Bombshell: The explosive backstory in the Robert Ortloff murder trial may be more fascinating than the case itself

In Part One of this series last week, Paul Rubin described how Tempe police focused on two suspects in the aftermath of the murder of 20-year-old Kathleen Smith inside her condominium on October 5, 1984 ("If the Shoe Don't Fit . . . You Must Acquit").

One of the suspects was a restaurant executive with whom Smith had both a business and personal relationship, though it remains unclear how personal it ever was. The other suspect — who quickly became the prime suspect — was Robert Ortloff, then 24 and the manager of his parents' flower store at 48th Street and Southern Avenue.

Ortloff and Smith had recently entered into a business partnership, with designs on opening one of the first Subway restaurant franchises in Arizona. But financial troubles plagued the project from early on, and were exacerbated shortly before Kathleen's murder when Ortloff withdrew $7,500 from the pair's business account (with or without her knowledge, depending on whom you ask) to repay money he'd recently stolen from his paternal grandfather.

Less than a week later, Smith was bludgeoned with a blunt object inside her condo, Unit 110. Her killer then poured gasoline on and around her body, ignited it and fled, shortly before the residence burst into flames. Two eyewitnesses saw the man police believe was the killer moments after he left Unit 110. The pair — a woman and her 14-year-old granddaughter — showed authorities a pristine footprint that the fleeing man had left in a wet flowerbed just a few yards from the front door of Unit 110.

In conclusion, Part One revealed that Ortloff wears a size-13 shoe, but the print in the flowerbed was a 9 1/2 or 10.

This week, Part Two describes how Ortloff found himself sentenced to 50 years in prison in 1986 for another crime, and how infamous Georgia criminal Fred Tokars came forward in 1999, claiming that Ortloff had confessed to him about killing Kathleen Smith.

Rubin contacted Robert Ortloff by mail shortly after a Maricopa County grand jury indicted the former Tempe resident for first-degree murder in May 2003. Ortloff responded with the first of literally hundreds of letters — most of them pages long — about the various permutations of his legal saga, now almost a quarter-century old.

Before writing this two-part story about Ortloff and the Kathleen Smith murder case, Rubin reviewed thousands of pages of court files, police reports generated by several agencies, documents obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act and other materials. He read the entire transcripts of Ortloff's two Texas trials on the Fort Hood mail-bombing case that is a centerpiece of Part Two, as well as transcripts of testimonies given by Fred Tokars at one of his own criminal trials in Georgia and as a government witness in an Iowa murder case in 2004.

Testimony in Ortloff's murder trial was expected to start on Thursday, February 14, in Maricopa County Superior Court.

Guilty or innocent, Ortloff himself put it best in a letter to Rubin.

"If you analyze everything about my cases, and I mean everything, you'll have yourself one amazing story, whether you end up liking me or not."

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Thad Gulczynski, a 20-year-old soldier from Mesa, walked from his barracks to fetch his mail.

It was a Saturday morning — January 11, 1986 — at Fort Hood, Texas.

Gulczynski was known as "Rambo" to his friends. But he didn't seem like such a tough guy to Anna Carpenter, who was working at Fiesta Flowers, a Tempe store managed by Robert Ortloff.

Carpenter had been dating Ortloff as well as working for him, but she had taken a fancy to Gulczynski during the soldier's recent Christmas leave back home.

Carpenter later would say she'd told Ortloff around New Year's Day that she wanted to slow down her relationship with him.

Then she had put together a care package for Gulczynski at Fiesta Flowers that included a bottle of rum, a teddy bear, and three letters. Carpenter stuffed the box with newspaper and other wrapping material from the flower shop, and sent it via UPS from Mesa.

A second package also awaited Specialist Gulczynski that morning at the mail pickup. It was a cardboard box addressed to him in handwritten block lettering. The return address on the box was Gulczynski's.

He returned to his room with both boxes, sat on his bed, and opened the second one first.

