A Nevada woman was accused of killing and beheading the father of her two daughters, a man she had dated for years while secretly married to his son.
Before the killing, the woman at the center of the case, Devyn Michaels, built a career in the adult film industry under two stage names, Nikki Fairchild and Tracee Tavarez, appearing in titles including “Ooze,” “Touch Me,” and “Freshman First-Times.”
She later left that career and worked as a real estate agent in Las Vegas. Court records reviewed during her later murder trial showed that Michaels had once been married to Robert Baker, a former adult film actor and convicted sex offender.
Baker was later convicted in an unrelated case involving the 2017 stabbing death of Fabio Sementilli, a hair-industry executive who worked as vice president of education for the salon brand Wella and was attacked while sitting in his own backyard.
Prosecutors said Baker carried out the killing with his lover, Sementilli’s wife Monica, as part of a scheme connected to a $1.6 million life insurance policy. Monica Sementilli was sentenced to life without parole in 2025, and Baker testified at her trial that his lover had no role in planning the murder.
“I murdered him because I wanted her,” Baker told the courtroom. He pleaded no contest to the killing and is serving a life sentence.
Years later, after that marriage had ended, Michaels began a long-term relationship with Johnathan Willette. The couple never married, but they had two daughters together, both under the age of 13 by the time of the trial, and their relationship was on-again, off-again for years.
While she was still involved with Willette, Michaels started a sexual relationship with his son, Deviere Willette. Deviere later testified that the relationship began in 2016, when he was 19 years old.
After Michaels and Johnathan Willette separated, Deviere moved in with her, and the two married in November 2021.
Both later told police the marriage was simply one of convenience, meant to help Deviere qualify for medical insurance. Prosecutors said this explanation was false, and that the couple had actually been carrying on a sexual relationship for years by that point.
In 2022, a child care worker reported bruising on one of the daughters, leading to a child abuse accusation against Michaels. Johnathan Willette was granted legal custody of the two girls as a result.
By the summer of 2023, Willette and Michaels had discussed a new living arrangement. Although Willette held legal custody, the two girls were already living primarily with Michaels and Deviere.
Willette planned to move into that same home so the family could reunite for the sake of the children. Prosecutors later argued this plan threatened the household Michaels had built with her husband, giving her a motive to stop it before it happened.
On the night of August 6, 2023, surveillance footage from a gas station showed Michaels and Willette together around 10:05 p.m. Willette’s mother, Yoko, saw the pair around the same time, and then saw Michaels again near the home around 1 a.m.
Sometime after that, Yoko later told the jury, she heard a strange banging noise from elsewhere in the house.
According to statements Michaels later gave police, she was massaging Willette in his bedroom when he asked her to perform a sexual act. She said she refused and became upset, then struck him in the back of the head with a wooden object she grabbed near the fireplace.
She also told detectives that Willette had been abusive toward her in the past, and that he had let their oldest daughter shower in front of him while he had custody of the girls, something she said she disliked. “He didn’t say anything.
He stopped moving,” Michaels told detectives in a recorded interview later played for the jury. She said she never intended to kill Willette and only wanted to hurt him badly enough that he would need to go to the hospital, giving her time to decide what to do about her children.
Chemicals believed to be bleach and ammonia were poured over Willette’s body afterward, leaving chemical burns and a smoking odor at the scene. His body was left wrapped in a blanket on the bed.
Detectives said Michaels admitted she placed his severed head in a laundry basket, drove it to her home in northwest Las Vegas, and threw it away in a neighborhood trash bin.
During one interview, a trash truck passed by outside as she described getting rid of it, and she remarked that Willette’s head went “bye-bye.”
Yoko Willette discovered her son’s body the following morning, August 7, 2023, at around 8:40 a.m. She told police she found him wrapped in a blanket, missing his head, with blood throughout the room, and she called 911 right away. Officers who responded found bottles of cleaning chemicals near the body.
Investigators quickly connected Michaels to the scene. Willette’s daughters found his cracked cellphone, stained with what appeared to be blood, in Michaels’ driveway and brought it to police.
A search of Michaels’ bedroom turned up a bag containing Willette’s wallet, identification, Social Security card, and truck keys. Phone records presented later at trial showed that Willette’s phone traveled alongside Michaels’ phone from the crime scene to her home, arriving around 2:45 a.m.
Days after the killing, Yoko also noticed that a large kitchen knife was missing from her own home. In an early interview, Deviere told police that he did not have a good relationship with his father and that Willette had not been around much while he was growing up.
Two days after the killing, on August 9, 2023, and before her arrest, Michaels appeared before a different judge for an unrelated child abuse case tied to the 2022 bruising report.
She was sentenced to one year of probation and told the judge she was “not an abusive person,” even as detectives were actively investigating Willette’s death behind the scenes.
Henderson police arrested Michaels on August 15, 2023. She was charged with open murder, a Nevada charge that leaves prosecutors room to pursue anything from manslaughter up to first-degree murder, depending on what evidence is presented at trial.
