Early on the morning of April 16, 2016, a 16-year-old girl was walking home along West River Road in Fruitland Township, north of Muskegon, Michigan, after a night at a party. A silver minivan came up behind her and the driver asked whether she needed a ride. She asked to use his phone. He told her she could, if she got in. Once she was inside, she said later, the window went up, the door locked, and the man told her his flip phone was dead. He started driving, slowed to reach under his seat, and came up with a gun. She unlocked the door and jumped from the moving van.
When she looked back, she testified, he was standing in the road pointing the gun at her. "I was running down the road and screaming for him please not to kill me," she said. She reached a stranger's house without her shoes, scraped and crying, and the people inside called 911. Police later said the man's stolen .22-caliber pistol had jammed.
The girl, known in court only by her initials, MJN, could not have known that the description she gave of the van would close two of the largest cases in Muskegon County history. The driver was Jeffrey Willis, a 46-year-old forklift driver with no criminal record. Within weeks he was charged with murdering a jogger named Rebekah Bletsch. Within five months he was charged with abducting and killing Jessica Heeringa, a young mother who had vanished from a Norton Shores gas station three years earlier and had never been found.
Jeffrey Thomas Willis grew up in Fruitport, a small community southeast of Muskegon. He was one of five boys raised by middle-class parents, according to a 2016 profile by WOOD-TV's Target 8 investigative team. At Fruitport High School he was a sprinter on the track team. A classmate remembered him as "that all-around what you would consider good American kid," popular in his own grade and the grades around him. His quote was chosen for the track team's page in the 1988 yearbook: "Track's a good sport because it teaches you respect for others."
Not everyone remembered him that way. A woman who met him at a track meet when she was 15 and he was 17 told Target 8 that a date with him ended on a two-track road in Fruitport, and that when she wanted to stop, "he did get quite angry. He felt he was maybe owed more." She said he took her home. She told her story to detectives after his arrest.
After high school Willis took a custodian's job in the Fruitport schools. In 1999 he was fired from Edgewood Elementary for viewing pornography on a school computer. In 2007 a woman reported that he had secretly videotaped her as he followed her out of a Sam's Club parking lot in Fruitport Township. The police report went nowhere.
For more than 15 years he worked the overnight shift at the Herman Miller furniture plant in Spring Lake Township, most recently driving a forklift and collecting scrap plastic and pallets for recycling. A longtime friend who worked beside him said coworkers liked him, that he lent out his trailer and tools, and that they played cribbage on breaks and video games after work. The same friend said Willis made crude comments to female coworkers, usually one-on-one so it was his word against theirs. His weight nearly doubled during those years, to close to 300 pounds.
He had a daughter with a woman who later died in a car crash, and by 2016 he was a grandfather. Around 2003 he married Charlene, who later testified under the name Charlene Bishop that the marriage lasted 13 years but that the two had gone their separate ways for the last five or six. She was diabetic and used an insulin pump. The couple lived in the 1800 block of South Sheridan Road in Muskegon Township. Willis was a hunter and snowmobiler, and in later years he became absorbed in the card game Magic: The Gathering. His circle included his cousin Kevin Bluhm, a sergeant at the West Shoreline Correctional Facility, whom a friend described as "tight since childhood," and a Fruitport classmate named Shawn Stefanich, who had become an officer with the Norton Shores Police Department.
When his grandfather died in 2011, a house at 3038 Bailey Street in Norton Shores, about 12 or 13 minutes from the Exxon station on East Sternberg Road, passed to Willis, according to the Michigan Court of Appeals. The house stood empty. Willis kept it padlocked.
Jessica Lynn Heeringa was 25 in the spring of 2013. She lived with her boyfriend, Dakotah Quail-Dyer, and their 3-year-old son, and had worked at the Exxon station on Sternberg Road since 2012. Her boyfriend later testified that she loved their son "very much" and would never have left him. Her grandmother, Diane Homrich, described her with a line from an old song: "5-foot-2, eyes of blue." Jessica kept a journal and wrote poetry. The lead detective, who read it after she disappeared, said she wrote often about making a better life for her son, whom she called the best decision she had ever made. She also struggled with heroin addiction, something both her boyfriend and a friend acknowledged in court, and her journal recorded hard days as well as days when she wrote "life is good, life is sweet."
