleia.
Wheeler-Weaver had reached her through Tagged, an app that, as one of her friends later explained in court, lets users connect with people nearby. On November 19, prosecutors said, he searched online for date-rape drugs and, less than two hours later, offered her money for sex. That was the exchange in which she asked whether he was a serial killer.
On November 22, her mother picked her up from school. That evening Sarah took her mother's van to visit a friend, said she would be right back, and did not return. Her friend Lamia Brown's last conversation with her was at 10:04 p.m. Video from a convenience store that night showed Wheeler-Weaver getting out of the van and going into the store while Sarah stayed inside it, on her phone. From 10:38 p.m. until 12:43 a.m., his phone was near Eagle Rock Reservation and the Highlawn Pavilion restaurant there. The next day, November 23, he searched for how to remove an Apple ID from an iPhone 6. Her family reported her missing that day.
On November 25 police found the van in a lot on Nassau Street in Orange, about five or six blocks from where Wheeler-Weaver lived. Inside were a black purse with Sarah's belongings, a condom box and a cigar. In the lot were a hair extension and a piece of clear tape with red hair stuck to it.
On December 1, 2016, her body was found in the woods of Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange, covered with sticks and brush, near a valet stand for the Highlawn Pavilion. A pair of sweatpants was wrapped around her neck. The medical examiner found the cause of death was compression of the neck. More than a hundred people came to her funeral on December 16.
What happened next came from the people closest to Sarah. Her sister and two friends, Lamia Brown and Samantha Rivera, knew the password to her laptop. On it they found her exchange with "LilYachtRock" on Tagged, in which he had arranged to meet her and offered to pay for sex.
Rivera made a Tagged profile of her own. The "lilyachtrock" account soon contacted her. The women kept him talking, and, according to NorthJersey.com, held a live phone call with him from Montclair police headquarters. They set up a meeting at a Panera Bread. NJ.com places it in Montclair; the appellate opinion calls it a restaurant in Glen Ridge, the next town. The women had told Montclair police their plan, and when Wheeler-Weaver arrived, officers were waiting instead.
At that point Sarah was still a missing person. Officers told him only that he might have been one of the last people to speak with her. He was not restrained, and he agreed to go to headquarters. Because the police did not yet know she was dead, that first conversation was not recorded. NorthJersey.com reports that he was questioned and released.
At trial, Assistant Prosecutor Wells called Sarah's relatives and friends "the heroes of this case." After the trial he put Tiffany Taylor beside them: Taylor and Butler's friends and sister, he said, "are the first true heroes." An Essex County Prosecutor's Office spokeswoman, Katherine Carter, said the investigation had been "particularly aided" by the family and friends.
The body in Eagle Rock gave investigators reason to follow the phone records, and the records drew a line between Wheeler-Weaver's phone, the places the women were last seen and the places their bodies were found. Five days after Sarah's body was discovered, on December 6, 2016, he was interviewed at the Essex County Prosecutor's Office.
The appellate opinion sets out what happened, from the recording. Detectives asked his name, age, address, schooling and job, then read him his Miranda rights at 7:27 p.m. He said he did not want to talk. The detectives stopped questioning him, took a DNA sample under a court order and left the room. After prosecutors authorized charges, Detective Christopher Smith came back and told him he was under arrest and would be charged with murder and desecration of human remains. In the elevator Wheeler-Weaver said, "This shit is ridiculous," and that he had not gotten to tell his side of the story. Asked whether he wanted to talk, he said yes. His rights were read again at 8:08 p.m., and he waived them.
In that statement he admitted lying to Essex County detectives and to Montclair police. He admitted he was "lilyachtrock," though he said the profile photo showed his stepbrother, and that he had created the account with an email address beginning "pimpkillerghost." He said he had wanted to find out whether Sarah used the app to sell sex. He admitted having sex with her that night. He first described a threesome, then changed his story, and said she had picked him up at the Orange Commons parking lot with another man in the car. He denied any part in Robin West's death or the fire.
A friend, Richard Isaacs, at first told police he had been working on cars with Wheeler-Weaver on the night of November 22. He later admitted he had lied, and said he was "covering for him."
Searches that day found black gloves, a hat and clothing in his home. In his car police found black gloves, plastic wire ties, pepper spray, a first aid kit and a body fluid cleanup kit. On the internet, the prosecution would show, he had searched for whether text apps can be traced, for "Walgreen needles," and for "Eagle Rock Reservation."
