Prosecutor Noel Levy expressed a quiet confidence in the outcome moments before the jury returned its guilty verdicts in the quarter-century-old Kathleen Marie Smith murder case. “I think we proved that [defendant Robert Ortloff] did exactly what we charged him with, even though this wasn’t an easy one by any…
The preppy blond guy whose career highlights in the NBA and for the Arizona Wildcats equal basketball legend is relaxing at a Phoenix sports bar. A deadly sharpshooter in such basketball-centric burgs as Chicago, San Antonio, and Tucson — Steve Kerr is now the general manager and president of basketball…
• Six straight first-half three-pointers as UA routed ASU in 1988. • A series-winning shot with Michael Jordan’s Bulls in game 6 of the ’97 NBA Finals. • Four three-pointers during the Spurs’ comeback defeat of Dallas in game 6 the ’03 Western Conference championship. • Signing Shaquille O’Neal to…
By Paul Rubin New Times did a lot of reporting last year about stun guns, of which Scottsdale-based Taser International is by far the world’s largest manufacturer. We studied endless scientific reports, police records and took training classes with the Phoenix cops (for the record, only idiots elect to be…
By Paul Rubin Minutes after a jury convicted Robert Stanley Ortloff of murdering 20-year-old Kathleen Smith back in October 1984, one of her brothers summed it all up perectly. “I felt it could go either way because of all the time that had passed and because there wasn’t the physical…
Robert Ortloff By Paul Rubin After hearing two months of occasionally riveting testimony, the jury in the Robert Ortloff murder case finally will begin its deliberations tomorrow morning. Just got back from the closing arguments, which took up the better part of the day in the courtroom of Judge Warren…
After almost 23 years of inflicting journalism at this rag (I mean, this august publication) and still having a blast, blogging could be a bit of a hoot, no?
On May 2, 2005, a prosecutor and an investigator at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office asked senior staffers to review a potentially landmark criminal case against a local journalist. Phil MacDonnell, second-in-command to County Attorney Andrew Thomas (who had assumed office five months earlier), gave the okay for the agency’s…
Lisa Pickett Steedman, a key witness in Robert Ortloff’s murder trial, had just torpedoed the defense with startling courtroom testimony that contradicted everything she’d told authorities since 1984. As she left the stand at the county courthouse in downtown Phoenix on Thursday, March 6, one of Tempe homicide victim Kathleen…
Michael Carbajal, Phoenix’s greatest boxing champion, sat on his front porch on East Fillmore Street, watching the world go by. He looked healthier and sounded better than he has in years. Though his battle with alcoholism has been no secret, the champ, now 40, says he’s been off the sauce…
Amy Natzel took the witness stand February 7, a few minutes after a Maricopa County jury had convicted her estranged husband, Eric, of physically abusing their daughter, Abigail Rose. The jury already had heard from Amy at the trial concerning 2-year-old Abbey’s death in August 2005. Now, during the so-called…
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…
On the morning of October 5, 1984, Lisa Pickett, 14, let her three cats outside of her mother’s condo on West University Drive in Tempe, east of Hardy. Lisa’s maternal grandmother, retired nurse Ina Weisbaum, had been staying there, and the pair liked to keep an eye on the pets…
Maricopa County law enforcement violated the constitutional rights of this newspaper and its readers in October, going so far as to subpoena the identities of anyone who’d looked at New Times online in the past four years. When the paper’s leaders revealed the apparent grand jury probe on our cover,…
Ruth McGregor, chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, says politicians and special interest groups are attacking the independence of the judiciary like never before. “What just happened with those judges in Pakistan may seem distant from our experience,” she tells New Times, “but it speaks to what a free…
Michael Carbajal faced a crowd of about 3,000 on a chilly afternoon in the village of Canastota, New York. It was June 2006, and Arizona’s best-ever pugilist was about to be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Never much of a talker, Michael spent most of his short…
It was the eve of the new millennium at Joe and Maxine Zawinul’s beautiful place in lower Manhattan. The music of Marvin Gaye filled the home — “What’s Going On,” as I recall. Zawinul had invited me to a small family celebration, and all my other plans for the big…
It came as little surprise to most people in the know that Buckeye Police Chief Dan Saban lost his recent defamation trial against Sheriff Joe Arpaio and company. That’s not to say that Saban didn’t have legitimate gripes with how key members of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had worked…
For Wesley Smith, author of Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder, the circumstances surrounding the death of Jana Van Voorhis provide a chilling example of a movement running amuck. “This is the secret that a lot of media has not reported much on,” says Smith,…
Last spring, family and friends gathered at a service for Jana Van Voorhis, a 58-year-old Phoenix woman who recently had died at her home. The memorial took place outside at the Greenwood Memory Lawn and Mortuary on West Van Buren, where Jana’s mother, Mary Jane, had been laid to rest…
A curious moment occurred inside Maricopa County Judge Andrew Klein’s courtroom on July 25. Danny Carbajal, the older brother and former trainer/manager of retired local boxing great Michael Carbajal, was about to plead guilty to three counts of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in property and retirement accounts from…
Second of two parts Just before midnight on May 3, 2005, the life of 24-year-old Keith Graff was about to come to a violent end on the third-floor landing of his north Phoenix apartment. During his Army days a few years earlier, the spirited Graff had been known to pals…
