Jury Convicts Larry Millete of First-Degree Murder in Wife Maya's Disappearance

On a January evening in 2021, a 39-year-old woman named Maya Millete walked into her home in Chula Vista, California, and never walked out again. Five years later, a jury would find her husband Larry guilty of her murder—even though her body has never been found, even though no one witnessed what happened behind closed doors that night, even though the case rests entirely on the accumulated weight of small, damning details.

Maya had come to America from the Philippines as a teenager, built a career as a contract specialist at Naval Base San Diego, and earned the respect of colleagues who saw in her a sharp mind and quiet confidence. She had three children with Larry, whom she'd married young after they both worked at a fast-food restaurant in Honolulu. By 2020, though, the marriage had begun to fracture. Maya was changing—growing into herself, her family said—and Larry could not accept it. He called her siblings asking them to intervene. He accused her of affairs. He wrote emails to her boss threatening to expose her infidelity. He forced her to attend church, quoting scripture about adulterous women and death. He tracked her spending. He hacked her social media accounts. He installed speakers under her bed that played subliminal messages while she slept: "No more men."

When conventional control failed, Larry turned to the internet and found spellcasters willing to sell him rituals for five dollars. He created a blood altar with an old photograph of them both, threw blood on it, and left reviews for the spellcasters like he was rating an Uber driver. By December 2020, he was desperate enough to send messages to practitioners of witchcraft: "Please punish May and incapacitate her enough so she can't leave the house. It's time to take the gloves off." On January 7, 2021, Maya filled out a divorce intake form and scheduled an appointment with a divorce attorney. That same day, she stopped communicating with her family. When her brother came to check on her, Larry said she was sleeping. When her sister and brother-in-law arrived the next day, the house was cold—the air conditioning running in January—and Larry said Maya had gone hiking. She never came back.

The police response was sluggish, but Maya's family did not wait. A former Navy criminal defense investigator named Billy Little inserted himself into the case and began looking for evidence. Inside the bedroom, he found two holes in the walls and door that had been recently patched. Larry claimed Maya had punched them in anger, but one hole was too high for her to have made. Outside the house, Little obtained security footage from neighbors. One camera captured the voices of the Millete children playing in the yard at 10:30 p.m. on a school night in cold weather. Another showed Larry backing the family Lexus into the garage at 5:58 a.m. the next morning, then leaving at 6:45 a.m. and not returning for nearly eleven and a half hours. A neighbor also provided audio of loud bangs around 10 p.m. that night—sounds Little believed were gunshots. The picture, as he told investigators, was becoming clear: Larry had killed his wife, sent the children outside to dispose of the body, and then driven away to hide it.

When police finally searched the house in January 2021, they found two Glock handguns, a rifle, a shotgun, and an illegal assault weapon. They downloaded images from Larry's phone and retrieved the GPS navigation system from his Lexus. In May 2021, they served him with a gun violence restraining order after finding a photo of their four-year-old son surrounded by weapons. By October 2021, nine months after Maya vanished, they arrested him for her murder. The evidence that emerged was circumstantial but dense: the controlling behavior documented by friends, the spellcasting messages, the suspicious timeline, the patched holes, the early-morning drive. There was no body. There was no confession. There was no eyewitness. But there was a pattern so complete, so suffocating in its detail, that a jury in July 2026 found him guilty of first-degree murder.

Maya's three children were granted to the custody of her sister Maricris in August 2024. They will grow up knowing their mother is dead but not knowing where she is buried, not being able to visit her grave, not having the closure that comes with a funeral. Her colleagues at the naval base, who had watched her rise through the ranks with quiet competence, will never know what happened to her in those final hours. Her family will continue to search the desert lands east of San Diego, hoping to find something—clothing, bones, anything—that might bring her home. And Larry Millete sits in prison, convicted of a murder he maintains he did not commit, his wife's body still missing, the full truth of that January night still locked away somewhere only he knows.