He Paid Online Spellcasters to Curse His Wife. Then She Vanished | Maya Millete

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Jonathan Hirsch (0:30)

Larry Millete would have done anything to keep his wife in their marriage. What people didn't realize at the time is that anything also meant putting a hex on her. On the afternoon of January 7th, 2021, a 39-year-old mother of three walked into her house in Chula Vista, California. Every driveway on that street had a camera pointing at it. Not one of them ever recorded her leaving. Maya Millete has still never been found. Welcome to Crime Scene, the show where we tell the stories behind the world's most unforgettable crimes. This week on the show, the disappearance of Maya Millete. She told her family that if anything happened to her, her husband would be the reason. He left 1,700 pages of what he wanted done to her sitting on his own laptop.

Five years later, a prosecutor asked a jury to convict him of her murder without ever telling them how she died. From Sony Podcast and The Binge, this is a story we're calling Maya's Curse.

Hey, all. Welcome to Crime Scene. My name is Jonathan Hirsch and each week over three acts, we are going to dive into the most complex and shocking true crime stories of our era. And each week, I am joined by my friend and fellow documentarian, Cooper Moll. Hey, Cooper.

Cooper Moll (2:00)

Hey, Jonathan.

Jonathan Hirsch (2:01)

Don't forget that this show is a part of The Binge, the true crime network that I head up where each month, we bring you a new true crime limited series. Go to getthebinge.com to find more. Okay, Cooper, this is yet another murder case without a body. We've been here before, but this case is unique because it is what everybody is really talking about right now, in part because the search for Maya continues.

And also because of some notably bizarre details that we're about to dig it to.

Cooper Moll (2:32)

Let's get into it.

Jonathan Hirsch (2:39)

Okay, so our story begins on Thursday, January 7th, 2021 The Millete house sits on the 2400 block of Paseo Los Gatos, a residential street in the East Lake section of Chula Vista, about 12 miles south of downtown San Diego here in Southern California. Newer homes, wider driveways, a doorbell and a security camera pointed in every direction on every street corner. So we are at the Millete home in this neighborhood. Inside the house are five people. Larry, who works at the Balboa Naval Medical Center, and then Maya, Mae, Maya Millete. She's 39 years old. She's a Department of Defense civilian at the Southwest Regional Maintenance Center. And Maya is a mother of three children, ages four, nine, and 11 And the two of them have been married for 20 years. So they're all in the house together. It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and Maya pulls into the driveway, which is seen on the security cameras. She starts cleaning out her jeep, which she had recently bought for outdoor trips that they had been planning together. She loved being in the outdoors and hiking. Her four-year-old son comes out into the driveway after her, and a neighbor's camera catches him asking if he can come along to the car wash with her.

And that is sort of the last ordinary footage we see of Maya. At about 445, so almost two hours later, Maya walks back into the house. Investigators will eventually pull and review hundreds of hours of footage from cameras up and down that street, and not one frame shows her leaving the house again, on foot or in a vehicle of any kind. That night or any night after that. All right, so about 30 minutes later, 5, 12 p.m., a tutor arrives to work with the children and leaves maybe 45 minutes later. She's the last person outside of the family, known to be seen inside the house that day. And at around 8 o'clock that night, Maya texts her sisters a photo of a travel trailer for sale, maybe something that she was looking into purchasing. And that is the last message that the family ever receives from her. About 45 minutes after that, it's now almost 9 o'clock at night, a neighbor's camera picks up one loud bang.