On April 26, 2013, a Friday, she dropped her boyfriend and son at his parents' home and went to work the closing shift alone. Around 10 p.m. her boyfriend called to ask her to pick up groceries on the way home. "Nothing seemed wrong. She was happy," he said. The last known customer bought a lighter at 10:52 p.m. and remembered that Jessica was mopping and "in a great mood."
At about 11 p.m. the station's manager, Susan Follett, and her husband rode past on their motorcycles and saw a silver minivan stopped at the back of the building. They watched the rear hatch open and close, and then the van drove away. At 11:14 p.m. a customer named Craig Harpster, who had just clocked out of work, found the pump would not take his card, walked inside, found the store open, lit and empty, and called 911.
Police found the store half closed for the night: the floor had been cleaned, the till was out and untouched, and nothing had been taken. Jessica's coat, her purse, her wallet with about $400 in it, her cigarettes and lighter, and her car keys were all there. Her car was in the lot. Outside the only back door, officers found a small smear of her blood, two watch-style batteries and the battery cover from a laser sight made for a Walther P22 pistol.
Jessica's disappearance became one of West Michigan's most closely followed missing-person cases. Her family held vigils beside the station and handed out flyers. The Norton Shores department, which had never handled a case of that size, called in the Michigan State Police; the U.S. Secret Service also assisted, and a task force at one point grew to 45 officers. Police took roughly 2,000 to 2,500 tips. Surveillance cameras at businesses along Old Grand Haven Road had recorded a silver minivan heading north around 11 p.m., and investigators cross-checked owners of silver Chrysler minivans against owners of Walther P22 pistols in Muskegon and Ottawa counties.
One tip, ranked of "medium" importance, concerned a silver minivan whose owner frequented a Starbucks. On May 8, 2013, officers met that owner on his front porch. He was Jeffrey Willis. He told them he had stopped at the Exxon station around 5 p.m. on April 26 to buy mints, had played in a Magic: The Gathering tournament at a shop in the shopping center behind the station until about 9:30 p.m., and had been home from about 9:45 p.m. until about 12:30 a.m., when he drove to his grandfather's house to fetch a board to repair his dog kennel and then bought food at a Taco Bell. With his permission they looked in his van. It had been recently cleaned. Officers left phone messages for his wife. She testified years later that she never received them; the recordings turned up on mini-cassettes hidden in a camera bag in Willis's shed.
Nothing marked him out from several hundred others. "He was one of several hundred people that were looked at," Muskegon County Prosecutor D.J. Hilson said in 2016. "They searched his van, they searched his phone, they had an opportunity to talk to him and found nothing." The case stalled. A 2016 episode of the Investigation Discovery series Disappeared brought new tips but no answer.
Rebekah Sue Bletsch, known to her family as Becky, was 36 and lived on Automobile Road in Dalton Township, north of Muskegon. She was married and a mother, and she coached children in the neighborhood; one neighbor who found her that evening was the mother of a girl she coached. Her sister Jessica Josephson said she was "a very strong person and she would do anything for any of us." Her family remembered her as the life of the party. "Becky is so much more than a jogger on the side of the road," her sister told the court in 2017. "She is a mother, a wife, a daughter, sister, aunt, friend, co-worker and a community member."
On June 29, 2014, a Sunday, she went out jogging on the rural road near her home, as she often did. Michelle and Mark Klint, neighbors driving along Automobile Road, saw something in the road and at first thought it was a deer. It was Rebekah, lying partly in the road. She was still breathing. Mark Klint called 911, and they tried to help her until deputies arrived. She died at the scene.
The first deputy assumed a hit-and-run, until he saw a spent shell casing in the road and blood near her body. Another deputy found two small wounds in her head; the autopsy found a third. Investigators recovered three .22-caliber casings, all CCI brand. Her clothing was disarranged, and she had bruises on her wrists, ankles, back and leg. Her armband, earbuds and sunglasses had been gathered neatly by the roadside.
There was no suspect. For almost two years her husband lived under suspicion, as spouses often do; after the trial her uncle, Tim Donkin, said the verdict had cleared his name "100 percent."
