About two years ago, the Arizona Department of Public Safety investigated whether one of its officers had a photo on his computer that depicted a sexual assault in his house — by a bulldog.
The alleged incident, much talked about among DPS employees and investigators, is said to have occurred at a party thrown in 2004 or 2005 by former DPS pilot Geoff Jacobs.
Story goes: A woman in a miniskirt passes out at the officer's house after somebody slips her roofies. Guests are drinking. Somebody notices she doesn't have panties on and smears her nether regions with peanut butter. Porter, one of Jacobs' two English bulldogs (he farms the canines out for stud service), then begins licking her down there. Another somebody takes a picture.
The officer wasn't accused of participating directly in the peanut butter incident — just of telling the story repeatedly. No picture backing up the tale ever turned up, either.
But Jacobs admitted to investigators that something untoward, though innocent, did happen with Porter (more on that later). In his version, he thought somebody might have slipped him Rohypnol, too.
At the time of the party, Jacobs had been working for the DPS for about three years as a motorcycle officer and a part-time pilot (the East Valley Tribune wrote about his piloting exploits in September 2008). Later, his duties would also include work as a photo-enforcement specialist.
In fact, he's the guy who arrested the state Republican Party's executive director, Brett Mecum, at the GOP's Phoenix headquarters in May 2009 after Mecum was pictured speeding excessively on a freeway.
By that time, Jacobs already was infamous among gossiping DPS officers and administrators for the dog-and-peanut-butter tale and for other strange, sexually charged rumors about which Jacobs was grilled officially in late 2008 and early 2009.
The reason: An ex-girlfriend began talking about Jacobs' alleged exploits days after a bitter breakup.
But she wasn't just any old ex. She was Ami Halliday — daughter of Robert Halliday, a 35-year veteran DPS officer who had retired in 2008 at the rank of commander and who still had plenty of friends at the agency.
Robert Halliday's now director of the DPS, appointed out of retirement in January by Governor Jan Brewer. He's known as a good cop —though something of a hothead.
Halliday and Jacobs got along fine during the two months that the pilot dated his daughter. They had lunch at least once, and Jacobs claims Halliday even bought him a gift: a small, crystal airplane tchotchke.
A divorced mother and former bank worker, Ami Halliday's well versed in real-life drama — and so is her family, for that matter.
She was involved in two of seven incidents of suspected domestic violence that police logged from 1997 to 2006 at her father's Glendale home. In 1998, for instance, she tried to have her brother charged with assault for throwing a piece of cheese at her.
"The cheese struck Ami in the lower right side of her back. [A Glendale officer] examined Ami's back," an incident report reads. Her brother described it as a "small chunk."
Both parties agreed that after her brother threw the cheese, Ami slammed him in the head with a phone they'd ripped off the wall. The case against him was submitted to prosecutors, who declined to pursue it because of "no likelihood of conviction."
Ami Halliday and Jacobs met at a party at the home of her aunt, Kristi Johnson, who's also a DPS officer.
On November 4, 2008, after a few weeks of what was described in official reports as rough sex and good times, the couple had an argument about who would pay for a sex toy. The next day, they broke up.
A few weeks later, the DPS started investigating Jacobs for the way he'd treated Robert Halliday's daughter.
The investigation began because now-Director Halliday was disturbed about bruises Jacobs allegedly inflicted on his daughter's arms and legs the day before the breakup. When Halliday and his daughter spoke, Ami told him things, according to official reports, that would outrage any father:
Jacobs had punched her, hurt her during sex, and taken X-rated pictures and video of her without her consent. She told him of bizarre things that happened at his parties, which she claimed to have heard about secondhand.
Rather than immediately call the Glendale Police Department, in whose jurisdiction the alleged domestic violence occurred, and have Ami's bruises documented by forensics experts — as is standard procedure in such situations — the veteran law officer took pictures of her himself. He then referred the matter to his agency's internal affairs office.
Interviews with Jacobs' friends and ex-girlfriends were conducted, starting with Ami Halliday. When investigators had enough dirt on him, they took a three-ring binder to the Glendale PD, which began a criminal investigation of Jacobs.
Incredibly, one focus of the probe into suspected wrongdoing by the DPS officer — based on complaints from the Hallidays — concerned Jacobs' reportedly gigantic penis.
The DPS fired Geoff Jacobs in September 2009, citing the findings against him in the investigation sparked by Robert Halliday.
Even after poring through Jacobs' personal laptop and desktop computers, Glendale detectives hadn't uncovered any proof of Ami Halliday's allegations.
