On the night of Saturday, August 26, 2017, Lloyd Neurauter climbed into the rear hatch of his 19-year-old daughter’s car and stayed out of sight as she pulled out of a hotel parking lot in Rochester, New York. His 14-year-old daughter, Charlotte, was in the passenger seat. She had no idea her father was there. Karrie drove south for a hundred miles, into the dark, toward her mother’s house.
Lloyd had a plan. He had been building toward it for years.
High school sweethearts
Lloyd Neurauter was 16 years old in 1989 when he fell for Michele Laundy, an older classmate graduating from their shared high school in upstate New York. Her mother, Jeanne, remembered the moment clearly: Michele had been allowed to invite friends to the ceremony, and she invited Lloyd. Within two years, they married.
They enrolled in college together as newlyweds, Lloyd studying engineering and Michele training to teach English, and by the mid-1990s they had settled into a house in Corning, New York, with their first daughter. Two years later, Karrie was born. A third daughter, Charlotte, followed.
Lloyd worked as an engineer at Corning Incorporated, a Fortune 500 company that anchored the town’s economy. Michele homeschooled the girls for years before joining the faculty at a local college as an English professor. She volunteered with homeless communities in Corning, organizing Thanksgiving meals. Friends and neighbors described her as warm, funny, and consistently present. Cynthia Raj, who became one of Michele’s closest friends after their daughters bonded in ballet class, said Michele was the kind of person who pulled people in without trying.
From the outside, Lloyd looked like a devoted father. He drove Karrie to ballet every Sunday, stayed for class, and did the girls’ hair before performances. The other mothers were rather smitten with him. But as Cynthia’s daughter Mina spent more time with Karrie, she began to see something underneath the attentiveness. Lloyd’s discipline could turn without warning, and for trivial infractions. He would call the girls front and center, make them drop to their knees in front of everyone, and yell. Mina had seen him slap them across the face. She had watched Karrie’s body physically shake when his mood shifted.
Michele was not exempt. According to Jeanne Laundy, Lloyd put her down in public, consistently, and always with a smile.
Twenty-six filings
Around Thanksgiving 2007, Michele suddenly cut off contact with her parents. Jeanne believed Lloyd was behind it. Cynthia Raj later confirmed it: Michele had told her directly that Lloyd had made her do it. He did not want her to have anywhere to go if she decided to leave.
The following year, he took a job in New Jersey. Within months, he served Michele with divorce papers. Nobody who knew her could account for it. There had been no visible collapse, no memorable fights. She had done, in the words of her attorney Susan Betzjitomir, everything she thought she could do to make him and the family happy. She was blindsided. And she was alone, because Lloyd had spent a year making sure of it.
Slowly, she rebuilt. Friends described a woman who became visibly more relaxed the moment he was gone. The divorce was finalized in 2012. Michele moved into a new house with the girls and began constructing a life. She found her work, found her footing, and started to thrive.
Lloyd filed 26 separate post-divorce motions against her. Susan Betzjitomir had never seen anything like it. Two or three post-divorce filings was considered a lot. Twenty-six, she told investigators, was astounding. The motions contained false claims designed to paint Michele as an unfit mother, strip her of custody of Charlotte, and eliminate Lloyd’s child support and alimony obligations. He was paying nearly $6,000 per month and carrying more than $100,000 in credit card debt. He needed a way out.
Buried inside Michele’s counter-filings, years before any murder investigation, were documented complaints about what Lloyd was doing to their daughters behind closed doors. She accused him of systematically turning the girls against her. The Neurauter case had become so well-known inside Steuben County family court that District Attorney Brooks Baker later described it as the one everyone talked about at the water cooler.
It just did not go away. By the early 2010s, the eldest daughter had moved in with Lloyd voluntarily. Karrie enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology, studying engineering, 100 miles from Corning. Only Charlotte remained with Michele.
Years of poisoning
Psychologists who later reviewed the case gave a name to what Lloyd had been doing inside Karrie’s mind for years: parental alienation. He had fed Karrie a version of Michele so consistently, and for so long, that by the time Karrie was a teenager she openly despised her mother without being able to explain why.
