Liam McAtasney 'made up stories' about robbing, killing Sarah Stern, attorney says

FREEHOLD - Liam McAtasney was "always making things up to be more interesting,'' the attorney for Sarah Stern's accused killer said in court on Wednesday.



But which of McAtasney's statements about his 19-year-old former high school classmate's disappearance are true, if any, and which are fiction?



Before Stern's disappearance on Dec. 2, 2016, he reportedly told an acquaintance who shared his interest in horror movies that he planned to choke Stern to death and dump her body over the Belmar Bridge.



But the acquaintance, who made horror movies that McAtasney sometimes acted in, didn't take the conversation seriously because he said McAtasney was always making up stories for his horror films, said Charles Moriarty, McAtasney's attorney.

"He was making up stories for my films,'' Moriarty said the acquaintance, Anthony Curry, relayed to authorities. "He was always making things up to be more interesting."



Meanwhile, days after the Neptune City woman went missing and her car was found atop the Route 35 bridge in Belmar, McAtasney told detectives that Stern was obsessed with going to Canada to get away from her father, with whom she constantly argued and whom she mistrusted because he took money left to her by her deceased mother and lost it in a series of bad investments.

In the weeks leading up to Stern's disappearance, she was packing her mother's belongings in bins and taking them to store in the houses of friends and relatives so her father wouldn't have them, McAtasney told the detectives. And, he told them Stern had found somewhere between $20,000 and $100,000 in a lockbox in her house that she believed her mother had intended to leave her when she died a few years earlier.



Asked to respond to the derogatory things McAtasney said to detectives about him in recorded interviews played in a courtroom on Wednesday, Michael Stern said, "I think he's spinning a web of lies; it's a big bit of fiction.''



But at one point when he was being questioned by detectives on one of the recorded interviews, McAtasney, 20, of Neptune City wasn't telling any stories. Instead, he was fishing for information from the detectives.



"If she did jump off the bridge, what are the odds she's not somewhere out in the ocean by now?'' McAtasney asked Belmar Detective John Mahoney and Detective Brian Weisbrot of the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office while being questioned by them on Dec. 6, 2016. ​​​​​



At a hearing on what evidence can be presented at McAtasnsey's upcoming trial in Stern's murder, prosecutors played a series of body-camera recordings of police questioning McAtasney after the car registered to Stern's 96-year-old grandmother and regularly driven by Stern was found atop the bridge shortly before 3 a.m. on Dec. 3, 2016.



Officers stressed to McAtasney the importance that he tell them anything he knew about where Stern could be, because emergency workers were risking their own lives searching for her in the frigid Shark River. They stressed to McAtasney that he was the last person known to be with Stern on the afternoon of Dec. 2, 2016.



"I just know she's been trying to get away,'' he told Neptune City police Sgt. Bradley Hines in the early morning of Dec. 3, 2016.



"In the past, she's had a tendency to have self-destructive, suicidal behavior,'' he told Neptune City Patrolman Michael Kepler the same day.



Stern several years ago had threatened suicide "over something her dad did,'' McAtasney told Kepler.



He told the patrolman, "Over the past few months, she's been telling me how bad the relationship with her father is and how she just needs to get out of here.''



Stern had been obsessed with people who made YouTube videos, with whom she cultivated friendships over the Internet, McAtasney said. She told him some of them lived in Canada, and she could go there and be roommates with them, he said.



McAtasney's roommate, Preston Taylor, 20, of Neptune, said in court when he pleaded guilty last year to his role in Stern's murder that the pair had plotted to lie to police and tell them Stern was suicidal when they were questioned about her disappearance, after they had staged her car on the bridge to make it look like she jumped.



Taylor admitted helping to dump Stern's body off the bridge in exchange for a 30 percent share of $10,000 McAtasney allegedly stole from Stern, which Taylor said he never received.



McAtasney told detectives he went with Stern to Taco Bell in Neptune on the afternoon of Dec. 2, 2016, and then accompanied her to Kearney Bank, waiting outside in her car while she went inside the bank. He said they then returned to Stern's house and played video games until it was time for him to go to work at Brennan's Steakhouse in Neptune City.

But before they went to Taco Bell, McAtasney said he helped Stern box up some of her mother's belongings and take them to a neighbor's house.



"She had said that her dad was coming home,'' McAtasney told Weisbrot and Mahoney. "She had to get the stuff out. She had to get to Canada. I had spoken about going to Canada with her over the past few weeks, but that was just for emotional support. I didn't think she would go through with it.''



But, he said he couldn't understand why the friend he had known since first grade didn't say goodbye before she left.

"She's always been obsessed with Canada,'' he said.



Other evidence that prosecutors are seeking to introduce at McAtasney's trial is a purported confession that was secretly recorded by Curry. Moriarty, who has previously described the confession as "scripted,'' is seeking to have it excluded from the trial.



Superior Court Judge Richard W. English is expected to view the confession, but it is unclear whether he will do so in open court or in his chambers when the hearing resumes today, weather permitting.



McAtasney and Taylor were only charged with Stern's murder after Curry came forward to police and recorded the confession in late January 2017. Stern's body has never been recovered, despite extensive efforts.

Moriarty on Wednesday tried to use that fact to convince English to throw out the indictment against McAtasney, but the effort failed when English declined to do so.



Moriarty said two people had reported seeing Stern alive after her alleged murder, after news of her disappearance spread in the media.

Sarah Stern murder: Liam McAtasney will be tried in Monmouth County

Meghan Doyle, assistant Monmouth County prosecutor, said the accounts were investigated and not deemed to be credible.