When William Winters Leverett, 27, confessed a week ago to leaders at the Open Gate Ministries of New England that he was the one who fatally stabbed insurance company executive Melissa Millan four years ago, they were stunned.
“Our reaction, of course, was silence probably for a minute because we had to digest what he just said. We were stunned. My first question to him was, ‘Will, are you sure you did this?'” Colette Trazinski, co-founder of the Connecticut house church, told The Christian Post Thursday.
“He said, ‘Yes. I’m sure.’ My husband said you know what you have to do. He said, ‘Yes. I have to go to the police and turn myself in,'” Trazinski said.
In November 2014, Millan, a 54-year-old mother of two and a senior vice president at Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., was jogging on a trail in Simsbury when she was brutally stabbed in the chest and left to die, the Hartford Courant said. And until Leverett’s confession on Sept. 19, Millan’s murder had remained unsolved.
It was about 8 p.m. approximately two Wednesday’s ago when Trazinski said she got a call from a young woman who’s also a member of their church. She and her husband, Mike, were meeting with two other church members at the time.
“We were just talking with them when we got a call from this young woman who was with Will at the time. He had confessed to her. She didn’t tell us on the phone. But she said we needed to come over. This is serious,” Collette recalled.
“She came over with Will. Asked if we could pray before we started and then Will pretty much told us. Asked us if we remembered about the case of the woman being stabbed in Simsbury and I had a vague recollection of it. … He pretty much told us that it was him. He had done it,” she said.
Officials at the Simsbury Police Department, located just outside of Hartford, released video taken from the station’s lobby showing Leverett and members of the Open Gate Ministries speaking with an officer on the morning of Sept. 19, according to ABC News. Trazinski says he was accompanied by her husband along with the young woman to whom Leverett initially confessed his crime, and another male member of the church.
Leverett confessed to police that on the evening of Nov. 20, 2014, he went to the trail in search of “human contact,” the Courant said. He had previously attended a treatment meeting for sex offenders in Hartford. He had met a woman a few months before the murder and was worried that she would find out about his sex crime.
He explained to police that he was “embarrassed and scared and figured that if I just killed somebody it would make all that go away and I wouldn’t have to explain myself.”
Leverett said he spotted Millan on the running trail and began “getting mentally aroused.” He grew anxious, however, when he realized that “I can’t have her” and that “she was way out of my league.”
He would eventually confront the insurance executive and told police “I went into a frenzy.”
Leverett Stabbed Millan once in the chest with a knife then pulled it out and watched as she fell back, over a guardrail and onto a roadway. He heard her say “oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” before she became silent.
At the time of his confession, Leverett had been working as an assistant manager at The Fresh Market in Avon. The pastor’s wife said they met him in March 2015 when he was about 23 and about four months after Millan’s murder.
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Source: Christian Post
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