William Jeffrey Devonshire was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on September 23, 1969. By a Florida prosecutor's account he began his criminal career at fourteen, and by the time he left prison in Delaware in 2013 he had been arrested more than sixty-nine times, on charges that included domestic battery, aggravated assault, sexual battery and robbery. Police records put his history in New Jersey, Maryland, Indiana, Ohio, Delaware and Florida.
On January 5, 2004, a grand jury in Kent County, Delaware, indicted him for first-degree murder and possession of a deadly weapon during a felony, over a killing on April 3, 2003; separately he had been indicted in November 2003 for an attempted first-degree robbery on October 1 of that year. Sarasota police later described the 2003 killing as having happened during a robbery. The murder charge was reduced to second-degree, he was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to eight years, and he was released in 2013 and moved to Sarasota. In 2018 he was convicted there of felony battery and burglary and served three years in the Florida prison system, and he was released in August 2021. He was homeless when he came to the notice of Sarasota police again.
Kelliann Ripley, forty-eight, was homeless in Sarasota. Her cellphone and surveillance video traced her last movements: at about five in the morning of February 23, 2022, she was seen walking north on the Tamiami Trail near Centennial Park, and on video detectives found a man walking with her, pointing toward the woods where she would die and heading that way with her. On February 25 her body was found in the woods near the Centennial Park boat ramp, in the 1100 block 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.
On March 10, just before four in the afternoon, the body of Vicky Levitch, fifty-nine, was found near the shore of Whitaker Bayou in the 1900 block of the Tamiami Trail. At a news conference the next day the acting police chief, Rex Troche, asked for the public's help and said the two killings had things in common that he would not describe.
Officers had been watching Devonshire. On Friday, March 25, they arrested him for trespassing, and by one report on drug charges as well. He gave them a cheek swab. "Mister Devonshire gave up the buckle swab," Troche said, "which in this case was a huge break in our case." His DNA matched evidence recovered where Ripley was found, and on March 26, while still in the Sarasota County Jail, he was charged with her murder. Two days later Troche called him a strong suspect in the second death and said he was not cooperating. 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, at fifty-two. 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. The assistant state attorney, Karen Fraivillig, set out his history for reporters, and the office said that after analyzing the evidence in both homicides it had determined that Devonshire committed both crimes, and that detectives were in the process of writing a probable cause affidavit charging him with the second murder when they learned of his death.
The proof arrived afterward. A Florida Department of Law Enforcement report dated October 7, 2022, found the March victim's DNA on Devonshire's clothing, which Sarasota police said scientifically connected him to that homicide. It came four months after he died and could not be used against him.
One conviction, then, and two killings that a police department formally found he committed but that no court ever tested. Some early reports gave the two women's ages the other way around; the Sarasota Police Department gives Ripley as forty-eight and the March victim as fifty-nine.