Khalil Wheeler-Weaver, who is already serving a 160-year sentence for the murder of three women and attempted murder of a fourth during an 88-day killing spree in 2016, was recently indicted in the alleged murder of a fifth victim, 15-year-old Mawa Doumbia.
Wheeler-Weaver was charged with murdering Doumbia, as well as attempted sexual assault of a minor, endangering the welfare of a child, and desecration of human remains in March after investigators from the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office positively identified her body, which was discovered in an abandoned house in Orange three years after she went missing in October 2016.
Prosecutors say there is “extensive digital evidence” showing Wheeler-Weaver met Doumbia online and solicited her for sex before October 7, 2016, when he is accused of picking her up at her family’s home in Newark and taking her to the house in Orange, where authorities claim he strangled her to death, much like his other victims.
Authorities began investigating the defendant after the body of Sarah Butler, a 20-year-old Montclair resident, was discovered poorly hidden in the thickets of Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange, near a valet stand for the Highlawn Pavilion, in December 2016.
Investigators got an assist from Butler’s sister and two friends, who knew the password to the missing woman’s laptop. On it, they found an exchange between Butler and a man using the handle LilYachtRock on a messaging app called Tagged, where Wheeler-Weaver had arranged to meet Butler and offered her money in exchange for sex.
It was his M.O. He would solicit women, offering to pay for sex, abduct them, duct tape their mouths, strangle and rape them and dump their bodies.
Butler’s sister and two friends used a fake profile to speak with Wheeler-Weaver, even holding a live phone call with him from Montclair Police Headquarters. They arranged to meet him at a nearby Panera Bread. The Montclair police showed up instead and escorted Wheeler-Weaver to police headquarters, where he was questioned and released.
Just days before Butler’s murder, Wheeler-Weaver had abducted and nearly killed a woman named Tiffany Taylor, who used artful split-second thinking to convince him to take her back to her hotel room to retrieve her phone. When she got there, she slipped free from her handcuffs and called the police.
The murderer fled, but Taylor, who knew Wheeler-Weaver through mutual friends, told officers what had occurred. But they didn’t believe her and dismissed her as a prostitute, Taylor said.
At least one of the officers, Billy Ly, testified he was wary of Taylor’s story during trial.
“They treated me like trash,” Taylor said of the Elizabeth police in an interview with The Record/NorthJersey.com.
It wasn’t until the discovery of Butler’s body that police finally traced the trail of cellphone data Wheeler-Weaver left behind, drawing a digital line between multiple murder sites and communiques with victims. Five days after the discovery in Eagle Rock Reservation, Wheeler-Weaver was apprehended.
At the conclusion of his 2019 trial, Wheeler-Weaver was convicted in the murders of three women: West, Butler and Joann Brown, who was strangled in an empty house on Highland Avenue in Orange and left lifeless on the stairs; and convicted of the attempted murder and kidnapping of Taylor.
Taylor and Butler’s friends and sister, who tracked Wheeler-Weaver, “are the first true heroes,” said Adam Wells, an Essex County prosecutor who led the investigation.
Taylor said in court that Butler would still be alive if the police had listened to her when she identified Wheeler-Weaver and apprehended him.
The killing of Doumbia occurred months before the killings for which a jury ultimately found Wheeler-Weaver guilty.
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