Jonathan Willette was supposed to be moving into Devon’s house that weekend. He had been hauling furniture in on August 6th, 2023, with his son Devier watching from a distance. Neither of them said a word to each other. The tension between father and son had been building for years, but it had finally snapped when Devier married Devon—the woman who had once been Jonathan’s girlfriend and the mother of his two youngest daughters.
Devier said the marriage was one of convenience, a way for him to help Devon with her medical issues. Jonathan saw it as betrayal. “WTF, I thought you were my seed,” Jonathan had texted his son in all caps. “If what I know, I can’t with you.
”
After that, the phone went silent. No birthday calls. No New Year’s texts. The last message Jonathan sent his son was a simple “Hey.
” Devier never replied. Devier had been living at Devon’s home on Porcupine Rim Street for a while by then. He had moved out of his father and grandmother’s house after quitting Jonathan’s moving company, The Vegas Moving Guy. Working for his father had become unbearable.
They disagreed constantly. Devier found a job as a technician and tried to build his own life away from his father’s shadow. But the affair had started long before that. While Jonathan and Devon were still together, Devier and Devon had already crossed lines that should never have been crossed.
It began when Devier was just 19 years old. In court, Devier later admitted he had felt trapped in the relationship with his father’s former partner. “I felt like I was filling some shoes that I had no business filling,” he testified. When asked whose shoes they were, he broke down.
“My own. ”
Devier also admitted he had never told his father about the relationship. When asked if Jonathan was the type of man who would have let it go if he found out, Devier said yes. But Jonathan never got the chance to find out.
By August 2023, Jonathan and Devon were sharing custody of their two daughters. Jonathan was trying to become their sole guardian, and the family court dates had become routine. Sometime around November 2022, the girls moved in with their grandmother, Yoko. They stayed there through May 2023.
Then something shifted. Devon later claimed she was doing Jonathan a favor by letting him move into her home. She said she didn’t think he was actually going to go through with it. But when he pulled up with his Vegas Moving Guy trailer packed with his belongings and his daughters’ furniture, she realized he was serious.
The arrangement was supposed to be temporary. The daughters wanted everyone under one roof. Jonathan was supposed to sleep in a makeshift bedroom on the ground floor while the girls had bedrooms upstairs. On the night of August 6th, Devon came to Yoko’s house after back-to-school shopping.
Around 1:00 in the morning, Yoko found Devon in the kitchen washing dishes. Devon said Jonathan had gotten drunk and gone to sleep. The girls woke up later that night and realized their mother hadn’t come home. They called her phone at least three times.
Each call went straight to voicemail. Their messages are hard to make out on the recording, but you can hear the fear in their voices. They were worried she had been in a car accident. “Hi, I know you’re laying in the field.
Come home. Please call me. I’m very, very worried about you. I’m very scared.
I don’t know if you got in a car accident or any insurance stuff. I’m getting very worried. Please call me. Please.
”
Around 3:00 a. m. , Yoko heard her dogs barking. She ignored it.
When the sun came up, she found her dogs locked outside the house. Jonathan’s truck was still in the driveway. His desk chair had been knocked over. At 8:30 in the morning on August 7th, Yoko entered her son’s home.
She found him in his bedroom. His head was no longer attached to his body. It was missing. She called 911 at 8:40.
Officers found empty bottles of ammonia and bleach next to the bed. The body was still smoking, as they later described it. Yoko testified through a Japanese interpreter about what she saw that morning. She opened the blanket wrapped around her son’s body and saw the feet.
Then she saw the blood. She went back upstairs and called 911. When officers interviewed Devon at her home, she said she had left Jonathan’s house the night before. She claimed she had no idea he was dead.
She said the last time she saw him, he was smoking a cigarette in his garage. She added that he had gone clothes shopping a few days earlier and was threatened by a stranger. Store surveillance footage showed nothing of the sort. Jonathan’s daughters found his bloody, cracked cell phone in the driveway next to Devon’s SUV.
