Post by natalie on Feb 17, 2014 14:24:46 GMT -5
By DAILY MAIL REPORTERS
As law enforcement investigating the sensational serial killing claims of Miranda Barbour admit her boasts could be real - others are dubbing the 19-year-old Pennsylvania girl, a 'real life Dexter'.
Claiming that she only killed 'bad people who do bad things' in her self-confessed nationwide murder-spree, Barbour, 19, has been compared to the fictitious 'moral' serial killer played by Michael C. Hall on the Showtime cable network.
In an interview given from prison and published on Saturday with the Daily Item in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, Barbour said that she participated in at least 22 killings in the past six years in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California.
Indeed, a law enforcement source close to the investigation has admitted their fears that Barbour's claims could be 'the real deal'.
'It's conceivable,' said the source to CNN in response to Barbour's claims that, 'When I hit 22, I stopped counting.'
Amid these gruesome claims, the tiny Alaskan town of North Pole has become the center of the outlandish story about satanism and serial killers that Barbour claims began at the behest of a cult leader.
Barbour contends she joined a cult aged just 13 in the town of North Pole, where hundreds of news outlets have turned out since the lurid story broke, and then spent her teenage years on a nationwide killing spree.
However, the woman, who is charged with murdering a Sudbury, Pennsylvania man in November, told a reporter the 'majority' of slayings took place in her home state.
According to a jailhouse interview, she joined the satanic sect as a young girl in the town, which is in the Fairbanks North Star Borough of Alaska and has a population of 2,210.
Claiming to have been sexually abused at the age of four, Barbour told the Daily Item that she only killed 'bad people' and was brought up in the cult by a man she would not identify.
Investigators are also pouring over the sordid Craigslist encounters that Barbour and her husband Elytte organized for cash in the months prior to her arrest while they lived in Dunn, North Carolina.
Elytte Barbour told The Daily Item of Sunbury that Miranda Barbour, whom he married October 22, regularly hired herself out as a 'companion' from $50 to $850 an hour to men she met on various meet-up websites.
He said he did not mind this because there was no sexual contact between his wife and her clients.
'She is not a prostitute,' he said at the time. 'What she does is meet men who have broken marriages or have no one in their lives, and she meets with them and has delightful conversation.'
Indeed, it was this individual who introduced Barbour to murder - killing a man down an alley in Alaska with a gun.
'It was in an alley and he (the cult leader) shot him,' she said, declining to identify him.
'Then he said to me that it was my turn to shoot him. I hate guns. I don’t use guns. I couldn’t do it, so he came behind me and he took his hands and put them on top of mine and we pulled the trigger. And then from there I just continued to kill.'
During her time in the cult, Barbour claims that at one point she fell pregnant and was subjected to a dangerous 'in-house abortion' by members after they drugged her and tied her to a bed.
In 2011, she moved to North Carolina from Alaska and met Elyett Barbour, her husband who is now 22. She said she left Alaska as a high-ranking member of the satanic cult.
The teen has a son by a man who is now deceased and his death is now part of the investigation.
Police in Pennsylvania told The Daily Item that they're working with investigators from other states to probe possible connections to unsolved murders.
A law enforcement source close to the investigation told CNN Barbour's new claims could be 'the real deal.' 'It's conceivable,' the source said.
Alaska law enforcement sources said they couldn't comment on whether they've launched their own investigations into her time in Alaska until after the President's Day weekend.
After the jailhouse interview, The Daily Item reported that she confessed to at least 22 killings in the past six years in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California.
'I can pinpoint on a map where you can find them,' she said from Northumberland County Prison.
Asked why she pleaded not guilty to the LaFerrara muder, she replied, 'I didn't want to.'
'When I was at my arraignment and the judge asked me how do I plead, I was ready to say guilty and my attorney (chief public defender Ed Greco) grabbed the microphone and said not guilty.'
Miranda Barbour said she has not spoken with her husband since the day she was arrested.
'He is proud of what he did,' she said. 'I will always love him.'
'I know I will never see my husband again and I have accepted that. I know I wanted to talk about all this because I know I had a 20-year window where I would possibly get out of jail and I don’t want that to happen. If I were to be released, I would do this again.'
