'What You Had Left Was A Horror': Young New York Mom Found Brutally Murdered After Night Out

On June 6, 2014, single mom Sarah Goode was looking forward to a much-needed night out with friends.

The 21-year-old had recently broken up with her boyfriend of two years and her brother-in-law, Nick Giannetto, had offered to babysit for her young daughter, Jocelyn.

Giannetto — who owned his own flooring business and was always particular about finishes —  said he agreed to help Goode paint her nails just before she left his house, a tradition they had done together for years.  

“We laughed and we talked, you know she was going out for the first time in a long time,” Giannetto, who had met Sarah when she was just 3 years old, told “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered,” airing Wednesdays at 8/7c on Oxygen.

With her nails freshly painted, Goode posted one last smiling selfie on Instagram as she stood in front of a mirror before she walked out the door.

But the 21-year-old would never return and her large family in Mastick, New York spent days searching for her, racing to their cars every time they heard police sirens and even taking on the role of amateur detective as they tracked down anyone who may have seen Goode the night she disappeared.

As the youngest of nine siblings, Goode never had a shortage of people looking out for her.

When she was 17 years old, Goode gave birth to her daughter, Jocelyn, but she didn’t let the new role in her life derail her from her goals. With the support of her large family, she graduated from high school and then college before getting a job as a medical technician.

“She was like a natural mother, you know,” her sister Elizabeth DeMuria said. “She knew what to do and how to take care of her and love her up every second and that’s what she did.”

On the evening of June 6, 2014, Goode had planned a casual night out with friends.

According to former Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney Janet Albertson, investigators would later learn that shortly after leaving Giannetto’s house, she met up with Jason Flores, a childhood friend who she had reconnected with several weeks earlier.

Flores took a selfie of the pair in her BMW — with Goode behind the wheel — at 6:51 p.m.

“She’s so happy, I mean she was just beaming,” Albertson said.

The pair drove to pick up Brandon Allen, a close friend of Flores’, before they went to a small gathering where about a dozen people had gathered in the front yard of a home.

They stayed at the party for about 45 minutes, snapping a group shot at 10:18 p.m., before Goode, Flores, and Allen returned to Allen’s house to watch “The Hobbit.” Around 1 a.m., Flores told investigators that he and Goode left Allen’s house. He said she dropped him off at his house before heading home herself.

At 1:17 a.m., text records show that Flores texted Goode asking her whether she had gotten home safely, and she seemingly replied, “Yes.” But the next day, Goode never showed up to a family birthday party to retrieve her daughter.

When her family reported her missing later that afternoon, police remembered an earlier report from an officer who had spotted an abandoned BMW not far from Goode’s home earlier that day and they quickly located the vehicle.

Goode’s family was unnerved by the discovery, but their concern only grew when Giannetto discovered that Goode had written several disturbing tweets just days before she disappeared.

“Sooo you know I live on a dead end? I see you creepin!” she wrote in one dated June 1, 2014.

In another, on June 3, 2014, Goode wrote, “Getting threatened for days now … is that the new thing to do?”

Although it wasn’t clear what Goode was referring to, some speculated she may have been referencing a conflict she had with her ex-boyfriend D.J. Watters and his mother.

Albertson said investigators received an anonymous tip that after Goode and Watters had broken up, he had left her a threatening voicemail asking her to take down a message about his family on social media.

Watters’ mother allegedly followed up with a phone call, where she threatened to kill the 21-year-old. It concerned Goode enough that she reported the incident to police.

“There were a whole bunch of rumors going around about DJ and his family and that things were not going well in their relationship,” reporter Nicole Allegrezza told “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.”

As search efforts continued, investigators and Goode’s own family focused on Flores and Allen — the last two men known to see her alive — but both willingly offered DNA samples. They also agreed to provide palm prints, after investigators found what appeared to be a bloody handprint on the hood of Goode’s car.

Both men, along with Watters, were eventually based off the print.

It wasn’t until Goode’s friend Allaura Cicero realized she had shared a cell phone plan with Goode and looked into Goode’s cell phone history that she realized there was another number that kept popping up on Goode’s phone the night she disappeared.  

The number belonged to Dante Taylor, a friend of Allen’s and Flores’ who had been at the small gathering that night.

Investigators spoke with Taylor, who insisted the reason his number appeared on her phone was because he had actually been calling Flores, who didn’t have his own cell phone at the time. He agreed to provide a palm print and a sample of his DNA.

As authorities waited for the results, Giannetto made a grisly discovery during a search for his sister-in-law. He and one of Goode’s brothers discovered the 21-year-old’s body deep in the woods.

According to Albertson, she had been raped and was left half-naked with deep bruising on her legs and inner thighs. Although the body had decomposed significantly in the six days it was left out in the elements, authorities could still determine that Goode had suffered a broken nose and had been brutally stabbed more than 40 times.

“It’s just sad, you know, you’re just standing over this, what was clearly six days before a beautiful young girl, and what you had left was a horror,” Albertson said.

Albertson believed Goode was likely killed when she resisted a sexual advance from someone.

“It’s very clear when you looked at it that he landed on her from behind, pinned her down and inflicted those injuries because she had bruising on her legs, front and back, inside the right and left thigh that were inflicted while she was alive,” she said, calling the killer “an animal.”

Using the bloody handprint left behind on the car and DNA from semen collected from Goode’s body, they were able to identify Taylor as the 21-year-old’s killer.

Investigators believe that although Goode had returned home safely that night, she later agreed to meet up with Taylor and met her demise.

Taylor was convicted of first-degree rape and murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He took his own life in prison about a year after the sentence was handed down.

For more on this case and others like it, watch “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered,” airing Wednesdays at 8/7c on Oxygen, or stream episodes here.