But after the Glendale cops ended their role in the Jacobs case, DPS investigators took a whack at Jacobs' computers. They dived deeply into the computers' hard drives — illegally, he claims — and found evidence of unrelated wrongdoing by Jacobs.
The most serious of the new allegations were that he'd cheated an airline out of a non-refundable plane ticket and published a picture of Officer Kristi Johnson in her uniform on his secured Facebook page while revealing her first and last name, which is a crime under an obscure and seldom-used Arizona statute.
As New Times reported in July, Jacobs, now 35, isn't sitting idle over the apparent retaliation: He's filed a federal lawsuit against the Hallidays and the DPS, seeking punitive damages for defamation and violation of his civil rights. He's not asking for his old job back, though — maybe because his off-duty antics made Jacobs and other officers look like Animal House characters.
That is, the salacious details of Jacobs' personal life brought out in his lawsuit and in police reports are far from flattering.
Even brushing aside the bias of his accusers, his professional judgment is suspect. With his pilot/cop job, his rock star lifestyle predicated his downfall at work. He held wild parties at his Glendale home with members of other local law enforcement agencies and dated other DPS employees. By 2008, a relationship with another officer already had caused his personal and DPS lives to clash.
The key players in this story wouldn't talk, citing the pending lawsuit. Jacobs, the Hallidays, the DPS, and Glendale police all declined comment for this article — which is based almost exclusively on court records and police reports.
Official documents show that Jacobs has his flaws, as does the DPS. In trying to get rid of someone they saw as a "bad apple," his superiors inserted themselves into a wacky boy-girl relationship.
The agency took the side of the complaining woman, despite evidence of her fickle feelings for Jacobs. After all, Robert Halliday is her father.
The reports detail a party lifestyle that included sexting, anatomically correct blow-up sheep, intimate piercings, booze-fueled bashes, the use of a police airplane to stalk an ex-girlfriend, cop sex, painful sex, "sleep sex," and plenty of racy video and photos.
Unproven allegations related to the case include bestiality, sexual assault (without the bulldog), incidents with roofies, misconduct with weapons, and — so far, anyway — the allegations in Jacobs' lawsuit.
Judging by the intensity with which the DPS went after Jacobs, the minimal incident reports generated in the domestic violence calls to Robert Halliday's home, and how two Glendale cop pals of Halliday's failed to see him shove a homeowner during a golf course incident, this saga apparently reveals a heap of "professional courtesy."
If Robert Halliday let his emotions get the better of him regarding his little girl, it wasn't the first time he'd lost his cool.
Years before Robert Halliday photographed bruises on his daughter's body, he was investigated for shoving a homeowner who'd yelled at him on a Payson golf course.
Unless you count the Geoff Jacobs investigation, the debacle seems to be the sole black mark on an otherwise stellar career.
He's considered a cop's cop — a boss who represents the average patrolman, according to sources who'd rather not see their names in this article, despite their praise of Halliday.
At the Payson Public Golf Course on September 21, 2000, though, Halliday acted no better than a schoolyard bully.
It was late afternoon, and Halliday and two Payson police officers he knew were finishing up the 18th hole. Halliday sliced a fairway shot into the covered patio of Pat and Marjorie Willis' home. The couple was sitting outside, and Pat Willis would later say the ball missed his wife by "inches."
The three cops weren't drinking; Halliday just wasn't very good at golf. They couldn't see where the ball landed, but they knew someone was angry by the yelling that erupted about 100 yards away.
"Take some lessons, asshole!" Pat Willis reportedly yelled. "Do you know what the word 'fore' means?"
Willis and his wife soon entered the golfers' sight, and Halliday yelled back that he was sorry. The three officers say the couple kept yelling at them as they continued toward the putting green. Halliday drove one of the golf carts over to the Willises' house.
Pat Willis, seeing Halliday pull up, walked down a hill in his backyard and stepped over a short fence. Halliday hopped out of the cart. According to a Payson investigator, he snarled to the homeowner: "I apologize, but if you keep yelling, I am going to kick your ass."
Willis remembers Halliday's phrasing differently. "I'm going to bash your face in!" the now-director of the DPS said to him, Willis alleged.
Halliday, who claimed later that he felt threatened, shoved Pat Willis backward with both hands.
Marjorie Willis began screaming and swearing at Halliday, a Payson Police Department incident report says, telling him that her husband had just gotten out the hospital.
"Mr. Halliday said this caused him to think and, in looking at the male subject, he did look sickly. So [Halliday] decided to back off," the report goes on.
