Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: Jeff German 2

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

In September 2022, veteran Las Vegas journalist Jeff German was found stabbed to death outside his home, killed in a brutal attack just days before he was set to receive records he had requested about... a disgraced local official. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation into German's murder, the surveillance footage of a disguised killer that horrified his colleagues, and the distinctive maroon SUV that pointed straight back to Robert Telles. As DNA evidence sealed the case, Telles clung to an elaborate conspiracy theory, insisting he had been framed. What followed was a standoff, a high-profile trial, and a guilty verdict in one of the rare cases of an American journalist murdered for his reporting, a killing that made Jeff German's legacy as a truth-teller more powerful than ever.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap.
Starting point is 00:00:24 It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. Some people believe a story is only as durable as the storyteller. Silence one, and the other goes quiet too.
Starting point is 00:01:06 Jeff Germans spent more than 40 years proving that idea wrong. He built his life around a story. simple conviction that the truth outlasts the people who want it buried write something down hand it to the public and it stops being yours it belongs to everyone so when someone decided that the way to end jeff german's reporting was to end jeff german they were making a bet that the story would die with a man it didn't the work he'd already done the colleagues he'd tried trained and the evidence he left behind would all keep speaking and every last piece of it would point back toward the one person who thought he'd gotten away people's lives are like a story there's a beginning
Starting point is 00:02:07 a middle and an end but you don't always know which part you're on sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon and we don't always get to know the real ending from carter roy and this is murder True Crime Stories, The Crime House Original, powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come at every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crimehouse community. Please rate review and follow the show.
Starting point is 00:02:39 And for early, add free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go tocrimehouseplus.com or tap, try free on the Murder True Crime Stories show page on Apple Podcasts. And this is the second of two episodes on the murder of Jeff German, an investigative reporter who spent 44 years exposing corruption in Las Vegas. Before we get started, please note that this episode includes descriptions of self-harm. Please listen with care.
Starting point is 00:03:13 Last time, I told you how Jeff's reporting on a county official named Robert Tellis, cost Tellis his job. When Jeff kept digging, he was ambushed and killed for it. And it was his own newsroom that pointed police straight at Tellus. Today, I'll take you through what happened next, the standoff and arrest that finally brought Robert Tellis in, and the strange story he told from his jail cell. And I'll cover the trial that followed in the fight over Jeff German cell phone that would end up changing the law itself. All that not, more coming up. On the morning of September 2nd, 2022, 69-year-old Jeff German was stabbed to death outside his Las Vegas home. The next morning, a neighbor found his body, and within days,
Starting point is 00:04:13 investigators had a prime suspect, a former county administrator named Robert Tellis. On September 7th, police pulled up outside Tellus's home with a search warrant. They spent hours there. They towed his cars. They questioned him. At one point, Tellis turned up at the property in a white protective suit and watched investigators carry his things out the front door. And then that afternoon, they let him walk. To a lot of people, it looked like a baffling call. The police had just spent the day taking Tellus's house and cars apart. And now they were letting their prime suspect go home? But there was a reason.
Starting point is 00:04:56 The district attorney, Steve Wilson, explained it. At that moment, they simply didn't have enough to hold him. So they released him, knowing the evidence was, as Wilson put it, being developed minute by minute. What they were waiting on was DNA. When the results came back, they were decisive. Talis's DNA had been found on Jeff German's hands and under his fingernails. A 69-year-old man fighting for his life in his final seconds had gotten his hands on his attacker, and his attacker had left himself behind, scraped under the nails of the man he'd come to kill.
Starting point is 00:05:42 That was enough. Whatever doubt had let Talas walk out of custody that afternoon, evaporated. rated the moment the lab results came back. That evening, officers returned to arrest Robert Tallis for murder. A Tellis wasn't coming out. For the next hour, Tellis barricaded himself inside his home while tactical officers surrounded it. Inside Metro's command, someone made a phone called to a criminal defense attorney named Ozzy Fumo, who had known Jeff German for years. A police negotiator asked Fumom.
