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Robert Telles, a former Nevada politician, has been found guilty of murdering a Las Vegas reporter who wrote stories that were critical of him.
Telles, the former Clark County public administrator, pleaded not guilty to the September 2022 killing of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German. The 47-year-old now faces life in prison. The sentencing phase of his trial will begin on Wednesday afternoon, CNN reports.
Telles’s trial began on August 14, nearly two years after German was stabbed to death in the yard of his Las Vegas home.
During the trial, prosecutors said the 69-year-old wrote articles critical of Telles and the Clark County office, alleging Telles had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate employee. Prosecutors argued those critical stories destroyed Telles’ career and were a clear motive for German’s murder.
The prosecution also played security footage from German’s neighbors of a man in a straw hat and orange vest on their street. This individual also drove a red SUV, which the prosecution said belonged to Telles.
They argued Telles wore this disguise and hid outside German’s home to kill him.
“He murdered him because Jeff’s writing destroyed his career, it destroyed his reputation, it threatened probably his marriage and exposed things that even he admitted he did not want the public to know,” prosecutor Christopher Hamner said on Monday, just before the jury went into deliberations, according to CNN. “He did it because Jeff wasn’t done writing.”
Prosecutors also told the jury that officers found a large hat and cut-up Nike shoes — the same ones shown in the security footage — while searching Telles’s house. Analysts discovered that DNA taken from underneath German’s fingernails matched Telles’s.
Telles, who testified in his own defense, argued he was framed for the murder after trying to end corruption in his office and that law enforcement did not properly handle the investigation.
“I want to say, unequivocally, I am innocent, I didn’t kill Mr. German,” he testified.
“It’d be quite a coincidence, the fact that Mr. German was killed and it was put on me, that they just had a serendipitous benefit from that,” Telles continued. “It’s done. No repercussions, no nothing.”
The former elected official told the jury that the police, the DNA lab, his colleagues at the county and a real estate company all conspired to kill German and frame him. Hamner dismissed these claims in closing arguments.
“What it does give you a window into is what’s in his mind,” Hamner said of Telles’s defense. That is how important Mr. Telles views himself. That every single one of these people, these entities, were literally willing to kill another human being — who is not him — just to frame him.”
“Does that make sense? And more importantly, where is the evidence to support that?”
