NJ serial killer victim’s parents say Khalil Wheeler-Weaver ‘messed with the wrong girl’ – NorthJersey.com
Sarah Butler was murdered two days before Thanksgiving in 2016. Now, two days before Christmas, her family’s living room in Montclair is dark. The only celebration for the Butler family this year was a somber one, held in a gray conference room inside the Essex County Courthouse.
Sarah Butler’s murderer is behind bars. There he will stay, possibly for the rest of his life. It’s not much to celebrate. This year, it will have to do.
“We didn’t even put up a Christmas tree, because there’s no joy in it,” Victor Butler, Sarah’s father, said Monday at a press conference marking the end of the killer’s criminal trial. “It’s going to take some time.”
Sarah Butler was murdered on Nov. 22, 2016. Her body was discovered nine days later, partially covered by a pile of leaves in Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange. That discovery, combined with a quick-footed scheme by Butler’s sister and friends to lure the murderer to a meeting with police, led to the arrest of Khalil Wheeler-Weaver on Dec. 5, 2016. Wheeler-Weaver, then 20, was a resident of Orange.
On Thursday, Wheeler-Weaver was found guilty of 11 felony counts, including three counts of murder and one count of kidnapping.
He will be sentenced early next year.
His spree of violence was compressed, lasting just 88 days in the summer and fall of 2016. During that time he killed three women. His first victim was Robin West, 19, a prostitute from Philadelphia whom he met on the street in Newark. Next, he killed Joann Brown, 33, who was working as a prostitute on Newark’s south side. A third victim was 34 when she escaped Wheeler-Weaver’s attack.
Sarah Butler, a Montclair High School graduate, was a sophomore at New Jersey City University. She was 20.
Within days of murdering Butler, Wheeler-Weaver went back online, using a social media app called Tagged to look for his next victim. It was there that Sarah Butler’s sister Bassania Daley joined with two friends to create a fake profile of a young woman that attracted Wheeler-Weaver’s attention. The women set up a meeting with Wheeler-Weaver, but police went instead.
“Mr. Wheeler-Weaver was ultimately a millennial serial killer,” said Adam Wells, the assistant county prosecutor who led the case. “He did everything on his phone.”
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Monday’s press conference represented a victory lap for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, which investigated Wheeler-Weaver for nearly three years before bringing its case. The criminal case relied on everything from canine searches across Eagle Rock Reservation to a device created by NASA called the Zephyr machine, which melted the insides of Wheeler-Weaver’s smartphone and allowed investigators to access its data without knowing the killer’s password.
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Tying all the evidence together was testimony from those who knew the victims, as well as from the woman who escaped the killer, known in court by her initials, “T.T.” With their help, investigators were able to assemble Wheeler-Weaver’s methods, which combined social media and brute force, to lure and trap his victims.
“It’s like peeling an onion. The deeper you dig, the more you find,” Wells said. “We would have been nowhere without the friends and families of the victims.”
At the press conference, Butler’s relatives remembered her love — her love for teaching children, her love for dance, and her love for her family.
“I just want him to know that he messed with the wrong girl,” said Laverne Butler, her mother. “Sarah was well-loved.”
Email: maag@northjersey.com
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