The break came from MJN. Muskegon County Sheriff's Detective Matt Schultz found a live .22-caliber round and her shoes at the scene of the April 2016 attempted abduction and went looking for cameras along the routes the van might have taken. About a month earlier Frank Coles, who owns the Soldini Blueberry Farm on Weber Road, had installed three surveillance cameras because of an unrelated threat. They had recorded a silver minivan heading south on Weber and turning through the farm's driveway shortly before the abduction.
The license plate was not readable. Schultz took enhanced stills to Jim Roberts, the shop foreman at a Muskegon Chrysler dealership, who used the headlights and taillights to narrow the van to a 2005 or 2006 model. Working with the Secret Service and other agencies, Schultz cut the list to about 1,000 vans, then 30, then 10 in Muskegon County. One belonged to Jeffrey Willis, and it had matching rust. MJN picked Willis out of a photo lineup.
Schultz questioned Willis 30 to 45 days after the abduction attempt. Willis said he had not had an oil change in a couple of months; Schultz produced a receipt from a quick-lube shop dated the morning of April 16. Willis said he did not know where Weber Road was and had no weapon in his van. When Schultz showed him the farm's surveillance video, he ended the interview.
Prosecutors did not yet think they had enough to charge him, and they worried about what he might do in the meantime. With a judge's approval, investigators put him under surveillance. On May 11, 2016, a sheriff's detective watched him sit in his minivan in the parking lot of the Meijer store on Harvey Street for about 15 minutes and then drive slowly up and down the rows. "Had he tried to do anything, he would have been stopped almost immediately," Hilson said later.
On May 17, 2016, deputies stopped Willis's silver minivan as he left work at Herman Miller and arrested him for the attempted abduction. From the jail he called his wife dozens of times without reaching her, then reached his friend Officer Stefanich. "Listen, I've been arrested," he said on the recorded call. "I need you to go get Char." Stefanich did not know why Willis had been arrested; the Norton Shores police chief said there was no indication of any wrongdoing by the officer, who cut off contact.
Under the front seat of the van, a state police sergeant found a combination lockbox containing a .22-caliber Walther P22 pistol with its serial number filed off, black gloves, handcuffs, syringes, a vial of insulin and blue pills later described as Viagra. A toolbox held a chain with handcuffs, rope, restraints and a large metal J-hook. Taped inside was a diagram of a woman's body marked with injection points. There were also video cameras, a ball gag, lubricant, sex toys and a typed list of women's names and addresses bearing Willis's thumbprint. Prosecutors would call the toolbox and lockbox together a "rape kit."
The state crime laboratory restored the pistol's serial number. It belonged to Michelle Schnotala, Willis's coworker of seven years at Herman Miller, who said it had disappeared from her home after the weekend of February 22, 2013, along with its laser sight, and that she had noticed snowmobile tracks around her house about then. She testified that Willis knew where she kept the gun and that he had repeatedly asked her for her underwear; underwear later identified as hers was found wrapped in foil in his shed. A state police ballistics expert matched the pistol to the casings and bullets from Automobile Road. Willis was charged with murdering Rebekah Bletsch.
The searches of his home turned up more. On two external hard drives, one hidden in an air vent, state police computer analysts found tens of thousands of videos depicting the abduction, rape and murder of women, some staged and some, investigators testified, apparently real. They found homemade videos shot without consent: neighbors filmed at night through their blinds, women in parking lots and stores, and more than 15,000 clips of girls in swimsuits at school swim events. Prosecutors added charges of producing child sexually abusive material, using a computer to commit a crime and surveilling an unclothed person. In the shed was a five-page printout titled "List of Serial Killers in the United States," with a mark beside Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, two men who abducted and killed five girls in California in 1979. Investigators also told at least one woman, Wendy Silvey, that Willis had kept her names, birth date, every address she had lived at since 2002 and photographs of her. She said she had never met him. State police told her they had notified other women in the same position.
