In early 2010, the residents of the tranquil city of Greensburg, in Western Pennsylvania, learned of what was probably the most horrifying crime committed in their community.
Jennifer Daugherty, aged 30 and who had mental disabilities that gave her the emotional intelligence of a twelve-to-fourteen-year-old, had been tortured by a gang that had posed as her friends, eventually killed and her body dumped in a garbage can place in the parking lot of the local middle school.
The crime, which resulted in several death and life imprisonment convictions, even motivated the proposal of a law (dubbed ‘Jennifer’s Law’) which would penalize the failure to report a violent crime to the police.
Hop along, as we review in this article, the circumstances that led to Jennifer’s death and the horrible thirty hours of torture that she had to endure before her supposed friends finally killed her.
10 /10 Not A Mean Bone
Jennifer Daugherty was a resident of the little town of Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, born with an unspecified disorder that caused mental disabilities that left her with a young teenager’s emotional and intellectual abilities.
She was beloved by everyone who met her, and by her family’s accounts, she loved to sing and dance.
According to Jennifer’s stepfather, then sixty-two-year-old Bobby Murphy: “There is no reason for them to do what they did to Jennifer. Jennifer was just a gentle, laid-back person. There wasn’t a mean bone in her body.”
9 /10 New Friends
Jennifer’s disabilities, however, didn’t prevent her from going on her own to doctor’s appointments and other errands to the nearby city of Greensburg by taking the bus.
During one of these trips, when she had met in the local community center, a group of six people she deemed her ‘new friends’: Melvin Knight, Angela Marinucci, Ricky Smyrnes, Peggy Miller, Ambert Meidinger, and Robert Masters.
They posed as her friends for a few months and even invited her for a sleepover eventually. She couldn’t have known that she was dealing with a band of disturbed people that would after her murder be dubbed ‘The Greensburg Six.’