In this week's print edition -- and in a story posted online today -- New Times staff writer Paul Rubin has an exclusive interview with Sue Krentz, who was widowed when her husband, Rob, was shot on the family's ranch near the U.S./Mexico border in March.
Krentz's murder, which is still unsolved, is believed to be the work of a drug-running Mexican national. It turned the old-school cowboy into martyr -- and put Cochise County at the center of a national debate about immigration.
But Sue Krentz, his wife of 32 years, has kept her silence until now. Other than a brief interview with Tucson's Channel 4, she's ducked the media.
In Rubin's cover story, "Cowboy Down," Sue Krentz tells of getting the call that her husband was missing (she was in Phoenix at the time) and the subsequent fallout.
As Rubin writes,
Sue's life has been out of whack since Rob's death, and she says she hungers to find "a new normal."
But she knows that the life she knew and loved is gone, stolen from her in a moment by a murderer's bullet.
"One bad decision killed one person and impacted a lot of people for the rest of their lives," she says. "I'm a widow now -- just like that. Think about it: My mom is 87 and my dad is 89, so I'm going to live 50 years or something like that by myself."
Rubin has been with New Times for decades, but before coming here, he was reporter at the Sierra Vista Herald/Bisbee Daily Review for four years, where he got to know many of the players in the Krentz saga.
His first story about this topic, "Badlands," focused on the fallout from Krentz's murder and the media circus in Cochise County. It's online here.