The single most discussed piece of evidence was a folder on one of the external drives titled "VICS," which investigators read as short for "victims." It held two subfolders. One was labeled "RSB" with a code that worked out to 6-29-14: Rebekah Sue Bletsch and the day she was shot. It contained photographs of her downloaded from Facebook, wanted posters from her case, a saved web page and, shortly after her death, phone records Willis had saved in support of a possible alibi. The other was labeled "JLH" with a code for April 26, 2013, the night Jessica Lynn Heeringa vanished. It held photographs of her, some with her son or boyfriend, along with a "missing kidnaped" flyer. Elsewhere Willis had saved a news article about her disappearance.
A document on the drive listed his computer passwords. Many of them were J4L27H13, which investigators read as Heeringa's initials and the date 4-27-13, the day after she disappeared. Prosecutors argued that this was the day she died.
The analysts also testified to limits. Forensic analyst Gerald McCarthy said the Bletsch subfolder was created on July 1, 2014, two days after her death; the Heeringa subfolder was created three years to the day after her disappearance, and he found nothing about her on Willis's devices from before she vanished. The photographs in the folders were publicly available ones, and none had been taken by Willis. The defense argued that the codes could refer to other people or dates in Willis's life and that the folder showed only a man keeping track of unsolved local cases. Willis himself testified that he made the folders "because I didn't trust the police," to keep records ready in case investigators came back to him. In a 2023 prison interview he said the J stood for Jeff, the 4 for his four brothers, the L for his father and grandfather, both named Lawrence, and the 27 for a favorite number. Asked about the H, he said he did not remember.
On May 18, 2016, the day after the arrest, state police interviewed Kevin Bluhm at his home. He said he had not seen Willis since July 2015 and had never seen him with a handgun. In a later interview he admitted that Willis had shown him a .22-caliber pistol the month before the arrest. He was charged with lying to police and suspended from his prison job.
Then, in an interview with Norton Shores Lt. Michael Kasher, the lead detective on the Heeringa case, Bluhm told a much longer story. According to a 16-page affidavit, he said Willis had invited him to the Bailey Street house the day after Jessica disappeared. At the bottom of the basement stairs, he said, he saw a woman lying face down, unclothed, her hands tied, with an obvious head wound; she was not moving. Willis, he said, told him he had tortured her. Bluhm said he helped wrap her body in plastic, load it into Willis's van and carry it to a hole already dug near old railroad tracks at South Sheridan Road and East Laketon Avenue, not far from Willis's home. During the drive with investigators, a prosecutor later said, Bluhm called his wife and told her, "I'm doing something I should have done years ago."
When Kasher told him the story did not add up, Bluhm said he had made it all up. Investigators searched the railroad site and found nothing. They also searched a northern Michigan cabin owned by Officer Stefanich, to which Willis had a key, with a cadaver dog, and found nothing there either.
Bluhm pleaded guilty to two counts of lying to a peace officer in August 2016 and was sentenced on September 20, 2016, to 96 days already served. He was not released. An hour later he was charged as an accessory after the fact to Jessica Heeringa's murder, because prosecutors believed at least part of his first account was true. He pleaded no contest to that charge shortly before his trial in late 2017. On January 9, 2018, Judge William Marietti sentenced him to time served, 476 days, and five years of probation with a GPS tether. Hilson said authorities believed Willis had later moved the body from the place Bluhm described.
The affidavit filed in September 2016 added what investigators had pieced together from phone and credit card records. Willis had used his credit card at the Norton Shores Exxon 15 or 16 times. A witness said she had seen him at the station talking with Jessica the day before she vanished. Herman Miller's records showed he had taken a vacation day on April 26, 2013. Willis had told police he was home with his wife at 11:23 p.m. and at midnight, but his wife was the one calling his cellphone from home at those times, and the calls placed his phone near the Bailey Street house. At 12:05 a.m. his phone called the Bailey Street landline. Then it went silent until 3:47 p.m. the next day. At 12:34 a.m. on April 27 his credit card was used at the Taco Bell on Sternberg Road, about seven miles from his home and close to the gas station, though another Taco Bell was about two miles from his house.
