Secret phone recordings linked Gary Triano's ex-wife to a suspected scheme to pay $400,000 to someone involved in his bombing death, a sheriff's homicide detective told a judge.
The detective said he believes Pamela Phillips stopped sending the scheduled cash payments to Ronald Young, who became upset and told her "you're gonna be in a women's prison for murder."
Neither Phillips nor Young have been charged in the Tucson slaying of Triano nearly 10 years ago.
Triano, 52, died when a pipe bomb mangled his car in the parking lot of a Foothills country club where he played golf.
On Wednesday, authorities seized documents and other items from Phillips' home outside Aspen, Colo.
In a sworn statement that supported the request for a search warrant, Pima County sheriff's Detective James Gamber said that when federal agents searched Young's Fort Lauderdale, Fla., home, hotel room, car and storage locker last November, they found microcassette and digital recordings of phone calls Young made to Phillips.
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Based on six recorded conversations, as well as e-mails and other documents dated as late as 2003, the veteran detective said he believes Phillips and Young were involved in the bombing and that Phillips agreed to pay Young $400,000 for his participation.
The search of Triano's ex-wife's home came Wednesday as Young, 64, nears the end of serving his sentence for carrying a gun while a fugitive from fraud charges. He is being held in a low-security prison in Miami.
Messages left for Phillips on her home and business phones were not returned Wednesday and Thursday.
But her former attorney, Doug Clark, who represented Phillips in post-divorce matters years ago, said it's clear that she had nothing to do with the slaying.
"There are at least five different very dangerous people, any of whom could have done it," Clark said Thursday. "They all had the means, the motive and the opportunity to do it."
Clark added: "Gary had a shady past and many enemies."
Triano, who hosted Donald Trump in Tucson, showed an annual income of $800,000 as late as 1992, when the Tohono O'odham Nation forced him and other partners out of management of its high-stakes bingo and slot-machine parlor. He and Phillips ended a seven-year marriage in 1993.
Triano was broke by 1994 but trying to make a comeback.
Detective Gamber's statement, released Thursday, did not cite any admissions of the slaying in the phone conversations between Phillips and Young but said he believed "both knew it was important to conceal their ongoing relationship and they tried to act accordingly."
In one phone call to Phillips believed to have occurred in 1998, Young "wondered if she had started talking to somebody about something she shouldn't, something involving Ronald Young," according to the 12-page affidavit that was filed in Pitkin County, Colo., district court.
"Pamela Phillips denied talking to anyone, saying that if she had to kill herself and go to her grave and not say a word, she would do that."
Gamber told the judge who granted the search warrant that he believes Phillips stopped withdrawing cash from ATMs and sending it to Young because she did not want to raise the suspicion of her money manager or because she believed it was illegal to get cash withdrawals in such large amounts.
After Triano's death, Seaboard Life Insurance Co. withheld payment of Triano's $2 million life insurance policy for several months, but then paid it to Phillips with about $20,000 in interest for the time it was withheld.
Gamber said the phone conversations also showed Phillips got angry when Young "demanded his share of interest on top of the $400,000."
The detective said the recordings and e-mail documents indicate Phillips still owed $248,000 on the $400,000 debt.
The sworn statement quotes Young as telling Phillips: " I helped you out on something that was beyond what anybody else in the world would probably do, especially somebody you can trust, and I think that deserves some consideration, since you are living off the benefits of it, you know."
In another conversation, "Ron Young stated that if he ever found out that she compromised him for her benefit that would really be unfortunate for her because there's plenty of stuff that he could dig, literally dig out of the ground, and she's a fried duck."
In another undated call that Young recorded on his digital voice recorder, Young was upset at not receiving money and said: "Well I'll … you, you're gonna be very serious when … you sit in a women's prison for murder."
Officers with the Pima County Sheriff's Department and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said they won't know whether arrests will be made until they finish examining what they seized Wednesday.