Acting Essex County Prosecutor Carolyn A. Murray announced the arrest at a news conference on December 7, 2016. At his first court appearance, on December 13, he pleaded not guilty to murdering Sarah Butler, with her parents in the courtroom. Her father had told CBS New York he did not recognize the young man and did not know how his daughter knew him.
On December 20, two weeks after the first arrest, he was in court on a second murder charge, for Joanne Brown, whose body had been found on December 5. Murray said then that the connection between them "remains under investigation." Bail was set at $5 million. His lawyer, Shevelle McPherson, called the evidence "very circumstantial."
On February 27, 2017, a grand jury indicted him in Robin West's death. By then he was also charged with the attempted murder of Tiffany Taylor. He pleaded not guilty again at an arraignment on March 13. The final indictment, No. 17-02-0547, had eleven counts: three of first-degree murder, three of desecration of human remains, aggravated arson, kidnapping, attempted murder and two of aggravated sexual assault.
In August 2018 a pretrial judge ruled that his December 6 statements could be used at trial and refused to split the case into four separate trials, one for each woman.
The trial ran about eight weeks, from mid-October to December 2019, before Superior Court Judge Mark S. Ali, a different judge from the one who had decided the pretrial motions. Assistant Prosecutors Adam B. Wells and Mira Ohm tried the case. Wheeler-Weaver was defended by public defenders; NJ.com photographed him at trial with attorney Alexandra Briggs. Judge Ali later said the jury had heard 42 witnesses and seen about 1,000 exhibits.
"He doesn't look like someone who would've done something like this," Wells told the jurors in his opening. "But you're going to see the evidence that says he did." Prosecutors said every attack was sexually motivated and that the women had been strangled with clothing. Newark Police Lt. Michael Krusznis testified about the defendant's internet searches during the period of the killings, including searches for homemade poisons and for a chemical to put on a rag to make someone fall asleep. Prosecutors presented hundreds of pages of such records. Phone evidence placed Wheeler-Weaver where the women disappeared and where their bodies were found.
Lamia Brown described Tagged for the jury, and the court heard how the fake profile was set up. Amina Nobles testified about Joanne Brown's last call. Tiffany Taylor testified and identified Wheeler-Weaver in the courtroom. The AP wrote that her account matched the details of the other cases and helped investigators.
The defense did not dispute that Wheeler-Weaver had arranged sexual encounters with the women. His public defenders told the jury that he had dropped each woman off safely afterward and had harmed no one.
On Thursday, December 19, 2019, the jury deliberated for less than three hours (CBS New York put it at about two) and found Wheeler-Weaver, then twenty-three, guilty on every count: the murders of Robin West, Joanne Brown and Sarah Butler; the kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault and attempted murder of Tiffany Taylor; three counts of desecration of human remains; and aggravated arson.
At a news conference on December 23, Acting Prosecutor Stephens said, "Every victim is important." Wells spoke of three families who, three years earlier, had "suffered the terror of a missing loved one." Ohm thanked the jurors and credited "the victims' friends and family who worked with us." He faced up to life plus eighty years.
The sentencing was postponed several times because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It took place in Newark on October 6, 2021. Wheeler-Weaver was twenty-five. His mother, aunt and brother came and did not speak.
Tiffany Taylor spoke of how her life had changed. "My whole life is different; I don't wear makeup anymore; I don't have friends," she said. "I hope you don't show him any remorse, because he's not showing any remorse." "I'm over 100% sure it was him, he told me who he was, he revealed himself to me," she said.
Anita Mason, Robin West's mother, said, "I will never forget her smile, her face, her walk, her desire to help homeless people," and, "Robin's chapter in the Book of Life is over and she is with God and her grandparents watching over us." Victor Butler asked for the longest sentence the law allowed and told the defendant, "I hope you suffer, boy, every night." Aleia Butler, Sarah's sister, asked the judge to "show him no mercy, the way he showed the victims no mercy." Laverne Butler, Sarah's mother, also addressed the court.
Wells told the judge the killings had been spaced weeks apart, time in which Wheeler-Weaver could have stopped. "The defendant believed these victims were disposable," he said.
