Larry Millete Paid Strangers to Help Him Keep His Wife. Then He Paid Them to Hurt Her. Then She Disappeared.

Most coercive control never ends in homicide. According to prosecutors, four months of Larry Millete's emails show what it looks like when it does.

* Larry has pleaded not guilty, and the jury will decide whether the prosecution has proved its case. What follows is what the preliminary hearing established and what prosecutors will present at trial.

On December 27, 2020, Larry Millete sat down at his computer in Chula Vista and wrote an email to a stranger he had been paying for four months to cast magic spells on his wife. He asked the stranger to make Maya “really sick and keep her sick” until she had no one left in her life but him and their three children, gathered around her “deathbed.” Eleven days later, his wife was gone.

Thirty-nine-year-old Maya Millete

Maya Millete was thirty-nine years old. She was a contract specialist at the Naval Information Warfare Center in Point Loma. She was the mother of three children, ages four, nine, and eleven. On the afternoon of January 7, 2021, she reached out to a divorce attorney. At 4:42 PM, she pulled into her driveway, and a camera outside the front door caught her walking toward the house. No camera ever caught her walking back out.

Between September 2020 and the day Maya disappeared, Larry Millete paid online spellcasters $1,154.05 to cast spells on his wife. The first ones, in September, were love spells. He asked the casters to bind Maya to him forever, to keep her from “hurting our family even further.” By October, he was asking the casters to give Maya “the worst nightmares” because “she needs to be punished.” By late December, he was asking the casters to keep Maya so sick she would be on her deathbed, with no one around her at the end except him and the children. On December 31, he asked one caster for an “accident or broken bone.” On January 7, two minutes before Maya walked through the front door for the last time, he sent his last spell-caster email about her. Jury selection for Larry’s trial began Monday in Chula Vista.

The trial itself is expected to last three months. Larry has pleaded not guilty, and the jury will decide whether the prosecution has proved its case. What follows is what the preliminary hearing established and what prosecutors will present at trial.

The prosecution will introduce four months of emails Larry wrote to online spellcasters between September 2020 and the afternoon Maya disappeared. The defense will work to keep them out, or to soften them, or to say they were the work of a man falling apart, not a man planning a murder.

They were the thoughts of a man planning a murder. They show a husband moving from “help me win her back” to “she needs to be punished” across one autumn and one winter, in his own writing, dated and recoverable. I have reviewed dozens of intimate partner homicide cases. Almost none leave evidence like this behind.

What the emails show, when read together, is the rare transition from coercive control to homicide, captured in real time. Most controlling marriages never reach it. The ones that do reach it almost always do so invisibly, inside the perpetrator’s head, where no investigator, no family member, and often no clinician can see. Larry Millete is the exception. He wrote down his version of it.

By the time Maya started telling her family she wanted to leave Larry, he had been part of that family for almost twenty years.

Maya and Larry met in Hawaii as teenagers. They married young. By 2020, they had three children, ages 4, 9, and 11. Larry had been at the family gatherings. The New Year’s trips. The children’s birthdays. The entire span of Maya’s adult life. To her siblings and her parents, he was not a danger to be assessed. He was the man who had been there for two decades.

Reclassifying a brother-in-law of twenty years as a man preparing to harm your sister is not something human relationships are designed to easily do.

This is the context in which Maya was telling her family.

She had been telling her brother Jay-R for months. She sent him texts during a brief separation in mid-2020, when she had temporarily moved out of the Chula Vista house and into Jay-R and Genesis’s home: “I’m so tired of his mental and emotional abuse. He’s got you all in his pockets, and I’m alone and isolated, exactly where he wants me to be.”

Jay-R and Larry kept in touch. When Maya disappeared, Jay-R was one of the first people Larry called.

She had told her close friend Kristeen Timmers something truly alarming. In conversations Timmers would later describe under oath, Maya disclosed that Larry had once choked her until she passed out.

Strangulation is one of the strongest predictors of intimate partner homicide in the published research. Women whose partners have non-fatally strangled them are seven times more likely to be killed by them than women who have not been. Timmers was not familiar with the strangulation literature. She knew her friend, and she worried. She had no way of knowing that one earlier disclosure could predict what would happen in the next six months.

