In 1994, on October 27th, four days before Halloween, a little girl named Sabrina was born on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio. Fated with alcoholic and abusive parents, she entered the foster care system at a young age. It was there that she met **Lisa Knoefel**, a social worker specializing in sexual abuse cases. Lisa took Sabrina under her wing and into her home. From that moment on, Sabrina seemed to have everything she’d ever wanted: two loving parents, two sisters, and a bright future ahead. Or so she thought.

On August 6th, 2014, Sabrina stood trial for the murder of Lisa, her own foster mother. Two years earlier, Sabrina had been arrested inside the Knoefel family home, holding a bloody knife in her hand. News reports quickly spread the shocking story:
“**Lisa Knoefel was stabbed to death. Her 18-year-old foster daughter is in custody tonight.**”
For many who knew Sabrina, the accusations were impossible to comprehend. “I can’t see the Sabrina that I know being violent towards anyone, let alone what she did,” one person remarked. Others insisted, “She would never have done this by herself.”

At the time, the police’s only other lead was **Kevin Knoefel**, Lisa’s husband and Sabrina’s foster father. But there was one more person who knew exactly how horrifying that night had been. On the night of the murder, **Megan Zanella**, Sabrina’s foster sister and Lisa’s biological daughter, was also in the house. “My name is Megan Zanella, and I am the daughter of Lisa Knoefel,” she said in her first interview. “This is my first interview and I have been waiting for this since my mom passed away.”

After dialing 911, Megan waited through six agonizing minutes before police arrived. At only 13 years old, she tried desperately to fight Sabrina off but was easily overpowered. Eventually, she heard sirens cutting through the night. She rushed outside to meet the officers, waving her arms and yelling for them to hurry. The police, not knowing who she was, pointed a gun at her, mistaking her for the attacker.

“She’s waving her hands, ‘You need to hurry, hurry, hurry,’” one officer recalled. “Worst case scenario was going through my head. What am I gonna see? How bad is this gonna be?” After clearing up the confusion, the officers entered the house. They called out to Sabrina and Lisa, but the only response was an eerie silence. As they moved past the stairs and into the first bedroom, they came face to face with Sabrina.

She was standing there, covered in blood, a knife in her hand. “It was a very tense couple of seconds,” Officer Randy Mullenax later recalled. “I could see blood on the blade, I could see blood on her. Immediately we started screaming to drop the knife.” Sabrina stared at him for a few seconds, as if in a trance, before finally tossing the knife aside and raising her hands. While his partner cuffed her, Mullenax approached Lisa’s bed.

“I could barely even see,” he said. “It looked like she literally showered in blood. I knew there was nothing I can do.” After Sabrina was taken outside, Mullenax began clearing the room, checking for any other threats or victims. That’s when he heard a sound that cut through the horror: the cries of a small child. “I could hear a child crying from my left,” he recalled. When they opened the closet door, they found a very small child screaming.

This was **Hailey Knoefel**, Megan’s little sister, who had crawled into the closet in terror when the attack began. Later, at the station, Sabrina initially tried to act as if she didn’t remember anything. She claimed she had blacked out and knew nothing about what happened to Lisa. But when detectives brought up Hailey and Megan, her composure started to crack. Before the truth came out, however, the investigation briefly hit a wall.

Lisa had first met Sabrina through her job as a social worker. During their initial conversation, Lisa felt an immediate empathy for the teenager. At 16, Sabrina had never known a stable home or consistent parental care. She longed for normalcy, security, and a place to belong. Believing she and her husband Kevin could provide that, Lisa made a major decision: she brought Sabrina into their family as a foster daughter.

This wasn’t Lisa’s first time taking in a foster child. Megan remembers the day they went to pick Sabrina up, thinking she might finally have a big sister figure. Sabrina blended into the household and, at first, seemed to thrive. Lisa worked with her through counseling, helping her cope with past trauma and teaching her strategies to manage her emotions. Sabrina attended her classes, got good grades, and appeared to be doing well in the Knoefel home.