Wheeler-Weaver maintained his innocence. "I was set up. I was lied on and framed by the Essex County Prosecutor's Office," he said. He added, "I do feel empathy for the victims and my heart goes out to their families and friends."
Judge Ali called him a sociopath. He found four aggravating factors: the nature and circumstances of the offenses, the gravity of the harm to the victims, the risk that he would offend again and the need for deterrence. He gave minimal weight to the one mitigating factor, his lack of a criminal record. He sentenced him to an aggregate 160 years in state prison, with 145 years to be served before parole eligibility under New Jersey's No Early Release Act. "The purpose of this sentence," the judge said, "is that this defendant never walks among society again." Stephens said the sentence "sends a clear and unequivocal message that each of these young women mattered."
Wheeler-Weaver appealed to the Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court (docket A-1884-21). The case was argued on December 6, 2023, before Judges Currier, Firko and Susswein, who decided it on January 25, 2024, in an unpublished opinion issued for the court as a whole. He raised four arguments.
First, he said the charges for each woman should have been tried separately, or the jury at least given a limiting instruction on how to use evidence of one episode against another. The panel disagreed. New Jersey law prefers a single trial, it said, unless a defendant shows prejudice, and the evidence showed a common plan or scheme, which "can be proved circumstantially."
Second, he said detectives had ignored his decision to stay silent on December 6 when Detective Smith came back to tell him he would be charged with murder. The court held that this was not interrogation: "The record clearly shows the detectives did not 'interrogate' defendant by informing him he was going to be charged with murder." The opinion notes that he then spoke up in the elevator and, asked whether he wanted to talk, waived his rights.
Third, he objected that the trial judge had told the jurors he had already found the statements admissible. Here the panel agreed there was an error. Two sentences of the jury charge, it wrote, "run afoul of the spirit if not the letter" of the state's rule, set out in State v. Hampton and Evidence Rule 104(c), that the jury must decide for itself whether a defendant's statement is credible. But the interrogation was recorded and the jury had been given a cautionary instruction, so "the error does not rise to the level of plain error warranting reversal of defendant's trial convictions."
Fourth, he argued that 160 years was manifestly excessive for a young man with no record. The panel upheld the sentence in full, writing that "the enormity of the sentence is amply justified" by the nature of his crimes. The convictions and the sentence were affirmed.
Whether he asked the New Jersey Supreme Court to review the ruling has not been reported. NJ.com reported in July 2026 that he had a new attorney and "appears more focused on appealing his earlier conviction" than on the new charge described below. It did not say what form that challenge takes.
Mawa Doumbia was fifteen, a freshman at East Side High School in Newark. She had come to Newark as a child from Abidjan, in Ivory Coast. NJ.com calls her "confident" and "feisty"; her friends said she liked to wear gray or green contact lenses. Her father and sister last saw her on the evening of October 7, 2016, as she left the family home. She was reported missing on October 11. Her friends made their own missing poster. According to an episode description of NJ.com's podcast, they looked into a man she had met on an app before she disappeared.
In the spring of 2019, decomposed remains were found face down on the second floor of a vacant carriage house on Main Street in Orange, behind a funeral home. An autopsy found homicide by ligature strangulation. The remains were not identified as hers until November 5, 2021, a month after Wheeler-Weaver was sentenced.
On March 31, 2022, the Essex County Prosecutor's Office charged him with her murder. After an investigation "involving extensive digital evidence," prosecutors allege, they found that he met her online on October 7, 2016, solicited her for sex, traveled to the area of her home, took her to the carriage house, strangled her and hid her remains. Stephens said he could not rule out other victims and that open cases with similar patterns were being reviewed. A grand jury indicted Wheeler-Weaver in October 2022 on charges of murder, attempted sexual assault of a minor, endangering the welfare of a child and desecration of human remains. On October 26, 2022, in a hearing of less than three minutes, he pleaded not guilty. He is presumed innocent of these charges.
If the allegations are proved, she would have been killed between Robin West and Joanne Brown, and would be the youngest of the victims.
As of the July 2, 2026 NJ.com report, Wheeler-Weaver was serving his 160-year sentence on the 2019 convictions, which the Appellate Division affirmed in January 2024. The Doumbia case had not gone to trial: NJ.com said it had "stalled for years," that his next court date was August 17, 2026, and that Judge Mark Ali had hinted the trial should be ready early in 2027. The outcome of the August hearing is not known.
