Miranda Barbour was 18 years old when police in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, charged her in December 2013 with killing Troy LaFerrara, a 42-year-old engineer from Port Trevorton who had answered an online advertisement she placed offering companionship for money. Her husband of three weeks, Elytte Barbour, was charged with her. According to the police account, Elytte told investigators the couple had killed LaFerrara because they wanted to kill someone together.
The case drew national attention twice. The first time was in December 2013, when wire services carried the police account of a newly married couple planning a killing. The second came in February 2014, when Miranda Barbour, held in the county prison, told a reporter for The Daily Item of Sunbury that she had killed at least 22 other people over six years, beginning in Alaska as a member of a satanic group when she was 13. Police, the FBI and agencies in several states looked into what she said. The district attorney said there was no verification of any of it, and the Alaska State Troopers said they knew of nothing beyond her own press comments that linked her to a homicide in their state.
In August 2014 both Barbours pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in LaFerrara's death, with other charges, under an agreement that took the death penalty off the table. On September 18, 2014, a Northumberland County judge sentenced each of them to life in prison without parole. She stands convicted of one killing. Her other claims remain claims.
Her father told The Daily Item that she had been in and out of treatment after becoming addicted to heroin, and that she could be manipulative. He did not dispute that she had called herself a Satanist.
A co-worker in North Carolina told ABC11 in Raleigh-Durham that she lived in the small town of Coats and worked as a cashier at a local grocery store, and that she had recently come from Alaska without saying much about her life there.
Elytte Barbour graduated from Triton High School in 2010, according to ABC11, played in a band and worked at a grill near the store where Miranda worked. ABC11 reported that he had no criminal record, only a traffic violation that had been dismissed.
The co-worker told ABC11 that the couple had been together about seven months. They had planned a Halloween wedding but moved the date up, she said, so that Elytte could be added to Miranda's health insurance. She served as a witness when they married in Lillington, North Carolina. Elytte later told The Daily Item that the wedding took place on October 22, 2013. Soon afterward the couple quit their jobs and left Dunn, North Carolina, for Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, near Sunbury. The Associated Press reported that they arrived about three weeks before the killing.
After the arrests, Elytte told The Daily Item that his wife regularly hired herself out as a "companion" to men she met through websites, earning between $50 and $850 for things such as dinner or a walk around a mall. He said the ads, including those on Craigslist, stated that sex was not part of the arrangement, and that she met men whose marriages had broken down or who had no one to talk to. Miranda Barbour told police the same thing in outline: that she used Craigslist to meet men who paid her for companionship.
Troy LaFerrara was 42 and lived in Port Trevorton, Pennsylvania. At the sentencing in September 2014 his widow told the court about her life without him and described him as a gentle man who loved the outdoors and held a civil engineering degree from Penn State, the Associated Press reported. His sister also spoke for the family, at the sentencing and in the months before it.
The police account, set out in affidavits and repeated in court, ran as follows. LaFerrara answered Miranda Barbour's ad and arranged to meet her on the evening of November 11, 2013. She picked him up in the parking lot of a shopping mall near Selinsgrove, in Hummels Wharf, and drove him several miles to Sunbury in her Honda CR-V. Elytte was hiding under a blanket in the back seat. On a signal from his wife, both of them attacked LaFerrara, and Miranda stabbed him. He was stabbed to death. The couple left his body in Sunbury, where it was found the next day, November 12.
As The Daily Item's Francis Scarcella reported, Sunbury police said the day of the killing was both the three-week anniversary of the wedding and Elytte's 22nd birthday. Elytte told investigators that the couple had planned a killing before, but that their plans had not worked out until LaFerrara answered the posting. Miranda later told The Daily Item that other men in central Pennsylvania had answered her ad earlier but had not shown up.
According to police, the couple bought bleach wipes, towels and cleaning liquid after the killing to clean the blood from the car, then went out to eat. ABC11 reported that store surveillance video showed Elytte buying the cleaning supplies, as he had told investigators. Miranda told police she took her husband to a strip club that night for his birthday. In a jailhouse interview later played in court, she said she had taken about $150 from LaFerrara.
For three weeks the killing went unsolved. The Daily Item reported on November 13 that the county coroner had identified the dead man as LaFerrara, and over the following days that more than half of Sunbury's police force was working the case and that a homicide task force had been formed. By December 2 the paper was reporting little progress.