At a December 2020 dinner with friends, Maya told Timmers something even more specific. Larry had been calling her phone repeatedly throughout dinner, with the calls getting more frequent as the evening went on. Maya told her friends she had started seeing a therapist to help her process the marriage. And then, through tears — the first time Timmers had ever seen her cry — Maya said: “I’m afraid Larry will hurt the kids to hurt me.” Most domestic violence victims fear what their partner will do to them. A smaller number fear what their partner will do to the children. Maya was in the second group. The clinical literature is clear about what those women are responding to: a perpetrator who treats the children as leverage rather than as people. Prosecutors will argue that Larry was that kind of perpetrator.

She had told her sister Maricris on the family New Year’s trip to Glamis in early January 2021. The divorce was happening. She was going to pawn her Rolexes and Louis Vuittons, the ones Larry wouldn’t notice missing, to pay for an attorney. “Larry had taken control of all the finances,” Timmers later testified Maya had told her. And then on that Glamis trip, Maya said the sentence reporters have quoted in nearly every piece of coverage of this case since: “If anything happens to me, it was Larry.”

Maricris encouraged her to wait until her finances were in order. It is the kind of thing an older sister tells a younger sister in a hard marriage. The level of danger wasn’t clear to her until after Maya was dead. This is what most pre-homicidal warnings sound like to the people who get them: a comment made in a hard week, a thing said on a trip, a sentence that sticks in memory only after the worst possibility comes true.

On the afternoon of January 7, 2021, Maya made one more disclosure to one more person. She called Broaden Law in San Diego at around 1:45 PM and spoke to a legal assistant named Desteny Johnson. Maya did not want to come to the office because she was afraid of being followed. She wanted the consultation by phone. Johnson would later testify that the way Maya spoke made her think the consultation needed to be about safety, not just paperwork. Johnson scheduled the phone consult for January 12, after Maya’s family trip to Big Bear for her daughter’s January 8th birthday.

That same afternoon, Maya posted to a Facebook group chat with her work friends that Larry was demanding 100% custody of the children.

By that night, Maya was gone.

What the Prosecution Alleges

Maya’s warnings were responses to things Larry was actually doing. At the preliminary hearing, prosecutors laid out what they say he had been doing to Maya throughout 2020 and into January 2021.

According to investigators, almost everything Larry did to Maya in the year before her disappearance served the same purpose. He wanted her to believe things that were not true, so she would do what he wanted. The phone in her car was supposed to make her believe he could watch her anywhere. The phone under her bed was supposed to make her think thoughts she had not chosen to think. The vitamins were supposed to make her tired so she would stay home. The story he told her family was meant to make her believe that her own siblings would not stand up for her.

The hitman proposition was supposed to remove the man she was leaving him for, so she would have nowhere to go. The spellcasters were supposed to do whatever spellcasters do. Researchers on coercive control have spent two decades tracking this pattern. The specific methods vary from case to case. The point of the methods does not. Larry’s methods were spellcasters and subliminal recordings. Other perpetrators have used other tools to do the same thing.

The methods themselves, in the order they entered Maya’s life:

He followed her to work. On June 27, 2020, the same day Maya moved out of Jay-R and Genesis’s home, where she had been staying during the separation, Larry followed her to her workplace and saw her with a coworker. He came to believe she was having an affair. He spent the next six months acting on that belief.

He surveilled her phone. In August 2020, Maya discovered that Larry had planted a cellphone in her car. She locked herself in a room in her house and called Kristeen Timmers. Timmers testified that she could hear Larry in the background of that call, asking Maya to open the door.

He surveilled his own home. Around December 18, 2020, Maya found a cellphone hidden beneath her bed that was playing subliminal messages. She confronted Larry about it. According to preliminary testimony from Larry’s sister-in-law, Genesis Nicolas-Tabalanza, Larry texted: “She found the subliminals and said I’m trying to cage her in an invisible cage.” The phrase “invisible cage” is Maya’s own description of what Larry was doing to her, preserved in Larry’s text to a third party. Larry told Genesis that the recordings beneath the bed were phrases like “I love you” and “Love me” played beneath white noise, designed to alter her thinking while she slept. Investigators also testified to speakers placed throughout the Millete house that broadcast the same kind of material, and to an internet search on Larry’s computer for “subliminal wife training.”