Police allege in court papers that Elytte Barbour told investigators they committed the crime because they wanted to kill someone together.
Barbour's defense attorney has sought a psychiatric evaluation for his client, according to news reports. He said he didn't know she was going to give the interview.
Sunbury Police Chief Steve Mazzeo told CNN the FBI is now involved in the investigation.
'The FBI's Philadelphia Division has recently been in contact with the Sunbury Police Department regarding Miranda Barbour, and will offer any assistance requested in the case,' it said in a statement to CNN.
In the local newspaper piece, Barbour, claims she will plead guilty to the butchering of Troy LaFerrara, 42, in November in addition to more than 20 victims from Alaska to North Carolina as part of her involvement in a satanic cult.
'I feel it is time to get all of this out. I don't care if people believe me. I just want to get it out,' Barbour told the newspaper for a story published Saturday night.
'When I hit 22, I stopped counting,' she said on the paper's website. She now just wanted to be honest, she said.
Mazzeo said earlier: 'From information we gathered and from information gathered from her interview we are seriously concerned and have been in contact with the proper authorities.'
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Barbour and her husband, 22-year-old Elytte Barbour.
Authorities said Barbour, a petite woman with long brown hair, told investigators she met the 6-foot-2, 278-pound victim after he responded to her Craigslist ad offering companionship for money.
Over the course of the deeply unsettling interview, Barbour claims that she is ready and able to cooperate with authorities to reveal where the bodies are buried.
She said in the interview that she doesn't want to get out of jail and that she would kill again if she were released.
These confessions from Barbour follow the graphic details she gave police about married Troy LaFerrara's last moments.
Barbour told police in December that LaFerrara was still alive and 'choking and gasping for air' as her and her husband tried to find somewhere to dump his body after stabbing him 20 times.
Initially, Miranda told police that she killed La Ferrara in self-defense after he started to grope her. But her 22-year-old husband Elytte Barbour gave police a different story, saying they conspired to kill a stranger together, and he helped hold La Ferrara down while his wife wielded the knife.
Miranda Barbour was the first to be arrested when police traced LaFerrara's last call to her cell phone. She was charged last Wednesday in his death, followed by her husband on Friday.
Investigators said Elytte Barbour confessed to police the couple planned the killing. He previously told The Daily Item of Sunbury his wife acted in self-defense when LaFerrara, who was married, groped her after hiring her as a ‘companion.’
According to authorities, Miranda advertised herself as a 'companion' on Craigslist and LaFerrara responded. She arranged to pick him up on November 11 at a mall, three weeks after her marriage.
Elytte Barbour says he hid in the back of the car under a blanket until the moment his wife gave him a signal.
He held LaFerrara back with a cable cord while his petite, bespectacled spouse repeatedly stabbed him. LaFerrara's body was discovered the next morning in an alley by Sunbury resident Brittany Settler.
After dumping their victim's body, the Barbours when to Wal-mart to buy garbage bags, carpet clearer, paper towels and seat covers to clean out the SUV - but it wasn't enough.
'She related that there was a lot of blood and she wasn't able to get it all,' police said.
After that they went to a strip club to celebrate Elytte's 22nd birthday.
The Barbours had recently moved from North Carolina to Pennsylvania after tying the knot October 22.
LaFerrara married his girlfriend of eight years, Colleen Keeney, in June 2011. The couple did not have children.
According to his obituary, LaFerrara was employed as the senior resident engineer at the Lycoming County Landfill.
The couple's arrests comes after Richard Beasley was given the death penalty in April this year after luring three men to an Ohio farm by using Craigslist job posts before killing them in cold blood.
Mr Barbour has been charged with criminal homicide, aggravated assault, simple assault and criminal conspiracy and possession of instruments of crime.
The 22-year-old man told police that he and his wife had plotted to kill someone in the past, but without success. It was not until they came across LaFerrara on Craigslist that their plan finally came together.
Miranda Barbour offered little detail on the murders she claimed to have participated in in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California.
She claims she joined a satanic cult in Alaska when she was 13 before moving to North Carolina. Online records for the woman that the newspaper identified as Barbour's mother show her as having lived in both Alaska and North Carolina.
Last week, a judge granted a lawyer's request to have a forensic psychiatrist evaluate Miranda Barbour. The judge earlier approved a psychiatrist to evaluate Elytte Barbour.