It exploded, as two pipe bombs inside propelled hundreds of nails in every direction. Some stuck in Gulczynski's legs, and he suffered cuts and minor burns but somehow escaped serious or permanent injury.

Other soldiers came to his aid, soon followed by military police and agents from the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID).

As medical personnel attended to the injured soldier, CID agents blew up the second package — the one from Carpenter — inside a shower stall at a nearby latrine in the event that it, too, contained a bomb.

Crime-scene techs put the debris from each exploded package into a separate container, as FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors assumed control of the case.

Within a few days, they sent the evidence to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Gulczynski said he didn't know who would have tried to blow him up.

But he did mention the name Robert Ortloff, who apparently had expressed dismay to Anna Carpenter over the soldier's budding romance with the young woman.

Gulczynski said he'd met Ortloff only once, an uneventful and brief contact a few weeks earlier in Mesa.

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Tempe police knew very well who Ortloff was. Though the case officially remained unsolved, detectives were convinced that Ortloff had bludgeoned 20-year-old Kathleen Smith and then lit her on fire at her West University Drive condo on October 5, 1984 ("If the Shoe Don't Fit . . . You Must Acquit," Paul Rubin, February 7).

That wasn't the only reason to question Ortloff on the mail-bombing.

The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had assisted the Tempe cops in investigating the January 1985 case of an unexploded homemade bomb at a Subway on Tenth Street and Mill Avenue. That restaurant was owned by Rick Schibler, with whom Ortloff had a contentious relationship.

But prosecutors had been unwilling to go forward because of the lack of evidence against Ortloff in both the murder and Subway cases.

On January 12, 1986, FBI agents interviewed Ortloff in Tempe. He denied having had anything to do with the Fort Hood mail-bombing.

The feds already had learned that someone had mailed the bomb to Texas from a post office about six miles east of Ortloff's flower shop, located at 48th Street and Southern Avenue.

A postal clerk recalled the transaction, but what she told the agents about the sender, and the fact that they'd even interviewed her, remained under wraps for years.

As the FBI analyzed the evidence from Fort Hood, the world mourned when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean on January 28, 1986, killing all seven onboard.

Three days later, an FBI fingerprint examiner concluded that one of Ortloff's fingerprints and a palm print had been on debris collected from Gul­czynski's room after the explosion.

The FBI arrested Robert Ortloff at his flower shop on January 31, 1986.

A federal magistrate ordered him held without bond, and he was extradited to Texas to face attempted murder and other charges.

During their search of Ortloff's home, the feds located a document that excited the Tempe cops when they learned of it. It was a checkbook for ROKS Incorporated, the partnership that Ortloff and Kathleen Smith had formed in early 1984 to open a Subway franchise.

Smith had lost a ROKS checkbook just before her murder, and police long had speculated Ortloff had stolen it to repay $7,500 that he'd embezzled from his grandfather.

A Tempe lieutenant told reporters that an indictment in Smith's murder finally might be at hand.

But the local cops learned it wasn't the missing checkbook after all but a new checkbook Ortloff had ordered after Smith's death.

The Smith case returned to the back burner.

The mail-bombing was another story.

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Robert Ortloff's family hired two well-known Waco lawyers to represent him.

The fingerprint and palm print seemed damning, and an FBI agent also was prepared to testify that tool marks lifted from wires on the bomb matched up with pliers confiscated from Ortloff's home.

The trial began in June 1986.

Members of Kathleen Smith's family attended every day, as did Robert Ortloff's parents.

Prosecutors claimed that Ortloff's motive had been jealousy, pure and simple.

But Anna Carpenter testified that it hadn't been that serious between her and Ortloff, which didn't bolster the government's theory.

An important witness for the prosecution was FBI explosives expert James "Tom" Thurman, a soft-spoken Kentuckian with a résumé that already included an investigation of the 1983 suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Later, Thurman would be a key investigator in the deadly bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the crashes of TWA Flight 800 and Pan Am Flight 103, and many other cases.