The two Payson cops in the threesome, Sergeant Jaime Escobedo and Captain Steve Craig, witnessed the entire incident. Halliday's pals even considered arresting Willis on charges of disorderly conduct at his own house. Because, gosh, neither of them saw Halliday shove Willis. Good thing for Willis that Halliday fessed up.
No charges were filed. But Halliday had to answer for his bullying almost a decade later, in his February 2010 confirmation hearing before a state Senate committee. A video of the hearing is available online.
Visibly embarrassed, he admitted the confrontation was a "mistake," that he was unprofessional, and that nothing like it would ever happen again.
But he also mischaracterized the alleged assault to senators. Halliday told them he merely "reached out [and] held my hands up" to keep distance between him and the homeowner.
Two Democratic state senators lambasted Halliday over the incident and went against his confirmation. They were outvoted 5-2.
As of late October, Halliday has been the DPS boss for about nine months. The only major complaint against him has been by Jacobs. That's not to say that everyone is happy with him, but that's to be expected.
Under Arizona statute, DPS directors serve five-year terms.
"The troops like Bobby," says a government official who works closely with the DPS. The official tells how Halliday, soon after his appointment, discovered that more than 100 new patrol cars purchased during the previous administration were sitting idle. He found cash to fix their tires and batteries and put them on the road, to the delight of many officers.
After coming home from the Vietnam War, (101st Infantry Airborne Division), Halliday graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in political science. He began his DPS career in 1971 as a patrolman in Flagstaff. He showed leadership ability and advanced in rank over the years.
His home life, evidently, has proved tougher to manage. Glendale police list 16 occasions from 1997 to 2006 when police were called to Halliday's home. Few full reports on these calls were filed by officers, so it's unknown exactly how many involved family disturbances. One was for a vehicle theft and another for a vehicle burglary. Other calls include two criminal-damage complaints, two calls of "unknown trouble," a 911 hang-up, and a suicide attempt.
But as mentioned above, seven of the calls were for suspected domestic violence cases.
Two involved Ami Halliday — the fight with her brother and a fight with her mother, Brenda Halliday. Another involved Brenda and her son, whom she claimed shoved her. In the domestic violence calls that involved Robert and Brenda, it's unclear what is alleged to have occurred.
The latter incidents preceded a divorce filing in 2000.
"Wife Brenda . . . arguing/yelling. [Robert] put [weapons] away to secure them," reads a short comment on one of the incident sheets.
"[Robert] and wife are arguing. Not physical at this time," reads another snippet.
The divorce was never finalized, court records show.
No arrests were made after any of the incidents at the Halliday home.
Because scant detail is given in the police reports, Halliday's personal life — unlike that of former Officer Jacobs — remains mostly personal.
Problems with girlfriends, money, and career have defined Geoff Jacobs' life over the past three years.
His difficulties are detailed in hundreds of pages of Glendale and DPS reports about him, much of which are based on interviews with Jacobs and his ex-girlfriends.
Jacobs is said to consider himself, first and foremost, a pilot. After getting out of the Navy, where he worked in aviation maintenance, Jacobs took flight lessons at Deer Valley Airport and obtained his pilot's license. A few years later, in 2002, he landed his job as a patrolman and part-time pilot for the DPS.
He met a woman during DPS field training who would become one of his best friends at the agency for the next five years. Later, in the wake of the Ami Halliday scandal, she would become one of his biggest detractors. We'll call her Officer Dee (which isn't her real name — New Times is naming only the principals in this article).
In the mid-2000s, Dee (who's still a DPS officer) hung out frequently with Jacobs, other officers from the DPS and Glendale Police Department, and their friends. There were tailgate parties before football games, lake fun on Jacobs' boat, four-wheeling, and holiday parties at each other's homes.
Jacobs' house, though, was where the "crazy stuff happens," Dee told investigators.
A sampling was captured in photographs found on Jacobs' computers. The few pictures New Times was able to obtain from public-records requests don't show anything that wild — but the irreverence toward the DPS displayed in the photos bugged agency officials.
Among the scenes displayed in the snapshots: a guy wearing Jacobs' DPS hat sticking his fingers in the butt of a blow-up sheep; partiers wearing Jacobs' hat and other DPS attire; men mooning the camera in front of Jacobs' patrol car and motorcycle; and the patrol car with its DPS slogan altered to read "Anal Patrol."
The DPS and Glendale PD refused to release most of the pictures, or any of the video, that investigators reviewed.
