Former Rare Staff
There’s been a disturbing update in the case of a 22-year-old college student who had just started school at Temple University, went missing after a night at a bar and was found to be murdered by blunt force trauma and strangulation days later.
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Police say 29-year-old Joshua Hupperterz, who has been charged with murder, transported Jenna Burleigh’s body in a storage bin more than 100 miles by using the Lyft rideshare service to his grandmother’s property in Jenkintown, according to NBC Philadelphia.
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Burleigh was last seen leaving a bar in Philadelphia with Hupperterz on Thursday and was found dead by Saturday. Hupperterz was arrested on Sunday. In addition to a murder charge, Hupperterz also faces charges of abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence and possession of an instrument of crime.
WPVI reported that Hupperterz admitted to “elements of the crime” on Saturday and police say he said being “so drunk when he left the bar he had no recollection of who he had been with.”
Another Temple University student named Natalie Abulhawa spoke to the press after seeing Hupperterz’s face on the news. She said that they used to be neighbors and that she remembered something being off about him.
“It was actually a really common thing, almost every time I saw him […] he was always outside smoking and he would always ask me and I would tell him I don’t smoke,” she said. “I saw his face pop up [on the news] and it was just like, I don’t know, chilling.”
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Hupperterz has had numerous run-ins with the law in recent years. These incidents included: public drunkeness, DUI, drug possession with intent to deliver and theft.
