A struggling New Jersey artist robbed and murdered his childhood friend for $10,000 — “the type of money that somebody would kill for,” according to a star witness who will resume testimony on Thursday.
Liam McAtasney hatched the sick plot in 2016 after learning 19-year-old pal Sarah Stern unearthed a “shoebox full of money with a note from her mother,” who died a few years earlier, the witness, Preston Taylor, told jurors.
His testimony — including disturbing details of Stern’s strangulation in her home in Avon — came on the first day of McAtasney’s murder trial in Monmouth County court, according to the Asbury Park Press.
Believing there was $100,000 at stake, McAtasney roped in Taylor to carry out the robbery.
“It’s the type of money that somebody would kill for,” McAtasney told a group of friends one night at Clancy’s Tavern in Neptune, where Taylor worked at the time.
McAtasney, 21, of Neptune City, and Taylor began talking privately about swiping Stern’s cash — but then “over time, our conversations progressed to killing her” so they wouldn’t get caught, Taylor said.
“Ultimately, we decided the best way to go about it was making it look like a suicide,” he added.
The plan was for McAtasney to strangle Stern — then the pair would dump her body off the Route 35 bridge in Belmar and leave her car there to make it look as though she had jumped.
McAtasney and Taylor communicated through Snapchat and walkie-talkies on Dec. 2, 2016 — the night of her death — to avoid leaving behind a trail of evidence.
In a back bathroom of her family’s secondary home, McAtasney throttled Stern for about a half-hour — far longer than he thought it would take for her to die, he told Taylor.
“All the while, she said his name a couple times,” Taylor told jurors. Stern also urinated and started to throw up.
Leaving her lifeless body slumped over the toilet, McAtasney fled with a backpack full of her money — a little more than $7,000. He returned later to steal a safe from her room, which the pair used a screwdriver to crack open. It contained just over $2,000.
Taylor — who had known Stern since freshman year at Neptune High School and was her date to junior prom — recalled helping remove Stern’s body and propping her up in her 1994 Oldsmobile “in the passenger seat, sitting up” to make it look like she was asleep.
Once at the Route 35 bridge, they dumped her body. It was never found.
“[McAtasney] picks her up by the shoulders, I pick her up by the legs, and we threw her over the bridge,” Taylor testified.
The next day, police questioned the two men, who’d concocted yet another scheme to paint Stern as a mentally unstable woman who had a falling out with her father.
Taylor said McAtasney directed him to say “she quite possibly was a closet lesbian.”
“I said, ‘I think she jumped,’” Taylor recalled telling police.
The two even joined search efforts to “make it look like we were concerned about finding her” while McAtasney gave an interview with a TV reporter, Taylor said.
Two months later, on Feb. 1, 2017, they were nabbed in Stern’s death. Taylor spilled his guts to detectives, telling them what happened to Stern and leading them to where he and Taylor buried their own safes that contained the tragic teen’s cash.
Taylor, 21, of Neptune, pleaded guilty in 2017 to a slew of charges for his role in Stern’s death — and was testifying against McAtasney, his former roommate, as part of a cooperation agreement with prosecutors. He faces between 10 and 20 years.
He is set to be cross-examined on Thursday.