A coworker, Clifford Barron, said Willis came to work on the night of April 28, 2013, with deep scratches on his face and arms. Willis said he got them doing a brake job; Schnotala said he told her a new puppy had caused them. At Bailey Street detectives found padlocks on three entrances, a cluster of empty bleach and Tide-with-bleach containers in the basement, and, in a trash can in the garage, a handwritten list in three sections. The first listed clothing, including "underwear & her panties," "coat?" and "hoodie"; Jessica's boyfriend said she always wore hooded sweatshirts to work. The second listed cameras, tripods, a gas can, matches, a crowbar and "video from house if any." The third, headed "kit," listed restraints, needles, zip ties, a hook and rope. A state police handwriting examiner matched it to Willis.
On September 20, 2016, Willis was arraigned on charges of open murder and kidnapping with intent to commit sexual assault. "In my opinion, we've found Jessica's killer," Hilson told reporters. He said investigators believed she died within 24 to 48 hours of being taken. After a four-day preliminary examination in December 2016, at which the prosecution called 28 witnesses and argued that the "VICS" folder showed Heeringa was dead and that Willis had been emulating the so-called Toolbox Killers, District Judge Raymond Kostrzewa bound him over for trial.
Jessica's family did not accept it. Her mother, Shelly Heeringa, ran a Facebook page devoted to finding her and maintained that her daughter was alive. The family's slogan became "No Jes, no justice," and they stayed away from both trials.
The pretrial fight was long. Willis's lawyers asked to dismiss the Bletsch case because jail staff had taken handwritten notes from his jumpsuit pocket and his cell and had looked into an envelope marked as attorney mail. Judge Marietti ruled in February 2017 that two jail sergeants had seen privileged material and barred any use of it, but refused to dismiss the case. The Court of Appeals declined to intervene on June 2, 2017, and the Michigan Supreme Court denied leave in September 2017. In April 2017 Marietti refused the prosecution's request to try all three cases together, although he allowed evidence from each to be used in the others. In the summer of 2017 Willis's lead defense lawyer, Brian Hosticka, took a job in the prosecutor's office; Chief Public Defender Fred Johnson took over, and the court declined to remove the prosecutor's office after Hilson promised Hosticka would be screened from the case. Johnson estimated that a private defense of the same scope would cost about a quarter of a million dollars.
Jury selection began in October 2017 from a pool of about 500 summoned residents. Over eight days of testimony the jury heard from the Klints and the first deputies, from MJN, from Willis's former wife and from a string of forensic witnesses. A state police ballistics lieutenant, Jeff Crump, matched the pistol to the casings and to bullet fragments from Rebekah's body; another analyst found Willis's DNA on the pistol's trigger, muzzle and slide. DNA analyst Michelle Schmitt testified that a mixture on the outside of a Reebok glove from the locked toolbox was 90 quadrillion times more likely to include Rebekah's DNA than not, and that a mixture on a sex toy in the same toolbox was 4,600 times more likely. Neither item matched Bluhm, MJN, Heeringa, Willis's wife or Schnotala. Analysts described the videos without playing them, including one called "The Jogger," in which a man attacks a woman running on a rural road and loads her into a minivan. A state police phone analyst said Willis's phone showed no activity at all on the afternoon of the killing, consistent with its being switched off.
Charlene Bishop testified that after his arrest Willis wrote her a letter about the day of the shooting that "felt like he was planting memories." She said she had stopped using syringes for her insulin in 2005, kept her insulin in the refrigerator and had never seen the lockbox, the gun, the handcuffs or the injection diagram.
The defense, led by Johnson, argued that Bluhm was the killer. Bluhm had met Rebekah through their daughters' soccer, had looked her up on Facebook, had saved pictures of her on his phone and had reset the phone after Willis was charged; Johnson said Bluhm borrowed the gun and the gloves and returned them. Called by the defense, Bluhm invoked his Fifth Amendment right and did not testify. Detectives testified that Bluhm had been at his daughter's soccer tournament in Grand Haven that day and that receipts and his family's accounts placed him elsewhere. Judge Marietti noted there was no evidence tying him to the killing.
On November 1, 2017, Willis took the stand. "I did not kill Ms. Bletsch. I wasn't even there, I was home," he said, adding that he had been cutting his grass. He said the gloves were Bluhm's and that he had lent Bluhm the pistol. He said his coworker had sold him the gun with the serial number already removed and had given him her underwear, which she denied. He said he had picked up MJN to help her, that she seemed to be on drugs and had jumped out, and that he left because he did not want to be arrested. He acknowledged writing the Bailey Street list and said the hard drives were his. Under cross-examination Hilson asked why, in 2014, he had saved phone records "for a murder you didn't commit."
