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Judge Denies Jeffrey Willis New Trials in Heeringa and Bletsch Murders

A Muskegon County judge rejected Willis's claims of evidence tampering and ineffective counsel, calling the evidence in both murders overwhelming. His life sentences stand.

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Jeffrey Willis has never accepted the verdicts that sent him to prison for the murders of Rebekah Bletsch and Jessica Heeringa. On Thursday, October 8, 2026, a Muskegon County judge closed the latest door he had tried to open. In a written opinion, Circuit Court Judge Matthew Kacel denied Willis's bid for new trials in both murders.

"To put it plainly, the evidence in the Bletsch and Heeringa cases was overwhelming," Kacel wrote in the nine-page ruling, according to WOOD-TV.

Willis had made his case in Kacel's courtroom at a hearing at the end of June. Through his lawyers, he claimed he had been wrongfully convicted, arguing that police and prosecutors tampered with evidence and that the lawyer who defended him at trial was ineffective. Kacel rejected each claim. He found that no fabricated evidence reached either trial and that there was no proof the prosecution had intentionally withheld evidence. Whatever mistakes the trial attorney made, the judge concluded, were not enough to have changed the outcomes. "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," he wrote.

The two cases began a little more than a year apart. Jessica Heeringa was working at an Exxon station in Norton Shores on the night of April 26, 2013, and was last seen just before she was closing up. She left behind her purse, her car and her other belongings, and DNA testing later showed that a small amount of blood found outside the station was hers. Investigators came to believe she was killed within a day or two of her abduction. Her body has never been found. On June 29, 2014, Rebekah Bletsch was shot and killed while jogging near her home in Dalton Township.

Separate Muskegon County juries convicted Willis in both deaths: in November 2017 of first-degree murder in the shooting of Bletsch, and in May 2018 of Heeringa's kidnapping and murder. He received life in prison without parole. That August, at the request of Prosecutor D.J. Hilson, a judge dismissed the four cases still pending against him, among them the attempted kidnapping of a teenager and child pornography charges. Hilson said he had consulted the teenage girl, and she agreed it was best not to try the case.

The appeals that followed went nowhere. The Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the convictions, and on September 8, 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in the Heeringa case. The new motions, filed in the trial court itself, were his attempt to win relief there. Willis, now 56, is serving his life terms at a state prison in Livingston County, Michigan.

Judge Kacel's opinion has not been published online. Its findings and the quotations from it are as reported by WOOD-TV. Published accounts differ on how the verdicts are described: WOOD-TV reported felony murder convictions in both cases, while the Associated Press reported a first-degree murder conviction in the Bletsch case.

Sources