As law enforcement investigating the sensational serial killing claims of Miranda Barbour admit her boasts could be real - others are dubbing the 19-year-old Pennsylvania girl, a 'real life Dexter'.
Claiming that she only killed 'bad people who do bad things' in her self-confessed nationwide murder-spree, Barbour, 19, has been compared to the fictitious 'moral' serial killer played by Michael C. Hall on the Showtime cable network.
In an interview given from prison and published on Saturday with the Daily Item in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, Barbour said that she participated in at least 22 killings in the past six years in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California.
Indeed, a law enforcement source close to the investigation has admitted their fears that Barbour's claims could be 'the real deal'.
'It's conceivable,' said the source to CNN in response to Barbour's claims that, 'When I hit 22, I stopped counting.'
Amid these gruesome claims, the tiny Alaskan town of North Pole has become the center of the outlandish story about satanism and serial killers that Barbour claims began at the behest of a cult leader.
Barbour contends she joined a cult aged just 13 in the town of North Pole, where hundreds of news outlets have turned out since the lurid story broke, and then spent her teenage years on a nationwide killing spree.
However, the woman, who is charged with murdering a Sudbury, Pennsylvania man in November, told a reporter the 'majority' of slayings took place in her home state.
According to a jailhouse interview, she joined the satanic sect as a young girl in the town, which is in the Fairbanks North Star Borough of Alaska and has a population of 2,210.
Claiming to have been sexually abused at the age of four, Barbour told the Daily Item that she only killed 'bad people' and was brought up in the cult by a man she would not identify.
Investigators are also pouring over the sordid Craigslist encounters that Barbour and her husband Elytte organized for cash in the months prior to her arrest while they lived in Dunn, North Carolina.
Elytte Barbour told The Daily Item of Sunbury that Miranda Barbour, whom he married October 22, regularly hired herself out as a 'companion' from $50 to $850 an hour to men she met on various meet-up websites.
He said he did not mind this because there was no sexual contact between his wife and her clients.
'She is not a prostitute,' he said at the time. 'What she does is meet men who have broken marriages or have no one in their lives, and she meets with them and has delightful conversation.'
Indeed, it was this individual who introduced Barbour to murder - killing a man down an alley in Alaska with a gun.
'It was in an alley and he (the cult leader) shot him,' she said, declining to identify him.
'Then he said to me that it was my turn to shoot him. I hate guns. I don’t use guns. I couldn’t do it, so he came behind me and he took his hands and put them on top of mine and we pulled the trigger. And then from there I just continued to kill.'
During her time in the cult, Barbour claims that at one point she fell pregnant and was subjected to a dangerous 'in-house abortion' by members after they drugged her and tied her to a bed.
In 2011, she moved to North Carolina from Alaska and met Elyett Barbour, her husband who is now 22. She said she left Alaska as a high-ranking member of the satanic cult.
The teen has a son by a man who is now deceased and his death is now part of the investigation.
Police in Pennsylvania told The Daily Item that they're working with investigators from other states to probe possible connections to unsolved murders.
A law enforcement source close to the investigation told CNN Barbour's new claims could be 'the real deal.' 'It's conceivable,' the source said.
Alaska law enforcement sources said they couldn't comment on whether they've launched their own investigations into her time in Alaska until after the President's Day weekend.
After the jailhouse interview, The Daily Item reported that she confessed to at least 22 killings in the past six years in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California.
'I can pinpoint on a map where you can find them,' she said from Northumberland County Prison.
Asked why she pleaded not guilty to the LaFerrara muder, she replied, 'I didn't want to.'
'When I was at my arraignment and the judge asked me how do I plead, I was ready to say guilty and my attorney (chief public defender Ed Greco) grabbed the microphone and said not guilty.'
Miranda Barbour said she has not spoken with her husband since the day she was arrested.
'I know I will never see my husband again and I have accepted that. I know I wanted to talk about all this because I know I had a 20-year window where I would possibly get out of jail and I don’t want that to happen. If I were to be released, I would do this again.'
Police allege in court papers that Elytte Barbour told investigators they committed the crime because they wanted to kill someone together.
