The attention-seeking fantasy of a self-confessed teenage murderer – or the unmasking of one of the most prolific female serial killers in American history?
That is the question that the Pennsylvania police and the FBI are now seeking to answer, as they attempt to establish the truth about the past of 19-year-old Miranda Barbour.
Prosecutors in Pennsylvania are currently seeking the death penalty against Ms Barbour and her husband Elytte for the murder last November of Troy LaFerrara, a 42-year-old man who answered her advert on the Craigslist website, offering sex for money. At the time, the Barbours had been married barely three weeks, and had only just moved to Pennsylvania from North Carolina.
In what police describe as an apparent thrill killing, the couple told investigators that she stabbed their victim to death in the front seat of her SUV while her husband, hiding in the back, held a cord around his neck. Mr LaFerrara “said the wrong things, then things got out of control”, was Ms Barbour’s reported version of events.
That one killing alone would be cold-blooded and remarkable enough. But in the case of Ms Barbour, it might merely be just the tip of an iceberg. If the story that she told local paper ‘The Daily Item’ in a weekend interview is true, she had already killed two dozen or more people in several states, starting when she was just 13, after she joined a Satanic cult in a small Alaskan town.
She gained her first taste of murder, she claimed, when the cult’s leader let her accompany him on a hit against someone who owed him money.
After shooting the man, the cult leader gave her the gun to finish the victim off. “I couldn’t do it, so he came behind me . . . put his hands on top of mine and we pulled the trigger.”
After that, murder seems to have held few qualms for her. “From there on, I just continued to kill,” she told ‘The Daily Item’. The bulk of the victims by her account were in Alaska, but others were in Texas, California and North Carolina.
They were “bad people, who didn’t deserve to be here any more,” she said. “When I hit 22 I stopped counting.”
She claimed to remember exactly where each victim was: “I can pinpoint on a map where you can find them.”
As Ms Barbour’s claims became known, the FBI, which traditionally handles multi-state crimes, became involved.
Few details of the earlier alleged killings have thus far emerged, but investigators said they are taking them seriously: “This could be the real deal,” one of them told CNN.
Read the full story at Independent.ie
