Claims of serial murder crumbling

MAT-SU — As law enforcement and news outlets continue to vet her story, a former Valley teen’s assertion that she murdered dozens of people seems less and less credible.

Miranda Dean Barbour, 19, formerly a student in at least six Mat-Su Borough schools, faces murder charges for allegedly conspiring with her husband, Elytte Barbour, 22, to kill a Pennsylvania man that she confessed to stabbing multiple times. She says while she stabbed the man, Elytte Barbour allegedly strangled him with a cord.

In a jailhouse interview published Feb. 14, Barbour claimed to have engaged in a killing spree in multiple states, but mostly in Alaska. She said the body count was fewer than 100, but that she stopped counting at 22.

Barbour, who met Pennsylvania victim Troy LaFerrara, 42, through a personals ad on Craigslist, had already garnered media attention as a so-called Craigslist Killer. Her claims that she committed dozens of murders — starting at age 13 as part of a Satanist cult — sent her story rocketing around the Internet. At least one news outlet — the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom, has apparently sent a reporter to Anchorage.

On Tuesday, Alaska State Troopers put out a statement that reads, in full:

“AST has had contact with authorities in Pennsylvania regarding Miranda Dean Barbour. We will assist them however we can. We will follow up on any credible lead that is provided to us. At this time, the Alaska State Troopers are not aware of any information — beyond Barbour’s comments quoted in the press — or evidence that would implicate Barbour with a homicide committed in Alaska.”

Similar statements vowing an investigation but stating no credible evidence of multiple murders came out of Pennsylvania law enforcement.

In an interview with the same reporter that reported Barbour’s jailhouse interview — Francis Scarcella of the Daily Item in Sunbury, Penn. — Barbour’s father, Sonny Dean, also a former Alaskan but currently a Texas resident, says that his daughter is an attention-seeking, drug-addicted liar whose account shouldn’t be trusted. He seems to believe she killed LaFerrara and maybe one other person in Pennsylvania. He said she could also have committed the murder she described for Scarcella as her first in Alaska from when she was 13. She ran away from home that year for 48 hours, so it’s possible, Dean told the paper.

But, he said, she was on lockdown for most of her time living at home when she was supposedly committing murders. Dean also poured water on his daughter’s claims to have murdered people in California and Texas, saying that the only time she was in those states she was not out of his sight.

“She wouldn’t have had the chance to do any of these things she said,” Dean said in Scarcella’s story.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.