Chula Vista mother May “Maya” Millete disappeared without a trace in a case that drew national attention and sparked months of searches by family, friends and strangers across Southern California. More than five years later, trial is set to begin Monday in a Chula Vista courtroom to determine if her husband killed the mother of three.
Larry Millete, 44, faces one count of murder, plus a felony count related to illegal possession of an assault weapon. Prosecutors believe he killed his wife and disposed of her body, though it has never been found.
Larry Millete sits in San Diego Superior Court during a preliminary hearing on Jan. 11, 2023. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / U-T file)
Maya, 39 at the time, was last seen in a neighbor’s surveillance footage arriving home the afternoon of Jan. 7, 2021. Phone records showed she was messaging friends and searching the internet until later that evening, according to prosecutors. She has not been seen or heard from since.
California law allows prosecutors to charge a person with murder when the victim is presumed dead and no body has been recovered. At least three such cases have gone to trial in San Diego County since 2015. Jurors convicted the defendants in two of those cases. In the other case — the presumed death of 2-year-old Jahi Turner, which was also a high-profile disappearance — a jury deadlocked and a judge later dismissed the case.
Because there is no body, prosecutors from the District Attorney’s Office will present the jury with circumstantial evidence. Based on the preliminary hearing and evidence laid out in recent court filings and hearings, they’re expected to argue that Millete was a controlling husband who was angry at his wife over an affair with her coworker, but also desperate to prevent her from divorcing him. They’ll tell the jury that Millete spent thousands of dollars online to hire spellcasters in hopes that their magic would convince Maya to stay with him, a practice that a prosecutor described as “sinister” during a hearing last month.
The prosecutors will also present evidence that Millete’s attitude and actions changed dramatically after Maya disappeared, including an allegation that he asked spellcasters to stop “hexing” his wife and instead hex her lover, according to court documents and recent arguments. They’ll also point to his actions on Jan. 8, the day after she was last known to be alive, when his cellphone remained turned off for 12 hours while he went to an unknown location in the family’s SUV, according to the court filings.
A button and candles on display at a prayer vigil for Maya Millete in honor of the first anniversary of her disappearance at Chula Vista Community Park on Jan. 8, 2022. (Sandy Huffaker / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
For years after Maya’s disappearance, Millete asserted that his wife left voluntarily and was still alive. It’s unclear if he maintains that position. In recent court documents, his defense team asserted that its theory of the case is that “another person” may be “responsible for her death.” The defense attorneys have suggested that investigators ignored other suspects with possible motive to harm Maya, including her lover and that man’s wife and mother-in-law.
Jury selection will get underway Monday. With the trial expected to last roughly three months, there could still be plenty of twists left in the long-running case.
‘A strong suspicion of guilt’
In the days after Maya’s family reported her disappearance and began plastering the eastern Chula Vista area with missing person posters, Chula Vista police said multiple times they did not suspect foul play and were treating her disappearance like any other missing person case.
“The husband has been fully cooperative with us,” Chula Vista police Lt. Miriam Foxx said on Jan. 13, a week after Maya was last seen. “We are handling it as a missing person because there has been no indication of foul play.”
Maricris Drouaillet, one of Maya’s sisters, is comforted by her husband, Robert Drouaillet, at the end of a press conference announcing the arrest of Larry Millete on Oct. 19, 2021. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / U-T file)
But something changed soon thereafter. Ten days later, police served a search warrant at the Millete family home in the San Miguel Ranch neighborhood near Eastlake, looking for clues about Maya’s disappearance. And by the time Chula Vista’s mayor and police chief held a news conference in early February, Foxx said Larry Millete had hired an attorney and stopped cooperating with police.
Over the next several months, investigators served dozens of search warrants at the Millete home and elsewhere. Defense attorneys recently alleged that investigators served a total of 82 warrants as part of the case. In October 2021, more than nine months after Maya was last seen, police arrested Millete on suspicion of murder.
In the days that followed, Maya’s family members hoped Millete’s arrest would bring answers to their many questions, most notably the location of her remains. But those questions remain unanswered to this day.
