A woman has been accused of brutally murdering her millionaire father and his girlfriend at the patriarch's multimillion-dollar Jersey Shore home in retaliation after she was removed from her dad's will.
Sherry Lee Heffernan, 55, of Landenberg, Pennsylvania, has been charged with two counts of murder and related weapons violations in connection with the killing of her father, John Enders, 87, and his girlfriend Francoise Pitoy, 75, of Manchester, New York Post reported.
Officers responded to the crime scene on Oct. 3 after they received a welfare check request from Pitoy's concerned daughter. After law enforcement searched the residence, they found Enders' body sitting on a recliner chair, and Pitoy on the landing of the stairs, both with multiple stabs wounds, as well as multiple injuries consistent with blunt force trauma. The couple was pronounced dead on the scene.
The officers also found blood in several places in and around the house. Authorities recovered from the scene bloody foot and shoe prints, a discarded rubber glove on the stairs, and blood on a fence post near where a person was captured idling on CCTV surveillance footage.
Heffernan reportedly told her father that she wanted to be the broker for his six-bedroom $1.9 million Surf City bayfront home and got “disgruntled” when he refused.
In addition to this, Enders recently amended his will this the past month and cut out Heffernan and his other estranged daughter from their inheritance in the process, one of the victims' friends told the authorities.
On Sept. 29, the CCTV footage captured a white RV similar to a Winnebago that Heffernan owns pulling up to Enders' North 7th Street home. The vehicle was then seen leaving the house about an hour later with its headlights off.
About an hour later, surveillance footage caught someone hopping a backyard fence near Enders’ home while holding an orange bag and wearing clothes that looked as if they were “too large for them.”
A relative of Heffernan told the officers that Heffernan had left Pennsylvania to visit her father last Tuesday or Wednesday during a “midnight dash,” NJ.com reported.
“I can’t believe she did this,” the family member told the officers. She added that Heffernan was the only one who drove the RV in the past two weeks.
After obtaining a search warrant for Heffernan’s RV, the detectives reportedly conducted an in-depth search of the vehicle and found dried blood on its carpet. Following the discovery, the officers received an arrest warrant for Heffernan and she was apprehended on Monday, Oct. 4, at her Pennsylvania home.
The next day, on Tuesday, Oct. 5, Heffernan was charged with murder, and proceedings to have her moved to Ocean County are underway.
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