Two months after her arrest for murder, Sunbury, Pennsylvania’s most notorious resident wrote me a letter.
“I put you on my visitor’s list,” she wrote in neat handwriting. “The rest is up to you.”
Sideways was her signature: Miranda Barbour.
Miranda and her husband, Elytte, had been the only topic of conversation in this tiny town since Dec. 3, when they were picked up for the murder of a local homeowner, Troy LaFerrara. They lured the married engineer with a Craigslist ad promising “companionship,” and stand accused of stabbing him 20 times in a parked car.
Police said Elytte allegedly confessed that the newlyweds did it for the thrill of it — “They just wanted to murder someone together.”
He had given a different story to the newspaper I work for, The Daily Item, before his arrest — Miranda had killed the man, but it was self defense, he said, after LaFerrara tried to molest her.
Now Miranda, all of 19 years old, wanted to tell her side of the story.
It was Valentine’s Day. She sat behind the glass, impassive in an orange prison suit, and gestured for me to pick up the phone. A voice came on the line, warning us that the conversation was being recorded.
“Wish you could have had your pad and pen,” Miranda said.
They didn’t let reporters record conversations, I explained. Memory would have to do.
“I have a lot of things I want to say,” she said. “Some of which will be difficult to hear.”
Her voice was very soft and high, like that of a little girl.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve done this.”
Lured a man on Craigslist?
“This was the first time on Craigslist, but I’ve killed before.”
It took me a moment to absorb that. How many times?
“Less than 100.”
Miranda, I said, no one in the world is going to believe you killed 100 people. Give me a number.
“Well,” she said, “I stopped counting at 22.”
‘Did you see the stars tonight?’
Sunbury, on the banks of the Susquehanna River, is classic small-town America, 10,000 people in each other’s business. The newspaper is right across the street from the courthouse, which is right next door to City Hall and less than three blocks from the police station.
Murders are rare, usually domestic. So finding a body strangled and stabbed was already big news.
“Whoever wanted him dead,” a cop told me, “wanted him really, really dead.”
Because the Nov. 11 killing was random, it wasn’t an easy case. LaFerrara, 42, who didn’t live in Sunbury full time, was remodeling a home he had there. His dealings were sketchy, police had reported. They began to release information that they were investigating a “subculture.” What that was no one had a clue, but sources had said that several local strippers had been in and out of the police station being questioned for about a week.
If the Barbours had left the state, there’s a chance they may have gotten away with it. But text messages were their ultimate undoing. A month after the killing, Sunbury police allegedly tied them to the victim through cellphones.
Miranda hadn’t gone into detail with the cops, but she told me she had been following my stories in the Item and liked how I wrote. She said she wanted to admit what she’d done.
LaFerrara had answered the Craigslist ad, agreeing to pay $100 for “companionship,” which he had taken to mean sex. Miranda said she was looking for “bad men” to punish.
She picked him up in her red Honda CRV, her husband hiding in the back seat. The 275-pound LaFerrara began groping her, and Miranda said she immediately looked for a way out.
“I told him I lied about my age and I had just turned 16,” she said. If LaFerrara had objected, he would have lived, Miranda said.
Instead: “He told me that was OK, it didn’t matter. I knew then he had to go.”
She had a password for her husband. “If we were going to do this, I was going to use the phrase, ‘Did you see the stars tonight?’”
But Elytte didn’t respond. After LaFerrara groped her again, she said the phrase another time. Still nothing.
“He still didn’t jump up, so I hit him in the leg and then he popped out,” she said.
Police say Elytte threw a electrical cord around LaFerrara’s neck, while Miranda stabbed him repeatedly in the chest.
The Barbours went to a local department store to buy cleaning supplies to wash the blood-soaked Honda, but Miranda said, “There was just so much. It was everywhere.”
The couple did what they could, then drove to a strip club. It was Elytte’s 22nd birthday.
Hours after the murder they drove back to see if the body had been found, but it was so dark they couldn’t find the alley where they dumped LaFerrara.
They drove back the next day. “I saw all the police and said, ‘Well, I guess they found him.’”
An Alaskan nightmare
Why would Miranda admit this? “I’ve lived my life as a lie,” she told me, “and I want to get it off my chest.”
Miranda Dean grew up in Wasilla, Alaska, the daughter of a military father and a stay-at-home mom. She said she was sexually assaulted at the age of 4 by a relative. Her mother, Elizabeth Dean, who came to Sunbury after Miranda’s incarceration, confirmed the incident took place and she immediately went to police and the man was arrested.
