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

Despite all that, Ortloff certainly fit as a solid suspect.

But there were others, including Rick Schibler, who then was (and still is) the Subway chain's development agent for Arizona.

Then 39, Schibler had opened the state's first two Subway franchises in 1982 — one on 10th Street and Mill Avenue and the other at 48th Street and Southern, next to Fiesta Flowers.

Shortly before she was murdered, a fuming Kathleen Smith told her mother that she was thinking about contacting Subway's home offices in Connecticut after learning that Schibler had "stolen" her preferred franchise site for one of his family members.

One reason for her anger was that the replacement site Schibler had identified for her and Ortloff's proposed franchise already had been a financial disaster, with no end in sight to the troubles.

Schibler's alleged breach of ethics (which he denied in an interview with Ortloff's attorney last October) might not have sat kindly with the bosses of a company then on the cusp of making a major move in Arizona's fast-food market.

Also to be considered is the personal relationship that Kathleen and Schibler had developed before her death.

How personal remains unclear, and Schibler has denied any romantic entanglements with her, but one of Kathleen's best friends said in 1985 that Schibler definitely had designs on Kathleen.

A private investigator asked a former roommate of Kathleen's in 1985 whether Schibler ever had spent the night at the condo with the young woman.

"I think he did, but I'm not sure," the roommate answered.

Schibler's account of what happened to him during the critical morning hours of October 5, 1984, and what he told police afterward also raises serious questions:

Schibler has said that he sustained a gash to his left ring finger at his Subway shop sometime after 10 a.m. that day and necessitated a trip to a hospital for 12 stitches. But corroboration of how he injured himself and what he did immediately thereafter is shaky.

Just as disturbing is what Rick Schibler said to detectives when they interviewed him a few days after the murder. Tempe detective Gary Lindberg referred to those unrecorded statements in a second session a week later.

"You asked me if I thought she had suffered," Lindberg told Schibler. "I told you we couldn't go into specifics.

"You made a comment that you didn't understand why somebody would hit her on top of the head and then burn her place. Was that from you, were you drawing a conclusion from all your conversation with other people, or what?"

Schibler fumbled his way through his response: "No, that was just, yeah, that, well, that, no, I don't know that was that. It was just more of a generalization, you know . . . Okay? You know, knock her out, you know, get her, and burn her place as opposed to a specific way that it happened, whatever it was . . . But I don't recall anybody ever saying to me that she was hit over the head. It was a general comment."

Even the Smith family hadn't yet been told about the exact circumstances of Kathleen's death, other than the obvious, that she'd been badly burned in the fire.

Rick Schibler declined to speak with New Times, writing in response to a request for an interview, "I'm not interested in revisiting this story. I'm confident Mr. Ortloff will get his due."

Schibler's attorney, Greg Clark, failed to respond to a phone call and an e-mail from New Times seeking comment.

For the record, Schibler has always denied wrongdoing in the Kathleen Smith murder case.

Tempe detectives never showed a photo of Schibler to eyewitnesses Lisa Pickett and Ina Weisbaum, even though the two had described a blond-haired man, which Schibler was at the time.

According to a police report, Pickett did pick Robert Ortloff and an unidentified man out of a six-man photo lineup as most resembling the guy she'd seen running from Unit 110. But Pickett also told police that she hadn't gotten a real good look at the man and wasn't at all sure that she was right.

Ortloff didn't fit the description that the pair first gave police. He wore a dark mustache at the time and had black hair.

Detectives also showed Ina Weisbaum the same photo lineup, but the grandmother was adamant that none of the subjects resembled the man who had barreled past her.

Notably, Tempe police never filed a report about Mrs. Weisbaum's non-identification of Ortloff.

That she even had been shown a lineup only came to light when an investigator who worked for Kathleen Smith's father turned over his notes and tapes to prosecutors after Ortloff's murder indictment in 2003.

Kathleen Smith was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1964, the youngest of David and Carol Smith's three children (the couple had twin boys). The Smiths moved back to the Valley about six weeks after her birth.

David Smith's father-in-law introduced him to the waste-management business, and Smith later opened his own very lucrative companies.

Carol Smith immersed herself in community activities after the couple returned to the Valley. Kathleen's mother, who died last summer, served several terms on the Tempe City Council in the 1980s and '90s.

In the 1960s, Carol met Claire Ortloff, a New York native and mother of six who was married to an aerospace chemist, William.

Robert was the Ortloffs' second child, and he was about four years older than Kathleen.

The two families socialized together, and Kathleen and Robert's sister, Mary, became best friends.