On November 2, 2017, after about 90 minutes of deliberation, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder, on both premeditation and felony-murder theories, and of felony-firearm. "It couldn't be anything but that," said Rebekah's father, Nick Winberg, who had attended nearly every hearing with photographs of both women.
At sentencing on December 18, 2017, Willis asked to leave before the family spoke. No Michigan law then required him to stay, and Marietti let him go. On his way out he turned and blew a kiss toward the gallery. Rebekah's mother, Debra Reamer, her sisters Jessica Josephson and Nicole Winberg, and her husband, through a letter read by the prosecutor, addressed an empty chair. Marietti imposed the mandatory sentence of life without parole, plus a consecutive term for the firearm count. On the drive to the state prison reception center in Jackson, Muskegon County deputies played a recording of the family's statements to Willis five times.
The second trial began with jury selection on May 1, 2018, and testimony on May 8. Willis was driven in each day from a state prison in Ionia. Because there was no body and no DNA linking him to Jessica, Hilson built the case from what he called 201 pieces of circumstantial evidence. The jury heard the Bletsch case and MJN's account as evidence of a common plan, under a court ruling that the three cases shared features: young women alone in isolated places in the same county within three years, the same pistol, and the same van.
A senior Chrysler product designer, Lawrence Brookes, testified that the van in the 2013 surveillance video was a Dodge Grand Caravan built between 2001 and 2007, identifiable by its black side molding, door handles and mirrors. A Secret Service analyst described narrowing about 80,000 minivans to about 350 and then 30, and said only one silver van appeared in all the surveillance video in the right time window, traveling on the most direct route to Bailey Street. A gun expert fitted the broken battery cover found behind the station onto the laser sight that belonged with Schnotala's Walther P22. A physician testified that the fast-acting insulin and syringes in the van could incapacitate a person in a few minutes.
Johnson argued that the evidence did not prove Jessica was dead, much less that Willis killed her. He suggested she may have met a drug supplier behind the station and overdosed, or may have chosen to leave, and he read from her journal. He pointed out that none of her DNA was found in the van and that Follett's sketch of the driver did not look like Willis. On Johnson's advice, Willis did not testify. A defense motion for a directed verdict failed; Marietti called the battery cover the evidence that put Willis "in the bulls-eye."
On May 16, 2018, after about 90 minutes, the jury convicted Willis of first-degree murder and kidnapping. "It just kept coming and coming and coming," Johnson said of the evidence. One juror later said that three or four jurors had wanted to review evidence before agreeing, and that the case had come together "like this Lego set." Hilson said the Heeringa trial was necessary even though Willis was already serving life: "Jessica Heeringa deserved her day in court."
On June 18, 2018, Willis was sentenced to life without parole for the murder and 18 years and 9 months to 40 years for the kidnapping. This time he had to stay. In a tearful eight-page statement he said he was innocent, accused police and the ballistics expert of lying and his own lawyers of incompetence, and said the kiss he had blown in December was meant for the prosecutor, not the Bletsch family. Rebekah's sister did not believe him. No one from Jessica's family spoke.
On August 7, 2018, at Hilson's request, Marietti dismissed the 15 remaining charges, including the attempted kidnapping of MJN and the child sexually abusive material counts. Hilson said he had consulted MJN and her family, and that Willis, already serving two life sentences, did not need "another stage or platform." That case was never tried, so the attempted abduction remains a charge, not a conviction, though Willis admitted in court that she had been in his van.
Willis appealed both convictions. In the Heeringa case his appointed lawyer, Anna Rapa, argued in December 2019 that the jury had been flooded with character evidence and that the trial should have been moved out of Muskegon County. On December 26, 2019, a Court of Appeals panel of Judges Patrick Meter, Colleen O'Brien and Jonathan Tukel affirmed. The panel agreed with Willis on two points: the homemade voyeuristic videos and the serial-killer list should not have been admitted, the list because it was printed on September 26, 2014, after Heeringa's disappearance. But it held the errors harmless in light of "strong untainted evidence," listing among other things the battery cover, the stolen pistol missing its laser sight, the van, the scratches, the hidden answering-machine tapes, the late-night visit to Bailey Street, the "rape kit" and checklist, the "VICS" folders and the passwords. It found the rest of the other-acts evidence properly admitted, ruled that Willis had waived his venue claim by accepting the jury, and rejected his claims about the computer search warrant and about withheld ballistics records.
