Thursday, July 21, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Murder trial witness tells of finding corpse

Body buried under floor of apartment

Gregory Stiegler appears in court during opening arguments Tuesday in his murder trial. Stiegler is accused of murdering his roommate, Robert Wilson. Photo by John Gurzinski.

A Las Vegas apartment manager described in court Wednesday how she found a man's decomposing corpse buried underneath the floor of an apartment she was renovating in 2002.

Heidi Raser, manager of the Orleans Square apartments on Maryland Parkway, said she'd gone to the apartment in May 2002 following the disappearance of the apartment's renter, Robert Wilson, 52.

Raser said in the process of renovating the apartment, she started pulling up the carpet and soon noticed that the floor was uneven, so she jokingly announced to co-workers that perhaps Wilson's body was under the floor.

"Not knowing anything was wrong, I sort of leaned down and said, 'Bob, are you in there?' " Raser said.

Raser then poked a hole in the uneven floor and she realized there was, in fact, something dead underneath.

"It was soft, I smelled something, and it was foul," she said. "There was something dead in there, and I told everyone to get out."

Raser offered the gruesome account during the murder trial of Gregory Stiegler, who is charged with killing Wilson, then burying the body under the floor of the apartment they shared in late 2001. Prosecutors said Wilson was bludgeoned in the head 14 times, then asphyxiated with a plastic bag and meticulously disposed of in the makeshift grave.

During Stiegler's ongoing trial in the courtroom of District Judge John McGroarty on Wednesday, Las Vegas police crime scene analyst Maria Thomas said the body was bound, duct-taped and wrapped in plastic. The corpse was placed in the ground under a stairwell of the apartment, then covered with two inches of concrete, cardboard and roofing tar.

Witness Mark Hegge said he met Stiegler while the defendant was on the run from the law in Arizona.

"He told me he was wanted in Las Vegas for killing someone," Hegge said.

Hegge testified that he and Stiegler, whom he knew as "Craig," regularly used methamphetamine together. Stiegler once told him that he had killed his roommate in self-defense during a struggle over a gun, and that an unidentified friend of Stiegler's then buried the body for him in the apartment.

Hegge said that he didn't believe Stiegler at the time. But after he heard Stiegler's story a couple of times, he started to think the story was true, so he called the Federal Bureau of Investigation and learned that Stiegler really was wanted for murder.

The trial is expected to resume Friday morning. If convicted of murder, Stiegler faces a potential life sentence.