Man Barges into Church, Confesses to Cold Case Murder

Last week, a man barged into a Connecticut church and confessed to a four-year-old murder that had gone cold. 

William Leverett walked into Open Gate Ministries Church pastored by Michael Trazinski last Wednesday and told the parishioners that he was responsible for the killing of 54-year-old Melissa Millan in 2014.

When the pastor heard Leverett’s confession he said he knew “Justice needed to be done.” 

The pastor and two other church members took Leverett, 27, to the Simsbury Police Station and had him turn himself in.

According to the arrest warrant affidavit released Monday, Leverett walked into the precinct and said, “I’m here to turn myself in for the murder on Iron Horse Boulevard almost four years ago.” 

Fox News reports that in his full confession the man told police that he went to the trail that night looking for “human contact” after going to a treatment meeting for sex offenders.

Leverett was a registered sex offender who had been charged with sexually assaulting a child in 2009 in Colorado and according to his confession, he was scared that a woman he had met would find out.

He told the 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.”

Then he ran into Millan, a mom of two, jogging on the trail and decided to take action.

Leverett said he was “mentally aroused” when he saw Millan but quickly became angry when he realized “I can’t have her” because “she was way out of my league.”

“I went into a frenzy,” he purportedly told police.

That is when he attacked her in an unlit area of the trail, stabbing her once in the chest. Millan reportedly pushed Leverett away, causing the knife to pull out of her chest and then she fell over a guardrail onto a roadway.

Leverett recalled that Millan repeatedly yelled out “Oh my God” before falling silent.

After the incident, Leverett recalled throwing the knife he used to commit the murder out of his car window into a side street. He went back a few days later to retrieve it and then threw it into a trash compactor. 

After making his confession, he led investigators to a bloody glove with DNA that matched Millan, officials said.

Police charged him on Sunday and he is being held on a $2 million bail in Hartford, Connecticut.

Leverett told police that after the murder he wrote many confession letters addressed to friends and family but never sent them.

Photo courtesy: Isaac Ordaz/Unsplash