Man Who Murdered Young Long Island Mother Found Dead In Prison

ALDEN, NY – The Long Island man convicted of murdering 21-year-old Sarah Goode in 2014 was found dead Saturday at the upstate prison where he was serving life without parole.

The New York State Department of Corrections has not said how 22-year-old Dante Taylor died at the maximum security Wende Correctional Facility in upstate Alden, just outside Buffalo.

A Suffolk County jury convicted Taylor of first and second degree murder, as well as first degree attempted rape in 2016, two years after Goode's body was found in a wooded area in Medford.

A medical technician and the mother of a 4-year-old daughter, Goode was reported missing by her sister on June 8, 2014, two days after she had last been seen watching a movie with friends. Goode’s car was found on Fire Avenue in Medford, and days later, a member of a search party looking for Goode found her body in a thickly wooded area on Camden Court. She had been stabbed 42 times, authorities said.

During the trial, a forensic scientist from the Suffolk Crime Laboratory testified that semen and other material taken from Goode's body during an autopsy matched Taylor’s DNA.

State Supreme Court Justice John Collins sentenced Taylor to life without parole in July 2016.

"You may make chalk marks on the cellblock and your walls in the cage in which you will live, and they will have no significance,” Collins told Taylor during the sentencing, Newsday reported. “ They will mean nothing, because there is no date for you to get out.”

Taylor served about seven months in the Marines before he was discharged for an undisclosed reason a couple months before he killed Goode.

Patch file photos