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Close friendships can truly impact overall health & well-being. It’s a wonderful feeling when another person cares for you & has your back through thick & thin. Those with strong social connections actually tend to be healthier with a reduced risk for significant health problems that include depression, elevated blood pressure & even a reduced body mass index (BMI). Older adults with meaningful relationships are likely to live longer than those with poor social support. However, in this case, the opposite proves to be true when a young girl’s once trusted friend commits the ultimate betrayal of murder.
Trouble began during the early morning hours of Saturday, December 3, 2016 when an Uber driver contacted the police at 2:45 am after he noticed an old Oldsmobile abandoned in the middle of the Route 35 bridge that crossed over the Shark River in Belmar, New Jersey. He saw no sign of the car’s driver & because it was so early on such a frigid day as well as the fact that it was a very odd place to leave a car, he felt something seemed off with the situation. Believing it was better to be safe than sorry, he reported the situation.
When police arrived, they noted that not only was the car unlocked, but the keys were still in the ignition. Because of its location at the top of the bridge, they questioned if they were dealing with a suicide & wondered if the driver stopped in that spot in order to jump over the side of the bridge to the frigid water below. However, when they ran the plates, they learned that the car was registered to 96-year-old Lillian Stern. When they headed to Lillian’s house, they found that she was alive & well.
Lillian informed officers that her 19-year-old granddaughter, Sarah Stern, often utilized her car & on the previous day, Sarah had borrowed her grandma’s car. Sarah worked at a restaurant in Neptune City & she was described as a sweet, bubbly, artistic girl who was a pleasure to be around & the epitome of innocence. The area of Neptune City, which sits along the Jersey shore, was very tight-knit & Sarah had a large group of family & friends who all adored her.
Sarah was the only child to Mike & Carla Stern who saw their daughter as a miracle baby since they didn’t think they’d be able to have children. The neighborhood where they raised their daughter was teaming with kids, all within the same age range & all the kids played together.
When Sarah was 15-years-old in 2013, the family was faced with heartbreak & devastation when Carla passed away after battling cancer. The teen was absolutely crushed by the loss of her mom, but took comfort in the love & support of those that rallied around her. Her beloved dog, Buddy, also helped Sarah get through the grief as did her love for art. She turned her grief into creativity & started going to various art conventions. During a convention in Toronto, Sarah absolutely fell in love with Canada & hoped to one day move there, hopefully sooner rather than later.
After Carla’s death, Mike met & fell in love with Christine, who could relate to Sarah’s pain since she also lost her mom at a young age.
Investigators began reaching out to Sarah’s friends in hopes they would find her, but she was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, Sarah’s dad Mike was vacationing in Orlando with Christine when he was notified in the middle of the night that his daughter seemed to be missing. He immediately packed up & got in his car to make the over 1,000 mile drive back home to New Jersey. Throughout the nearly sixteen hours it took to get home, Mike & Christine’s minds raced with thoughts of what could have happened to Sarah as Mike desperately tried to get ahold of his daughter without success & finally arrived home on Saturday night.
When investigators went to the Stern home, they found Sarah’s beloved dog Buddy in his crate, but the house was otherwise empty. Soon, they spoke with 19-year-old Liam McAtasney, Sarah’s childhood best friend whom she’d known since age six. In an attempt to build a timeline, they talked to those close with Sarah & were told that she had spent the previous day with Liam before she vanished. Her close friends & neighbors said that Sarah came by on December 2 & asked if she could leave a bin of belongings at their house. The bin held random items including some Halloween decorations & coins from her grandparents. During the short time she was there, she voiced frustrations about her dad & the fact that they had been potentially arguing, but nothing at all seemed out of the ordinary. She left their house in her grandma’s car to run some errands & that was the last they saw of her.
Liam told investigators that on Friday, December 2 they ran some errands together, had lunch at Taco Bell & just hung out. Liam claimed that he hadn’t seen or heard from Sarah since that afternoon & he had no idea why her car was abandoned on the bridge.
Sarah’s family were panicked when they heard about what was happening & were unable to reach her despite the fact that Sarah always had her phone with her. Since the car was so close to the edge of the bridge & the keys had been left inside, they wondered if it was possible that she jumped over the bridge. Sarah’s friend Carly didn’t believe this theory since they had been making plans for later that night & she’d seemed so happy that day. Carly thought, if anything, Sarah could have left to move to Canada & mentioned that Sarah had found some money which would have allowed her to make the move. All Carly knew was that Sarah had found a safe in an old house that her dad owned in a neighboring town & she came across thousands of dollars inside & asked Carly not to tell anyone.
