Rancher Rob Krentz Murder Case Reports Tell of Intense Loyalty by His Dog “Blue”
By Paul Rubin, Phoenix News Times, Jun. 15 2010 [here]
We’ve gotten our hands on a heavily redacted police report made public a few hours ago by the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office.
It’s about the Rob Krentz murder case, a subject that we explored last week in the story “Cowboy Down.”
It is available right [here] if you haven’t checked it out yet.
Nothing earthshaking emerges in the carefully edited CCSO reports.
What does hit us hard, however, is the remarkable loyalty that Krentz’s beloved blue heeler-appropriately named Blue-showed to his master until the very end.
As we described in our story, Rob Krentz’s body was found out on the family’s sprawling ranch in southeastern Cochise County hours after he and Blue went missing. Krentz had been shot twice from close range by a still-unknown assailant.
Blue was shot once in the back, but still was clinging to life as authorities moved into the crime scene around midnight last March 27.
The sheriff’s police reports describe how Krentz, after being fatally shot, had fallen out of the Polaris all-terrain vehicle he and Blue had been riding around in.
Blue was lying in the back of the vehicle near his slain master when authorities arrived.
The dog was”extremely weak and shivering,” according to the reports, but roused himself when the deputies tried to approach Krentz’s body, causing them to retreat.
Soon, they realized that Blue couldn’t move, and he was fading fast.
They phoned an animal-control officer, who drove out to the remote setting and euthanized the animal.
Investigators later traced tire tracks from Krentz’s ATV back about 1,000 yards, to a location where they strongly suspect he was shot before speeding off.
At the shooting site, the detectives found “shoe prints and dog paw [prints] in the dirt” in proximity to each other.
That finding may prove interesting down the road.
We long have suspected that Blue somehow had a role in what happened out on the Krentz Ranch on the morning of March 27.
Could the dog simply have happened on a drug scout-remember, southeast Arizona is a dope-smuggling haven these days-and been the catalyst with his protective nature for a violent nightmare?
Maybe we’ll all learn the truth about all this someday-sure hope so.
As we wrote in “Cowboy Down,” our story (not the CCSO reports), Rob Krentz and Blue were cremated.
Krentz’s widow Sue told us that, someday, she will spread their ashes together down by a creek on the family’s ranch.