William Jeffrey Devonshire was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1969. He was convicted there of second-degree murder, reduced from a first-degree charge, over a killing in 2003, and sentenced to eight years. By 2022 he was living homeless in Sarasota, Florida.
On February 25, 2022 the body of Kelliann Ripley, forty-eight, was found near the Centennial Park boat ramp, at the northern end of the Tamiami Trail. An autopsy gave her cause of death as blunt force trauma and manual strangulation. Sarasota police were at first reluctant to release details, including her surname, and did so only after her family agreed.
Thirteen days later, on March 10, the body of Vicky Levitch, fifty-nine, was found near the shore of Whitaker Bayou, on the same northern stretch of the Tamiami Trail. Detectives believed the two killings were connected. Devonshire’s DNA matched evidence recovered where Ripley was found, and he was arrested on March 11 and charged with her murder. He was not charged in the Levitch case, because at that point the evidence did not support it.
He never came to trial. He was taken to Sarasota Memorial Hospital after a medical event on May 17 and returned to the jail on May 27 under hospice care with a do-not-resuscitate order. He died in the Sarasota County Jail on June 5, 2022. The sheriff’s office said it was confident the death was from a medical illness and that the official cause would come from the District Twelve Medical Examiner. The State Attorney for the Twelfth Judicial Circuit said the prosecution could not continue, and police closed both cases.
What the State Attorney’s office said at the time is the clearest statement of where the second case stood: after analysing the evidence in both homicides they had determined that Devonshire committed both crimes, and detectives were in the process of writing a probable cause affidavit charging him with the murder of the second woman when they learned of his death.
The proof arrived afterwards. A Florida Department of Law Enforcement report dated October 7, 2022 found that DNA from the March victim was on Devonshire’s clothing, which Sarasota police described as scientifically connecting him to that homicide. It was published four months after he died and could not be used against him.
One conviction and two killings that a police department formally determined he committed but no court ever tested. Reporting at the time swapped the two women’s ages; the Sarasota Police Department gives Ripley as forty-eight and the March victim as fifty-nine, and those are the figures used here.