He may have been drugging her. Maya stopped taking the vitamins Larry was giving her. She told him they were making her drowsy. She kept a private digital diary in which she expressed concern that she was being poisoned. When investigator Matthew Grindley was asked under oath whether he believed Larry was poisoning Maya, his answer was “Yes.” He clarified: “I can’t factually say he was poisoning her. I can see other evidence that backs up.” The other evidence included Larry’s December 16, 2020, Google searches for Rohypnol, flunitrazepam, and other sedatives commonly known as date-rape drugs.

He controlled her finances. Maya told Timmers that Larry “had taken control of all the finances.” She was prepared to pawn jewelry to pay for a divorce attorney because she could not draw down the joint accounts without Larry noticing. She told Timmers she was worried that if she filed for divorce, her valuables would disappear. She also told Timmers she no longer had access to a safe in the house.

He weaponized her family. Throughout 2020, he repeatedly contacted Maya’s family with a narrative about Maya. He told Genesis he was “willing to sell my soul” to keep the marriage. He told Genesis he was considering apprenticing under a spellcaster because he was “desperate.” He cultivated a story about Maya’s infidelity. He repeated it to family, friends, and his employer.

He tried to have her suspected lover killed. In mid-2020, during the period of separation, Larry approached Jay-R with a proposal. He offered him $20,000 to find someone who would, in Jay-R’s preliminary testimony, “get the guy” Larry suspected Maya was having an affair with. Jay-R was offered an additional $4,000 for his trouble. He declined.

That offer is significant. By mid-2020, six to eight months before Maya disappeared, Larry had already moved past trying to save the marriage. He was prepared to pay a third party to remove a perceived rival. By September 2020, when the love spells started, Larry was not at the beginning of his escalation. He was already in the middle of it.

And underneath all of it, prosecutors say he treated the children as leverage. Maya cried at a December dinner because she was afraid Larry would hurt the children to hurt her. On January 7, she told her work friends that Larry was demanding 100% custody. Whether she was responding to specific threats or to the broader pattern of his behavior, the fear was rational. A man who plants phones under his wife’s bed to alter her thinking while she sleeps, who searches for sedatives on his work computer, who pays strangers to incapacitate her, is a man whose relationship to the people around him is instrumental. The children were the largest leverage point he had.

What the Eight-Stage Timeline Looks Like

Most coercive control does not end in homicide. Most controllers cycle. They escalate, retreat, escalate again. The pattern can run for decades without ever becoming lethal. The forensic question researchers have spent two decades trying to answer is what separates the marriages that end in killing from the ones that don’t.

Jane Monckton-Smith, a British criminologist, looked at 372 femicides and found that the lethal cases shared an eight-stage timeline. Stages one through three describe how the relationship forms and how the controller takes hold. The first three stages describe how the relationship forms: a perpetrator with a history of stalking or prior abuse (stage one), a whirlwind early commitment (stage two), and a relationship built on coercive control (stage three). Most controlling marriages stay in stages four and five, sometimes for years. Stage four is a trigger that threatens his control, usually the partner saying she will leave. Stage five is escalation. He tightens his grip. She retreats or stays. He escalates again. This can go on for decades.

Stage six is the moment he stops trying to keep her and starts thinking about killing her. “I will keep her” becomes “she will not have a life apart from me.” Stage seven is the planning that follows. Stage eight is the killing.

The hardest stage to detect is stage six. It happens inside the perpetrator’s head. By the time anyone in his life can see it, the homicide is often only hours or days away. Restraining orders take days to file. Safety plans take hours of work with a trained advocate. Danger assessments require an interview that has to be scheduled. None of these tools moves as fast as Stage Six can.

We rarely get to watch it happen. According to the prosecution, Larry Millete is the exception.

