When Trust Becomes a Weapon: The Lisa Knoefel Case

The Attack That Should Never Have Happened

Lisa Knoefel was 41 years old, and on the night of November 26, 2012, she was exactly where she should’ve felt safest—her own bed, trying to get some sleep. No alarm bells. No warning signs. Just the usual quiet that comes with middle-of-the-night stillness. Until it wasn’t.

The bedroom door cracked open, slow and deliberate. Someone stepped inside without a word. And what followed? Chaos—fast, brutal, and horrifying.

Lisa didn’t just wake up. She woke up fighting for her life. A knife came down on her again and again, turning her room into a war zone. She was slashed roughly 178 times and stabbed another 12. That’s not a typo. One of the wounds blinded her. Two of her fingers were nearly sliced off. Defensive wounds on her arms and hands told the story—she tried to fight back, twisting, grabbing, shielding herself the way anyone would when survival mode kicks in.

She curled in on herself, instinctively protecting the parts of her that mattered most. But two of the stab wounds hit fatal targets. One tore through her lung, diaphragm, and liver. The other cut straight through her carotid artery. After that, the clock was ticking... just minutes.

Lisa never stood a chance. She didn’t go quietly. She fought. Hard. But there’s no defense for being ambushed in your sleep.

And here’s the part that makes your stomach turn, Lisa had spent years caring for the person who killed her. The same person who crept into her room that night. The same person she had tried to help.

A Family Taken In... and Torn Apart

When police got to the scene, they walked into something straight out of a nightmare. Seventeen-year-old Sabrina Zunich was still there, covered in blood, clutching the knife she’d just used to kill Lisa Knoefel, the woman who had taken her in and tried to give her a stable home. Her foster mom. Her safe place. Or so everyone thought.

Sabrina didn’t just end up with the Knoefels by accident. Lisa and her husband Kevin made the intentional choice to bring her into their family a few years earlier. They’d fostered kids before. Lisa had the background—she was a social worker with experience helping teens who’d been through the wringer. This wasn’t new territory.

But Sabrina wasn’t coming in with a blank slate. Her life up to that point had been chaos. Friends said that when she was still in diapers, her family used vodka in her bottle to get her to sleep. Her main caregivers were her grandmother—elderly and overwhelmed—and her father, who was deep in addiction. Mental health issues started young. Sabrina was diagnosed with ADHD at age four, followed by a running list: oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression. The kind of résumé no kid should have.

When her grandmother could no longer take care of her, Sabrina landed in the foster system. Her dad died not long after—an apparent overdose. From there, it was the usual shuffle: one house to the next until she ended up with the Knoefels. And on paper, it looked like she finally caught a break.

“Had she been placed anywhere else, she might have made it,” someone would later testify in court. That one sentence says a lot—and none of it’s good.

Lisa tried. People who knew her said she went above and beyond for her foster kids. Her ex-husband called her a natural with children. Her friends said she treated every foster child like her own, and did everything she could to give them a real shot at life. The Knoefel home had two biological daughters already, one from Lisa’s first marriage and one from her marriage to Kevin. It was supposed to be a full, blended, healthy family. Safe. Supportive. Normal.

But behind closed doors, things were unraveling. Lisa’s marriage to Kevin was starting to crack, and it was more than just the usual arguments over dishes or bills. Something deeper was off, and Lisa, maybe, was starting to feel it.

Inside the Knoefel Home: A Family, a Fracture, and a Dangerous Bond

Before the chaos, before the knife, before anyone started calling lawyers, Lisa Knoefel had a pretty average-looking family tree.

Her first marriage was to a man named Nicholas Zanella, and together they had a daughter, Megan. That relationship eventually ended, and life moved on. Lisa later married Kevin Knoefel, a truck driver with a calm demeanor and what most would assume was a solid pair of hands for steering life’s chaos. They had a daughter of their own—Hailey. Add in Sabrina, their foster teen, and the family unit looked complete. One big blended household, with Lisa at the center holding it all together.

At first, it actually worked. Sabrina started to settle in. She felt supported. She had siblings, structure, someone checking in on her homework. Lisa and Kevin were both involved, but it was Kevin who Sabrina said she felt especially comfortable around. “We had a very close relationship,” she later said. “I could be open with him.”

