Abington woman who killed and dismembered her parents did so after being confronted for stealing from them, prosecutors say

Verity Beck was at a low point in her life at the beginning of this year, Montgomery County prosecutors said.

She was 43, bankrupt, and living with her parents. And when they confronted her about stealing money from them, including to buy jewelry from Amazon, she killed and dismembered them in the Abington home they shared, according to court documents filed this week.

“The defendant is the only person who had a motive to kill Reid and Miriam Beck,” Assistant District Attorney Samantha Cauffman wrote. “With them dead, her financial difficulties would be a thing of the past, because she would have their money, without the threat of being turned over to the police for spending it.”

Cauffman’s filings offered the first glimpse into the potential motive for the crime, which shocked the Beck family’s neighbors on their sleepy suburban street and made headlines across the state.

Beck’s attorney, James Lyons, said Friday that he would seek to suppress evidence of text messages Beck had exchanged with her parents about finances that prosecutors say establish a motive for murder.

Beck, a former special-education teacher at St. Katherine’s School in Wynnewood, has been charged with first- and third-degree murder, as well as abuse of corpse and related offenses in her parents’ Jan. 10 deaths. Investigators said Beck shot her father, 73, and mother, 72, in the head with handguns she had purchased days earlier, and then dismembered their corpses with an electric chainsaw.

After the killings, Beck impersonated her parents and responded to text messages sent to them by friends and loved ones in the days after their deaths, the court documents said. During that ruse, she made dinner plans with their friends, canceled the weekly visit from the cleaning woman, and even told their grandchildren she was proud of them.

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In the end, those texts would be Beck’s undoing: Her brother, Justin, began to suspect something was wrong because he hadn’t spoken to his parents on the phone in days, which was unusual, he later told investigators.

During a Jan. 17 visit to his parents’ home, he found their bodies amid a bloody crime scene, prosecutors said. In a conversation with his sister, who was home at the time, he said she told him things “had been bad” in recent days, and that their parents were dead.

Police summoned to the house by Justin Beck took his sister into custody after discovering the mutilated bodies.

Detectives found a large supply of cleaning products in the home, the documents said. And in an upstairs bedroom, Beck’s DNA was found on a wall safe, along with drill marks. Cauffman said it appeared that she had attempted to break into the safe.

Beck’s DNA was also found on her father’scell phone, which contained text messages revealing that five days before his death, he had confronted her about unauthorized Amazon purchases — including a $1,097 necklace — that she had made using his bank account.

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He told his daughter he had reported the purchases as fraud, and promised her she would be hearing from the police, according to the court filings.

Earlier text messages revealed that in November 2022, Beck had stolen a $600 check mailed to her parents by a woman who sought to rent their beach house in Sea Isle City.

When confronted about this and the later fraud, she sent both of her parents a long text message accusing her father of “having rage issues,” being emotionally abusive, and ruining her relationships, the documents said.

Beck’s lawyer, Lyons, said the texts are hearsay and are not relevant to the case and he would seek to have them excluded from evidence.

“We don’t object to motive evidence per se, but we argued it must be presented lawfully within the rules of evidence,” he said. “The text messages do not constitute lawful evidence.”

Beck had had financial problems for years, prosecutors said, and she declared bankruptcy in May 2020, citing $114,059 in student loan and credit card debt, according to prosecutors.

“She was ... living with her parents and wanted their money,” Cauffman said, “and when she got caught taking it without permission one too many times, she decided to kill them so she could have their money and avoid the consequences of taking it.”

Montgomery County Court Judge William Carpenter has not yet ruled on whether the texts and other evidence included in Cauffman’s filings will be presented to a jury at Beck’s trial, which is scheduled to begin Feb. 5.