Connecticut: William Leverett bursts into church to confess to the murder of Hartford jogger Melissa Millan
A man burst into a Connecticut church and confessed to the congregation that he was the person who killed a Hartford jogger four years ago.
Michael Trazinski, the pastor at Open Gate Ministries in East Granby, talked ABC News on Monday about the cold case murder of Melissa Millan in 2014 and how William Leverett confessed.
“Justice needed to be done,” Trazinski said of Leverett’s Sept. 19 confession.
“I’m here to turn myself in for the murder on Iron Horse Boulevard almost four years ago,” Leverett told police, according to the arrest warrant affidavit released Monday.
Leverett told cops he went to the running trail the night of Nov. 20, 2014, looking for “human contact” after attending a treatment meeting for sex offenders, the Hartford Courant reported.
The registered sex offender had been charged with sexually assaulting a child when he lived in Colorado in 2009.
Leverett told police 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,” adding that hewas immediately “mentally aroused.”
The killer confessed that he grew angry when he realized “I can’t have her” because “she was way out of my league.”
“I went into a frenzy,” he allegedly told police.
Leverett allegedly threw the knife out of his car window into a side street, then went back to retrieve it a few days later and chucked it into a trash compactor. After the confession, he led investigators to a bloody glove with DNA that matched Millan, officials said.
Police charged him Sunday and he is being held on $2 million bail in Hartford.
“We believe that he is the sole person responsible for this crime,” said Simsbury Police Chief Nicholas Boulter.
Six months after Millan’s death, police said they had no suspects and were looking for leads. An anonymous donor offered a $40,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer. The FBI and the cold case squad in the Connecticut chief state’s attorney’s office got involved in the investigation over a year ago.
William Leverett and Melissa Millan