Starting point is 00:06:18 if he would talk to Tell us to keep anyone else from getting hurt. The call came in at 623 in the evening. It lasted 48 seconds. Fumo got in his car and drove the 22 minutes to the scene, trying to figure out what he'd even say. He never got the chance to say any of it. By the time it was over, Tellus had locked himself in his bathroom
Starting point is 00:06:43 and was talking about harming himself. SWAT sent in a drone, and a robot, and through their cameras, they could see him. He'd dropped a knife he'd used to cut his own arms, and he was covered in blood. They carried Robert Tellis out of his own house on a stretcher, bleeding from wounds he'd given himself, and drove him to a hospital. Once he was treated, he was booked into the Clark County Detention Center. The next day, he shuffled into a courtroom with bandages on both forearms and said nothing at all,
Starting point is 00:07:18 while a judge ordered him held without bail. At that first hearing, the judge called the police reports, chilling. She said it described Jeff German fighting for his life with defensive wounds on his arms and DNA believed to be talus's under his fingernails. And she laid out the things that made this look less like a crime of passion and more like a plan. The killer had case Jeff's neighborhood for more than an hour. He'd left his cell phone at home and he dressed in a disguise. And this wasn't a man who'd snapped in a moment of rage.
Starting point is 00:07:59 This looked like a man who'd thought it through. The criminal complaint said as much it accused tell us not simply of murder, but of lying in wait in the legal terms for hiding and waiting to ambush someone. So who was Robert Tellis? To understand him, you have to go back to El Paso, Texas, and to a family name that once meant something close to royalty in border politics. Robert's great uncle was Raymond L. Tellis. In 1957, he became the first Mexican-American mayor of El Paso,
Starting point is 00:08:39 and one of the first Mexican-Americans elected mayor of any major American city. He was such a rising star that President John F. Kennedy tapped him to be the U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica. It was, at the time, a genuinely historic thing. A barrier broken. Behind that success was Robert's grandfather, Richard Tellis, the family's tactician. In a city where many Mexican-American voters had been shut out for generations, Richard found ways in. He set up empty refrigerator boxes as practice voting booths, so first time voters wouldn't feel intimidated. And for voters who couldn't read English, he used the rosaries they already carried.
Starting point is 00:09:29 He'd mark a single bead, and in the booth, a voter could hold the beads up to the machine and pull the lever right beside the mark. That was the TELUS legacy, opening doors. but legacies curdle. Robert's father, Raymond Arteleis, won two terms on the El Paso City Council, then lost a run for mayor. He became a lawyer instead, and in 2008, he pleaded guilty in a sprawling federal public corruption case,
Starting point is 00:10:02 gave up his law license, and narrowly avoided prison. That was the family Robert Tellis came from, and he wanted to get as far away from his father's legacy as possible. So he went west to Las Vegas and became a probate and estate lawyer, licensed in Nevada in 2015. And in 2018, he ran for a small, sleepy county office that almost nobody thinks about as a public administrator. It's the job that handles the estates of people who die with no will and no family to claim them.
Starting point is 00:10:39 He won. On paper, it was an obscure job, but by several accounts to tell us it wasn't the destination. It was a first run. People who knew him said he had bigger ambitions that he talked about someday running for governor. He was, in other words, a man who cared a lot about getting ahead and about how he came across. which may be why Jeff Germans' reporting hit him the way it did. Because Jeff's stories didn't just allege mismanagement. They painted the picture of a toxic office,
Starting point is 00:11:19 one where Tellis bullied longtime employees, retaliated against them and carried on with a subordinate, all while eyeing a bigger political future. The reporting didn't just embarrass him. It threatened everything he believed he was on his wife. way to be coming. There were warning signs about the kind of man he was under pressure. In February 2020, while he was already in office, tell us his wife called 911. He was arrested, accused of grabbing her in what the report called a bear hug and of resisting the two officers who tried
Starting point is 00:11:59 to handcuff him. Body camera video caught him slurring his words and shouting that they only wanted to take him down because he was a public official. The most serious charge, the domestic battery, was later dropped. For the other count, he got a suspended sentence and was sent to a class on corrective thinking. It's a small moment, and it happened well before the murder. But it's a revealing one. Cornered, he reached first for his status, like a man who figured the rules were supposed to bend around his title. Six weeks after his arrest, a grand jury formally indicted Robert Tellis for murder
Starting point is 00:12:43 with the use of a deadly weapon. He pleaded not guilty. His law license was suspended and from his jail cell Tellis began to tell a story of his own. Not a confession. The opposite. He said he was an innocent man being framed. Today's episode is brought to you by Vinted. Have you ever looked into your closet and realized, you know, I only wear like a fraction of the clothes that are in here. For me, that was a few weeks ago trying to clean out the closet and I have all these clothes. I'm like, I only wear a few of these. It's taking up space and holding money I could actually be using.