For over a year, Sabrina grew close to the family. She bonded with Megan and Hailey, often spending time with them. Even her relationship with Kevin seemed positive at first. But slowly, things began to shift. Kevin started spending increasing amounts of time alone with Sabrina, pulling away from the rest of the family. Lisa noticed this disturbing change and confronted him through text messages, expressing her concerns.

Kevin dismissed her worries and told her she was overreacting. But Lisa was not naïve. As someone who worked in the **sexual abuse division** of job and family services, she recognized the warning signs. “I started to notice that something wasn’t right between Sabrina and Kevin,” Megan later said. Lisa, with her experience, had a strong inkling that something very wrong was unfolding under her own roof.

Sabrina had never experienced a truly stable, loving family before, and Kevin seemed to know exactly how to exploit that vulnerability. “Kevin Knoefel is a sexual predator,” one investigator would later say. “He was no better than the people that sexually abused the kids that Lisa was trying to help.” He showered Sabrina with attention, gifts, and secrets, making her feel special and dependent on him. In time, he began to groom her in subtle but deeply manipulative ways.

He promised to help her get into a **massotherapy** school and told her she should “practice” on him. From there, it didn’t take long before he escalated things into a sexual relationship. Kevin took advantage of every opportunity when they were alone. Even after Sabrina’s appendix burst and she had emergency surgery, Kevin’s behavior crossed all imaginable lines. “That day while I was there, shortly after,” Megan recalled, “Kevin had sexual relations with her in a hospital bed after she just had appendix surgery. That makes me sick to my stomach.”

As the months went by, Kevin’s control over Sabrina grew stronger. After each sexual encounter, he would talk about Lisa. He twisted the narrative, painting himself as the victim in his marriage. He made Sabrina believe that Lisa was the obstacle to their future together. Slowly, he began planting the idea that the only way they could be together freely was if Lisa was gone. Step by step, he manipulated Sabrina into believing that killing Lisa was the only solution.

Lisa, meanwhile, was trapped in a nightmare she suspected but couldn’t fully prove. With no solid evidence, she could only try to protect her children and her home the best she could. She talked about **divorcing Kevin** and sending Sabrina back into the foster care system. Kevin insisted they wait until Sabrina finished high school before making any decisions. In the meantime, Lisa tightened her rules around Sabrina.

She became more strict with her foster daughter, insisting she stay home more often so Kevin wouldn’t have opportunities to be alone with her. However, for reasons that remain unclear, Lisa also began isolating Sabrina from her sisters. This created a tense and volatile atmosphere in the house. “There was some tensions between Lisa and Sabrina and then Sabrina and the minor child too, Megan,” one account noted. Megan felt the family dynamic falling apart.

“It was all downhill from there,” she said. “And I never knew that it could lead to this.” One evening, Megan watched as Kevin hugged Sabrina before leaving for work. She saw Sabrina whisper something into his ear, and it set off alarm bells in her mind. “I just didn’t think that was right,” she recalled. Later that night during dinner, Megan noticed that Sabrina was getting an unusually high number of text messages.

Even as the evening went on and bedtime came, she could still hear Sabrina’s phone buzzing from the next room. Around 1:00 a.m., the buzzing suddenly stopped. Seconds later, a high‑pitched scream tore through the silence of the house. Megan jolted awake. “I was hearing screaming and I was like, ‘What the hell is going on downstairs?’” she said. When she went down the stairs and turned the corner, she walked into a scene straight out of a nightmare.

“Brie’s stabbing my mother to death,” Megan recalled. “I said, ‘Get off of her!’” At one point, Megan physically jumped onto Sabrina in an attempt to pull her away. Sabrina shoved her off with ease. Megan ran into the office area, grabbed the phone, and dialed 911. At just 13 years old, she tried to explain the horror unfolding in front of her to the operator while still attempting to defend her mother.