The break came from LaFerrara's phone. Investigators found that the last call on it had come from Miranda Barbour's number. When police first spoke to her, she denied knowing him. According to the police affidavit described by ABC11, her account changed as investigators gathered more evidence. She then said she had met LaFerrara in Selinsgrove and driven with him to Sunbury, where they parked, and that she had stabbed him with a knife from between the front seats after he groped her and put his hand around her throat. In other words, she first claimed self-defense.
Miranda Barbour was arrested on December 3, 2013, and charged the day after police first contacted her, ABC11 reported. Elytte Barbour was arrested on Friday night, December 6, and arraigned that night without a lawyer. He gave police what they described as a full confession. In it, according to the police account, he said he had hidden in the back seat and joined the attack on his wife's signal, and that they had done it because they wanted to kill someone together. Sunbury police Cpl. Brad Hare repeated that phrase to Reuters in a report printed by the Bangor Daily News on December 7: the couple, he said, "just wanted to murder someone together." Police also said the Barbours had changed their accounts of the events leading up to the killing more than once.
Sunbury Police Chief Steve Mazzeo declined to discuss motive while the investigation was active. ABC11 reported that investigators also planned to look into the death of a man with whom Miranda Barbour had a 1-year-old child; Mazzeo would not say whether foul play was suspected. On December 10, police searched the couple's home in Selinsgrove, The Daily Item reported.
Both Barbours were held without bail on criminal homicide and related charges. In mid-December prosecutors added robbery and conspiracy charges, The Daily Item reported, and LaFerrara's widow prepared to face the couple in court.
The preliminary hearings were held one after the other at the Northumberland County Courthouse in Sunbury, Miranda's first. WNEP reported that she said nothing as she was brought in. Her lawyer raised spousal privilege, a rule that protects some communications between husband and wife. Northumberland County District Attorney Tony Rosini answered that the privilege covers confidential communications between spouses, not what one spouse sees the other do, and would not be an issue in a homicide case. The judge found enough evidence for both to stand trial on the homicide and robbery charges. LaFerrara's family attended both hearings and did not speak to reporters.
Rosini told reporters that prosecutors would review the case for aggravating circumstances and would file notice that they were seeking the death penalty if the evidence supported it. By February 2014 prosecutors were seeking death sentences for both defendants, the Associated Press reported, and both had pleaded not guilty.
By mid-February 2014 the court had approved psychiatric evaluations of both defendants, first of Elytte and then, at her lawyer's request, of Miranda.
Francis Scarcella, a reporter for The Daily Item, had tried for more than a month to interview Miranda Barbour when she wrote to him saying she wanted to talk. He met her at Northumberland County Prison on February 14, 2014. He later described her to WNEP as meek and soft-spoken, someone who did not hesitate or seem to be reciting a script.
In that interview, published that weekend, she said she wanted to plead guilty to killing LaFerrara. She also said that she had killed at least 22 other people over six years, in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California, and that most of the killings had taken place in Alaska. She said she had joined a satanic group in Alaska at 13 and had begun killing soon afterward at the direction of its leader. She told Scarcella she had stopped counting at 22. Asked for an actual number, she said it was under 100. She said she was ready to talk to police about the other killings and could point on a map to where they would find the victims. "I feel it is time to get all of this out," she said, according to the Associated Press account of the interview. "I don't care if people believe me." She said she felt no remorse, did not want to leave jail, and would kill again if released.
She offered little detail about any of the other deaths. She said the people she killed had done bad things and did not deserve to be alive.
After the first interview drew wide attention, she was moved from the county prison to the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, a women's prison, where she gave Scarcella a second interview. In that one, reported at the end of March, she repeated her claims and named places she said investigators should search: Big Lake, a lake about 13 miles from Wasilla, Alaska, where she had once lived; Mexico Beach, Florida, where she said she had worked at 15; and the area along Interstate 95 near Raleigh, North Carolina. She complained that the FBI had not come to interview her.
Prosecutors later played parts of the recorded February interview in court. In one passage, Scarcella asked her why she stabbed LaFerrara. "It got out of control," she answered. She said the whole plan was for the two of them to do it together. The district attorney said that portion was played to show a conspiracy. A county prison guard who sat about five feet away during the interview testified that some of what Barbour said made her feel sick.