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Starting point is 00:14:42 There's a lot of people that had motive to do something. We want to paint Natalie as this angel. It's not all angelic. I'm your host, Sean Kuy. And this is The Truth About Natalie. Listen and subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. To convict Robert Tell us, prosecutors didn't need his story to be false. They just needed theirs.
Starting point is 00:15:08 to be true. And their story was brutally simple. A powerful man, humiliated by a reporter, decided that if he couldn't stop the words, he'd stop the writer. And piece by piece, they were putting that story together. They started with the DNA. Tellus' own genetic material was found under Jeff Terman's fingernails. Then the car. Surveillance video had tracked a maroon Yukon Denali registered to Tellus' wife, leaving his neighborhood the morning of of the murder and circling the blocks around Jeff's home. When police searched Tell us his house, they found a maroon SUV in the driveway, and something stranger in the house, the cut-up pieces of a wide straw hat and a gray athletic
Starting point is 00:15:54 shoe hacked apart as if he'd meant to destroy them. They matched the hat and shoe worn by the figure in the surveillance footage. Not only that, but there was blood on the shoe. The orange shirt and the murder weapon were the only things Tellis seemed to have made disappear for good. And then there was the planning. In the days before the murder, Tellus had cased Jeff's address with online map searches. And on the morning of the killing, his phone was off, leaving him untraceable for the exact window that mattered, including at home where he'd later swear he'd been.
Starting point is 00:16:34 A man with nothing to hide keeps his phone on. To prosecutors, a phone that went dark on that particular morning was the fingerprint of someone who understood exactly how these cases get solved and tried to erase himself in advance. And prosecutors could point to the moment they believed push Talis over the edge. Even after he'd lost his primary and his job, Jeff wouldn't let go. Still filing public records requests about the office. Still digging. To the prosecution, that was the point of no return. The moment Tellus understood the reporting would never stop
Starting point is 00:17:18 and decided the only way to end it was to end Jeff German. Laid and end, it was overwhelming. The rare kind of case where the physical evidence, the forensics and the behavior all pointed the same way. Tellus told a different story. From behind the glass of the Clark County Detention Center, in an interview with the true crime program, 48 hours, Tellis was calm and certain.
Starting point is 00:17:47 He said the DNA, the hat, the shoe, all of it, had been planted, and he promised he'd prove it at trial. His theory went like this. He said that as the county's public administrator, he'd stumbled onto corruption, a real estate company that handled estate sales for his office was crooked. When he threatened to expose it, the powerful people behind it framed him for Jeff's murder to shut him up. To sway the jury, Tellis' theory would have to carry an enormous amount of weight.
Starting point is 00:18:22 It had to explain how his own DNA ended up under Jeff's fingernails. It had to explain the cut-up hat and the bloody shoe in his house. And it had to explain the SUV and his dream. driveway and the map searches for Jeff's address. Intelis is telling every single one of those things had been faked and planted by a conspiracy that somehow tied together realtors, his own coworkers, prosecutors, and the police. There was a grain of something real underneath it. A detective had actually looked into Tellus's claims about that realty company back in early
Starting point is 00:19:03 2022. He found that the company's practices looked suspect, but didn't clearly break the law as written. And there was no evidence that Tellus himself was clean either. And the company's owner flatly denied any conspiracy, calling Tellus a desperate man who'd say anything to wriggle out of the charge against him. Tellus's certainty about all this didn't make him an easy man to represent. As the case dragged on, he hired and fired three different lawyers. For months, he represented himself, filing his own motions from a jail cell, before finally bringing on a veteran Las Vegas defense attorney in early 24 to take him to trial. While all of that was unfolding, another fight was taking shape. This one had nothing to do with Tellis' guilt or innocence and everything to do with what Jeff German had spent his life protecting.
