ANCHORAGE - A woman who admitted to a murder in Pennsylvania said she killed even more people in Alaska. Miranda Barbour claims to be a serial killer who got her start at age 13.
Barbour is in custody in Pennsylvania. She told police she and her husband killed a 42-year-old man they’d lured with a Craigslist ad offering sex.
But in 2009, Miranda Barbour was Miranda Dean, a student at Colony Middle School in Palmer and later Colony High. According to Barbour, she was already a member of a satanic cult, with more than one murder under her belt.
Glen Klinkhart, a retired APD detective, doesn’t buy it.
“In my opinion, she didn’t kill as many people in the way that she said or the time frame she said,” Klinkhart said. “It doesn’t mean that she hasn’t had some issues in her life and we want to make sure that the people she came into contact with in her life are OK.”
Klinkhart said satanic cults don’t really exist in Alaska, and if they did, he doesn’t believe they would murder people. Looking at the timeline when Barbour lived in Alaska, he said, it would be difficult for her to have committed as many murders as she claimed. He also said Alaska doesn’t have enough missing people to account for all her crimes.
Klinkhart said another reason to doubt Barbour’s story is that most serial killers are highly organized and do a lot of planning before their crimes. He said the murder in Pennsylvania was not like that at all.
Alaska State Troopers said they are aware of Barbour’s claims and will look into them.