Investigators gather outside the home of Larry and Maya Millete on Oct. 19, 2021. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / U-T file)
In January 2023, after a 10-day preliminary hearing, San Diego Superior Court Judge Dwayne Moring ordered Millete to stand trial. The judge pointed to testimony of witnesses and family members who testified that Millete appeared to be fixated on his wife in 2020, but then quickly changed his behavior after she disappeared.
“There is a marked contrast in the action before Mrs. Millete’s disappearance and afterward that provided a strong suspicion of guilt,” the judge said.
Later in 2023, Millete spoke publicly for the first time — against the advice of his defense attorney — granting NBC7 San Diego a series of interviews from jail. He offered few insights into the case, except to say that he believed his wife was still alive. But he declined to explain how she left the home without being seen and why, if she was still alive, she’d stopped using her phone and credit cards and cut off all contact with the couple’s children.
In the jailhouse interview, he called the allegations against him “outrageous” and said the important answers about the case would come out at trial.
Pretrial issues
Monday’s trial is a long time coming, having been delayed at least five times since Millete switched attorneys in October 2023. Presiding over the trial will be Superior Court Judge Enrique Camarena, who last month denied a defense motion for a sixth delay and has also made a series of consequential decisions about the jury pool, restrictions on cameras in the courtroom and who will prosecute the case.
Last year, defense attorneys Liann Sabatini and Colby Ryan asked for the trial to be moved out of Chula Vista, arguing their client wouldn’t be able to get a fair trial “based on what the media has extensively and rarely accurately detailed about” Millete. They argued there was an “extreme danger” that South Bay residents had already judged Millete on his reputation in the media, “rather than on his proven acts or anything based on the actual evidence in this case.”
Camarena denied the request, saying he had not seen evidence that South Bay jurors would be more or less biased against Millete than jurors from other regions of the county.
More recently, Camarena ruled in favor of Millete by barring cameras from the courtroom — a stark difference from the preliminary hearing, which was streamed live online.
Melissa Graves, Abraham Sarmiento and Reagan Pablo walk a trail on Mother Miguel Mountain Jan. 13, 2021, in search of May “Maya” Millete, who went missing last Thursday evening. (Kristian Carreon / U-T file)
According to NBC7, the judge said cameras could potentially impede Millete’s right to a fair trial, prevent the jury from deliberating freely and subject the jurors to harassment and intimidation. Camarena also reportedly said he didn’t want the search for truth to turn into a performance.
Late last month, Camarena ruled against Millete in a last-ditch effort by his defense team to either dismiss the case entirely or disqualify the District Attorney’s Office from prosecuting it.
Sabatini and Ryan alleged, in part, that Deputy District Attorney Christy Bowles had “gotten too close to the case” and that she was chasing a conviction rather than following the evidence. They also alleged that several investigators lied on the stand during the preliminary hearing and accused Bowles of misconduct for failing to correct the allegedly inaccurate statements.
The District Attorney’s Office vigorously denied those allegations, arguing the defense took isolated moments from the lengthy preliminary hearing out of context in order to mount a “reckless attack” on Bowles.
Camarena sided with prosecutors, denying both defense motions to disqualify the District Attorney’s Office and to dismiss the case. He found that none of the prosecution witnesses were deliberately untruthful during the preliminary hearing; that prosecutors had not withheld evidence; that neither Bowles nor the rest of the District Attorney’s Office had a conflict of interest requiring they be disqualified from the case; and that nothing prosecutors had done violated Millete’s due-process rights.
‘Also had motive to kill’
The full extent of Millete’s defense strategy is not yet known, but court filings and arguments by his attorneys at recent hearings hint at a few key aspects of that strategy.
For one, Sabatini and Ryan accuse prosecutors of wanting to “portray Mrs. May Millete as a doting mother and saint” when they believe the evidence of her affair “would tend to undermine those assertions.”
More importantly, the defense team has alleged that Maya’s lover “also had motive to kill,” given that his wife was pregnant with their first child at the time and that he risked losing his job — he and Maya were both civilian Navy employees — and faced potential perjury charges for allegedly lying about the affair during an earlier probe by Navy investigators.
The defense team has also argued that the wife and mother of Maya’s lover had been hounding Maya about the affair, and that both Maya’s lover and his wife initially lied to investigators and acted suspiciously.
It’s unknown if Millete will testify in his own defense. In his 2023 jailhouse interview with NCB7, he suggested that the decision would be up to his attorneys.