On January 2, 2020, the same panel affirmed the Bletsch conviction, rejecting arguments about the jail notes, the search warrant, the other-acts evidence, the failure to call defense ballistics and DNA experts, alleged prosecutorial misconduct over a corrected ballistics report, Hosticka's move to the prosecutor's office, media coverage and the exclusion of parts of Bluhm's police interview. On September 8, 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court denied leave to appeal in both cases.
Willis continued to insist he was innocent. In 2024 he filed motions in Muskegon County Circuit Court seeking new trials in both cases, arguing that police and prosecutors had fabricated bullet evidence and lied, that evidence had been withheld, and that his trial lawyer had been ineffective. Judge Matthew Kacel heard the motions at the end of June 2026. On October 8, 2026, he denied them in a nine-page opinion, finding that no fabricated evidence reached either trial, that there was no proof the prosecution intentionally withheld evidence, and that the trial lawyer's mistakes would not have changed the outcomes. "To put it plainly, the evidence in the Bletsch and Heeringa cases was overwhelming," Kacel wrote. "The Court has no reservation in finding that the defendant (Willis) received fair trials and that the verdicts in each were soundly grounded on reliable evidence."
As of WOOD-TV's October 8, 2026 report, Willis, 56, was serving his two life sentences without parole at a state prison in Livingston County, Michigan. Whether he will appeal Kacel's ruling had not been reported.
Jessica Heeringa has never been found. In 2023, on the tenth anniversary of her disappearance, the retired lead detective, Michael Kasher, said for the first time where he believes she is buried. Phone records, he said, showed Willis's phone heading north on US-31 and east on M-46 at 1:10 a.m. on April 28, 2013, and returning to the same area around 3 a.m. on a day in June and another in August, days on which Willis called in sick. Kasher believes she is in the Manistee National Forest near the Lake-Mason county line, northwest of Baldwin. Beginning in 2017, he said, police searched that area at least half a dozen times with cadaver dogs, helicopters and infrared cameras without making the searches public. "The only one that really could tell us," he said, "is going to be Jeffrey Willis." Asked in a prison interview why he would not help Jessica's family, Willis said, "I'm not even going to answer that."
Her son was 13 in 2023 and being raised by one of her sisters. Her family still did not accept the verdict. "I don't think Jeffrey Willis is guilty of killing Jes," her sister Samantha wrote to WOOD-TV. "She is still out there."
Willis's exit from his first sentencing changed Michigan law. State Rep. Holly Hughes of Montague introduced a bill requiring convicted defendants to remain in court for victim impact statements, and Rebekah's family testified for it. Gov. Rick Snyder signed the "Rebekah Bletsch Law" on May 23, 2018, with immediate effect, leaving judges discretion to remove defendants who are disruptive or dangerous. "They duck out, they're able to duck right out of the courtroom and this is going to put a stop to that," Nick Winberg said. The law applied at Willis's own sentencing for Jessica's murder less than a month later.
Rebekah's family also turned on Kevin Bluhm. Supporters wore shirts reading "Your silence killed!" to his sentencing, and in June 2018 a billboard with those words went up near US-31 and Laketon Avenue in Muskegon. Their argument, which the assistant prosecutor made in court, was that if Bluhm had spoken up after Jessica disappeared, Rebekah might be alive and MJN would never have been in danger. In August 2018 the Michigan Fraternal Order of Police named three sheriff's detectives on the case, Lisa Freres, Chad Petersen and Matt Schultz, its Peace Officers of the Year. Rebekah's family held a memorial walk in her name each year near Whitehall.
Hilson credited MJN above everyone. "Her bravery and her willingness to really put her life on the line on that fateful early morning has opened the doors to a lot of different things," he said in 2016.