Jacobs had "tons" of nude or explicit pictures of his ex-girlfriends stored on the computers, Officer Dee told investigators. Once, during a party, she said a friend took her into Jacobs' bedroom and showed her pictures on Jacobs' computer of a woman she knew had worked for DPS' human resources department. Jacobs and some more friends came into the room and told her that they'd uploaded some of the pictures and a video of the employee — including one that showed off the employee's pierced clitoris — to a porn site.
The woman in the pictures, who reportedly left the DPS to work as a stripper, was ticked off, Dee said. The DPS later interviewed the woman — who told them she didn't mind what Jacobs did. In fact, the woman said she remained good friends with him.
Though his parties appeared to be drunken bashes, Jacobs is a light drinker, Dee and others said in the reports.
As much as Dee said she enjoyed spending time with Jacobs over the years, she didn't like some of his friends. The "shadiest," she told investigators, was his roommate, John Wright, whom she described as a wanna-be cop.
At one gathering, Wright stripped naked and posed for a picture on Jacobs' DPS motorcycle, which had been parked in the garage. The picture was later found on Jacobs' computer.
Dee said Jacobs told her the story of the bulldog "eating out" a woman after Wright had slipped her roofies.
But what eventually stopped Dee from going to barbecues at Jacobs' house, she claimed, was the time she once caught Wright "molesting" one of her friends, who was drunk and unconscious on the couch.
"He was on his knees in front of her, reaching over and caressing her breasts, as if trying to get her nipples hard," Dee told investigators. Dee said one of Jacobs' friends, a Maricopa County detention officer, pulled Wright, who also was "really drunk," off the woman.
New Times was unable to reach Wright for comment about what appears in the investigation reports.
Officer Dee didn't report the incident to the DPS or to police. The woman, whom Dee called an alcoholic, claimed it never happened and that she didn't want to make an issue of it.
The woman "kept going to parties at Jacobs' house," Dee reported.
Jacobs dated at least five women between 2007 and 2009, but it seems he was most obsessed with a DPS officer we'll call Officer Joan. She moved in with him in June 2006.
Months later, records show, she became the source of an internal investigation against Jacobs that sought to find out whether he had raped her.
According to Dee, Joan told someone within the agency that Jacobs had once been too rough with her in bed, pinning her down, hurting her with his large penis and ignoring her protestations.
Joan apparently never wanted Jacobs to get into trouble, Dee stated. Joan's tale of rough sex got passed around the DPS, and a sergeant felt obligated to report the allegation. Investigators later determined no crime or policy violation was committed.
In fall 2007, Joan dumped Jacobs for another DPS officer — a friend of Jacobs' — and moved out. Jacobs was upset and bothered Joan at the office about it. She complained to her superiors, who instructed Jacobs in a formal letter not to contact Joan, cautioning him not to make waves.
That January, Jacobs sent Officer Joan a taunting text message about how the investigation regarding her had been "squashed." When his superiors found out about the text, they disciplined Jacobs for insubordination.
The reports show how Jacobs' problems with Joan also got him transferred out of the motorcycle unit to photo enforcement, to keep them apart. Jacobs hated his new assignment — except when he got to bust people like the GOP's Brett Mecum for excessive speeding.
Joan's departure also affected Jacobs' finances, because she'd been paying many of the bills. He overextended himself and ran up thousands in credit card debt. He filed for bankruptcy in December 2007. That's when he invited friend John Wright to move in to help defray expenses.
A month later, he hooked up with a new lover, whom we'll call Jane. She was separated and had a 10-year-old son. "Oil and water" is how she later described their three-month affair to investigators. After their breakup, she took out an order of protection against Jacobs, which resulted in a court order that forced him to give up his firearms for a week. Jane later regretted taking out the order and tried to have it canceled.
Investigators — as usual — wanted to know how Jacobs performed in the sack.
Jane told them Jacobs was "very into anal sex" and that "often there would be choking involved . . . but she didn't feel it ever got out of hand. [Jane] reiterated there were aggressive moments during their sexual intercourse but [that it] was nothing that made her uncomfortable, nervous, or scared."
She also mentioned that Jacobs had a sleeping disorder: "sleep sex." He would wake her in the middle of the night for sex and not recall it the next morning, saying, "[I] must have been dreaming." She said she knew another ex of Jacobs' who had reported the same thing.
