KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — For months, John Bassett kept secret the whereabouts of his murder victim, girlfriend Desheena Kyle.
There's no mystery about where the 30-year-old Knoxville man will spend the rest of his life -- in a Tennessee prison. A Knox County jury on Wednesday afternoon decided he should spend all of his remaining days behind bars, with no chance at parole.
Their verdict came just a couple hours after they found him guilty of first-degree murder in the 26-year-old Kyle's June 2021 killing.
"I will never get to see my daughter's big beautiful eyes and smile again," a weeping Crystal Jackson, Kyle's mother, told the panel before sentencing. "She did not deserve to leave us like this."
Bassett's relationship with Kyle lasted about a decade -- and it was tempestuous toward the end. They fought. He abused her, prosecutors say. She stabbed him, according to the defense.
Her family said she wanted to leave him behind and start a new life and her own business. He was mad at her because he thought she was pregnant with another man's child, they said. In truth, she was not pregnant at all.
Her family said he saw other women often while they were supposed to be a couple.
Defense attorneys Josh Hedrick and Cullen Wojcik tried without luck to convince jurors that Kyle herself was holding a pistol when it went off in her Knoxville apartment on June 19, 2021. They argued that after a single gunshot to the head killed her their client panicked, cleaned up the blood, removed evidence, ditched the gun and her phone, wrapped her body in bags and hid it under his great-grandmother's vacant house on Sam Tillery Road.
She decomposed over several months under that house, and only Bassett knew where she was. Police found the body in September 2021.
Her grandmother Betty Deas told jurors she begged Bassett to tell her where the young woman was during the summer of 2021. He acted as if he was innocent, she said.
"I told you that she was somewhere decomposing and we would not be able to have a decent burial," Deas said to Bassett from the witness stand.
Jackson said her younger son, who graduates from Central High School on Friday, will never get to see his big sister again. Jackson said she'll never get to play with the grandchildren that Kyle might have given birth to.
Bassett was serving a cocaine sales term on probation when he killed Kyle.
The jury also convicted him Wednesday of abuse of a corpse and evidence tampering.
Knox County Criminal Court Judge Scott Green set July 20 for sentencing on those convictions.
One of the big questions for him will be determining if Bassett's time for those crimes should be concurrent or consecutive to the murder term.