An elected official in Las Vegas blamed his 2022 primary defeat on negative stories in the local newspaper. Now a jury has found him guilty of murdering the journalist who wrote them.
Two years ago, Las Vegas was shocked by the savage stabbing of one of the city’s best-known journalists, Jeff German. That shock was compounded when police arrested an elected county official. Now a jury has found that former official, Robert Telles, guilty of first-degree murder.
At the time, Telles was the Clark County Public Administator, whose office oversees the disposition and transfer of deceased people’s assets in the absence of next of kin or a valid executor. But he lost his bid for re-election in the Democratic primary in June of 2022, after the Las Vegas Review-Journal published critical articles about him. The articles reported he’d had a romantic relationship with a subordinate, and had created a « hostile » work environment.
German, the veteran investigative reporter behind those stories, continued to request public documents from Telles’ office even after his primary election defeat, and prosecutors say that’s when Telles resolved to kill German.
« 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 that he didn’t want the public to know », Deputy District Attorney Christopher Hamner said in court.