Four Months of Magic

Larry started buying spells in September 2020. Investigator James Rhoades of the San Diego District Attorney’s Office testified to over 1,700 pages of communications between Larry and the casters. Larry left at least one of them a five-star review. He told the casters things he could not tell anyone in his actual life, because they had no relationship to him and no stake in his marriage.

The first emails are conventional. “I would like a powerful love spell to bind my wife, May T. Millete, to me forever.” He wants her, and he wants her with him. The marriage is already failing. Maya had briefly moved out to her brother’s house earlier that year. But Larry hasn’t given up on keeping her yet.

Larry Milette’s altar for his spells on his wife

Through October and November, the emails come faster. He asks for the casters to give Maya “the worst nightmares.” He writes: “She needs to be punished for her actions. She’s too much sometimes.” He asks for spells to “focus on dominating her and for her to obey me.” In late November, Larry sends Maya an article titled What Men Want From Their Wives. He is using the spells to change her and the article to instruct her—two methods for the same goal.

In December, the language shifts. On December 16, Larry’s Google searches turn to flunitrazepam, Rohypnol, and diphenhydramine. Sedatives. He writes a spellcaster: “If you can cast a spell to cause bodily harm or cripple without killing.” He writes another: “Is there a spell you can cast for May to be dependent on me and weigh her down?” By late December, he is asking for spells that would have her “dependent on me and humble her down.”

Larry still wants Maya alive. He still wants her with him. But what he is willing to do to her to keep her has changed.

December 27

On December 27, 2020, Larry sent two emails to the same spellcaster within hours of each other.

The first asked the caster to “make her REALLY SICK and keep her sick until she realizes that it is us, her family … are the only ones that will be by (her) bedside on her deathbed. … Please banish everyone from her life except us four.”

Larry is paying a stranger to make his wife gravely ill. He is asking for everyone other than himself and their three children to be removed from her life. He is using the word “deathbed.” Maya will be gone in eleven days.

The second email, written the same day, asked: “Please punish May and incapacitate her enough so she can’t leave the house. It’s time to take the gloves off. It’s too much. She needs to be humbled down to the lowest of the low.”

The email tells us what Larry is now thinking. Maya is the one at fault. She is “too much.” She “needs to be punished.” She “needs to be humbled.” He has decided he wants her to be physically unable to leave the house, and he no longer cares how that happens. The same day, in the same emails, he asks a spellcaster to put her on her deathbed.

The article Larry had sent Maya five weeks earlier was titled “What Men Want From Their Wives.” By December 27, he isn’t trying to teach her anything.

That is what taking the gloves off meant.

This is an escalation in writing.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Across the four months of correspondence with spellcasters, Larry described his love for his wife.

He wanted Maya bound to him forever. He wanted her to love him unconditionally, the way he said he loved her. His vocabulary of love runs through the September and October correspondence the way it runs through any love letter.

A man who loves his wife does not pay a stranger to keep her sick until she is on her deathbed or is incapacitated so she cannot leave the house. A man who loves his wife does not slip a phone playing subliminal messages under her bed in an attempt to alter her thinking. He does not pay for a spell that will make her subservient or obedient. He does not search for date-rape drugs on his work computer. None of these is love.

What Larry called love was an attempt to trap Maya inside a marriage she was trying to leave. To get what he wanted regardless of how his wife felt or desired. He wanted her compliance. When that failed, he wanted her to suffer and, when that didn’t work, he was willing to destroy her. This is the sequence of coercive control that can become fatal. The “because I love her” talk had nothing to do with his feelings for Maya; it was how he justified his behavior to himself.

The clinical observation, which the prosecution will frame in expert testimony, is that Larry’s correspondence is not one feeling caught at one moment. It is a record built across four months. The sequence is what the jury has to read. Take any one email, and the defense argument has plausibility. Read the four months together, alongside the subliminal devices and the Rohypnol searches and the planted phones and the $20,000 offer to remove the suspected rival, and the desperation framing collapses. What’s left, according to the prosecution, is a man whose goal was to control Maya. When the methods stopped working, he changed methods.