Barbour's defense attorney has sought a psychiatric evaluation for his client, according to news reports. He said he didn't know she was going to give the interview.
Sunbury Police Chief Steve Mazzeo told CNN the FBI is now involved in the investigation.
'The FBI's Philadelphia Division has recently been in contact with the Sunbury Police Department regarding Miranda Barbour, and will offer any assistance requested in the case,' it said in a statement to CNN.
In the local newspaper piece, Barbour, claims she will plead guilty to the butchering of Troy LaFerrara, 42, in November in addition to more than 20 victims from Alaska to North Carolina as part of her involvement in a satanic cult.
'I feel it is time to get all of this out. I don't care if people believe me. I just want to get it out,' Barbour told the newspaper for a story published Saturday night.
'When I hit 22, I stopped counting,' she said on the paper's website. She now just wanted to be honest, she said.
Mazzeo said earlier: 'From information we gathered and from information gathered from her interview we are seriously concerned and have been in contact with the proper authorities.'
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Barbour and her husband, 22-year-old Elytte Barbour.
Authorities said Barbour, a petite woman with long brown hair, told investigators she met the 6-foot-2, 278-pound victim after he responded to her Craigslist ad offering companionship for money.
Over the course of the deeply unsettling interview, Barbour claims that she is ready and able to cooperate with authorities to reveal where the bodies are buried.
She said in the interview that she doesn't want to get out of jail and that she would kill again if she were released.
These confessions from Barbour follow the graphic details she gave police about married Troy LaFerrara's last moments.
Barbour told police in December that LaFerrara was still alive and 'choking and gasping for air' as her and her husband tried to find somewhere to dump his body after stabbing him 20 times.
Initially, Miranda told police that she killed La Ferrara in self-defense after he started to grope her. But her 22-year-old husband Elytte Barbour gave police a different story, saying they conspired to kill a stranger together, and he helped hold La Ferrara down while his wife wielded the knife.
Miranda Barbour was the first to be arrested when police traced LaFerrara's last call to her cell phone. She was charged last Wednesday in his death, followed by her husband on Friday.
Investigators said Elytte Barbour confessed to police the couple planned the killing. He previously told The Daily Item of Sunbury his wife acted in self-defense when LaFerrara, who was married, groped her after hiring her as a ‘companion.’
According to authorities, Miranda advertised herself as a 'companion' on Craigslist and LaFerrara responded. She arranged to pick him up on November 11 at a mall, three weeks after her marriage.
Elytte Barbour says he hid in the back of the car under a blanket until the moment his wife gave him a signal.
He held LaFerrara back with a cable cord while his petite, bespectacled spouse repeatedly stabbed him. LaFerrara's body was discovered the next morning in an alley by Sunbury resident Brittany Settler.
After dumping their victim's body, the Barbours when to Wal-mart to buy garbage bags, carpet clearer, paper towels and seat covers to clean out the SUV - but it wasn't enough.
'She related that there was a lot of blood and she wasn't able to get it all,' police said.
After that they went to a strip club to celebrate Elytte's 22nd birthday.
The Barbours had recently moved from North Carolina to Pennsylvania after tying the knot October 22.
LaFerrara married his girlfriend of eight years, Colleen Keeney, in June 2011. The couple did not have children.
According to his obituary, LaFerrara was employed as the senior resident engineer at the Lycoming County Landfill.
The couple's arrests comes after Richard Beasley was given the death penalty in April this year after luring three men to an Ohio farm by using Craigslist job posts before killing them in cold blood.
Mr Barbour has been charged with criminal homicide, aggravated assault, simple assault and criminal conspiracy and possession of instruments of crime.
The 22-year-old man told police that he and his wife had plotted to kill someone in the past, but without success. It was not until they came across LaFerrara on Craigslist that their plan finally came together.
Miranda Barbour offered little detail on the murders she claimed to have participated in in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California.
She claims she joined a satanic cult in Alaska when she was 13 before moving to North Carolina. Online records for the woman that the newspaper identified as Barbour's mother show her as having lived in both Alaska and North Carolina.
Last week, a judge granted a lawyer's request to have a forensic psychiatrist evaluate Miranda Barbour. The judge earlier approved a psychiatrist to evaluate Elytte Barbour.
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