After Carly talked to detectives, they went to the bank & learned that on top of the multiple accounts Sarah held, she also had a safety deposit box that she’d accessed on the very day she disappeared. They theorized that she may have taken the money out & left for Canada. However, after obtaining a search warrant for the safety deposit box, they found $25,250. Much of the bills were very brittle & began to crumble when handled. With this discovery, the odds of her leaving town weren’t good. On top of this, she also left her social security card & passport behind.
Mike Stern had been completely unaware that his late wife had been saving money for their daughter & was surprised that Sarah hadn’t told him about what she’d found.
A massive search for Sarah began & divers entered the Shark River Inlet, but there was no sign of the young girl. Neighbor’s & area surveillance cameras were checked & saw Sarah’s car coming & going throughout that Friday which helped them put the pieces of her final known moments together. She & Liam could be seen in the Taco Bell drive-through at 2:18 pm, she later went to a Bradley Beach bank just before 3 pm & she could be seen entering the lobby of the bank as she waved hello. The branch manager who was a friend of the Stern family said that she seemed happy & mentioned that she might be back soon.
Since Liam was the last known person to have seen her, a formal interrogation was held & Liam questioned if Sarah could have jumped from the bridge & indicated that she had discussed suicidal thoughts with him on previous occassions. He said that her relationship with her father was rocky & her mom had died from cancer in 2013. Suddenly, Liam’s theory as to what might have happened to his friend changed when he mentioned the possibility that she’d run away to Canada, a place he said she really wanted to visit.
Soon, Liam & his roommate, Preston Taylor, joined the immense search party for Sarah in the weeks that followed the discovery of her abandoned car, but there was absolutely no sign of her. Her social media activity stopped, there was no activity within her bank accounts & no one had seen her which reinforced the idea that something terrible happened to the young girl. Mike Stern held out hope that his daughter would one day come home.
Two months after Sarah vanished, a young man named Anthony Curry contacted investigators. He was an independent filmmaker who had gone to high school with both Liam & Preston Taylor, but had since moved to New York. Anthony & Liam had bonded over their love of movies, music & TV shows with their favorite being The Sopranos. Anthony told investigators that he’d spoken with Liam on Thanksgiving, eight days before Sarah was last seen. Liam told Anthony that he had a great idea for a movie plot that they could both work on together.
He went on to explain that Sarah had recently come across a load of cash in their family’s second home. With the cash, she’d also found a note from her deceased mom. According to Anthony, Liam said that the plot of the movie would be that he choked Sarah, disposed her body over the side of a bridge & left her car there to make it appear as a suicide so that he could keep the money for himself.
As the Thanksgiving holiday passed, Anthony headed to Brooklyn to work on a horror movie & never gave his conversation with Liam a second thought. The two often spoke about horror movie plots, so nothing was of concern according to Anthony. When he saw something about Sarah’s disappearance on social media, he started to worry that Liam could be responsible. He still didn’t think anything of it until Liam began to continuously contact him, mostly through Snapchat, saying he needed to meet up to tell him something, stressing that it was urgent. Since Snapchat messages disappear, Anthony decided to use his digital camera to take a picture of one of the messages that Liam had sent him since he knew if he screenshotted the image, Liam would be notified.
After Anthony explained the situation to investigators in January 2017, he agreed to wear a wire & meet up with Liam at a favorite hang out location in Bradley Beach, New Jersey. The ruse started with a phone call where Anthony told his friend that he needed to borrow money to replace a broken camera & asked him if he could spot him some cash from that girl’s money. Liam told him he might be able to, but he couldn’t talk about it over the phone & agreed to meet him on January 31, 2017.
Investigators told Anthony that he’d have to ask Liam questions in order to get him talking. When Liam climbed into Anthony’s car, he told Anthony that he’d been hiding from the cops over the past two months as he explained that before they spoke, he had to pat him down to see if he was wearing a wire. Anthony readily agreed since he wasn’t actually wearing a wire, instead, investigators had placed an audio & video recording system into the car’s radio system, assuming that Liam might do this. Police units were right nearby in case Liam became violent during their interaction.
