CASSELBERRY, Florida – A Casselberry sex offender who tried to arrange the killings of his child victim, the prosecutor and the lead detective in his case has been convicted of solicitation to commit first-degree murder.
A Seminole County jury found 25-year-old Talil M. Vann guilty on November 12 of three counts of solicitation, a first-degree capital felony. Assistant State Attorneys Stewart Stone and Jessie Canario presented the evidence.
Each count carries a potential additional sentence of 30 years in prison. Circuit Judge David Dugan scheduled sentencing for January 8, 2027.
Plot hatched from the county jail
Prosecutors said Vann used Snapchat in 2024 to manipulate an 11-year-old girl in Altamonte Springs into meeting him for sex, and he recorded the encounter on a phone. After his arrest in 2025, he plotted from the Seminole County jail to derail the case by hiring a hitman to kill the girl, the prosecutor and the detective.
Vann asked a fellow inmate to arrange the killings through someone outside the jail. He offered a BMW he owned as payment. According to an investigative report, Vann’s written directions called for the detective to be killed with a pipe bomb strapped to a remote-controlled car.
The hitman Vann thought he had hired was an undercover deputy with the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office. A confidential informant had tipped off the agency.
What the jury saw
Evidence at the solicitation trial included Vann’s communications with the would-be hitman. That included recorded jail phone calls and letters and emails written in code. Prosecutors pointed to the sexual battery case as his motive.
Vann’s sexual battery trial went ahead as scheduled. Prosecutors used the murder solicitation there as evidence of his consciousness of guilt. In June, a jury convicted him of two counts of capital sexual battery on a child younger than 12, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison.
The case drew attention in the Casselberry area and across Seminole County after Vann’s earlier life sentence for sexually battering the girl and trying to have her killed.