Jacobs' Olympus camera was active throughout the relationship. Once, he shot a video of them having sex in the cabin of his boat, Jane reported. She said she knew he still had the video and told investigators she was miffed that he'd once uploaded explicit shots of her — with her eyes and tattoos blacked out — to a Web site called newbienudes.com. She said he later deleted the photos from the Internet.
After Jane, Jacobs dated a woman who had recently broken off a five-year relationship that involved domestic violence. They split in August 2008.
Then, he hooked up with Ami Halliday, whom he knew was the daughter of retired DPS Commander Robert Halliday. It was the worst career move of Jacobs' life.
Their fling lasted seven weeks.
On the evening before their breakup, Halliday and Jacobs agree, the couple engaged in a robust round of "play-fighting."
As Ami Halliday, now 34, related to investigators, the couple had been sitting in Geoff's yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser, about to eat at Oregano's, when Jacobs smarted off to her. She reached over and gave one of his nipples a pinch. He punched her in the arm, and she punched him back.
"Ami said that they would always play and just smack each other," a DPS interviewer wrote. "She said, that day, Geoff got real rough and caused bruises on her arm and leg. She said he had an aggressive look in his eye, but was not mad."
In a second version of the story, she made it sound much worse to Glendale police, claiming he was "full-on punching" and that he "pushed hard on the area [of the blows] so it would bruise."
As for Jacobs' side of what happened, he later told his DPS superiors that "tapping," not punching, better described his actions.
If the incident upset Ami, she didn't show it that night. She went to dinner with Jacobs, as planned, and then asked him to buy her a sex toy for her birthday. They went to Fascinations — but Jacobs made her buy the toy.
"After they returned to Geoff's house and had sex, they argued about the toy because he wanted her to leave it at his house," a Glendale police investigator wrote in his report.
The next day, Ami Halliday broke off the relationship. She told Glendale investigators that she "was tired of paying for everything when they went out." Although she had dated at least two other guys during the affair, Ami was upset that Jacobs had slept around on her, which she'd learned about by talking to Officer Dee.
The breakup wasn't entirely one-sided. Jacobs didn't like that Ami had talked to Dee behind his back, he told his superiors. He told investigators that Ami was emotionally unstable — that she was a "badge bunny" who sought out sex with cops.
In a statement to the DPS, Jacobs wrote: "She calls me to end the relationship and tells me she was dating other guys. Then gets mad at me when I am okay with it because I don't think our personalities mesh well."
A long e-mail Ami Halliday sent to Jacobs supports his contention.
The DPS reports don't detail when Robert Halliday snapped the pictures of his daughter's bruises. They also don't state when Halliday first spoke with Ami about Jacobs.
But it's not hard to imagine the tense father-daughter chat that occurred. Ami Halliday told her daddy that the bruises were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Jacobs' behavior.
Robert Halliday, then retired but still working as a reserve DPS officer, called colleagues at the agency, gave them information, and requested that Jacobs be investigated by the Professional Standards Unit, the agency's internal affairs brigade.
Despite his concern, though, Halliday didn't make the call while his daughter's bruises remained fresh. He called on November 26, after an angry text-message exchange between Ami Halliday and Jacobs on November 25.
The report was taken by a lieutenant in the PSU, who took a few notes on what the veteran law officer told him. A two-page write-up of the conversation details some of Halliday's concerns: The bruises; the tales of "secret" photos and videos of his daughter and two DPS employees; a rumor that Jacobs had been "rough" with Officer Joan; and alleged criminal acts by Jacobs' roommate.
Halliday even complained that Jacobs had "asked Ami to go to a sex store [to] buy toys."
At the end of his complaint, Halliday made sure to point out that "revealing photos" were contained in two of Jacobs' personal computers.
Halliday said his daughter soon would be calling with more details.
Ami Halliday sat down with the DPS internal affairs investigators on December 30, 2008. She was the first to be interviewed in the case.
She told them she didn't usually have sex on a first date but had made an exception with Jacobs.
The well-endowed Jacobs hurt her, she said, and he didn't even slow down when she begged him to stop.
"Ami said that she was in tears, and she was in a position where she couldn't move," states a DPS report. "Ami believed that Geoff knew she was crying. She said it hurt her feelings that he didn't care enough to stop."
Yet "she explained that she liked him and she kept dating him."
Her tale, like others in this article, is compiled from at least two interviews from two separate investigations — the internal DPS probe and the Glendale criminal investigation. When Halliday talked to Glendale detectives, she told a similar story of how that first — supposedly unpleasant — encounter marked the start of their relationship. Jacobs soon, according to the Glendale report, "ended up meeting her family."