“And this keeps going on for over six minutes,” one account states. During those six minutes, Megan’s worst nightmare was playing out in real time. “I have trouble sleeping every night,” she later said. “I have flashbacks all the time, and that will never stop.” After Sabrina’s arrest, she was taken to the hospital to treat numerous stab wounds to her hands, sustained while Lisa and Megan fought back. Once she was stabilized, police brought her to the station for questioning.

“Our main goal when we first interviewed Sabrina was to get Sabrina to tell us exactly what happened,” Detective Parmertor said. “We caught her coming out of the room, so we knew she did it, but we wanted to know why.” For over an hour, Sabrina insisted she remembered nothing. She claimed she had taken too many ibuprofen, blacked out, and only woke up in the hospital. She said she had no idea Lisa was dead. But to a veteran detective, her behavior spoke louder than her words.

“The first thing she does is she has an itch on her forehead for no apparent reason,” Parmertor recalled. “When people touch their face or start scratching or start tapping their toes, it’s a good indication to us that the person’s probably lying, they’re nervous.” Despite her denials, he was convinced she was hiding something. Some at the station argued that no further investigation was necessary. They had caught Sabrina red‑handed, literally holding the knife. As far as they were concerned, the case was open and shut.

But Parmertor couldn’t ignore the gaps in her story. It was unusual, he thought, for someone caught in the act to cling so hard to a total blackout. Something about it didn’t add up. He decided to look at the bigger picture and called in **Kevin Knoefel** for an interview. To his surprise, Kevin immediately requested that his attorney be present. Attorney **Michael Connick** refused the request for an interview on Kevin’s behalf.

To persuade them to come in, Parmertor offered a limited pretext: they would only talk about Lisa’s work. Even so, the police found Kevin’s reluctance strange. Why wouldn’t he help them? Why was his attorney so defensive if Kevin had nothing to hide? What truly caught Parmertor off guard, however, was their reaction when he mentioned Sabrina. Before that, the detective had no clear understanding of the strange and inappropriate relationship between Kevin and Sabrina.

In the days following Lisa’s murder, Kevin stayed in the house with Megan until her biological father could move her out. During that short period, Megan saw things that intensified her suspicions about Kevin’s role in what had happened. “All I know is that the next day, he was getting rid of my mom’s stuff,” she said. “She was just murdered. She didn’t die from cancer. It wasn’t long coming or anything. She was murdered.”

On that same day, just hours after Lisa’s death, Kevin called his insurance company. Six months earlier, he had terminated his own coverage and that of his two children, transferring all the policies to Lisa’s name. This gave Lisa **quadruple life insurance coverage**. When he got off the phone that day, he had secured more than **$785,000** in insurance payouts. “He did, taking it out the morning of,” Megan said. “I was shocked. It was a lot of money, and he blew through all of it.”

“He was buying cars, he was buying a camper,” one source recounted. “He was remodeling his house, all with Lisa’s insurance money.” While he was spending, he also continued trying to visit Sabrina in jail **every single day**, though he was denied each time. Megan found this deeply unsettling—why would he be so eager to see the person accused of killing his wife? But his unnerving behavior didn’t stop there.

The next day, Megan watched as Kevin brought an ax into her mother’s bedroom. “The bed my mom was stabbed to death on, he was chopping it up, like cutting it up,” she said. “I thought that was very odd.” Even after Megan left the home and returned to her biological father, her suspicions about Kevin only grew. At Lisa’s funeral, he stood before the mourners and asked them to **pray for Sabrina**—the young woman accused of murdering the very person they had come to mourn.

“I was looking over at Kevin,” Megan said. “He had no emotion. It’s like my mom was never there. Your wife was murdered and you haven’t even cried once? That’s weird and sketchy, and that’s when I knew… He did this.” Despite all this, the case stalled. After six months, there still was no clear motive or explanation for the murder. Both Megan and Parmertor were certain Sabrina had killed Lisa, but they still didn’t know why—or how exactly Kevin fit into the picture.

