How Spellcaster Messages Proved Premeditation in Larry Millete Trial

The strange part of the Larry Millete trial's spellcaster record was not that it involved Fiverr spellcasters. It was that a set of messages that looked fringe on first read became legally usable once they were read in sequence. Prosecutors did not need the occult content to be credible on its own; they needed the dated record it created, the escalation it preserved, and the abrupt change that followed Maya Millete's disappearance [1][2][4].

The sequence prosecutors cared about

Millete began contacting multiple spellcasters through Fiverr in October 2020. The requests did not stay in the lane of reconciliation or fantasy. Over the next months, they moved from love spells to demands to break Maya's will, turn her into a "sex slave," and physically incapacitate her [1][2].

Frank Peavey, the Fiverr spellcaster who testified under the pseudonym Tess Joy, gave the state its most concrete witness to that progression. He said Millete would send as many as 27 messages at a time, wanted immediate results, and became so "manic and desperate" that he was blocked. Peavey also described requests that crossed into physical harm, including spells to break bones, make someone sick, or cause cancer, which he refused [2][3].

Why the messages mattered in court

California first-degree murder requires a willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing [5]. That standard gave the spellcaster record real legal value. The prosecution did not offer the messages as gothic color; it used them as a chronological course of conduct that showed fixation, escalation, and repeated requests for harm. In an intent case, that kind of sequence is often more useful than a single dramatic statement because it lets the jury see planning develop over time.

The sharpest inference came on January 9, 2021, two days after Maya disappeared. Millete asked spellcasters to remove hexes from Maya and redirect them to Jamey Laird, the man prosecutors said she was seeing. The state's theory was plain enough: a man does not redirect harm away from a living target if he knows that target is already dead. On that reading, the end of the spellcasting against Maya was not trivia; it was consciousness of guilt [4].

The defense had a narrower explanation. It argued that the messages were evidence of a desperate husband trying to salvage a collapsing marriage, not proof that he intended murder. That distinction mattered, because there was no confession and no crime scene to anchor the case in the usual way. What made the communications dangerous for the defense was not the occult theme but the pattern: months of escalation, third-party refusals, and then a sudden stop tied to the victim's disappearance.

One piece of a larger case

The spellcaster evidence was not the whole case. Prosecutors placed it alongside digital forensics, poison evidence, control behavior, post-disappearance conduct, and victim state-of-mind evidence to build a circumstantial case without a body or conventional crime scene [3]. The messages mattered because they fit that larger pattern and gave jurors a dated record of intent that other evidence could reinforce.

Juror Beverly Feldman later said the abrupt end to spellcasting against Maya after she disappeared was "especially damning" [6]. That is useful less as a sound bite than as a signal of how the proof landed: not as superstition, but as timing. The jury appears to have treated the records as chronological, escalating, corroborated, and then abruptly redirected.

Sentencing has not yet occurred as of July 19, 2026, and an appeal is expected. For legal analysts, the lesson is narrower than the headline suggests. Eccentric content mattered here because it was recorded, sequenced, and tied to a post-offense change in behavior, which made it legally readable as evidence of premeditation rather than merely odd conduct.

References

1. Online 'spellcaster' testifies during the Larry Millete murder trial - NBC San Diego
2. Spell-caster testifies in murder trial that Millete was 'manic and desperate' to keep wife - San Diego Union-Tribune
3. Prosecutor says poison, spellcasters and obsession led to Maya Millete's murder - Courthouse News
4. Spellcasting evidence takes center stage in Millete murder trial - NBC San Diego
5. Jury finds Larry Millete guilty of murdering missing wife - Courthouse News
6. Jury reaches verdict in Larry Millete murder trial - NBC San Diego