Ami Halliday left investigators with a thoroughly mixed review.
Jacobs' love-making was aggressive and painful from their first date — but that didn't stop her from coming back for much more over the following weeks. She related that his penis hurt her at other times during sex, to the extent that she'd bleed a little afterward.
A text message she sent to Jacobs during their relationship may capture her feelings more accurately than what she told her father:
"I totally thought of you behind me, fucking me hard. It made me cum so fast & hard!"
Along the same lines, the play-fighting incident — despite the bruises — has to be juxtaposed with excerpts from the long e-mail Ami Halliday sent to Jacobs just after the breakup. The message speaks glowingly of Jacobs:
"We had such a great time last night and this morning. How can we just throw it away?
"I know that I said some things that were not very nice and for that, I apologize, Geoff. I do think you are a great person.
"I wanted you to want me so bad . . . But the bottom line, you didn't, and that is ok.
"Geoff, I truly care about you with all my heart. Seeing you with my family, kids, and friends melted me. I totally could have fallen in love with you."
The e-mail was dated November 5, the day after Jacobs allegedly inflicted the bruises.
The investigation plunged deeper once Ami Halliday began tattling about the weird, sexually charged atmosphere at Jacobs' home. She told investigators of the racy, surreptitious pictures he'd taken of her and Officer Joan. And she relayed the stories she'd heard from DPS officers about the dog and the peanut butter and about how roommate Wright allegedly fondled a drunken woman.
Her tales spurred investigators to conduct interviews with others who could dish on Jacobs.
Of all the stories that Ami Halliday told, though, one proved pivotal to the investigation of Jacobs. She said that one day, while she was over at Jacobs' home, Wright pointed a handgun at her.
He'd been on the phone, walking through the hallway of the house, when she wisecracked about his "womanizer" status.
"Are you . . . slaying another dragon?" she teased, as he chatted, presumably, with a woman.
She said Wright usually kept his Glock in his back waistband. Still on the phone, and without a word to her, she claimed, Wright pulled out his gun and aimed it briefly at her head.
Police used the accusation as the basis to arrest Wright and enter Jacobs' home to look at his desktop and laptop computers.
Glendale and DPS investigators wanted to get their hands on that rumored trove of pictures and videos, which might contain hard evidence for their case.
Ami Halliday didn't claim to authorities that Wright had pointed a gun at her until after she broke up with Jacobs.
The accusation was made in context of her complaints about her ex-boyfriend. Nevertheless, at least two months after the alleged incident, Glendale police decided to bust John Wright on suspicion of aggravated assault.
They used undercover detectives to begin surveillance on Jacobs' home. Three days later, on a morning that Jacobs was at work, they caught sight of Wright leaving his home in his pickup truck. Members of Glendale PD's Gang and Fugitive Apprehension squad joined in for the takedown. Near 75th Avenue and Thunderbird Road, Wright's truck was stopped, and he was arrested at gunpoint. He was taken to Glendale police headquarters, read his Miranda rights, and informed that the investigation actually "centered around his roommate."
He was encouraged to chat generally about Jacobs' friends and ex-girlfriends. He characterized Ami Halliday as a "snappy kind of person" and a "smartass."
Asked about the gun allegation, Wright denied it vehemently. He was a "trained professional" with an extensive military background and simply wouldn't do that, he said.
Detective William Johnston, who conducted the interview, switched subjects: "I asked him if he could tell me about the barbecues."
Wright said he was usually the cook. He downplayed the "crazy party" rumor.
"None of us drink a lot," he said. But he went on that it was true people would sometimes get drunk and pass out at the parties.
Did he ever fondle the breasts of a woman at a party? Absolutely not, Wright replied. But he said the woman in question once "showed her breasts to everybody attending a party in the kitchen of Geoff's home."
Next came questions about Jacobs' two bulldogs. Jacobs earned money by breeding the pair, Wright explained. Sometimes, Jacobs would "milk poor Porter" by hand, he told Johnston.
"He explained that Geoff will often have to ejaculate the dog in order to collect the semen for the artificial insemination," the report states.
"I explained to him that this was not the incident that I had heard of," Johnston continues in his report. The detective asked about the dog's supposedly licking the genitals of an unconscious woman at the house.
Wright acknowledged he'd heard about it, explaining that he hadn't been involved because it happened long before he met Jacobs.
But he told the cop that he had been involved in a silly thing involving Porter and peanut butter.