Starting point is 00:20:01 When police found Jeff's body, they'd seized his cell phone and his computers. To an investigator, those were simply evidence in a murder case. But to a journalist, they were something else entirely. Those devices held 40 years of work and buried in the notes and the contacts were the names of Jeff's confidential sources. Some of those sources worked inside the very institute. now handling the case, the police department and the district attorney's office. If investigators simply scrolled through Jeff's phone, they might expose the very people
Starting point is 00:20:44 who had trusted him. Inside the same government, he'd spent his life holding to account. Once years earlier, a court ordered him to name a source. He wouldn't. He leaned on the state's shield law and kept the name to himself. The promise a reporter makes to a frightened source that their name will never service only works if it's absolute. Jeff had never once broken it, so his newspaper went to court to keep it for him. In a motion filed weeks after his death, the Review Journal argued that Jeff's materials were protected under Nevada's Shield Law, one of the strongest press protection laws in the country. At first, a lower court sided with the police.
Starting point is 00:21:34 The paper appealed, and it wasn't alone, more than 50 news organizations signed onto a single friend of the court brief asking the justices to protect Jeff's sources. And on October 5, 2003, the Nevada Supreme Court handed down a decision that had never been made anywhere in the country before. It ruled that a reporter's privilege, the promise that protects confidential sources, doesn't die when the reporter does. That was new. Nearly every state, 48 of them, plus the District of Columbia, recognizes some form of reporters' privilege. But no court anywhere had ever come out and said the protection outlives the journalist. Nevada was first. and it got there because of Jeff German
Starting point is 00:22:31 and because his newspaper refused to let his killing become the reason a source somewhere got exposed. The paper's editor put it bluntly, letting the police and prosecutors decide for themselves what counted as privileged was like the fox guarding the henhouse. Instead, the court ordered that a neutral team, not the police, would go through Jeff's devices first. They were a former federal magistrate judge and a former Clark County District Attorney
Starting point is 00:23:02 picked precisely because they had no stake in the outcome. They would comb the devices, flag anything that touched a confidential source, and handed to the newspaper, which would decide what stayed protected. The police, meanwhile, spent around $77,000 on outside lawyers fighting for the right to look themselves. And there's a bitter irony buried in here, it later came out that in the frantic hours after Jeff's body was found, police had already used data from Jeff's own phone to help identify Tellis as a suspect in the first place. Even in death, Jeff German's reporting was working the case. By the summer of 2004, nearly two years after the murder, all of it was finally headed for a jury.
Starting point is 00:23:53 On paper, the state's case looked airtight, but Robert Tellis had made a decision that would put everything in doubt. He was going to take the witness stand himself, look 12 strangers in the eye, and tell them he was innocent. And juries have surprised prosecutors before. All it takes is one member who finds a sliver of doubt. So the question that hung over that courtroom was simple. Would the case against Robert Tellis hold? Robert Tellis's murder trial started in the middle of August 24. By then, the case was national news and it was unsettling.
Starting point is 00:24:50 An elected American official was on trial for assassinating a reporter over what that reporter had written. Over the days that followed, a jury of seven. women and five men listened to eight days of testimony from dozens of witnesses, detectives, forensic experts, neighbors, people who'd worked alongside Tellus, and then, remarkably, three full days of testimony from Tellis himself. Watching all of it from the gallery sat a small group of women, many of them Tellus's former employees, the ones who'd first blown the whistle, Throughout the trial, they wore red and they kept vigil. Day after day, the testimony piled up.
Starting point is 00:25:40 Real estate agents who'd worked with Tellis took the stand to say the suspect's gait and build had nagged at them from the start. They admitted that they'd quietly wondered if it could be him and had talked themselves out of it until they saw the photographs. And then the jury saw it for themselves. Prosecutors played the surveillance footage. the figure in orange, slipping into the side yard where Jeff was ambushed. Then Robert Tellis did the thing a lawyer almost never wants a client to do. On August 21st, he took the stand, looked the jury in the eye and told them, I didn't kill Mr. German, and I'm innocent.