A search warrant for the house revealed more of Jonathan’s belongings inside Devon’s bedroom: his wallet, keys, and license. Devon owned at least three katanas, which investigators photographed but did not take into evidence. They were classified later as prop weapons. The day after finding Jonathan’s body, Yoko realized her meat cleaver was missing from the kitchen.
She alerted investigators. Devon emerged as the sole suspect. On August 15th, she agreed to a polygraph test. The results showed a significant reaction when she was asked if she had participated in Jonathan’s death.
After the test, Devon admitted she had made Jonathan lie down on his stomach. While he lay face down, she struck him with a stick she described as something candlestick-like. She claimed he got aggressive that night after she refused to be intimate with him. She accused him of hurting her, their daughters, and his son Devier.
She said all she wanted was to hospitalize him so she could figure out what to do with her children. When interrogators asked if she could not recall the actual act of killing him, Devon agreed that it was very possible. Authorities said she used a knife and a mechanical saw to remove Jonathan’s head. She placed it in a laundry basket, drove it to her home, and threw it in the trash.
They suspect she left it in her outdoor bins for the garbage truck. Jonathan’s head was never recovered. The medical examiner could not determine an official cause of death. The murder weapon was never located.
Devon was arrested and booked for open murder. In interviews after her arrest, Detective Dennis O’Zala asked her to walk through the night of August 6th. Devon described it as a typical day. Shopping.
Groceries. School supplies. Clothes and shoes. “It was a very exciting pleasant day for the both of us,” she said.
She told the detective she hadn’t been intimate with Jonathan in about a month. She said he kept asking, and she kept saying no. She described giving him a back massage on the floor of his bedroom. “He was laying on the ground and I pushed him.
Pushed him on the floor,” she said. “How did you fall on his back? ” the detective asked. “Obviously you’re quite smaller than he is.
”
“I was standing up,” she said. “Straddling his lower back. ”
She said she rubbed his back. Then she went to smoke a cigarette.
When she came back in, he was lying with his back to her. That was when she struck him. Devon claimed she was only trying to help Jonathan put their family back together. She said their daughters wanted everyone under one roof.
She said she was helping him no matter how much he had hurt her. “When it was all said and done, when he needed something, I was helping him,” she said. “And everything said, ‘Thank you for helping me. ’ And it’s like I was learning to try to do my best to put back together my family.
”
The detective pressed her: “Put back together your family, or get your girls back? ”
“My family,” she said. “Because my girls wanted everybody under one roof. ”
Devier learned his father had been murdered at 1:00 in the afternoon on August 7th.
His grandfather had to break the news. Shortly afterward, he spoke to Detective O’Zala. Devier claimed he had been drinking before the interview. When asked about the nature of his relationship with Devon, Devier said they married out of convenience, not love.
But investigators looked at phone records and found intimate messages between Devon and Devier dating back to 2016. Jonathan’s family stayed mostly out of the press. Only Devier and Yoko appeared publicly, and only in court. Jonathan’s stepsister, Valerie Rivera, started a GoFundMe to raise money for funeral expenses.
She described Jonathan as someone with the personality and charisma that attracted everyone to him. She wrote that he left behind two young daughters, his father, mother, brother, and stepmother. “Rest in peace, Jonathan. We all love you.
”
Devon had another legal issue hanging over her at the time of Jonathan’s death. In October 2022, she had been charged with child abuse after one of her daughters came home with a bruise on her leg and a childcare worker reported it. On August 9th, 2023—two days after Jonathan’s murder—Devon received her sentence: one year of probation. Judge Mary Kay Holthus oversaw that hearing.
Devon argued she was at low risk of reoffending. “I’ve done counseling classes, therapy, drug tests, psych evaluations,” she said. “I’ve done everything and everyone I spoken to say I’m not an abusive person and they don’t feel there’s any risk for me to her or would ever do this again. ”
Given her circumstances, a plea deal was offered: at least 15 years in exchange for a guilty plea.
Devon initially accepted. But at her sentencing hearing in July 2025, she sobbed her way through a request to withdraw her plea. “Jonathan was very special, very unique, and I know no matter what I say at this moment, no one in the family is going to believe me,” she said. “But I can actually prove my innocence.