"He said that he once put peanut butter on a girl's leg, and the dog chased her around Geoff's house," Johnston's report states. "He said that there was nothing sexual about it. Everybody at the party was laughing about it."
Under questioning, Wright said he had never seen explicit photographs of Ami Halliday, stating that he assumed she wouldn't pose for such pictures because "she seemed like a prude."
In fact, though, Ami had already admitted to investigators that she e-mailed nude photos of herself to Jacobs during their affair.
Johnston asked Wright whether it was okay to examine his computer for anything related to the investigation. Wright told him it was no problem.
Johnston stepped out of the room and quickly arranged for computer forensics experts from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center to meet him and Wright at Jacobs' home.
The reports don't say why the center's experts were called, and Glendale police, like DPS, refused to answer questions for this article. One thing is certain, though: From 2004 to 2007, the commander of the ACTIC had been none other than Robert Halliday.
Jacobs pointed out the Halliday link in his federal lawsuit, stating that the ACTIC was employed "even though [I] was never accused of terrorism."
In his view, the ACTIC connection was more evidence that the Hallidays were out to get him.
About the same time Glendale police were interrogating Wright, the DPS' Professional Standards Unit called Jacobs to an interview room at the agency's headquarters.
They took his cell phone at the request of Glendale police and told him that criminal investigators would soon be chatting with him. He waited for detectives for half an hour. When he had to use the restroom, Professional Standards sent an escort with him.
He later claimed in his lawsuit that this was the same thing as getting arrested — minus the cops affording him his civil rights.
"Jacobs was . . . without a support advisor, without an attorney, had not been informed of his status as the subject of either criminal or administrative investigations, and had not been advised of the Miranda warnings," the lawsuit states. "Jacobs believe[d] that if he refused to cooperate fully, he could be fired for insubordination."
DPS investigators introduced him to Glendale Detective Samantha Zaragoza, who interviewed him about allegations that he was rough with women, about the house parties, and about the rumored lewd photos and videos supposedly taken without consent of the subjects. He denied he'd been too rough or done anything improper.
The dog incident came up. Officer Dee and the wife of another DPS officer had emphasized to DPS investigators that Jacobs told the story several times himself. He'd supposedly told Dee that he had a picture of the licking incident, and Dee had asked him how something like that could happen.
"I don't do it, but I have friends that slip roofies and stuff, so I'm sure that's what happened," Dee quoted Jacobs as telling her.
Armed with information from the DPS interviews, Zaragoza peppered him with questions.
Jacobs said the story about the bulldog was like a "game of telephone." It may have stemmed from the time he and the alleged victim, whom he'd been dating at the time, came home from a bar one night believing they'd been drugged. Jacobs recalled he was way too hammered for having only two drinks, and his roommate at the time (unidentified in the reports; this was a few years before Wright moved in) had put him to bed.
He told the detective that he'd heard later from his friends how Porter had been caught licking the woman's vagina.
An identified friend "heard [the woman] moaning and went into the bedroom and saw Porter violating her," Zaragoza's report states. "[The friend] pulled Porter off of her and closed the door. Geoff said he never told [the woman] about the incident. His friends made a big story of it because they thought it was funny."
Jacobs told Detective Zaragoza that neither he nor his friends would ever hand out or slip anybody Rohypnol.
Knowing that police and ACTIC experts already were at Jacobs' home, Zaragoza asked Jacobs if he would allow Glendale police to look at the hard drives of his personal computers.
"He said, 'Ya,'" Zaragoza wrote in her report. "Geoff granted permission for ACTIC to copy his computer so all his files could be viewed."
But in his lawsuit, Jacobs insists his "ya" was intended only to allow Glendale PD to look for photos or videos of a sexual nature — none of which, he knew, were evidence of any crime.
In any case, Glendale and the ACTIC plowed through the hard drives — and found nothing, basically.
"There were several photos of many different women in various nude poses," wrote Detective Johnston. "None of the pictures appeared to have been taken surreptitiously."
At least two videos of Ami Halliday were found; a DPS report says she is masturbating in one of the videos. In another, she can be heard saying she wants to take a picture of Jacobs' "wiener." Her face isn't visible in any of the videos.
Glendale police concluded that Jacobs had broken no law. Except, possibly, one: He had uploaded the fully clothed picture of DPS Officer Kristi Johnson, Ami's aunt, to his Facebook page. Although the page was set to "private" — meaning only friends could view photos on it — Glendale PD had proof it wasn't secure. An undercover officer had sent him a "friend" request as an unknown girl, and he had accepted it.