Chief Mazzeo told The Daily Item that investigators had contacted the FBI and police in several other states, and that they were "seriously concerned" based on what they had gathered, including the interview. Pennsylvania police said they had been working with investigators in other states on possible links to unsolved killings even before the interview was published. The FBI's Philadelphia office said it had recently contacted Sunbury police and would assist if asked; by the following Tuesday the FBI said it was assisting local police in determining whether she was linked to other victims and expected the work to take some time. A spokeswoman for the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said the bureau had been in contact with Pennsylvania authorities.
The answers that came back did not support her. That week District Attorney Rosini issued a statement saying there had been "no verification of any of the information" about prior killings, and that ethics rules barred him from commenting further on her statements.
The places she named in her second interview produced the same result. Local investigators in Alaska, Florida and North Carolina told The Daily Item they were taking her claims seriously, but none knew of an unsolved homicide that fit. The police chief in Mexico Beach, Glenn Norris, said the town had no known unsolved homicides. A Raleigh police spokesman, Jim Sughrue, said the department was looking into what she said but called her information very vague, noting that Interstate 95 runs about 30 miles from the city limits and covers many miles. The Alaska State Troopers would neither confirm nor deny an investigation and said any leads would be followed up.
By April 2014 investigators said they had found no evidence to support any of the other killings, the Associated Press reported. When the Barbours pleaded guilty that August, Northumberland County District Attorney Ann Targonski told WNEP that the FBI was still looking into the claims. At the sentencing in September, WNEP reported that police were helping the FBI examine them and that no evidence so far supported them. In a phone interview from the state prison at Muncy days before the sentencing, she stood by what she had said, the Associated Press reported.
Her family disputed the claims publicly. Her sister, 22, told The Daily Item at the end of March 2014 that Miranda was making it up and called her a "master at lying." She said her sister and Elytte loved the television series "Dexter," about a forensic analyst who kills people he considers bad, and that Miranda was borrowing from it. "If you listen to what she is saying, she is using descriptions from the show," she told the paper. Their father told The Daily Item that his daughter was a liar and a manipulator and that he did not believe she was a mass murderer.
Through the spring of 2014 the case moved through pretrial motions, with the possibility of death sentences hanging over both defendants. Miranda Barbour's lawyer, Ed Greco, asked the court to strike the aggravating circumstances in her case, which would have removed the death penalty. He also won the court's approval to hire a computer expert, and told WNEP that LaFerrara had used at least eight email addresses. At one pretrial hearing, prosecutors played parts of the February jailhouse interview. The defense said it would fight the admission of the interview as evidence, and in February and May 2014 The Daily Item reported on challenges to her confession to police on the ground that she had asked for a lawyer.
The defense also asked the court to exclude the knife, arguing that the search warrants contained mistakes; if the warrants fell, prosecutors could not use it. WNEP reported that no ruling had been made at that stage, and the fight over the knife was still before the court in June, The Daily Item reported. At the same hearing a judge found Elytte Barbour competent to stand trial, which left prosecutors free to seek the death penalty against him.
The trials never took place. On Tuesday, August 26, 2014, Miranda and Elytte Barbour pleaded guilty in Northumberland County Court in Sunbury. Each admitted second-degree murder, aggravated assault, robbery and possessing an instrument of crime, WNEP reported, in exchange for a life sentence. Both had originally been charged with first-degree murder. In Pennsylvania a conviction for second-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence, the Associated Press noted, and the plea removed the possibility of a death sentence.
District Attorney Targonski told WNEP that the agreement had been in the works for several weeks. It spared LaFerrara's family the agony of a trial and years of appeals, she said, and a trial would probably have cost the county about $1 million, though she called that figure speculation. LaFerrara's widow told WNEP that her main concern had been that the couple never be able to do the same thing to anyone else. "They got what they wanted, they got their 15 minutes," she said, adding that she wished people would stop giving it to them.
The Barbours were sentenced on Thursday, September 18, 2014, in Northumberland County Court. Judge Charles Saylor imposed life in prison without parole on each and said that their permanent removal from society was appropriate. He said he had trouble understanding their indifference to human life. Neither defendant showed emotion, the Associated Press reported.