Robin West's father started a $500 yearly scholarship in her name at Frankford High School. Her parents objected to news reports that had labeled their daughter by the work she did. "She was a person," Anita Mason told WHYY, "and did not deserve to lose her life." Leroy West said he had not forgiven the man accused of killing her: "I'm not there yet."
The case has drawn steady attention to how police handled the warnings that came before Sarah Butler's death: the license plate Breniesha Patterson wrote down, Wheeler-Weaver's own account of being with Robin West, and Tiffany Taylor's report to the Elizabeth police. NorthJersey.com published a special report on the victims and the failures in 2020. In 2026 NJ.com and The Star-Ledger released "Someone's Hunting Us," a podcast series by Rebecca Everett and Daysi Calavia-Robertson based on more than 2,500 pages of court transcripts, interviews with friends of all four girls and women who died, and police records including the recording of his interrogation and of the catfishing. The reporters said their aim was to understand "the systemic issues and failures" that let him kill repeatedly.
Proven at trial and affirmed on appeal: the murders of Robin West, Joanne Brown and Sarah Butler; the kidnapping, sexual assault and attempted murder of Tiffany Taylor; the arson; and the desecration counts.
Charged and not tried: the murder of Mawa Doumbia. These are allegations.
Denied: Wheeler-Weaver has never admitted any of the killings. At trial his lawyers said he had sex with the women and left them unharmed; at sentencing he said the prosecutor's office framed him.
Unsettled in the sources: prosecutors told the jury, according to Oxygen, that the murdered women had tape over their noses and mouths and had been drugged before being strangled; the appellate opinion describes tape only on Joanne Brown and the drug evidence only as internet searches. Some coverage said all the victims did sex work; prosecutors said that was true of West, Brown and Taylor, not of Butler. Reports put the length of the series at 84 or 88 days. Whether he was taken into custody at the restaurant meeting or released and arrested later is reported both ways; the appellate opinion and NorthJersey.com indicate he was questioned and released while Butler was still missing, and arrested on December 6. Stephens's 2022 remark about other possible victims is not an accusation in any specific case.
April 2016: Wheeler-Weaver pays Tiffany Taylor for sex; she leaves without returning (appellate opinion).
August 31, 2016: Robin West, 19, gets into his car on a Newark street; a companion records the plate.
September 1, 2016: Her body is found after a fire in an abandoned house on Lakeside Avenue, Orange; identified about two weeks later.
October 7, 2016: Mawa Doumbia, 15, leaves her Newark home and is not seen again (he is charged, not convicted, in her death).
October 22, 2016: Joanne Brown, 33, leaves a friend in Newark and does not return.
November 15, 2016: Tiffany Taylor is attacked in Linden and escapes at a motel in Elizabeth.
November 19, 2016: Sarah Butler asks "lilyachtrock" on Tagged whether he is a serial killer.
November 22, 2016: Sarah Butler, 20, disappears in her mother's van.
November 25, 2016: The van is found on Nassau Street in Orange.
Late November 2016: Butler's sister and friends lure him to a restaurant meeting through a fake Tagged profile; Montclair police question him.
December 1, 2016: Sarah Butler's body is found in Eagle Rock Reservation, West Orange.
December 5, 2016: Joanne Brown's body is found at 354 Highland Avenue, Orange.
December 6, 2016: He is interviewed and arrested for Butler's murder.
December 20, 2016: He is charged with murdering Joanne Brown; bail $5 million.
February 27, 2017: Indicted in Robin West's death and the attack on Taylor.
August 2018: Pretrial rulings admit his statements and deny separate trials.
October to December 2019: Trial before Judge Mark S. Ali.
December 19, 2019: Convicted on all eleven counts.
October 6, 2021: Sentenced to 160 years, 145 without parole.
November 5, 2021: Remains found in 2019 in an Orange carriage house are identified as Mawa Doumbia's.
March 31, 2022: Charged with Doumbia's murder.
October 2022: Indicted in the Doumbia case; pleads not guilty on October 26.
January 25, 2024: Appellate Division affirms the 2019 convictions and sentence.
February to March 2026: NJ.com releases the podcast "Someone's Hunting Us."
July 2, 2026: NJ.com reports the Doumbia case still untried, with a court date set for August 17, 2026.