Kimberly Osborne vanished before a family gathering in 2024, leaving relatives to wait months before learning what had happened to her.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Kimberly Osborne was supposed to be with her family on Mother’s Day in 2024. When she did not arrive, relatives who knew the 48-year-old Morgantown woman began asking where she was, starting a months-long period of uncertainty that ultimately led investigators to a shallow grave and prosecutors to the man who had shared her home.
More than two years after Osborne vanished, Joseph Nevera was sentenced Aug. 10 to life in prison without the possibility of parole for her murder. The sentence was the final step required after a Monongalia County jury convicted Nevera of first-degree murder in April and then denied him mercy. But the courtroom conclusion came only after Osborne’s family spent much of 2024 without answers, investigators worked through a missing-person case and a man in the woods unexpectedly found the remains that transformed the investigation.
Osborne’s absence on May 12, 2024, stood out immediately. Relatives expected her at a Mother’s Day gathering, and family members later testified that simply failing to appear was unlike her. The concern that began that day continued as weeks turned into months. For her mother, Rose Osborne, the period was marked by an effort to hold onto the possibility that her daughter might still return. Investigators, meanwhile, had to reconstruct the last part of Osborne’s life while there was still no body and no public answer about where she had gone.
The case changed in November. A sportsman practicing with a bow in woods near Little Indian Creek Road came across human remains in a shallow grave. Authorities recovered the remains and identified them as Osborne’s. The location was roughly two miles from the residence she had shared with Nevera. The discovery ended one part of the family’s uncertainty and began another phase of the investigation. Rose Osborne later told jurors that when an officer appeared at her home after the discovery, she understood before being told why authorities had come.
Nevera was arrested the following month and charged with first-degree murder. The prosecution that eventually reached a jury in April 2026 drew heavily on evidence about the relationship before Osborne disappeared. Friends and relatives testified that Osborne had been moving toward ending the relationship. Prosecutors argued that her attempt to separate from Nevera supplied the immediate context for the killing. Their case also included evidence of earlier violence, allowing jurors to consider the 2024 disappearance alongside events that had brought law enforcement to the couple’s home more than two years earlier.
One of the most significant pieces of that history came not from a witness recalling Osborne’s words but from police video recorded in January 2022. Jurors watched footage showing Osborne speaking with a sheriff’s deputy after a domestic disturbance. She said Nevera had climbed on top of her and choked her until she lost consciousness. She also described trying to keep away from him during the confrontation. Nevera was arrested after that earlier incident, according to trial coverage. The recording became important at the murder trial because it preserved Osborne’s own account long before anyone knew she would later disappear.
Jurors also heard testimony about threats prosecutors said closely foreshadowed what happened. A witness recalled Nevera saying Osborne could end up “in a grave or a hole in the ground.” Detective Joshua Ward told the jury that witnesses heard the couple fighting on the day Osborne vanished and described another statement by Nevera that she would not be found. Prosecutors argued those threats mattered not because of their wording alone but because Osborne was later discovered buried near the home and because the state had additional testimony about Nevera’s actions on the night she disappeared.
That additional account came from John Claburn, who had been Nevera’s close friend. Claburn told jurors that Nevera appeared at his camper on the evening of May 12, 2024, and said he had killed Osborne. Claburn initially thought Nevera was not serious, according to his testimony. Nevera then opened his truck, and Claburn saw Osborne inside. The disclosure, Claburn testified, forced him to confront what his friend was saying. Investigators would not receive that account for many months, a delay that became a central line of attack for the defense and led to criminal consequences for Claburn himself.
Claburn was charged as an accessory after the fact for failing to report what he knew. The prosecution maintained that he had not been given immunity in exchange for testimony. His account placed Nevera with Osborne’s body on the night she vanished, but defense attorney Christopher Wilson argued that jurors should be cautious about relying on someone who waited more than 600 days before approaching investigators. The defense also stressed the absence of physical evidence directly tying Nevera to the killing and challenged the prosecution’s effort to prove precisely how Osborne died from remains that were not discovered until months later.
The jurors nevertheless returned a first-degree murder verdict April 21 after deliberating for several hours. Their task was not finished. West Virginia procedure required them to consider whether Nevera should receive mercy, a designation that would preserve a possibility of parole after the required minimum term. The next day, Osborne’s family gave the jury a picture of what had been lost. Rose Osborne spoke of her daughter. One of Osborne’s children described growing up without her mother and the future events — including major family milestones — that Osborne would never see.
The mercy proceedings shifted the trial from the question of who killed Osborne to what punishment the conviction would carry. Nevera’s lawyers asked the jury to leave open the possibility of parole. Prosecutors argued against mercy and pointed to the violence and evidence presented during the murder phase. The panel declined to grant it. That decision meant the eventual sentence would be life in prison with no parole eligibility. When Nevera returned before Circuit Judge Cindy Scott in August, the judge imposed that sentence, formally completing the punishment the jury had chosen months earlier.
The trial also brought a separate criminal investigation after Claburn testified. His camper was set on fire shortly after he appeared in court. Authorities said a man who had allegedly called Claburn a “rat” was captured by surveillance at the property before the fire. David Dewalt was arrested on charges of first-degree arson and retaliation against a witness. Those allegations were handled separately from Nevera’s murder case, and they did not form the basis of the jury’s verdict against Nevera. They did, however, add another layer to an already unusual prosecution centered on a witness who acknowledged that he had stayed silent far too long.
Outside the case, Osborne’s obituary remembered a life not reflected by the months of testimony about disappearance, abuse and death. She was a mother of three and worked as a self-employed health care provider. Her family described her as generous, caring and fond of karaoke. Those details became particularly important during the mercy phase, when relatives asked jurors to understand that the person at the center of the prosecution was more than a missing-person report or evidence recovered in the woods.
Nevera’s sentencing brought the murder prosecution to its final judgment: life without mercy for the killing of Osborne. The result cannot restore the months her relatives spent hoping she would come home, but it resolved the central legal question that followed the Mother’s Day gathering she never reached. What began as an unexplained absence ultimately became a homicide case built from an earlier police recording, witness testimony, the discovery of Osborne’s remains and a jury’s determination that Nevera was responsible.
Author note: Last updated September 22, 2026.