Nurse faces 60 years in murder, dismemberment of college student

Jermaine Richards was found guilty on Friday Sept. 15, 2017 for the 2013 murder of Alyssiah Marie Wiley. Jermaine Richards was found guilty on Friday Sept. 15, 2017 for the 2013 murder of Alyssiah Marie Wiley. Photo: News12CT, Contributed Photo Photo: News12CT, Contributed Photo Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close Nurse faces 60 years in murder, dismemberment of college student 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

BRIDGEPORT — A local nurse faces up to 60 years in prison when he is sentenced Friday for killing a college student and dismembering her body.

Jermaine Richards was found guilty of murder after two previous Superior Court juries deadlocked on whether he killed 20-year-old Alyssiah Marie Wiley of West Haven some time after April 19, 2013.

Richards is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Earl Richards.

Wiley, a sophomore at Eastern Connecticut State University, disappeared after leaving the Willimantic campus in Richards’ car. Twenty-seven days later — after a statewide search and appeals by her mother on television — Wiley’s partial remains were found in a wooded area at the end of Quarry Road in Trumbull, a mile and a half from Richards’ Bridgeport home.

Richards, a private-duty nurse from Bridgeport, had been dating Wiley since she had been in high school. But there was no physical evidence in the case — no blood residue or anything to show where or when Wiley was killed, no eyewitnesses and certainly no confession. Richards did not testify during the trial.

Instead, the state rested its case on the claim that Richards had the motive and the opportunity to kill Wiley.

“All the evidence points to Jermaine,” argued Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Ann Lawlor.

Wiley’s family and friends testified Richards was jealous and possessive.

Her sister, Chaharrez Landell, testified that a month before Wiley’s disappearance, Wiley had called her, panicked.

“He put me in a headlock and threw me on the bed and I couldn’t breathe,” Landell said her sister told her.

When Landell picked her sister up at the Norwalk home where Richards was working as a nurse, she said, Wiley was crying and said she wanted to break up with Richards but didn’t know how.

Prosecutors Lawlor and Joseph Corradino presented a newly acquired photograph of Wiley sitting in a domestic violence seminar.

Jevene Wright, a high school classmate of Richards’, testified that Richards told him he was upset because he believed Wiley was ‘messing around,’ with an old friend.

“She doesn’t know who she is messing with,” Wright recalled Richards telling him. “I’m a nurse and I know how to get rid of her.’’