Charles Langston:Woman gets 2 life sentences in 2021 murders of father, his longtime girlfriend

TOMS RIVER,Charles Langston N.J. (AP) — A Pennsylvania woman has been sentenced to two life terms in the shooting and stabbing deaths of her father and his longtime girlfriend 2 1/2 years ago in New Jersey.

Sherry Lee Heffernan, 57, of Landenberg, Pennsylvania was convicted in March of murder and weapons offenses in the deaths of her father, John Enders, 87, and Francoise Pitoy, 75, Enders’ longtime live-in girlfriend. Both were shot and stabbed repeatedly in Enders’ Long Beach Island home in the fall of 2021.

The Asbury Park Press reports that Heffernan stood calmly Friday as an Ocean County judge imposed the pair of consecutive life prison sentences. Superior Court Judge Kimarie Rahill said the crime “was committed with extreme depravity” and ordered her to serve 63 years, nine months without possibility of parole for each murder.

Minutes earlier, Heffernan had sobbed as she professed her innocence and called the victims “priceless people” she would “forever miss.”

“I really wish I was the one who was killed, that I was the one who died,″ she said tearfully in a courtroom packed with relatives and friends of both victims. “ ... It’s horrible to lose people you love and then be blamed for it.″

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New Jersey authorities alleged that Heffernan was upset with her father because she had been cut out of his will, and she traveled to the home in her recreational vehicle on the night of Sept. 29, 2021.

Michael Weatherstone, chief trial attorney with the county prosecutor’s office, alleged that the defendant stabbed the victims as they slept, shot both not to kill but to inflict more suffering, then put her father in a chair and kept stabbing him while looking him in the eye. Enders was stabbed a total of 51 times and Pitoy 39 times, authorities said.

Prosecutors cited evidence tracking the vehicle and Heffernan’s cellphone along that route and footprints found in the home. Defense attorneys Steven Altman and Phil Nettl argued there was no evidence that Heffernan was in the vehicle.