Proven in court: Willis's first-degree murder of Rebekah Bletsch, supported by ballistics and DNA, and his kidnapping and first-degree murder of Jessica Heeringa, a conviction resting on circumstantial evidence without a body. Both were affirmed on appeal, and a 2026 motion for new trials failed. Willis denies both.
Charged but never tried: the 2016 attempted kidnapping of MJN and the child sexually abusive material, computer and surveillance counts, all dismissed in 2018 because he was already serving life. Willis admitted under oath that MJN was in his van and jumped out, but denied any crime.
Accomplice account: Kevin Bluhm's description of seeing Jessica's body and helping bury it was recanted by Bluhm himself. He was convicted, on a no-contest plea, of being an accessory after the fact; Kasher has said he believes Bluhm's original account and believes Willis acted alone in the abduction. The defense theory that Bluhm killed Rebekah was rejected by the jury and found unsupported by the trial judge.
Theories: Kasher's belief that Jessica is buried in the Manistee National Forest is his reading of phone records; no remains have been found. The prosecution's claim that Willis was emulating Bittaker and Norris rested on the serial-killer list that the Court of Appeals later said should not have been admitted. The trial court kept out evidence of necrophilia videos, a "roadside abduction" video and a 2007 incident. The prosecutor's statement that the "kidnap and kill" videos included real killings was never tied to any identified victim.
Looked at, not charged: shortly after his arrest, the family of Angela Thornburg, a 15-year-old Fruitport High School freshman whose body was found in woods in Fruitport Township in October 1996, said police had pulled her case file to check for a connection to Willis. Her death was ruled a probable homicide; no one has been charged, and no source found links Willis to it. Investigators also found that he had collected personal details and photographs of several women over many years. None of those women was harmed.
1988: Willis graduates from Fruitport High School.
1999: Fired as a custodian at Edgewood Elementary in Fruitport.
2007: A woman reports that he videotaped her in a Sam's Club parking lot; no charge.
2011: His grandfather dies; the Bailey Street house in Norton Shores passes to him.
February 2013: Michelle Schnotala's Walther P22 pistol and laser sight disappear from her home.
April 26, 2013: Jessica Heeringa, 25, disappears from the Exxon station on East Sternberg Road, Norton Shores, about 11 p.m.
May 8, 2013: Police interview Willis on his porch and look in his van; he is not pursued.
June 29, 2014: Rebekah Bletsch, 36, is shot three times while jogging on Automobile Road, Dalton Township.
July 1, 2014: The "RSB" subfolder is created on Willis's hard drive.
September 26, 2014: The serial-killer list found in his shed is printed.
April 16, 2016: MJN, 16, escapes from his minivan on West River Road, Fruitland Township.
May 17, 2016: Willis is arrested leaving Herman Miller; the pistol is found in his van.
May 2016: Charged with Bletsch's murder after the ballistics match.
June 22, 2016: The "VICS" folder is revealed at his preliminary hearing; he is bound over in the Bletsch case.
September 20, 2016: Charged with Heeringa's kidnapping and murder; Kevin Bluhm charged as an accessory.
December 13, 2016: Bound over for trial in the Heeringa case.
November 2, 2017: Convicted of first-degree murder of Rebekah Bletsch.
December 18, 2017: Sentenced to life without parole; leaves the courtroom and blows a kiss before the family's statements.
January 9, 2018: Bluhm sentenced to time served and five years' probation.
May 16, 2018: Convicted of kidnapping and first-degree murder of Jessica Heeringa.
May 23, 2018: Gov. Rick Snyder signs the Rebekah Bletsch Law.
June 18, 2018: Sentenced to life without parole for Heeringa's murder.
August 7, 2018: Remaining 15 charges dismissed.
December 26, 2019: Court of Appeals affirms the Heeringa conviction.
January 2, 2020: Court of Appeals affirms the Bletsch conviction.
September 8, 2020: Michigan Supreme Court denies leave in both cases.
April 2023: Retired Lt. Michael Kasher says he believes Heeringa is buried in the Manistee National Forest.
2024: Willis files motions for new trials.
June 30, 2026: Hearing on the motions before Judge Matthew Kacel.
October 8, 2026: Kacel denies new trials in both cases.