Over the past five years, a 19-year-old Satanist named Miranda Barbour claims she killed at least 22 people. The number 22 is the point at which she “stopped counting.”
If she’s telling the truth, Barbour would be among the most prolific serial killers in United States history, but for now, we have no way of knowing if that grim mark is correct.
In a recent jailhouse interview, Barbour gave her motive in the killings, and it makes for a darkly fascinating read: She says she only murdered those who did something to “deserve it,” and her life is drawing the inevitable comparisons to Dexter. Barbour says her issues began when she sexually assaulted by a relative at age four, which checks out; her uncle served 14 years in jail for assault of a minor. From Pennsylvania’s Daily Item:
Miranda said when she was 4, she was sexually molested by a relative…Nine years later, Miranda joined a satanic cult in Alaska. Soon after, Miranda said, she had her first experience in murder. Barbour said she went with the leader of the satanic cult to meet a man who owed the leader money.
“It was in an alley and he (the cult leader) shot him,” she said, declining to identify the cult leader. “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.”
Police in Sunbury, Penn.—where Barbour was arrested for the Nov. 11 knifing of Troy LaFerrara—have begun working with other state investigators and the FBI to uncover her connection to deaths in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina, and California. Barbour claims that the bulk of her murders came in Alaska, saying, “I can pinpoint on a map where you can find them.” (She also says she left Alaska a high-ranking member in its Satanic cult.)
The latest murder was the first to involve her husband, Elytte.
LaFerrara, Miranda Barbour said, was Elytte’s first victim.
The 42-year-old Port Trevorton resident was killed on the Barbours’ three-week wedding anniversary.
“I remember everything,” Miranda Barbour said. “It is like watching a movie.”
She said she agreed to sex for $100 with LaFerrara, whom she met through a Craigslist ad. The two met in the parking lot of the Susquehanna Valley Mall in Hummels Wharf, and drove nearly six miles to Sunbury.
At one point, she planned to let LaFerrara out of her Honda CRV.
“He said the wrong things,” she said. “And then things got out of control. I can tell you he was not supposed to be stabbed. My husband was just supposed to strangle him.”
Barbour recounts her killings with a coldness that you can just fucking feel through the computer screen. She says she feels no remorse, claiming the murders were justified because she killed those who did “bad things.” And if she is telling the truth, Barbour would have killed dozens more people than Jack the Ripper. That’s more terrifying than any TV show.
Read the whole story here.
[H/T: Uproxx]