Larry Millete: Guilty of Murder — and Maya Has Never Been Found

There was no body. No crime scene. No murder weapon. No eyewitness. For five years, the disappearance of Maya "May" Millete — a 39-year-old mother of three who vanished from her Chula Vista home on January 7, 2021 — sat in the hardest category a prosecutor ever touches.

On July 9, 2026, a San Diego County jury heard six weeks of evidence answer for all of it. Deliberations took less than five hours. The verdict on her husband, Larry Millete: guilty of first-degree murder.

The disappearance: twelve dark hours

The timeline prosecutors built for January 7–8, 2021 is short, and its gaps are the case:

• 4:45 p.m. — Maya returns to the family home in Chula Vista. It is the last time she is ever known to be alive.
• 8:15 p.m. — Her final text exchange with her sister. The family had been planning a birthday trip; Maya never stopped mid-plan before.
• 1:25 a.m. — Her cell phone disconnects from the network. It never comes back online. Neither do her bank accounts, her social media, or any other trace of her.
• 6:45 a.m. — Larry Millete leaves the house alone in his SUV.
• 6:00 p.m. — He returns. Where he spent that time was never fully accounted for at trial.

Maya was days away from meeting a divorce attorney. Prosecutors said that appointment is why she never made it out of the house.

The investigation: 67 warrants, 87 interviews

Chula Vista police worked the case for nine months before making a move — 67 search warrants and 87 interviews, per the district attorney's office. On October 19, 2021, Larry Millete was arrested and charged with murder, along with illegal possession of an assault weapon seized months earlier under a gun violence restraining order.

Then the case sat, through years of pretrial fights, until testimony finally opened in May 2026.

The evidence: spellcasters, hemlock, and a vial

With no body to examine, the state built its case from what Larry Millete typed, bought, and asked for.

• The spellcasters. In the weeks before Maya vanished, he sent message after message to online "spellcasters" — asking that his wife be made obedient, that she stay, and eventually that she be incapacitated or made sick. Jurors later told reporters this was the spine of the verdict. One put it flatly: "If he wouldn't have done the spellcasting, we probably wouldn't be here today."
• The searches. His devices held repeated searches for poison hemlock and other ways to disable or kill a person.
• The vial. After his arrest, investigators found a vial in the home that tested positive for coniine — the toxin in poison hemlock.
• The control. Testimony described him tracking Maya's whereabouts and controlling the family finances as the marriage collapsed and she pursued a divorce.

The defense answer was the case's original problem, turned into an argument: no body, no scene, no weapon, no witness. Attorney Liann Sabatini told jurors the poison theory was implausible — even suggesting hemlock, which grows locally, could have been carried in by the children — and that a jealous husband investigating suspected infidelity is not the same thing as a murderer.

The jury took five hours to disagree, unanimously.

No body, no acquittal: how that's legal

The most-asked question about this case is the oldest misconception in criminal law: don't they need a body?

They don't — and never have. Corpus delicti means "the body of the crime," not the body of the victim. The state must prove a crime occurred; it can do that circumstantially. When every digital, financial, and social signal of a living person stops at 1:25 a.m. and never resumes — no phone, no cards, no contact with three children she was devoted to — a jury is allowed to conclude she is dead. From there the question is only who, and Larry Millete's own keyboard did most of the answering.

No-body murder convictions are rare, but the doctrine is centuries old and California juries have returned them before. This one now joins the reference list — and it won't be the last such trial this year (a no-body case out of Virginia is on our court dates tracker).

What happens next

• The weapon charge: resolved. At the July 20, 2026 hearing, Millete — who had elected to have the bifurcated assault-weapon charge decided by a judge rather than a jury — instead pleaded guilty to it, ending the last contested piece of the case.
• Sentencing: September 29, 2026. With the weapon count resolved, Judge Enrique Camarena set sentencing on both counts. Millete faces 25 years to life in state prison for the murder; the weapon conviction carries up to three more years, and whether it runs concurrently or consecutively is the judge's call.
• The search — Deputy District Attorney Christy Bowles said it after the verdict: "While today's verdict is significant, May is still missing." Maya's sister, Maricris Drouaillet, who pushed the case into public view for five years, said the family's work continues until she is found.

Why this case file matters

Almost every case this channel covers begins with a camera. This one is the inverse: a conviction built on the absence of every signal a person leaves behind — and on the digital record of what one man asked the internet to do to his wife.

The phone remembered when it went dark. The search history remembered the hemlock. And a jury decided that between the silence and the searches, there was no room left for a missing person.

Case status as of this writing: convicted of first-degree murder on July 9, 2026; pleaded guilty to the assault-weapon count on July 20, 2026; sentencing on both counts set for September 29, 2026. Maya Millete has never been found. This article is based on trial evidence as described in court, public records, and contemporaneous reporting. Photo: Larry and Maya Millete in a family photograph, as shown in NBC 7 San Diego's broadcast coverage of the verdict.