A jury in Nevada has found a Democratic former local Las Vegas-area politician guilty of murder in the killing of Jeff German, an investigative journalist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal who wrote articles critical of his conduct in elected office.
The jury later sentenced Robert Telles, 47, to life in prison with eligibility for parole after 20 years. Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty; Telles had also faced the possibility of life in prison without parole, or a lesser penalty of 20 to 50 years in prison.
Telles hung his head, shaking it slightly from side to side as the guilty verdict was read earlier on Wednesday in Clark county district court. Jurors had deliberated for nearly 12 hours after hearing eight days of evidence in his trial, which began on 12 August.
“Robert Telles could have joined the long line of publicly shamed Nevada politicians who’ve gone on with their lives, out of the spotlight or back in it. Instead, he carried out a premeditated revenge killing with terrifying savagery,” Glenn Cook, the executive editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, said in a statement shortly after the guilty verdict.
“Today also brought a measure of justice for slain journalists all over the world,” Cook added. “Our jobs are increasingly risky and sometimes dangerous. In many countries, the killers of journalists go unpunished. Not so in Las Vegas.”
Telles had been jailed without bail since his arrest several days after German was found slashed and stabbed to death in a side yard of his home on Labor Day weekend 2022.
German was an old-school investigative reporter, accustomed to digging into accounts of misconduct by elected officials and dealing with the blowback. After 40 years on the job, his editor said, German wasn’t much concerned with the threatening messages he started receiving from Telles, a local Democratic official who headed an office that settles the estates of county residents who die without a will.
According to the prosecution, Telles became so exasperated with the stories German was writing about him – stories depicting him as a nightmare boss who harassed and bullied his staff and conducted an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate – that he drove to German’s house on 2 September 2022, and stabbed him to death in broad daylight after learning that his electronic communications with the subordinate were about to be made public.
Telles lost his primary for a second elected term after German’s stories appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in May and June 2022.
“Jeff was killed for doing the kind of work in which he took great pride: his reporting held an elected official accountable for bad behavior and empowered voters to choose someone else for the job,” Cook said.
Staff at the Las Vegas Review-Journal watched the verdict via live stream from their newsroom, the paper reported, with some wiping tears from their eyes as the guilty verdict was announced.
“Let’s also remember that this community has lost much more than a trusted journalist. Jeff was a good man who left behind a family who loved him and friends who cherished him. His murder remains an outrage. He is missed,” Cook said in the statement.
Four of the women German had interviewed for his reporting on Telles later went public and filed a lawsuit against Telles and the county, in which they described a workplace where employees were forbidden to talk to each other, the boss made sexual advances to several women and imposed punitive restrictions on those who resisted.
One plaintiff, Jessica Coleman, alleged that Telles told her “she would die alone, and no one would find her for a long time”. She became so frightened, she said, that she contemplated hanging herself in the office to force the county to mount an investigation. Telles has moved to have the suit dismissed, saying it is full of lies.
Coleman, who attended the trial, sobbed as she exited the courtroom after the guilty verdict was read. “Finally. Finally,” she said. “Finally the system is working.”
Telles had maintained his innocence, and chose to testify at the trial, saying that he was being victimized by a political and social “old guard” real estate network for trying to fight corruption that he saw in his office.
“I am not the kind of person who would stab someone. I didn’t kill Mr German,” he testified. “And that’s my testimony.”
Telles’s accusation that he was framed for the murder by a broad conspiracy of officials and a local real estate company was called “unconscionable and irresponsible”, by the company, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
From the prosecution, the jury heard that Telles’s DNA was found beneath German’s fingernails. Telles had family ties to a maroon SUV seen in German’s neighborhood at about the time German was killed. Police found on Telles’s cellphone and computer hundreds of photos of German’s home, and several pages of German’s identity records, including timestamps showing they had been collected just weeks before the killing.
Surveillance video, shown in court last week, captured a person in a wide-brimmed straw hat and an orange oversized long-sleeve shirt and carrying a large cloth satchel slipping into a side yard of German’s home. Later, at Telles’s house, police found cut-up pieces of a broad straw hat and gray athletic shoes that resembled those worn by the person in the footage.
German was the only journalist killed in the US in 2022, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. The non-profit has records of 17 media workers killed in the US since 1992.
The Associated Press contributed reporting