Michele was volatile, he told her. Michele was dangerous. Michele was the reason everything had gone wrong. Lloyd was the victim. Karrie believed it completely. She had been hearing it since childhood, from the one person whose judgment she trusted without question.
The clearest documented example came in 2015. Michele was backing her car out of the driveway during a disagreement with Karrie. Lloyd was not present. When Karrie described the incident to him afterward, he told her that Michele had been trying to run her over. Karrie called the police and filed a report accusing her mother of attempted assault. The charge never stuck.
Court documents from the custody proceedings noted the episode explicitly. It made no difference. The idea had lodged inside Karrie’s understanding of who her mother was, and nothing about the actual Michele, the woman who organized Thanksgiving meals for homeless families and fought through 26 legal filings to keep her daughters close, was allowed inside that understanding.
Michele’s attorney, Susan Betzjitomir, drew the logic of what followed. If Lloyd could convince Karrie that her mother inching out of a driveway was attempted murder, then the next step carried its own logic: her mother had tried to kill her, so helping kill her first was something like defense.
Two days before the murder, Lloyd failed to appear at a custody hearing. He did not withdraw his petition, did not request an adjournment, and did not respond to the court’s calls or emails. The case was dismissed. Michele texted Susan to say she was stunned. In years of filings, Lloyd had never once missed a hearing. He was always the first one at the courthouse.
His absence, Susan said, was unthinkable. But Michele was relieved. That Saturday, she celebrated with Susan and their families. A friend brought the children to slide on large blocks of ice down a grassy hill. Someone took a photograph of Michele that afternoon. District Attorney Baker would later keep it pinned to the wall of his war room throughout the investigation. It was, he told a reporter, the last good day of her life.
The ultimatum
About a week before August 26, Lloyd sat down with Karrie and laid out his position. He could not keep paying child support and alimony. There was no other way out. “I’m either going to kill myself,” he told her, “or I gotta kill your mother.”
He had spent years making sure she would choose him over anything. She did. “I had to choose,” she told investigators later. She chose her father.
The plan was set for the night of August 26. Lloyd drove to Rochester and checked into the Microtel hotel, establishing the alibi he would need. He left his phone in the room. That Saturday evening, Karrie came to visit him at the hotel. When she walked him back to her car later that night, he climbed into the rear hatch. Charlotte was inside the car.
According to Karrie, her younger sister never knew he was there.
Lloyd had explained the method in advance. He would put a towel in Michele’s mouth to muffle her, then use the rope. Karrie knew exactly what was going to happen before she turned the car south toward Corning.
At Michele’s home on Dwight Avenue, Karrie went inside first. Michele was at the top of the stairs. She saw Lloyd come through the door and immediately demanded to know why he was there. He went upstairs. They argued loudly in the bedroom. The noise woke Charlotte, asleep downstairs. Karrie took her outside and put her in the car. She waited.
When the house went quiet, Karrie went back inside. Michele was on the floor. Lloyd said he needed her help. Karrie helped drag her mother’s body around the corner. Lloyd tied the rope to the banister, lifted Michele, and arranged the scene. Then he slipped out the back of the house, around the side, and climbed into the open rear hatch of the car. They drove north to Rochester together.
At 6:30 the following morning, hotel cameras caught Lloyd walking alone across the parking lot to his own car. He was still wearing the same clothes from the night before.
He drove to New Jersey and flew to California for his scheduled job interview. The body was not discovered until Monday morning, August 28, when a family friend pulled up to the house to collect Charlotte for swim practice and looked through the front door glass. Michele appeared to be standing motionless at the bottom of the stairs.
She was not standing.
The investigation
Police Sergeant Jon McDivitt was the first officer through the door. He found Michele cold and stiff, a rope around her neck, and no pulse. The scene looked like a suicide. Chief Jeff Spaulding noticed the ligature mark on her chin almost immediately. The pattern suggested someone had come from behind, thrown a rope over her neck, and pulled back and down. That, he said later, was unsettling.
Charlotte was nowhere in the house. Investigators swept attics, basements, and garages. Then Lieutenant Jeff Heverly received a phone call: Karrie, from Rochester, sounding distraught. Charlotte was safe at Karrie’s apartment. Karrie explained that she had driven back to Corning the previous Saturday night to spend one last night in her childhood bedroom. Her mother had screamed at her, accusing her of always taking Lloyd’s side. Karrie had taken Charlotte and left. Charlotte confirmed every detail.