As a teenager, Miranda began to hang out with older men and would run away from home.
“She would be gone for days at a time,” Dean said. “I would be out on the streets looking for her.”
Miranda always returned home, but sometimes with stories that were hard to believe, her mother said. She also was in and out of treatment for cutting herself; “One time she cut herself so deep it was into the tissue,” Dean said.
The family moved to Florida for a year after Miranda’s father took a job. “She told me about things that would happen to her there,” Dean says, crying, “She said she would walk on the docks and piers and smoke weed and sleep with other guys.”
Dean returned to Alaska after the couple began to have problems, she said. Miranda, then 17, moved back to Alaska with her and told her she was pregnant. Dean sent her to live in Coats, North Carolina, thinking she’d get better care.
Miranda gave birth to a baby girl there in July 2012.
Dean and her husband had already filed for divorce so she decided to move to North Carolina to be near her daughter, Dean said.
Miranda got a job at a Coats grocery store and began going to community college, Dean said. “I was proud and she was doing really well. She bought her own car.”
Then things all of a sudden took a turn for the worse.
“I got a call that Miranda was missing,” Dean said.
“She changed her phone number, and I didn’t hear from her for about a week until she called from a restricted number and she was in Pennsylvania. I asked her what she was doing there, and she said ‘Elf’ had a best friend who lived there.”
Elf was Elytte Barbour, Miranda’s husband of three weeks.
“She told me she left because she was being treated like a child and she was tired of ‘proving myself,’ ” Dean said. “She told me moving to Pennsylvania was the best decision she ever made.”
Elytte got a job at a local restaurant as a dishwasher, and Miranda stayed at home with her daughter.
When news of the murder broke, Dean was shocked. In the weeks between the killing and the arrest, she had Skyped with Miranda and her granddaughter, and nothing seemed amiss.
“Right before Thanksgiving she was asking for recipes and telling me she was going to be coming back to North Carolina for Christmas.”
‘Just can’t be true’
Miranda fills in the missing days of her childhood with stories of horrors. She was part of a Satanic cult, she says, a gang that would perform occult rituals in the Alaskan woods.
She first killed at age 13.
“I lured a man into an alley that owed the gang leader money,” Miranda said.
“He shot the man and then gave me the gun and told me it was my turn. I hate guns and I couldn’t do it, so he put his hands on my hands and we pulled the trigger,” she said.
Miranda explained at that point she knew she had something bad inside her and that Satanism let her embrace it.
After that, she said she only targeted “bad people” and those who had hurt children. She says she’s willing to “pinpoint on a map” where she murdered.
An ex-boyfriend, meanwhile, has given Dean an old journal he claims is Miranda’s — a diary the mother will not release but wants to talk to her about.
“There are things in here that just can’t be true,” Dean said. “Some of this I just don’t believe.
“I don’t believe she has done any of what she is saying, and I don’t know why she is saying all of these things.”
“Who’s to say how many,” Elytte said about his wife’s claims during a phone call placed to reporters.
“I know what she told me was 50-50.”
Authorities are still scrambling in various states trying to see if there is any truth to what Miranda is claiming.
Sunbury Police Chief Steve Mazzeo said he could not comment on current investigations but has confirmed the FBI is now working on the case.
After my jailhouse interview with Miranda, the police asked me to authenticate the tapes of our conversations.
“I know people won’t believe me, but I don’t care,” Miranda said. “I’m saying all this for me. I want to remain in prison.”
‘I don’t want to get out’
During our long conversations, Miranda Barbour never smiled, never changed expression at all. If she’s doing it all for the attention, why talk only to me? Until now, she’s rejected other interviews and doesn’t seem to watch her own coverage on television.
She seems overwhelmed by guilt, or at least fear about herself.
“I told my lawyer I wanted to plead guilty to this,” she said.“He was not going the direction I wanted and when the judge asked me what my plea was, my attorney grabbed the microphone away from me and said not guilty.”
Miranda and Elytte won’t face trial until 2015, and she realizes that, even if found guilty, “I have a 20-year window. Then I can get out, and I don’t want to get out.”
With that same blank expression, she said, “If I get out of here, I’d do it again.”
Did Miranda Barbour kill all those people? I don’t know. But I do know she’s broken. And I don’t know if she can be fixed.
Francis Scarcella is a reporter for The Daily Item in Sunbury, Pa.