Starting point is 00:26:22 He said he had been framed by a real estate company he claimed he'd been investigating. He gave the jury an alibi. by. He'd been home that morning, gone for a walk around 10, then headed to the gym, where he signed in at 1209. He even admitted the figure on the surveillance video was the killer. He just swore the hat and shoes in his own home didn't make him that figure. His time on the stand only grew stranger the longer it went. At one point, as the questioning turned to the shoes recovered from his home, Tellis asked to show the jury. photos of his ransacked house. As the images came up on the screen, he broke down, describing
Starting point is 00:27:07 walking in to find his wife sitting in the middle of the mess the search had left behind. It was a hard sell, so hard that even Tellus' own attorney wouldn't fully back the conspiracy theory. All he told jurors was that his client's belief in it was at least understandable. The prosecution had a simpler explanation. As one of the prosecutors put it, Tellis had decided to be judge, jury, and literally executioner, and he did it because Jeff Sherman wasn't done writing. On cross-examination, the prosecution took Tellus' story apart a thread at a time.
Starting point is 00:27:50 They tore down the alibi. No one could back up. The DNA, Tellus couldn't explain away, and the disguise that matched the one found in his home, and finally they took aim at the sprawling conspiracy that would have had to rope in realtors, coworkers, prosecutors, and police all at once. One prosecutor bore down on every piece of it,
Starting point is 00:28:12 openly ridiculing Tells's claim that Jeff's murder had been some professional job staged to frame him. When the jury finally went out to decide, they didn't rush. They waited for the better part of three years, days. Inside the jury room, the work was painstaking. They built a chart and walked through more than 400 exhibits. One by one, they picked apart the story tell us had told them from the stand. The walk he claimed to have taken on a hundred-degree morning, the fresh cut on his finger
Starting point is 00:28:48 he blamed on making chicken-fried rice. Almost none of it held up. But for the foreman and several others, one comparison mattered more than anything else. The jurors asked for a second laptop and put two videos side by side, the surveillance footage of the killer's walk, and a clip of Tellis walking from one of Jeff German's own review journal stories. They studied the gate, the way the man carried his arm as he moved. To the foreman, that side by side was what sealed it. In the end, Robert Tellis was undone by the way he walked.
Starting point is 00:29:29 Matched against a video, the reporter he'd killed had already made public. On August 28, 2004, after hours of deliberation, the jury came back. They found Robert Tellis guilty of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon. And they went further. Under Nevada law, they attached three special findings to the verdict, that the killing was willful, deliberate, and premeditated. That it amounted to elder abuse because Jeff was over 60, and that Tellus had carried it out by lying in wait.
Starting point is 00:30:08 In other words, they didn't just find that he did it. They found that he had planned it and waited for it. The reaction was immediate. In the Review Journal Newsroom, reporters who'd gathered around a desk to watch a live feed of the verbiased, broke down, and their editor stood and pulled them into hugs. In the courtroom, Jeff German's nieces held on to each other, and the women in red, the whistleblowers who'd waited two years for this moment finally let themselves exhale.
Starting point is 00:30:43 The paper's executive editor called the verdict a measure of justice, not just for Jeff German, but for murdered journalists everywhere. The district attorney had a message. He said that any attempt to silence or intimidate a journalist would not be tolerated, and he had no patience for Tellis' claim that he'd been framed. He said the only conspiracy was between him and his evil mind. The verdict answered one question, but it led to another. How long Robert Tellus would spend behind bars, and whether he would always.
Starting point is 00:31:22 ever walk free. That was for the penalty phase to decide, a second stage of the trial where the same jury sets the punishment. Here, the two sides laid their grief side by side. Jeff's brother and his two
Starting point is 00:31:38 sisters told the court about the whole the murder had torn in their family, holding up photos of Jeff as a doting uncle. His brother Jay spoke for all of them. We lost a brother, an uncle, a friend, a leader, he said. Two years on, he told the court they were still in shock. Then,
Starting point is 00:32:00 Tellis' own family asked for mercy. His mother wept as she begged the jurors to give her son a shot at parole so he might someday come home to his own young children. The jury set Tellis' sentence at life with the possibility of parole after 20 years. Then, at a hearing that October, Judge Michelle Levitt added eight more years for using a deadly weapon and for killing a victim over the age of 60. Life with no shot at parole for 28 years. The district attorney said the judge had given Tellis the maximum that she couldn't have given him more. Even then, prosecutors pointed out that Tellis had shown no remorse and hadn't taken an ounce of responsibility. They argued he'd be a real danger to the community if he ever got out.
