The Kiss of Death

Jessica Heeringa was twenty-five, the mother of a three-year-old son, and she worked late shifts alone at an Exxon station on East Sternberg Road in Norton Shores, Michigan. On April 26, 2013, a customer came in near closing time and found the store empty. Her purse, holding more than four hundred dollars, sat on the counter. There were no security cameras.

Fourteen months later, on June 29, 2014, thirty-six-year-old Rebekah Bletsch was shot three times while jogging on Automobile Road in Dalton Township, twenty miles away. Then, on April 16, 2016, sixteen-year-old Madison Nygard refused a ride from a silver minivan but got in to borrow the driver’s phone. He locked the doors, and when he reached for a gun she jumped from the moving van. He fired twice as she ran and the pistol jammed. She picked Jeffrey Willis, a local factory worker, from a photo lineup, and his van held a hidden compartment, a padlocked toolbox of restraints, and a lockbox with the pistol that killed Bletsch.

A jury convicted Willis of Bletsch’s murder on November 2, 2017. At his sentencing that December he left before the family’s statements and blew them a kiss on his way out. A second jury convicted him of kidnapping and murdering Jessica in May 2018, and he drew a second life sentence without parole that June. Her body has never been found.