Man gets 35 years for slaying jogger

William Leverett was sentenced to 35 years in prison and seven years of special parole on Tuesday for the murder of jogger Melissa Millan on a Simsbury trail in 2014, according to court records.

The 30-year-old convicted sex offender, who was living with his grandparents in Simsbury at the time of the crime, confessed to police four years after he fatally stabbed the 54-year-old Massmutual executive in the chest on the Iron Horse Boulevard trail and left her to die, records show.

On Nov. 22, 2014, Leverett told police, he returned home from a sex offender therapy group and found himself in need of “human contact.” The then-21-year-old had moved to Connecticut from Colorado after being convicted of sexual assault.

Out near Iron Horse Boulevard, he spotted Millan, a mother of two, triathlete and senior vice president at Massachusetts Mutual who was out on a routine run less than three miles from her house, according to police and court records. He approached her on a public, yet poorly lit, part of the trail where he stabbed her once in the heart and left her to die, according to the warrant for his arrest.

When he showed up at the Simsbury Police Department to confess four years later in September 2018, after telling a friend from church what happened, he told police he thought Millan was attractive. He approached her but thought she was out of his league and went into “a frenzy” — as he described it — and stabbed her with a knife.

Leverett was arrested in Simsbury on Sept. 23, 2018. He pleaded guilty in March to one count of murder.

He has been in custody at the Macdougall-walker Correctional Institution in Suffield since his arrest, according to the Department of Correction. He will get credit toward his sentence for the three years he has already spent behind bars.