When Miranda Barbour was 18, she confessed to the murder of a 42-year-old man.
She was the young mother of a baby girl, newly married to her partner, Elytte, when the two of them decided to murder Troy LaFerrara on a November day in 2013.
“We just decided that we were going to kill somebody,” Elytte told the police, in interrogation footage shown in the new BBC Three documentary Miranda Barbour: Serial Killer or Liar? “We had no reason other than that.”
He said Miranda answered an online ad from Troy LeFerarra, who was looking for an escort.
“[Miranda] misleadingly sold him sex through texts,” said Elytte. “But that was never the intention. The whole intention was to kill him.”
Miranda drove to meet Troy, with Elytte hidden in the back seat of their car, under a blanket. They met in the parking lot of the local Susquehanna Valley Mall, and Troy got into the car. The plan was for Miranda to signal for Elytte to jump out and strangle Troy, by saying, 'Did you see the stars tonight?'
While Elytte strangled Troy, Miranda began to stab him. Then they dumped him in a driveway. His body was later found with more than 20 stab wounds.
Bite Films / Rebecca Hendin / BBC ThreeAfter the murder, Miranda and Elytte went for dinner. “I ate a burger and it was fantastic," Elytte told the police. It was his 22nd birthday that day.
The pair were jailed in December 2013. However, two months later, while awaiting trial, Miranda made a new confession: this was not her first murder.
She’d written to local Pennsylvania reporter Francis Scarcella, asking him to visit her in prison. As he sat across the glass from her in the visiting room, Miranda told him, “My entire life went upside down when I turned 12. I got into a gang, based around Satanism.”
She continued: “I always felt there was something inside of me, and I knew it was bad, and one day it would be totally out of control. This is not the first time."
“Are you saying that you’ve killed before?” asked Scarcella. Miranda said yes.
“How many times, Miranda? If you had to take a guess, what would you say?” he asked.
“I guess… I know that when I hit 22 I stopped counting,” she replied.
Robert Ingliss / Daily Item / Rebecca Hendin / BBC ThreeScarcella was lost for words. “Immediately I’m thinking, 'I could be sitting in front of the world’s worst female serial killer of all time,'” he told BBC Three.
Miranda's confession unleashed a media frenzy across the world, with people calling up the police to ask if their murdered loved ones could have been killed by this young mother. Within days, her claims were being investigated by the FBI, in partnership with local police forces.
Scarcella explained there had been disappearances in areas Miranda claimed to have murdered - but the local police were unable to find evidence to link any of the murders or missing persons to her. She had talked about severed body parts being dumped in Big Lake outside Wasilla near Anchorage; a man being murdered by a pier in Mexico Beach Florida; and body parts thrown from a vehicle between Raleigh and Coats, North Carolina. But, following investigations, many of Miranda's claims were dismissed by the authorities.
Miranda's family also said they were lies, telling reporters that she had always been a compulsive liar. But Miranda's husband told the police in a private interview that he believed his wife. “I fully believe she killed these people. I always told everybody I thought Miranda was possessed. We called her Super Miranda," he said referring to the persona Miranda would take on when apparently possessed.
"It’s a demon. I believe she’s capable of anything.”
Bite Films / Rebecca Hendin / BBC ThreeIn a January 2018 interview by the freelance investigative journalist Jill Burke, shown in the new BBC Three documentary, Miranda says she killed Troy so that her daughter would be adopted and have a better life than the one she could give her.
“I was a good mother, but I had two sides of me, at war with each other,” she said. “I felt if I did something to get myself out of the picture, everyone else would be so much better off in their lives.”
She believed Elytte would never have come up with the idea of murder without her, and that she “manipulated” him into it.
Bite Films / Rebecca Hendin / BBC ThreeDetails about Miranda's childhood have come to light since Troy’s murder. Court evidence shows that her uncle, Rick, was jailed in 1998 for raping her when she was just three years old.
Years later, Miranda wrote in her diary: “I felt dirty, violated, hurt, and ashamed. How could he think he had the right to hurt me and my sister the way he did? I wanted him to hurt worse than he hurt me.”
From the age of 13, she was put on medication for schizophrenia, ADHD, and depression. She had attempted suicide several times throughout her teens.
Jill has been investigating Miranda's story for four years. “It could be that ‘Super Miranda’ is an identity she formed to cope with the Uncle Rick years,” she says.
“’Super Miranda’ is defiant, powerful, has control over men. She’s a killer. Maybe she’s an offshoot of the schizophrenia.”
To Jill, the truth about whether Miranda is a serial killer “pushes credibility,” and she believes the media portrayal of Miranda as a dangerous, possessed woman is not the full story.
“It’s much easier to vilify a satanic, sinister femme fatale who acts callously and without remorse and takes a life, than it is to try to rain justice down on someone who’s mentally ill and has been a victim of child sexual abuse," Jill said.
“As a society, we like to believe in good and evil. But it’s just not that simple.”
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