In 2024, Michaels reached a plea deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, a charge for killings that are intentional but not planned out ahead of time, unlike first-degree murder.
A sentencing hearing was scheduled for the following year, and under the agreement, she would have been eligible for parole after serving 15 years in prison.
In the months before that sentencing hearing, Michaels hired a new defense team, which argued in court that she should be allowed to withdraw her plea.
Her new lawyers claimed detectives had shown her only two photographs from the case before she agreed to the deal, and that evidence in the case had been mishandled.
In July 2025, at that same hearing, Michaels broke down in court and formally withdrew her guilty plea, insisting she had not killed Willette. The case was then sent to a jury trial on a first-degree murder charge.
The trial, which lasted two weeks, began on November 5, 2025, in Las Vegas. “All I can say is buckle up, because you’re in for a wild ride,” prosecutor John Giordani told jurors in his opening statement.
He argued that Michaels killed Willette because she wanted a future raising her children with Deviere rather than with their father, and prosecutors said the killing was both planned in advance and tied to a robbery, since Michaels had taken Willette’s belongings from the scene.
Under Nevada law, a killing connected to a robbery can support a murder charge even without separate proof of planning, giving prosecutors two paths to the same conviction.
Defense attorney Robert Draskovich countered that Deviere, not Michaels, had the strongest motive to kill his father, since Willette moving into the home threatened Deviere’s marriage and living situation.
The defense showed jurors intimate photographs and messages between Michaels and Deviere dating back to 2016.
Deviere Willette testified on November 6, 2025. He said he did not kill his father and was not involved in disposing of the body. He testified that on the night of the killing, he was home and had texted Michaels around 10:30 p.m. to say he had put the two girls to bed.
He said he did not leave the house again that night, and that he did not suspect Michaels’ involvement in his father’s death when police first questioned him.
Under further questioning, Deviere admitted he had lied to police, to a grand jury, and on the witness stand about the true nature of his relationship with Michaels, and about how close he actually was with his father in the years before the killing.
Yoko Willette testified the following day, describing how she found her son’s body and later discovered the missing kitchen knife.
A Clark County medical examiner, Stephanie Yagi, told jurors that the cause and exact manner of death were difficult to determine without the head, though she confirmed the decapitation took place after Willette had already died.
Yagi added that his body weighed about 169 pounds without its head, bore chemical burns across the front, and showed several shallow wounds near the main neck injury, suggesting more than one attempt had been made to sever it.
Henderson detectives testified over the following days about the phone records and surveillance footage linking Michaels to the crime scene and to her own home.
One detective testified that a search of the home Michaels shared with Deviere turned up two swords, two handguns, a notebook, and several of Willette’s personal documents, but said detectives never tested the swords for blood or fingerprints, since they appeared to be decorative replicas.
He also testified that investigators never located blood or Willette’s DNA inside Michaels’ SUV, nor a white tank top she was recorded wearing in surveillance footage both before and after the killing.
During closing arguments on November 14, 2025, prosecutors described Michaels’ actions as calculated. “Devyn is a master manipulator and that is shown through the evidence,” prosecutor Brittni Griffith told the 14-member jury.
She argued that Michaels made a series of deliberate choices that night, including getting up, retrieving an object, and striking Willette while he lay unaware. Draskovich compared the case to the Greek myth of Oedipus, telling jurors that a young man’s passion and resentment toward an absent father could just as easily explain the killing.
He also maintained that no witnesses placed Michaels at the moment of the killing, and questioned whether she had the physical strength to remove Willette’s head.
The jury deliberated for about two hours before reaching its verdict that same evening. Jurors found Devyn Michaels guilty of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon. After the verdict, Giordani said he was glad the jury had recognized both Deviere’s innocence and Michaels’ guilt.
On January 8, 2026, a Clark County judge sentenced Michaels to 28 years to life in prison. Throughout the case, prosecutors had described it as centering on a love triangle involving Michaels, Willette, and his son, while her defense maintained her innocence to the end.
The sentence included 20 years to life for the murder conviction, plus a consecutive term of eight to 20 years for using a deadly weapon. She received about two years of credit for time already served.
Under the sentence, Michaels will not be eligible for parole until she is approximately 70 years old. Addressing the court briefly before her sentence was handed down, Michaels said, “I cannot deliver what the family is hoping for.”
Johnathan Willette was 46 years old when he died. In the years before his death, he lived in the downstairs portion of a Henderson home he shared with his mother, Yoko, who lived upstairs with her longtime boyfriend.
Yoko spoke through a Japanese interpreter throughout the trial to describe the son she raised and ultimately found lifeless in his own bed. He was the father of two young daughters, and by the summer of 2023 he had agreed to move back in with their mother so the girls could grow up under one roof.
He never got that chance. On the morning she found him, Yoko told investigators she had noticed his white pickup truck still parked outside and sensed something was wrong before she ever opened his bedroom door. His head was never recovered, and the weapon used against him was never found.
