Camden, NJ – Authorities have identified a young Burlington County couple whose bodies were buried in a Camden back yard, but the mystery of how they got there remains.
The Camden County Prosecutor’s Office said that Muriah Ashley Huff, 18, of Cinnaminson, and her boyfriend, Michael Hawkins, 23, of Mount Holly, were found buried in the yard of a rowhouse on Berkley Street near Broadway.
Huff, a senior cosmetology student at the Burlington County Institute of Technology, in Westampton, suffered blunt force trauma and was strangled. Hawkins also suffered blunt force trauma and was shot several times.
Jason Laughlin, a spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, would not say why the couple was at the Camden rowhouse.
“We’re energetically pursuing leads in this case,” said Laughlin. “We have two victims who apparently suffered before they were wrongly killed.”
No arrests have been made and no one answered the door at the red rowhouse. Laughlin said that the bodies were buried sometime on Feb. 23, and that investigators believe that Huff and Hawkins were killed shortly before. Camden police received a tip and found the bodies.
The home’s owner, Yehuda Klein, of Brooklyn, said that he didn’t know the names of his tenants on Berkley Street but that they were in the federal subsidized-housing program formerly known as Section 8.
Klein said he had received a letter from Camden police in the past about drug dealing in the back yard of the home. A man who answered the phone at Four Corners Management, the company that manages the property for Klein, declined to comment.