After Liam felt reassured that he was only having a private conversation with a trusted friend, he quickly got to talking & told Anthony that the police were on to him about killing Sarah. They spoke for twenty minutes & in that time, he said that the worst part of the whole situation was that he thought he was going to walk away with $50-100k in his pocket. He explained that Sarah ended up having only $10k & the money she did have was old & in terrible condition. He didn’t think any was even usable & he’d only come out with about $7,000 which he had hidden.
Liam told Anthony that while they were hanging out on December 2, they went to the bank & she took some money out. After, while they were at her house counting the money, she got up to go out the front door & he began to choke her out. According to Liam, the biggest problem was Sarah’s dog who just layed there & watched him choke her. When he was done, he pulled her body into the bathroom & realized that he needed to leave to get to work. However, he couldn’t find his cell phone after he thought it may have fallen out on the driveway.
Since he didn’t want to be late for work, he left Sarah’s body in the bathroom & called his roommate Preston & asked him to go to Sarah’s to move her body outside & hide it in the bushes until he could get off work. Preston had been a friend of Sarah’s & the two had even gone to junior prom together.
During his shift, Liam left several times in search of his cell phone which he didn’t end up getting back until the next day when Sarah’s cousin found it on Sarah’s driveway. When he got off work, he went straight to Sarah’s house. He buckled Sarah’s body into the passenger seat of her car & drove the Oldsmobile, backing out of the driveway just as he’d watched Sarah previously do, fully aware that the neighbor had a security camera across the street. In the meantime, Liam was in communication with Preston via walkie talkie.
He told Anthony that he didn’t realize how heavy a dead body was & believed he would just quickly throw her body from the bridge, jump over the divider & get into Preston’s getaway car. However, when he reached the top of the bridge, he got out of the car, unhooked Sarah from the car & began to drag her body to throw her over when he saw other cars driving over the bridge. Now panicking, he threw her body back into the car until Preston drove up to Sarah’s car & helped him throw her body over the side of the bridge.
When Anthony asked Liam how he killed Sarah he said, I pretty much hung her. I picked her up & had her just dangling off the ground. He said that she lost control of her bladder, said his name & that was that. He went on to say that he was under the impression that it was only going to take him a couple of minutes to kill Sarah, but it ended up taking thirty minutes. When he initially strangled her, she lay on the ground & appeared to have a seizure so he took a shirt & shoved it into Sarah’s mouth to prevent her from vomiting & held his finger over her nose. He said that he set a timer on his phone & it took thirty minutes until she was gone.
Liam said because he was the last known person to see Sarah, he was continuously interrogated over the next month, but it was his full intention for authorities to know they were hanging out. He wanted them to believe that because they were close friends, they would never suspect he would have done anything to hurt her. He went on to tell Anthony that other than Preston, Anthony was the only other person to know this information. Liam was worried that if Preston found out that he told Anthony what happened, Preston would kill Anthony to prevent him from telling anyone else. This was when he clarified that he planned Sarah’s murder for six months.
Liam voiced his disappointment that he didn’t get as much money as he anticipated, but it was enough to allow him to throw continuous parties at his house. He told Anthony he was coming off a multi-drug “bender” that included mushrooms, cocaine, Adderall & acid. As their conversation was wrapping up, in referencing Sarah’s murder, he said, I don’t feel any different & I don’t think about it.
Detectives listening in on the conversation were stunned & sickened by what they heard & the callous way Liam so easily talked about ending his trusted friend’s life, as if he was talking about something as trivial as the weather.
On February 1, 2017, the morning after Anthony spoke with Liam in his car, both Liam & Preston were arrested. Liam was a 19-year-old college sophomore who was studying psychology & had known & been friends with Sarah since first grade. Preston was also in college, studying economics & political science while working part-time. Neither had a criminal record.
When Mike Stern learned the information from Liam’s confession, he was stunned into silence & absolutely heartbroken. He knew & trusted these kids & had spent so much time with them over the years. He was in disbelief they could have been capable of hurting his only child.
A celebration of life was held about seven months after Sarah disappeared & displayed all of her art as a 1,000 or so visitors came through the community center.
Both Liam & Preston pleaded not guilty to all charges against them.