Perhaps desperate to justify the time it wasted on Jacobs, Glendale PD sought to have him charged with putting a peace officer's personal information on the Web.
Jacobs allegedly had violated a little-known statute that prohibits posting "personal information" of cops on the World Wide Web. It's the arguably unconstitutional law under which former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas tried to have New Times busted after the newspaper published the home address of Sheriff Joe Arpaio online.
On May 26, 2009, the County Attorney's Office declined to prosecute Jacobs. Prosecutors also rejected the aggravated-assault case against John Wright.
A week later, Sergeant Laurie Griffiths of the DPS' Professional Standards Unit came into possession of Jacobs' personal hard drives and conducted her own forensic search.
According to Jacobs' lawsuit, the DPS had no legal foundation for obtaining his computers or searching their contents. It was another violation of his rights, he insists.
Nevertheless, by the time the second search and a few more interviews were completed, the DPS felt it finally had enough ammo to fire Jacobs.
As the internal affairs investigation against Jacobs continued throughout the summer of 2009, one damning piece of evidence was found in Geoff Jacobs' computer.
Just before Jacobs split with Officer Joan, the couple had intended to travel to Hawaii. But the airline ticket for Joan was non-refundable, thwarting Jacobs' plans to take another woman on the trip after the breakup. So he wrote a fake obituary for Officer Joan and e-mailed it to Hawaiian Airlines.
The scheme worked — but now he was caught. His supervisors noted that the act seemed like fraud and showed he was dishonest. He claimed a representative of the airline had suggested the scheme to him, but he couldn't justify his behavior.
Other evidence in the hard drives includes the photos of people partying with DPS gear and letters he'd written to a laser speed-gun-repair shop in which he'd called the DPS "cheap."
And there were several pictures of "child porn," the DPS alleged. Several "thumbnail" photos were found, suggesting someone had clicked on larger pictures from a website.
Though the accusation sounds serious, the DPS never determined any of the models in the pictures were under 18. Basically, someone with access to Jacobs' computer looked at a porn site that advertised "teen" models. The DPS grilled Jacobs about the photos but didn't press the issue with prosecutors.
Another avenue of inquiry involved Jacobs' alleged misuse of a DPS airplane.
Officer Dee, when interviewed about Jacobs, said he had once confided to her how he spent "hours" flying over Chandler one day trying to spot Officer Joan's vehicle following his breakup with her. He wanted to find her new apartment. Dee reportedly thought the story added to Jacobs' "creepy-ness."
Asked about the incident, Jacobs started telling investigators of how he'd been flying from Chandler Municipal Airport to Sky Harbor so he could return some keys to another police air unit. He stumbled as he tried to explain himself.
"Forget everything I just said. I misspoke," he told DPS investigators. Then he explained that actually he'd been conducting surveillance that day for Scottsdale police.
Ultimately, he admitted to investigators that he made "one circle" over the vicinity of Joan's apartment at an altitude of between 1,500 and 2,000 feet, where he managed to spot her maroon Toyota pickup.
It was either a hell of a lucky find or he was lying.
Combined with the photos of people partying with DPS equipment, the photo of Officer Kristi Johnson, and the possibility that he lied about having knowledge of the gun-pulling incident with Wright, agency heads recommended that he be fired.
In late 2009, the Law Enforcement Merit System Council voted 3-0 to uphold the dismissal based on all the testimony and evidence.
Then, in the spring of this year, Jacobs had his first victory in the battle with Ami Halliday and her powerful father.
The DPS had tried to withhold unemployment benefits from its fired employee, claiming he wasn't eligible because he was discharged for misconduct at work.
On March 29, 2010, the Appeals Board of the state Department of Economic Security ruled in Jacobs' favor.
The board downplayed the Hawaiian Airlines ticket scam, the letters to the speed-gun vendor, and the photos of people partying with his DPS equipment. Even the airplane-stalking incident wasn't so bad, the ruling states, because "the Claimant only veered off of his flight path for a few moments."
The ruling points out that much of the information used to terminate Jacobs was taken from his computer, "which was examined while the Employer was conducting an investigation into a totally unrelated matter from which the Claimant was exonerated."
None of the allegations suggests "misconduct in connection with the employment," the board ruled. Jacobs' benefits were reinstated.
In September, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow dismissed Glendale police from the lawsuit because Jacobs never filed a notice of claim with the city, as required by law.
But the suit is still very much alive and moving forward. So the drama isn't over.
For Geoff Jacobs, Ami Halliday, and possibly her father, it may never be.
