On November 11, 2013, Troy LaFerrara, forty-two, of Port Trevorton, Pennsylvania, met a young woman in the parking lot of the Susquehanna Valley Mall in Hummels Wharf. He had answered her ad on Craigslist. They agreed on a price, $100 for sex by her account, and she told him she had just turned sixteen, which was a lie. They drove six miles to Sunbury, a small city about a hundred miles northwest of Philadelphia. Hidden under a blanket in the back seat of the Honda CR-V was her husband of three weeks, Elytte Barbour. At her signal he rose up and wrapped a cord around LaFerrara's neck while she stabbed him about twenty times.
His body was found the next day in a residential back yard in Sunbury. The couple had bought bleach wipes, towels and cleaning liquid to scrub the blood out of the car, and then gone to dinner. At first they denied knowing him, but the last call from LaFerrara's phone had gone to Miranda Barbour's. Her story moved from self-defense to a joint confession of a planned killing. Elytte Barbour told investigators they had done it because they just wanted to murder someone together, and police said it had been timed for three weeks after their wedding, which took place on October 22, 2013, when they were living in Dunn, North Carolina. Elytte, a 2010 graduate of Triton High School, was twenty-two; Miranda, born Miranda Dean, was nineteen.
Both pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, which carried a possible death sentence. Then, from the county prison, she gave an interview to the Sunbury Daily Item. She said a relative had molested her when she was four, and her mother confirmed that an uncle had been convicted of sexually abusing a minor and sentenced to nineteen years. She said she had joined a satanic cult in Alaska at thirteen and had committed her first murder soon after, when the cult's leader made her shoot a man who owed it money. She claimed to have killed at least twenty-two people between 2008 and 2013, all of them, she said, bad people, and she felt no remorse. The claim went around the world.
The FBI and other police forces looked into it. The Northumberland County district attorney told the Daily Item he was skeptical: the agencies in places where she had lived had sent nothing to verify it. The Alaska State Troopers said they had no evidence she had killed anyone during her time in Alaska. No other killing was ever charged to her.
The Barbours pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and on September 18, 2014, both were sentenced to life in prison without parole.