Everything changed when Sabrina, still in custody, agreed to speak with **prosecutor Karen Kowall** through a process called a **proffer**. “A proffer is a good faith first step,” Kowall explained. “When the defense attorney and the prosecution meet with the suspect, it’s an opportunity for them to be 100% completely honest and tell exactly what happened.” By then, it was clear to both Kowall and Parmertor that Sabrina was probably trying to protect someone.

Even behind bars, Sabrina showed deep concern for Megan and Hailey. She seemed overwhelmed with guilt and remorse over what she had done. This emotional weight, combined with the strange behavior from Kevin, strengthened the suspicion that Sabrina was shielding him. During the proffer, Kowall went straight to the point. She asked Sabrina directly about Kevin. Under this pressure—and with the promise that her words wouldn’t be used against her if she lied—Sabrina finally began to open up.

What they had suspected all along soon took shape. From what authorities gathered, Kevin was a classic **groomer**. He built a relationship with Sabrina, an underage, emotionally fragile girl, to gain her trust. Then he used that trust to manipulate her into a sexual relationship and, eventually, into committing murder. He used attention and gifts to make her feel special, then twisted her need for love into a weapon. He reinforced her dependency by telling her that Lisa stood in the way of their future and that the only way to remove that obstacle was to kill.

Lisa’s murder, as Sabrina described, did not go as Kevin had planned. On the night of the attack, Sabrina stood by Lisa’s bed, knife in hand, frozen with fear. Lisa woke up and saw her standing there. Sabrina realized, in that split second, that there was no going back. In a blind panic and emotional chaos, she began stabbing her foster mother. When Lisa and Megan fought back, Sabrina’s rage escalated until it ended with Lisa’s death and Sabrina’s arrest.

Kowall and Parmertor were cautious at first. Sabrina could have been lying, inventing a story to shift blame onto Kevin. But this time, her behavior didn’t match that of someone fabricating a story. She was clear, consistent, and assertive. She wasn’t fidgeting or dodging questions. She also provided a crucial corroborating detail: someone else knew about the murder plot—her high school friend, **Autumn Pavlik**.

When police knocked on Autumn’s door, she didn’t act surprised. “Myself and a chief assistant prosecutor knocked on her door,” Kowall said. “We introduced ourselves and she says, ‘I’ve been expecting you guys.’” Autumn confirmed that Kevin had already spoken to her about his relationship with Sabrina and hinted at wanting Lisa dead. With this knowledge, the police saw an opportunity: if Kevin had confided in Autumn before, maybe he would do so again.

They wired Autumn with a hidden recording device and sent her to meet Kevin. During their conversation, she directly accused him of being involved in Lisa’s murder and conspiring with Sabrina. Kevin’s reaction, or lack thereof, was chilling. He did not deny it. He did not act confused or offended. He showed almost **no reaction at all**. “If somebody’s accusing you of being involved in something you know you’re not involved in,” Parmertor said, “you would say something like, ‘What are you talking about? I have no idea what you’re talking about.’”

Armed with Sabrina’s confession, Autumn’s testimony, and an increasingly disturbing timeline of Kevin’s behavior, Parmertor moved quickly. “I got an arrest warrant,” he said. “We went to Kevin Knoefel’s house and we arrested him.” When they arrived, they found Kevin **sleeping in Sabrina’s room**, a detail that only deepened the sense of something deeply wrong. “I don’t think he was surprised,” Parmertor added. “It was kind of weird because he was sleeping up in Sabrina’s room.”

Following his arrest, police finally had Kevin in custody, but they knew time was limited. A Lake County grand jury soon indicted him for **plotting to kill Lisa** with the help of his foster child. That wasn’t the only charge. He was also accused of **sexual battery** for his relationship with Sabrina. Megan remembers the moment she learned Kevin had been arrested. “I was out to eat and I remember just seeing my mom’s face on the news,” she said. “My dad looked at me and said, ‘Kevin got arrested today.’ And I was like, ‘Really?’ And I had no emotion. I had no emotion ’cause I didn’t know what to say.”

