Sarah Stern's killer Liam McAtasney's conviction upheld by appellate court
In a ruling Friday in the Sarah Stern murder case, an appellate court upheld the conviction and life prison sentence of Liam McAtasney, the Neptune City man who unwittingly admitted on a secretly taped video that he strangled his childhood friend and threw her body off a bridge in a robbery that netted $10,000.
In perhaps the most highly publicized murder case in Monmouth County in recent times, a three-judge panel with the Appellate Division of Superior Court rejected McAtasney’s arguments for a new trial, among them that the jury should have been precluded from watching his chilling videotaped confession.
Judges Heidi Willis Currier, Jessica R. Mayer and Avis Bishop-Thompson, in a 63-page opinion, let stand McAtasney’s 2019 convictions for murder, felony murder, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, desecration of human remains, tampering with evidence and hindering apprehension.
The convictions, secured by assistant Monmouth County prosecutors Christopher Decker and Meghan Doyle, resulted from a jury trial that spotlighted a startling plot by Stern’s former high school classmates to kill her for her money, dispose of her body and stage her car on the Route 35 bridge between Belmar and Neptune to make it look like she committed suicide.
"Of course, I'm kind of elated that it's over, after waiting three years,'' said Michael Stern, the victim's father, upon learning of the appellate court ruling. "It's been hanging over me. It's always been there in the back of my mind for the past three years.
"He should have gotten the death penalty, as far as I'm concerned,'' Michael Stern said of his daughter's killer. "He took my daughter for no reason. His rationale and reasons were evil.''
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McAtasney, now 25, is serving life in prison without the possibility of release on parole, the most severe punishment in New Jersey since the state abolished the death penalty in 2007.
His former roommate and accomplice, Preston Taylor, also 25, is serving an 18-year prison term after admitting he took part in the conspiracy to rob Stern - his date for the Neptune High School junior prom - and helped to throw her body off the bridge.
Stern, a budding artist from Neptune City, vanished on Dec. 2, 2016, setting off massive marine and land searches that day and in the weeks and months to come, after her car was found unoccupied early that morning, atop the Route 35 bridge between Belmar and Neptune.
Her disappearance remained a mystery until January 2017, when a former Neptune High School classmate of McAtasney came forward to authorities and revealed details of a conversation McAtasney had with him on Thanksgiving 2016.
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The former classmate, horror filmmaker Anthony Curry, revealed that McAtasney told him he planned to choke Stern to death and rob her of a large sum of money that she had recently found.
Curry said McAtasney told him he and Taylor were going to throw Stern’s body off the bridge and leave her car there to make it look like she jumped, something defense attorney Carlos Diaz-Cobo tried to dismiss as an attempt to impress the filmmaker with a potential movie plot.
Curry told police he never took the conversation seriously until after Stern went missing.
Investigators enlisted Curry to engage McAtasney in a conversation about Stern and secretly videotape it. Curry met with McAtasney on Ocean Avenue in Bradley Beach on Jan. 31, 2017 and recorded him discussing Stern’s murder in chilling detail for a half hour. McAtasney and Taylor were arrested the following day.
When the video was played for the jury, it was arguably the most dramatic part of a trial that was covered by a swarm of media outlets, including all of the major television networks for their newsmagazine programs.
On the video, McAtasney told Curry he timed the killing with an application on his cell phone, and that it took him a half hour to choke Stern to death while the victim’s dog sat and watched.
He said he choked Stern in her home, stuffed a T-shirt down her throat so she wouldn’t vomit and held his finger over her nose until she died.
The killing occurred while Stern’s father, with whom she lived, was vacationing in Florida.
McAtasney, on the videotape, lamented to Curry that the money he killed Stern for, which she had found in a shoe box in a house her family owns in Avon, was in bills that were of such poor quality, he couldn’t use them or deposit them in the bank, so he buried the cash at Sandy Hook. Investigators later found it there when Taylor directed them to the precise location.
McAtasney told Curry he went to work at a local restaurant after killing Stern and returned to her house later that night with Taylor to get rid of her body. He said he placed Stern’s body in the passenger seat of her car and drove it to the bridge, with Taylor following in a second car he referred to as the “escape car.’’
On the bridge, McAtasney said he needed Taylor’s help to throw Stern’s body over.
“The worst part is, we threw her off the bridge, and the body never showed up,’’ McAtasney told Curry on the secretly recorded video.
In his appeal, McAtasney argued it was a mistake requiring reversal of his convictions to allow the jury to see "the surreptitious recording by Curry of defendant's alleged confession,'' the appellate court decision said, rejecting the defendant's argument.
"Defendant agreed to meet with Curry, after already communicating with him and voluntarily described his killing of Sarah,'' the judges wrote. "The trial court did not err in admitting the statements defendant made to Curry.''
McAtasney also alleged "multiple instances of prosecutorial error denied him a fair trial,'' including statements in the prosecution's summation that Taylor was a credible witness. The appellate judges rejected that argument, saying prosecutors were permitted to respond to the defense attorney's summation in which he repeatedly called Taylor a liar.
Taylor took the stand against his former roommate under terms of a plea agreement with the state.
He testified that McAtasney told him they stood to gain $50,000 to $100,000 by robbing and killing Stern, but in reality, the robbery only netted them about $10,000. Taylor said his share of the proceeds was $3,000, but the money was in old bills that were in such disrepair, they were useless.
He told the jury the plot to rob and murder Stern was concocted months earlier, after McAtasney learned Stern found the shoe box full of cash at her family’s home in Avon.
Taylor, who pleaded guilty to robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, desecrating Stern’s remains, conspiring to desecrate her remains, and hindering his and McAtasney’s apprehension, appealed his prison sentence, but an appellate panel last year upheld it.
In addition to the life term he imposed on McAtasney for the murder, Superior Court Judge Richard W. English, who presided over the trial, sentenced the killer to a consecutive 10-year prison term for disposing of Stern’s body.
McAtasney has been serving his sentence at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.
Taylor is at the Mid-State Correctional Facility in Wrightstown.
McAtasney’s prosecution was only the second time in Monmouth County’s history that a murder prosecution went forward in the absence of a body. The first was in 1975, when suspected serial killer Robert Zarinsky, now deceased, was convicted of the murder of 17-year-old Rosemary Calandriello of Atlantic Highlands.
Kathleen Hopkins, a reporter in New Jersey since 1985, covers crime, court cases, legal issues and just about every major murder trial to hit Monmouth and Ocean counties. Contact her at khopkins@app.com.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Sarah Stern murder: Killer McAtasney's conviction upheld
