Las Vegas Police Withhold the Jeff German Case File Two Years After Robert Telles’s Conviction

Two years after Robert Telles was convicted of murdering Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has declined to release its case file, telling Crime Docket that the records “pertain to an open criminal investigation and/or criminal proceedings.” Crime Docket has asked the department to reconsider.

What we asked for

On August 31, 2026, Crime Docket’s Records Desk filed a request with the department under Nevada’s Public Records Act, NRS Chapter 239, for seven categories of records from the investigation into German’s September 2022 killing: the evidence and property log; 911 audio and dispatch records from the discovery of the victim; the area surveillance video collected as evidence, including the suspect-vehicle and person-of-interest recordings the department itself released to the public in September 2022; body-worn camera video from the response, canvass, search-warrant executions and arrest; recordings of the department’s interviews of Telles; the investigative case report and supplemental reports, including the forensic reports on DNA recovered from beneath the victim’s fingernails; and Telles’s recorded telephone calls from the Clark County Detention Center. The request excluded any image or video depicting the deceased, and invited redaction of victim and witness identifying information.

What the department sent

The next business day, September 1, the department’s records portal marked the request “Records Complete – Closed” and produced a single 101-kilobyte PDF. It is not a record from the case. It is a form letter headed “LEP – Law Enforcement Privilege – WITHHELD,” which states that the requested records “pertain to an open criminal investigation and/or criminal proceedings,” recites Nevada case law on the balancing of interests, and closes by inviting a new request “as the investigation proceeds.”

The letter does not address any of the seven categories individually, does not describe any record it is withholding, and does not explain why redaction, which the letter itself acknowledges is preferred over withholding, would not suffice.

Why that does not fit this case

Telles was convicted of first-degree murder in August 2024 and sentenced in October 2024. The trial was conducted in open court and broadcast; Telles testified in his own defense. The only proceeding still pending is his direct appeal, which is decided on the closed trial record.

Under the Nevada Supreme Court’s decision in Reno Newspapers, Inc. v. Gibbons, 127 Nev. 873 (2011), the burden is on the agency to show, with particularity, that its interest in nondisclosure clearly outweighs the public’s presumed right of access, and exemptions are construed narrowly. The department’s letter contains no case-specific analysis of any kind. The factors Nevada courts weigh when an investigation is genuinely open, such as the risk of tipping off a suspect or prejudicing a jury, do not apply to a convicted defendant in custody whose trial is over. Several of the requested categories, including the evidence log and dispatch records, are administrative records that no investigative theory reaches; others, including the surveillance imagery the department published in 2022 and the exhibits shown at trial, are already public.

Nevada law also makes body-worn camera recordings public records subject to redaction rather than blanket withholding (NRS 289.830), and provides that a requester who prevails in court against an improper denial recovers costs and attorney’s fees (NRS 239.011).

What happens next

On September 1, Crime Docket filed a renewed request, tracking number X016577-090126, setting out the points above and asking the department to process the request category by category, to produce an itemized log of anything it continues to withhold and the specific legal basis for each item, and to prioritize the evidence log, dispatch records and surveillance video if resources are constrained. Under NRS 239.0107 the department has five business days to respond. Crime Docket will report the department’s answer, and will publish the records it releases after privacy review.

The full text of the renewed request and the department’s withholding letter are available on request from foia@crimedocket.com and will be added to this page.