But that closeness? It started veering way off course.

“They were too friendly,” one of Sabrina’s friends told investigators later. “They were too close. They’d make sexual jokes toward each other.” That wasn’t just teen gossip. People were noticing. And Lisa? She wasn’t looking the other way.

She and Kevin got into it—loudly. One of their final arguments was about Sabrina. Lisa accused Kevin of crossing a serious line, of being physically involved with the teen who was supposed to be their responsibility, not his… whatever this was turning into. It was a fight, sure. But it was also Lisa sounding the alarm.

A Predator’s Plan: Grooming, Control, and a Chilling Betrayal

About a year after Sabrina moved in, Kevin Knoefel’s behavior took a disturbing turn. According to what Sabrina later told investigators, Kevin had begun giving her money in exchange for letting him take inappropriate photos. What she didn’t share at the time, but would later admit, was that their relationship had already crossed a serious and illegal line. This was not a foster parent helping a teen through a rough patch. It was grooming, manipulation, and abuse.

Kevin was already laying groundwork behind the scenes. He told Sabrina’s social worker he was thinking about divorcing Lisa. If that happened, he said he wanted custody of Sabrina. Not out of concern. Out of control. He wanted her close and was willing to say whatever he had to in order to make that happen.

But he never filed for divorce. Instead, he leaned in closer to Sabrina and began planting a deadly idea. According to her later testimony, Kevin told her that Lisa had to die.

He didn’t just suggest it. He allegedly coached her on how to stage the crime and how to make it look like a break-in gone wrong. He told her where to stab someone if she wanted it to be fatal. He even helped her pick out a knife.

Then, just before it all happened, Kevin left the state for work. While Sabrina stayed home, he was off in Michigan, putting distance between himself and the crime he had just set in motion.

The Witness, the Fallout, and the Truth That Finally Broke Loose

Inside the Knoefel house that night were two kids who had no business being anywhere near what was about to happen. Thirteen-year-old Megan and three-year-old Hailey were both home. When Megan heard the struggle in her mother’s bedroom, she ran toward the sound. What she found was horrifying. Sabrina—older, stronger, and completely out of control—was stabbing Lisa. Megan did what most kids wouldn’t even think to do. She tried to stop her. She physically launched herself at Sabrina, pulling, grabbing, doing anything she could. But it wasn’t enough.

So Megan ran. She grabbed the phone and called 911, her voice shaking, desperate. “She’s stabbing my mom with a knife and she’s beating her!” you can hear her say on the recording played later in court. When the dispatcher asked who was attacking her mother, Megan replied, “My sister! She’s trying to kill my mom!”

By the time first responders arrived, Sabrina was still there. Still holding the knife. Covered in blood. Lisa was still alive but barely. She died in her bedroom moments later. Three-year-old Hailey was found hiding in the closet.

This wasn’t a whodunit. Everyone knew who killed Lisa Knoefel. Sabrina pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after thirty years. Her earliest chance at parole will come in 2042, when she’ll be forty-seven.

Sabrina never denied what she did. But for a while, she refused to explain why. And while she sat in jail, silent, Kevin Knoefel was out there living his best life—on someone else’s grave.

He collected on two life insurance policies he had taken out on Lisa. That payout totaled more than $790,000. He kept the house. He got custody of the kids. He bought new cars. Took flying lessons. Moved on like nothing had happened.

And he let Sabrina rot.

But eventually, reality hit. Sabrina realized Kevin had no intention of helping her. No plans. No loyalty. He had used her, tossed her aside, and left her holding the knife in every way possible.

So she talked.

She told police the murder wasn’t her idea. It was Kevin’s. “I said, ‘Why not just divorce her?’” she later told them. “And he said, ‘Because I can’t do it. The girls would end up going to her.’ Then he said, ‘She’s worth more dead than alive.’”

That broke it open.

Kevin Knoefel was hit with eleven charges, including sexual battery and complicity to commit aggravated murder. Sabrina testified against him, and the jury believed her. Kevin was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life in prison. The man who manipulated a broken teenager into killing the mother of his children now has nothing—no money, no freedom, and no one left to manipulate.