I actually can. And I’m not going to stop fighting to prove my innocence. Jonathan deserves to have the actual person who’s guilty behind bars. ”
The judge cut her off.
“You pled guilty, ma’am. You are not to address the state. You are to address me. ”
Devon continued, her voice shaking.
“I was told one thing after another. And I truly believed that we were going to do the right thing. And it just didn’t happen. I am so sorry for all of this.
But I didn’t do this. I didn’t know this would end up like this. ”
When the judge explained that withdrawing her plea meant going to trial on a charge of open murder—that a jury could convict her of first-degree murder—Devon still asked to withdraw her plea. “Yes, please,” she said.
The trial began in November 2025. In his opening statement, Deputy District Attorney Jordani told the jury, “Buckle up because you’re in for a wild ride. ” He referenced a photo of Devon, Devier, and the children. “This is the future that she saw and that she wanted,” he said.
“And the only way to have that future was with John out of the picture. ”
The prosecution argued Devon did not want Jonathan in her life more than he already was. Even though she had two children with him, even though she let him move into her home, she didn’t want anything to come between her and Devier. Devon’s defense attorney, Robert Draskovich, argued that Devier had a stronger motive.
“What happened on August 7th, 2023 was Devier was getting kicked out,” he told the jury. “He was no longer going to be in this relationship because the dad he hated was coming in and not only taking his home but taking his wife. ”
Draskovich argued that Devier had access to tools and the physical strength required to commit such a brutal crime. But the prosecution pushed back.
Phone records and surveillance footage did not place Devier at the crime scene. And Detective O’Zala testified that the mechanical saw used was a one-size-fits-all product, something anyone could use regardless of size or strength. Draskovich pressed the detective on the katanas found in Devon’s home. “We’re dealing with a decapitation case, correct?
” he asked. “Fair to say that samurai swords would kind of fall into that realm of importance when it comes to a decapitation case? ”
The detective responded that the swords were prop weapons, so the department didn’t see a need to test them for blood or fingerprints. But he also acknowledged that investigators never found Jonathan’s DNA in Devon’s vehicle.
Devier took the stand. Draskovich hammered him about the lies he told the police after his father’s murder. He had told the detective that he and Devon’s marriage was just a legal arrangement for insurance purposes. He had said they didn’t sleep in the same room.
He had said they weren’t intimate. None of it was true. “Fair to say that you were downplaying your feelings for your wife when this detective came to ask you about the murder of your father? ” Draskovich asked.
“Yes, sir, because I didn’t want to talk about my life,” Devier said. When asked about his whereabouts on August 6th, Devier first told police he had been working that day. Then he corrected himself, saying it was his day off. Draskovich pointed out the inconsistency.
“I was drinking a lot and I don’t remember,” Devier said. “But you made the same mistake and initially told him, ‘I was working yesterday,’” Draskovich pressed. “Then you corrected yourself. So you really weren’t drinking that much.
”
“I was drinking very heavily from my father’s stuff,” Devier said. Yoko took the stand next. She said she couldn’t remember everything clearly. She was too upset.
Draskovich pointed out that she had never mentioned Devon looking surprised or startled when she saw her in the kitchen that morning—not in her police interview, not in her grand jury testimony. “I don’t remember what I said or not,” Yoko said. Devon was found guilty of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon after two weeks of trial. On January 8th, 2026, she was sentenced to 20 years to life for first-degree murder and 8 to 20 years for the use of a deadly weapon, to be served consecutively.
She was granted two years of time served. Devon was incarcerated at the Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center in North Las Vegas. Jonathan’s funeral services were private, held on September 16th, 2023. His obituary described him as someone who loved to talk to everyone, especially at his jobs.
It called him one of the most likable people on the Las Vegas strip, someone who would help you out by giving you a job in hard times or moving your possessions on a moment’s notice. Jonathan’s head was never found. The murder weapon was never recovered.
And Devon maintains she is innocent.