What Larry called love is what dozens of perpetrators in dozens of cases have called love, and the gap between the word and the behavior is what makes this kind of marriage lethal. Larry’s case is unusual because he wrote it down for strangers he was paying, and the writing survived.

What the Defense Will Argue, and What the Judge Has Already Ruled

Maya’s body has never been found. Five years of searches, nothing. The prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Maya is dead and that Larry killed her, without remains, without witnesses, without physical evidence sufficient to establish where or how she died. That is a hard prosecution to bring.

The defense will argue that the emails show desperation, not intent to kill. Larry was a man whose marriage was ending. He had tried therapy. He had sent his wife articles about marriage. He had pressured her family to convince her to stay. None of it worked. So he reached for something else. He paid spellcasters because he came from a background where some people believed spellcasters had power, and because he was desperate enough to try anything. The defense will argue that a man planning to kill his wife does not spend four months and $1,154 trying to fix the marriage through magic. He acts. The spell-caster emails are evidence that Larry was trying every other option before accepting that the marriage was over. The emails are pathetic, the defense will argue, not predatory.

The defense will also argue that the prosecution has built a homicide narrative out of selected moments. A single Google search for Rohypnol on December 16 is not evidence of intent to drug. The $20,000 offer to Maya’s brother happened during the separation period in mid-2020, and Larry never followed up on it. The spell-caster correspondence is dark in places and ordinary in others. The defense will argue that the prosecution has lifted Larry’s worst moments out of months of normal life and presented them as a homicide plan.

The defense had a second line of argument until recently. Maya was reportedly having an affair with a married coworker. The defense planned to tell the jury the coworker had his own reason to harm Maya. Exposure of the affair could have ended his Navy career and his marriage. Judge Enrique Camarena ruled this spring that the defense cannot make that argument. Without an alternative suspect to offer, the defense’s remaining options are to attack the prosecution’s circumstantial evidence, contest the credibility of police testimony, and ask the jury to credit the absence of a body as the absence of proof.

What This Case Teaches About Detection

The path along the Homicide Timeline is often predictable, but the speed of travel is not.

The people closest to Maya were worried she was in trouble. Jay-R had her texts. Timmers had the choking disclosure and the December dinner. Maricris had the New Year’s trip and the warning that named Larry. But each of them was holding a different piece. Jay-R did not know what Timmers knew. Timmers did not know what Maricris knew. Maya had told different parts of her marriage to different people, the way most women in dangerous marriages do. What none of them had was the rest of what they would have needed: knowing that strangulation predicts homicide at seven times the base rate, knowing that a woman who fears her partner will hurt the children is in a higher-risk group, knowing what each day Maya spent in that house was doing to the odds that she would get out alive. That knowledge is not common knowledge. It is expert knowledge.

Even if they had known it, they would have needed to know how to get Maya out. Safety planning is a skill. It involves living arrangements, financial preparation, timing, legal protection, and child-custody strategy. It is not something a sister, brother, or close friend would have any reason to learn. Most people never need to. Maya’s family did, and they didn’t know they did, and even after Maya disappeared, the information they had would not have told them what to do.

This is not a failure of love. This is what it looks like when the work of recognizing and responding to lethal coercive control falls on the people closest to the woman in danger. Maya’s family did everything a family can be expected to do. They listened. They worried. They were there. They heard her warnings through the context of a twenty-year history with a man who had been part of their family, one who would never kill someone they loved.

The Trial

Jury selection began on Monday, May 11th. The chosen twelve will get to hear all of the evidence in a way that’s impossible before the unfathomable happens. They will read four months of her husband’s emails. They will see what he asked strangers to do to her. They will hear about his mental and emotional abuse, his choking her until she passed out, and his search for date rape drugs. And they will decide whether his behavior was that of a desperate, loving man whose wife abandoned him or a controlling man who killed his wife. Maya’s family has been waiting 1950 days.

As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. Please pass it along to your true-crime-following friends. See you next week!

References

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Monckton-Smith, J. (2021). In control: Dangerous relationships and how they end in murder. Bloomsbury.

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