Journalist Jeff German was stabbed to death. Las Vegas watches as the accused politician goes on trial

Jeff German was a doggedly old-school investigative reporter in Las Vegas who didn’t care what mobsters or tainted politicians he offended. After more than 40 years on the job, he had received so many threats and angry phone messages he stopped paying attention to them.

“I get that stuff all the time. It’s not a big deal,” he told his editor at the Las Vegas Review Journal.

It was the summer of 2022, and the editor, Rhonda Prast, had seen threatening texts and social media messages from a local politician who German had been writing about and considered reporting them to upper management.

German saw no particular reason to fear the politician, a short, bullet-headed lawyer named Robert Telles who headed an office that settles the estates of county residents who die without a will. At the time, he had two much more chilling messages on his voicemail from hard, angry men calling him every name in the book and threatening to come after him.

Even those didn’t bother him. Earlier in his career, German had stared down Tony Spilotro, a notorious, cold-eyed mafioso who was memorably portrayed by Joe Pesci in the Martin Scorsese movie Casino, and came away unscathed. Prast, too, did not think Telles meant her reporter physical harm. “I thought he was going to sue us,” she said.

Related: Jury hears case against ex-politician accused of killing Las Vegas reporter

Yet, as a murder trial now underway in Las Vegas has revealed, there may have been more to Telles than met the eye. 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.

German, who was 69, was left to die in a row of bushes along the side of his house. It was 24 hours before neighbours, alarmed by the fact that he’d left his garage door open and was not responding to messages, walked around his house and discovered the body.

Once police arrived, however, it took just four days to gather enough evidence to arrest Telles. Security video footage gathered between Telles’s house and German’s showed a maroon GMC Yukon Denali travelling between the two and a man dressed improbably in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a reflective orange jacket walking to and from German’s house with a grey bag slung over his shoulder.

In their opening statement, prosecutors invited jurors to linger, twice, over footage showing German walking over to the side of the house where his assailant lay in wait, tussling with someone in the greenery and the orange-jacketed assailant re-emerging and walking away with an eerie calm.

The day after the murder, Telles was found washing an identical Yukon Denali in his driveway. When police searched his house, they found a wide-brimmed straw hat matching the one in video footage that had been cut into pieces and stuffed into a shopping bag. They also found a pair of shoes matching the killer’s shoved under a sofa. One of the shoes had been cut up, much like the hat, and the pieces stuffed into a baggie.

Telles had a nasty cut on one of his fingers, and when police took a sample of his DNA they found it was a match for tissue found beneath one of German’s fingernails, prosecutors said. When investigators examined Telles’s phone, they found he had searched for German’s house on Google Maps shortly before the murder.

There were other puzzling details suggesting this was hardly a professional hit job. The man in the hat and orange jacket walked aimlessly up and down the streets around German’s house before the crime, perhaps in the mistaken belief that this might confuse eyewitnesses. After the murder, he returned to his car on a neighbouring street, only to return to the scene of the crime shortly afterwards – to check that German was dead, perhaps, or to retrieve something he might have dropped. Committing the crime during daylight hours made it almost ridiculously easy to track his movements via home video security systems.

The district attorney’s office has described the evidence against Telles as “overwhelming”, a characterisation Telles and his legal team hotly dispute. Indeed, Telles’s lawyer, Robert Draskovich, waved away much of the evidence against his client in his own opening statement, saying Telles was the victim of a political witch- hunt and that the only rational explanation for cutting up the hat and shoes was that this made it easier for the police to “conceal and plant” them in Telles’s house.

Draskovich portrayed his client as an anti-corruption crusader determined to push back against the “old guard” at the public administrator’s office, which he said cut sweetheart deals with a local real estate agency to make money off the houses it handled. He described Telles as “blowing the whistle”, even though Telles was the elected leader of the office whereas whistleblowers are typically subordinates who witness wrongdoing by their superiors.

But it was precisely such whistleblowers who became German’s sources inside the office. Four of the women he interviewed 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.

Two months after German’s death, his colleagues at the Review Journal retrieved his notes and contacted his sources and fleshed out a long story about Telles, tracing allegations of anger and sexual misconduct back to his days as a law student in Las Vegas. One notable episode that came to light was an arrest for domestic violence in 2020, after his wife made an emergency call complaining that he had drunk too much and was “ going crazy ”.

Part of the investigative team’s goal was to pay homage to their fallen colleague in the language he understood best: old-fashioned, muck-raking journalism. “All we did after Jeff was killed was work on the investigation and deal with our trauma and grief,” Prast said.

In a precarious news business, however, in which investigations are expensive and newsroom budgets strapped, the Review-Journal has gone through two years of upheaval, leaving only one of German’s colleagues still at the paper.

Prast has moved the furthest afield, to a newspaper in Bellingham, Washington. She said she was following the trial carefully and planned to fly back to Las Vegas to attend in person. “We still feel his absence two years later,” she said of German. “I still dream about him at night. I have his picture on his desk. I hope that what people remember is not Robert Telles and what a terrible person he is, but Jeff the first-class human being and journalist, working to change people’s lives for the better.”