Twenty-three years after Kathleen Smith's storied Tempe murder, a footprint will loom large in her alleged killer's upcoming trial

Lisa lived in Unit 111, in the southeast section of the SceneOne Condominiums, a few minutes west of the Arizona State University campus.

She was just inside the condo when her grandmother came in to report that she'd heard an odd noise and suspected the cats were fighting.

The two went back out to see what was up.

"I heard something like a slamming of the door," she said later. "I turned around and I saw this man coming out of Kathleen's apartment."

Kathleen was Kathleen Marie Smith, a 20-year-old who lived alone in Unit 110, about 20 feet around a corner.

Lisa Pickett hadn't actually seen the man close Kathleen's door, but he had come toward her and her grandmother directly from the area of 110.

"He saw me, and all of a sudden he just took off running from her door around in front of my apartment on the sidewalk," Lisa said. "My grandmother was in this little pathway between the two apartments, and he had almost practically knocked her over because he stepped in the flowerbed."

Lisa and her grandmother described the man as blond-haired, fair-skinned and wearing red shorts, a white T-shirt, and sneakers.

The guy had seemed familiar to Lisa. "But it was not a face who was around a lot," she said. The man didn't have facial hair, she said, a noteworthy observation in light of what followed.

Ina Weisbaum told a private investigator in 1985, "He was just a madman, boy. I've never seen anybody move so fast in all my life."

She made another point that would come into play more than two decades later, long after her death in 1994: "His foot was in the mud here and I thought, 'Oh, my God, what big feet.' That was what come into my mind."

Right after the man vanished into the 120-unit complex, Lisa and her grandma became distracted by the sight and smell of black smoke seeping out of Kathleen's front door — the only way in and out of Unit 110.

Lisa tried to open the door, but it was locked.

Other neighbors had rushed over when two engine companies from the Tempe Fire Department reached the scene at 10:42 a.m.

Firefighters broke down the door and entered the burning condo. They quelled the fire within minutes, but the thick smoke didn't allow them to immediately see a body on a floor near the laundry room.

Then they did. Two firefighters carried the obviously dead victim outside to a sidewalk. It was a young woman whose face had been burned beyond recognition.

Eerily, though, a gold necklace with a pendant that said "Spoil Me" had remained intact around her charred neck.

The firefighters found her face-up, and her back seemed mostly unscathed by the flames and intense heat. The victim also had a deep, fresh wound to the back of her head, as if someone had bludgeoned her.

Tempe fire investigator Al Haeberle entered the smoldering condo. He saw the body of a small, gray cat that had died on the dining room floor, apparently of smoke inhalation. A parrot also was dead, at the bottom of its cage.

The investigator also found a burned Clorox bottle in the laundry room that smelled strongly of gasoline.

As for the fleeing man's "big foot," Lisa Pickett and her grandmother directed authorities to his footprint, saying they saw him make it in the wet flowerbed. It was if he'd stuck his hand into a freshly poured sidewalk at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

Though police generally find eyewitness testimony flawed, that kind of identification seemed different.

A crime-scene technician placed a ruler next to the pristine print and took black-and-white photographs.

Now, 23 years after Kathleen's murder — one of the highest-profile crimes in Tempe history — that footprint will loom large at the trial of her alleged killer, 47-year-old Robert Ortloff.

Trial testimony is scheduled to start February 13 in Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Warren Granville's courtroom.

As Robert Ortloff's trial gets started, nagging mysteries and contradictions about him and his murder case remain. Some things can be sorted out; some cannot.

Veteran Deputy County Attorney Noel Levy will have the task of trying to prove to a jury that Ortloff is guilty of first-degree murder, arson, and burglary.

Levy may be right when he claims that Ortloff is an evildoer who deserves to spend the rest of his days behind bars (prosecutors decided to drop the death penalty last year after originally filing the case as a capital crime).

But reasonable doubt blankets this case as densely as the terrible smoke that enveloped Kathleen Smith's condo so long ago.

For starters, there's the footprint in the flowerbed that police long believed was made by Kathleen's killer.

"There was reason to believe that the assailant left a footprint in the muddy flowerbed outside Lisa Pickett's apartment?" Ortloff's attorney, assistant public defender Dan Patterson, asked original Tempe case agent Hal McCormick last year.

"Yes," the retired detective said.

The long-held police theory got an ostensible boost in October 1999 by a federal prison snitch named Fred Tokars, whose essential role as the murder trial progresses is a huge part of this story.

Tokars told a Tempe detective what Ortloff (who was serving time for a different crime at the same federal prison unit as Tokars) allegedly had confessed to him some months earlier:

"Someone saw him leaving, and they — I mean it sounds sort of silly — but they even described his big feet. 'Cuz he does have enormously large feet. I mean, like, 13s or 14s."

That was what Ina Weisbaum had said years earlier, which excited authorities.

In January 2006, Dr. John DiMaggio, a "forensic podiatrist" hired by the prosecution, took measurements of Robert Ortloff's feet at the Maricopa County Jail by court order.

DiMaggio reported that Ortloff's shoe size is 12 1/2 to 13, which certainly qualifies as big.

But, after analysis of the photograph in the flowerbed, the podiatrist concluded that the footprint had been made by size-9 1/2 Nike sneaker, maybe a 10.

That dealt a huge blow to the prosecution's case because it doesn't take an expert to explain what that means — it's not Ortloff's print.

"If the size estimate is correct," DiMaggio wrote, "[Ortloff] could not have worn the shoe that made that scene shoe impression."

O.J. Simpson's defense attorney , the late Johnnie Cochran, might have put it like this: "If the shoe don't fit . . . you must acquit."

The reason the County Attorney's Office finally filed murder charges against Ortloff in 2003 was Tokars, a former Atlanta prosecutor turned murderer, money launderer, and drug trafficker.

Ortloff is serving a 50-year sentence on a 1986 conviction of mailing a homemade bomb from Tempe to a soldier at Fort Hood in Texas. It detonated, but the victim escaped serious injury.

That case, too, bursts with intrigue and controversy, and includes a notorious scandal inside the FBI's laboratory that may have affected the outcome.

Ortloff's conviction in his retrial (his first trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict — it was 10-2 for acquittal) also pivoted on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch.

Can one fellow wrongfully be accused of not one, but two serious crimes in a single lifetime?

No one would put money on that one.

But, surprisingly, it's within the realm of possibility in this sprawling legal epic.

"Weird things do happen in the justice system, believe me," Ortloff wrote to New Times in 2004, in one of hundreds of letters he's sent to the paper. "My legal situation qualifies as one of the weirdest."

It's tough to argue with him.

Tokars told authorities that Ortloff sought his legal help in continuing to appeal the 1986 mail-bomb conviction — about which Ortloff maintained his innocence throughout their short relationship.

But Tokars has claimed that Ortloff — an adept jailhouse lawyer himself — did come clean with him about killing Kathleen Smith.

"At the end, he was almost like a sniveling little crybaby, begging for my help," Tokars told a Tempe detective in October 1999.

"But for Frederic Tokars, this case would not now be filed," prosecutor Noel Levy wrote to federal authorities in 2002, in trying to expedite Tokars' transfer into the federal witness-protection program.

"Without Frederic Tokars, the state will not have the sole critical 'ear' witness definitively connecting Robert Ortloff as the murderer of Kathleen Smith."

The feds did place Fred Tokars into witness-protection, because of his "cooperation" both in the Ortloff case and in an Iowa murder case. The circumstances of his incarceration — or even whether he is locked up somewhere — remain a closely guarded secret, as his name does not turn up on a Bureau of Prisons "inmate locator."