Starting point is 00:32:57 Another prosecutor framed it in a way that reached well past that one courtroom. Tellis had killed Jeff over what he'd written and that kind of political violence was dangerous for a whole community. With time already served, Robert Tellis will be around 73 years old before he can even ask to go free. His attorney said Tellus, to appeal, then withdrew from the case, given a last chance to speak, Tullis turned to Jeff German's family and offered his deepest sympathies. He said he understood their need for accountability, and then in the same breath he insisted once more that they had the wrong man, that he didn't kill Jeff. It was to the very end the same performance the jury had already seen through,
Starting point is 00:33:51 And it's a performance he's still giving. In November of 2024, weeks after he was sentenced, Tellus appealed his conviction to the Nevada Supreme Court. Through a public defender, he has argued that the trial judge wrongly excluded a defense expert and that she failed to tell his lawyers about a jury note suggesting the panel had at one point been deadlocked. Prosecutors have urged the court to reject every client. As of this recording, the appeal is still pending, and from a cell at high desert state prison, Robert Tellis is still insisting.
Starting point is 00:34:32 He's an innocent man. Robert Tellis killed Jeff German to end a story. It's the oldest miscalculation there is, the belief that if you get rid of the messenger, the message disappears with him. But the story didn't. end. Jeff's own colleagues finished it, and the reporting Tellas tried to bury is the reporting that convicted him. And the killing led to something Jeff German might have valued more than any verdict. Because he died with his sources locked inside his devices, Nevada's highest court ruled for
Starting point is 00:35:14 the first time anywhere that a reporter's promise to protect a source outlives the reporter. That ruling now protects the next whistleblower and the next reporter far beyond Las Vegas. The tributes came fast, too, just three weeks after his murder at the Nevada Press Association's annual banquet at the Westgate, a dinner he never got to attend. Jeff was inducted into the Nevada newspaper Hall of Fame. Hours later, the true crime podcast he'd written and hosted, mobbed up, was named the state's podcast of the year and honor the review journal noted he'd won posthumously. The work behind those honors was mostly invisible. Jeff wasn't chasing celebrities or gossip.
Starting point is 00:36:05 He worked the unglamorous beat of local power, county offices, courthouses, and casino backrooms, the places where officials assume no one is watching. But that's how how a community learns when the people it elected have gone wrong. And that matters more than you might think. Jeff German was the only journalist killed in the United States in 2022. But that same year, at least 67 were killed around the world, most in places where no courts would ever rule in their favor. Killings like this are rare in the U.S.
Starting point is 00:36:47 Press freedom groups have counted only about 17. in the whole country since they started keeping track in 1992, which is exactly why the ones that do happen carry so much weight. But strip away everything and what's left is a man. A 69-year-old reporter who, when colleagues asked when he'd finally retire, told them simply that he never would, who was, by every account, already working on his next story about Robert Tellis when he was killed. police confirmed there was still more of his reporting on Tellis's office in the pipeline,
Starting point is 00:37:27 which means that in the end, Tellis didn't even stop the story he was so desperate to stop. He only guaranteed that it would be the last and the most red thing anyone ever wrote about him. Jeff had outlasted mobsters, casino bosses, and crooked officials of every stripe, and he wasn't brought down by any of those powerful forces he'd spent his life chasing. He was killed by a small-time county official who just couldn't stand what was written about him. There's a terrible smallness to that, and there's also a grim arithmetic. Robert Tellis gave up the rest of his life, his career, his family, his freedom, to silence one man.
Starting point is 00:38:18 And he failed, even at that. The last word belongs to the people who trusted Jeff. The office workers who came to him at their breaking point, scared for their jobs, then sat in that courtroom in red week after week until the verdict was read. They had nowhere else to turn, and he believed them. A scared source, a stubborn journalist, and the promise between them. That's the fragile machine Robert Tellis tried. to smash. One of those staff members, Alicia Goodwin, put it plainly, to her and to everyone. Jeff
Starting point is 00:38:56 fought for he is 100% our hero. That's what Robert Tellis never understood. You can kill the reporter. You can't kill what the reporting stood for. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. Murder at True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you
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Starting point is 00:40:02 You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, plus ad-free and early access to every show across Crimehouse and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try-free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Friday.
Starting point is 00:40:25 Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pritzofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Nicolette Tavallero, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind.
Starting point is 00:41:14 No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe. at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube.

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