Killer, former firefighter offers confession
A former Las Vegas firefighter convicted of hiring a hit man to kill his wife has admitted for the first time that he committed a crime.
George Tiaffay tucked his short, cryptic confession from Ely State Prison inside a 107-page court filing packed with dozens of handwritten pages, appealing his conviction for first-degree murder.
He wrote in the third person and all capital letters that he suffered from lingering effects of prescription medication when Shauna Tiaffay was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in September 2012 as she returned to her Summerlin apartment.
“The prescriptions altered his mind and removed his ability to know right from wrong to the point that he thought God directed him to perpetrate a crime to protect his child,” wrote George Tiaffay, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who was sentenced in September 2015 to life in prison without parole.
Prosecutors argued at his trial that he walked his 8-year-old daughter into his wife’s apartment, knowing that the 46-year-old Palms waitress was dead inside. George Tiaffay had hired a home
FIREFIGHTER
less man named Noel “Greyhound” Stevens to crush her skull with a hammer. The two men spent weeks planning the killing, authorities said.
“It was always pretty evident that he committed the crime,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc Digiacomo said of Tiaffay’s appeal. “The fact that he’s now using a confession to try to get out of it is somewhat ironic.”
Stevens, who had been friends with the former firefighter for years, would later admit to tracing Shauna Tiaffay’s steps, burglarizing her apartment and waiting inside on Sept. 29, 2012, before beating her to death with a hammer.
At trial, Tiaffay’s attorney Robert Langford tried to paint Stevens as a psychotic liar. But prosecutors said George Tiaffay — who had given Stevens a key to his wife’s apartment and bought him dark clothing weeks before the slaying — was the only one with a reason to want Shauna Tiaffay dead.
George Tiaffay’s appeal is expected to take its first step forward during a hearing Thursday, when a judge could assign him a new lawyer.
Langford has since withdrawn from the case.
In his appeal, Tiaffay wrote that Langford was ineffective during the trial and ignored the defendant’s mental troubles. He said he had suffered an injury while working as a firefighter and took prescribed hormones, estrogen blockers and Adderall.
The convicted killer laid out a dozen grounds for his appeal, most of them focused on his mental condition and Langford’s representation.
“Tiaffay told his defense counsel about prescriptions that led to hallucinations that God was directing Tiaffay to perpetrate a crime to protect his child and visions of deceased wife letting him know all was okay and that he thought God told him to trust Langford,” the inmate wrote. “Langford told Tiaffay not to get help and failed to request psychiatric evaluation required for Tiaffay in this condition.”
Langford disagreed.
“He never indicated any kind of psychosis or any kind of abnormal behavior that led me to believe that he was anything other than competent and able to assist in his defense,” Langford said.
Contact David Ferrara at dferrara@reviewjournal.com or 702-3801039. Follow @randompoker on Twitter.