LaFerrara's sister told the couple that they were fundamentally flawed and lacked empathy and remorse, calling them "rotten to the core." His widow described her life without him. Elytte Barbour read a written apology. He said he could not explain taking part in what he called a senseless crime, and that it was not who he was or wanted to be. Miranda Barbour did not address the judge.
In an account published on the day of the sentencing, she gave yet another version of the killing, saying it had been her husband's part of the plan that went wrong and that she had then used the knife. The claims of other killings were not part of any charge.
In September 2015, Elytte Barbour, then 23, asked the court to let him withdraw his guilty plea. His new lawyer, Richard Feudale, argued that his earlier lawyers had been ineffective, that a breakdown in communication had led to the August 2014 plea, and that he should have been allowed to plead guilty but mentally ill. Elytte said he had been told there was no defense available and that he would face the death penalty if he did not plead guilty. Judge Saylor granted a hearing on the petition.
On November 2, 2015, Feudale withdrew the petition, WKOK reported, which in effect ended the case. At that time Elytte Barbour was serving his sentence at the State Correctional Institution at Forest. Later that month the Associated Press reported that a judge had approved his request to drop the appeal after speaking with him in court. Both he and Miranda Barbour, then 20, remained under life sentences without parole.
Miranda Barbour's statements about other killings stand on her word alone. The numbers were loose from the start: at least 22, she said, adding that she had stopped counting at 22 and, when pressed, that the total was under 100. No other death has been charged against her. The Northumberland County district attorney said there was no verification of any of her information about prior killings; the Alaska State Troopers said nothing beyond her own press comments linked her to a homicide in Alaska; and officials in Mexico Beach and Raleigh knew of no unsolved killings that matched what she described. Her sister and father both said publicly that she was lying.
Her accounts of the LaFerrara killing also changed. She first denied knowing him, then said she stabbed him in self-defense, then, in the February 2014 interview, described a plan the couple had carried out together, and later blamed the way her husband had carried out his part. Elytte's account to police, that they wanted to kill someone together and had tried before, was at the center of the police case.
In December 2013 ABC11 reported that police intended to look into the death of the father of her young child. The chief would not say whether foul play was suspected, and no charge in connection with that death was reported.
2010: Elytte Barbour graduates from Triton High School.
2011: Miranda Dean leaves Alaska for North Carolina, pregnant with her daughter.
October 22, 2013: Miranda and Elytte Barbour marry in Lillington, North Carolina; they soon move to Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania.
November 11, 2013: Troy LaFerrara, 42, is killed in Sunbury after answering Miranda Barbour's online ad; it is Elytte's 22nd birthday.
November 12, 2013: LaFerrara's body is found in Sunbury.
December 3, 2013: Miranda Barbour is arrested and charged.
December 6, 2013: Elytte Barbour is arrested; police say he confessed and said the couple wanted to kill someone together.
December 2013: robbery and conspiracy charges are added; after preliminary hearings, a judge orders both to stand trial.
February 2014: prosecutors are seeking the death penalty; the court approves psychiatric evaluations of both defendants.
February 14, 2014: in a county prison interview with The Daily Item, Miranda Barbour claims at least 22 other killings.
February 2014: the district attorney says there is no verification of her claims; the Alaska State Troopers say nothing beyond her press comments links her to a homicide in Alaska. She is moved to the State Correctional Institution at Muncy.
March 31, 2014: The Daily Item reports a second interview, at Muncy, in which she names places in Alaska, Florida and North Carolina; local officials know of no matching unsolved killings.
By April 1, 2014: her sister and father tell The Daily Item she is lying.
Spring 2014: pretrial hearings on the death penalty, the jailhouse interview and the search warrants; Elytte Barbour is found competent to stand trial.
August 26, 2014: both Barbours plead guilty to second-degree murder, aggravated assault, robbery and possessing an instrument of crime; the death penalty is ruled out.
September 18, 2014: Judge Charles Saylor sentences each to life in prison without parole.
September 2015: Elytte Barbour asks to withdraw his guilty plea, arguing his lawyers were ineffective.
November 2015: the petition is withdrawn and a judge approves the withdrawal; Elytte Barbour is held at SCI Forest.