During Kevin’s trial, twelve witnesses took the stand. They ranged from Sabrina’s teachers and social workers to friends and family of the Knoefel household. Each one helped construct a pattern of Kevin’s suspicious and predatory behavior. Witnesses described his inappropriate closeness with Sabrina, his lack of grief after Lisa’s murder, and his eagerness to visit Sabrina in jail. One of the most damaging testimonies came from his best friend, **David Strunk**.

Strunk testified that, in the weeks after Lisa’s death, Kevin seemed strangely fixated on Sabrina. He insisted on showing Strunk some of Sabrina’s suggestive modeling photos. He also talked repeatedly about wanting to visit Sabrina in jail, just as Megan had observed. “He told me that he just wanted to let her know that he was still there for her,” Strunk said. “This was the person that had just killed his wife and I was shocked that he would want to have any sort of contact with her.”

After nine hours of deliberation, the jury reached a verdict. Kevin was found guilty of conspiracy to commit aggravated murder and sexual battery. In an interview with prosecutor Karen Kowall, journalist **Josh Mankiewicz** reflected on the layers of betrayal in the case. “This is really just betrayal on top of betrayal on top of betrayal, isn’t it?” he said. “I mean, you got Kevin betraying Lisa, Sabrina betraying Lisa. Then you have Kevin betraying Sabrina, and ultimately, Sabrina betraying Kevin.”

“Yeah,” Kowall replied. “It’s a perfect circle.” But in that circle of betrayal, one person stood at the center of the damage: **Megan**. No one had been betrayed more thoroughly than she had. Megan wasn’t just a bystander. She was forced to watch the attack, tried to save her mother, and failed through no fault of her own. Now she has to carry that trauma in her body and mind for the rest of her life. “If I had to pick one emotion, I would say angry,” she said. “I am very angry. To take away someone who was helping a lot of people in their life and doing what they could for their family is awful.”

Sabrina eventually pleaded guilty to all charges against her. She admitted her role in the murder and acknowledged Kevin’s influence over her. “I believe that I should do time because I know they deserve justice,” she said. “And the only justice they could get is me behind bars.” Sabrina was sentenced to life in prison, with no parole eligibility until **2042**. Kevin received a similar fate. Together, they will spend decades behind bars.

In **2017**, Megan and Hailey filed civil lawsuits against both Kevin and Sabrina. The court awarded them more than **$6 million** in damages. From her cell at Dayton Correctional Institution, Sabrina has been interviewed twice—once by **Dateline** in 2015 and again by **HLN** in 2020. In both interviews, she expressed remorse and begged for forgiveness from her former foster sisters. “I realized that there’s more than one victim in this story,” she said.

“If I had a chance, yeah, I would tell them that I was selfish and that I’m sorry and that I never meant to hurt them. And I know, how can I say that when I killed their mother? I was in a place that I wasn’t thinking about anybody but myself, and that was wrong and it doesn’t make it right. I know no matter what I say, I can’t bring her back and I can’t undo what’s already been done and what they’ve felt. If it means anything, I truly do apologize.”

For Megan, those words mean very little. “Sorry will never be enough for the act that you did,” she responded in her own interview. “The pain I go through every day knowing that my mom is not there to see me get married and have kids—you took that away from me.” Yet Megan refused to let her life be defined only by trauma. Instead, she chose to transform her pain into a purpose.

Since Sabrina and Kevin’s convictions, Megan has grown into a strong and independent woman. She went on to study **criminal law** in college, hoping to someday fight for justice and help other victims of violent crime. In doing so, she carries forward a piece of her mother’s legacy. Lisa dedicated her life to helping survivors of abuse rebuild their lives. Today, Megan shows the same desire to help others, even after everything she has endured.

“She just wanted to help people, you know, make a difference,” Megan said of her mother. In that way, mother and daughter remain forever linked—not only by tragedy but also by the compassion and strength they shared.