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Jury Convicts Khalil Wheeler-Weaver of Murdering Three New Jersey Women

After a two-month trial, an Essex County jury took less than three hours to convict the 23-year-old of killing Robin West, Joanne Brown and Sarah Butler and trying to kill a fourth woman.

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Illustration: an empty courthouse hallway with benches and closed courtroom doors. Not the actual courthouse.

After a trial that ran two months, an Essex County jury needed less than three hours. On Thursday, December 19, 2019, in Newark, it found Khalil Wheeler-Weaver, 23, of Orange, guilty on every count: the murders of three young women in 2016 and the kidnapping, sexual assault and attempted murder of a fourth woman, who survived.

The women he was convicted of killing were Robin West, 19, Joanne Brown, 33, and Sarah Butler, 20. Robin West, a Philadelphia native who was living in Union Township, was killed in Orange on September 1, 2016. Prosecutors said Wheeler-Weaver set fire to her body and then set the vacant house on fire. Joanne Brown, of Newark, was killed on October 22. Her body was not found until December 5, in a vacant home in Orange. Sarah Butler, a Montclair college student, was killed on November 22. She was found on December 1 in Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange.

The woman who lived was 34. Along with the three murder counts, the jury convicted Wheeler-Weaver of kidnapping her, sexually assaulting her and trying to kill her. It also found him guilty of three counts of desecration of human remains and of aggravated arson.

Prosecutors said he met the women through a social media app. His public defenders told the jury that he had arranged sexual encounters with them but dropped each woman off safely afterward and harmed no one.

At a press conference on Monday, December 23, Acting Essex County Prosecutor Theodore N. Stephens II said Wheeler-Weaver had believed his victims were people on the margins whose deaths would not matter. "This defendant somehow thought that he could kill these women without anyone caring," he said in a statement. Assistant Prosecutor Adam B. Wells, who tried the case with Assistant Prosecutor Mira Ohm, spoke of three families who had lived through the terror of a missing loved one before learning she had been murdered, and of a survivor still recovering from what was done to her. Ohm credited the victims' friends and family, who had worked with investigators to solve the case.

Wheeler-Weaver faced a possible sentence of life plus 80 years.

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