The trial began in January 2019 & Preston was offered a deal to testify against Liam in exchange for the felony murder charge to be dropped & in exchange, he pleaded guilty to six other charges. He indicated that after Sarah told Liam about the shoebox full of money, Liam started thinking about what to do in order to get his hands on the money. Initially, he thought they could just burglarize the house or rob her personally & then the conversation & plan morphed to murder. They utilized the walkie talkies so their cell phones couldn’t be tracked & initially planned to commit the murder in November, one month earlier. However when Liam was at Sarah’s house on that particular day, he realized the money wasn’t there & aborted the plan for the time being.
Since Sarah expressed her desire to move to Canada, Liam convinced her to take the money out of the safe deposit box in preparation. On December 2, he took advantage of the fact that Mike & Christine were on vacation & put his plan into motion. Late that afternoon, Liam strangled Sarah to death & surveillance showed him outside her house with a backpack containing some of the money. Another video showed him arriving at his job at a steakhouse, leaving only a few minutes later. Preston testified that after he left work, he came back to the house they shared in an absolute panic & told him that he lost his phone & he needed Preston to go to Sarah’s house to find his phone & move her body & in the meantime, Liam went back to work.
When Preston arrived at Sarah’s house, he climbed the back fence & snuck through the back door, but was unable to find Liam’s phone. He said that Sarah’s body was in the bathroom & he dragged her to the bushes along the fence in the backyard & hid her body under sticks. After Liam finished work, he & Liam went back to Sarah’s house & he helped move her body into the Oldsmobile & followed Liam to the bridge where they both discarded her body over the side & drove home in Preston’s car. When they got home, they started counting Sarah’s money which amounted to less than $10k.
Preston testified that they buried the money in two small safes in the woods in a nearby park & another twenty miles away at an abandoned Army base. Mike & Christine sat in the courtroom, listening to the horrifying details of Sarah’s last moments.
21-year-old Liam’s defense attorney tried to argue that Preston was only lying during his testimony & indicated that he was not a credible witness as he lied in the past about a relative sexually assaulting him. He claimed that Sarah only either ran away from an unhappy home life or took her own life that day. He claimed that Sarah’s relationship with her dad was volatile. Sarah’s aunt took the stand & admitted that Mike & Sarah’s relationship was rocky & Sarah did want to move away while her dad was in Florida.
The defense also called a witness that said he was driving his son to work at 5 am on Saturday, December 3, when he saw a girl walking along the street. He indicated she wore a fur coat & high heels & he then drove over the bridge & noticed the abandoned Oldsmobile on the bridge. A few days later, he saw Sarah’s missing poster at 711 & realized it was the same girl he saw walking down the street on December 3. However, investigators indicate that Sarah’s car was towed away two hours before he would have crossed over the bridge. The man is firm on the fact that the car was absolutely there at 5:15 am & his son was in the car to vouch for that. The prosecution also argued that this was absolutely not Sarah as she was an Uggs or Timberland boots kind of girl, not a fur coat & high heels kind of girl.
Anthony Curry also took the stand & spoke of the conversation he had with Liam on Thanksgiving about killing Sarah & posing it as a movie plot at the time. The defense attorney argued that Anthony concocted this story because it would be publicity for his film career. When Liam’s recorded video from Anthony’s car was shown to jurors, they were stunned into silence, shocked at how Liam proudly told his story without an ounce of remorse for what he’d done. It was the first time Mike had seen & heard the extent of the confession & cried as the video ended. Liam’s attorney said Liam had just made it up as part of a fantasy murder plot to his filmmaking friend.
On February 7, 2019, Liam was found guilty of first-degree murder as well as six additional charges against him that included tampering with evidence, conspiracy & desecrating human remains. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole plus an additional ten years.
Preston Taylor testified against Liam & said that his childhood friend told him that Sarah had the type of money somebody would kill for. He admitted that he helped him dispose of Sarah’s body over the bridge in exchange for $3,000 of Sarah’s money. Preston was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role.
Sarah’s father Michael is eternally grateful for Anthony Curry & realizes that he would never know what happened to his daughter without him. Sarah’s remains have never been found.
References:
- Radio Keokuk: Filmmaker explains why he helped police record friend confessing to Sarah Stern’s murder
- Oxygen True Crime: New Jersey man chillingly timed how long it took him to murder friend in cold blood
- Medium: Money, murder & a movie plot: Sarah Stern
- YouTube: this is MONSTERS: Liam McAtasney full confession
- NBC News: The Betrayal of Sarah Stern
- Mayo Clinic: Friendships: Enrich your life & improve your health