But the story had no foundation. Michele had been celebrating a court victory two days before her death. Her attorney, her friends, and everyone who had seen her that week described a woman who was relieved and happy. A violent tantrum on that same weekend had no explanation.
Lloyd flew back from California within 36 hours of being notified of his ex-wife’s death. His first stop was not his daughters. He went directly to the Steuben County Family Court to file paperwork terminating his child support and alimony payments. Investigators were waiting outside the courthouse when he walked out.
He answered their questions calmly, echoed Karrie’s account of the weekend, and confirmed he had spent Saturday night at the Microtel. Hotel footage backed him up. His phone data confirmed the device had not left the room. But the same footage showed something else: when Lloyd walked Karrie to her car that Saturday night, he got into the vehicle with her and they drove away. The cameras did not pick him up again until 6:30 the following morning. Lloyd’s phone was in the hotel room all night. Lloyd was not.
He had also arranged for Michele’s remains to be cremated after her death, eliminating the basis for any further examination. The county medical examiner returned a verdict of undetermined causation. Baker took the full autopsy documentation to a private forensic pathologist for a second review. The pathologist looked at the chin mark and the petechial hemorrhaging in Michele’s eyes and gave a clear ruling. This was a homicide. Michele Neurauter had been manually strangled.
In mid-November 2017, investigators tapped both phones. The calls were guarded for weeks. Then, using a technique investigators call tickling the wire, an investigator called Karrie and told her there were new developments in the case. Less than a minute later, Karrie called Lloyd.
The recording captured everything. Lloyd told her to skip the interview, make an excuse, and tell them the situation had been hard on her. Then he asked: could she cry? She said she might be able to. “God, it would be nice if it was just over,” he said. “That would be the dream,” she answered.
Both spoke as though Michele’s death were an inconvenience they were managing together. Not a mother who was gone.
On January 24, 2018, investigators arrived at Lloyd’s workplace in New Jersey while state police troopers brought Karrie in from her internship in Syracuse. Told that the medical examiner had ruled the death a homicide, Lloyd held his story and agreed to take a polygraph test, accepting directions to a nearby station. He never arrived. His phone signal traced him to a five-story parking structure in downtown Princeton. Officers found him on the roof, standing on the ledge, threatening to jump. For two hours he held them back. When he turned away, a state trooper made a ten-yard sprint and tackled him.
In Syracuse, Karrie had not made it far into the interview before she broke. In barely a whisper, she told investigators her father had been in the car that Saturday night. Then she told them everything.
The reckoning
Lloyd’s touch DNA was recovered from the pajamas Michele was wearing the night she was strangled. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in October 2018. At sentencing in December, he opened by blaming Michele, telling the court he had killed her because he believed she might harm their children. Then, bound by the terms of his plea agreement, he walked it back.
He admitted he had planned the murder, carried it out, and manipulated Karrie into participating. He had no excuse, he said. Murder was wrong. The judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Karrie had initially faced a second-degree murder charge carrying up to 25 years to life. She agreed to testify against her father in exchange for a plea to second-degree manslaughter. During the preparation process, she disclosed something she had not initially included: she had helped drag Michele’s body and helped Lloyd lift it onto the banister. She had touched her mother’s dead body and helped arrange the scene around it.
Baker believed Karrie had been brainwashed. The court documentation from the custody proceedings filled four to five bankers boxes in his war room, years of filings in which Michele had named exactly what Lloyd was doing to Karrie’s perception of her. Baker compared the psychology to cult dynamics: a person can appear capable of choosing differently and still find themselves unable to, after years of methodical conditioning. The judge sentenced Karrie to one to three years in state prison. She was released on parole on January 16, 2020.
Jeanne Laundy spent days writing the letters she submitted to the judge at both sentencings. For Lloyd, she asked for life without parole. For Karrie, she asked for mercy, and she wrote that she always asked herself what Michele would have wanted. Michele would not have wanted a long prison sentence for her daughter. She would have wanted her to eventually lead a happy life.
The letter said something Lloyd had spent years trying to remove from Karrie’s understanding of her own mother. It said that Michele Neurauter had loved her.
