In the autumn of 1973, a 21-year-old woman named Katherine Mestites found her life tragically cut short in a house trailer near Mesa, Arizona. Her death was not an isolated act of violence but a chapter in a horrifying saga of crime that spanned two states and left seventeen people dead. The story of her final days is intertwined with the names of her killers, Douglas Gretzler and his accomplice, Willie Steelman, two men who embarked on a brutal crime spree fueled by robbery and a chilling
determination to eliminate any witnesses.
The events leading to Katherine’s murder began to unfold when Gretzler and Steelman arrived in the Phoenix area. They had been staying at the trailer with Katherine and her 19-year-old acquaintance, Robert Robbins. The motive for the killings appeared to stem from the killers' paranoia that Robbins suspected their involvement in other recent disappearances. On the evening of October 24, 1973, Gretzler strangled Robbins with an electrical cord. The following day, their violent spree continued. Shortly after dusk on October 25th, as Katherine knelt at a private altar to conduct a séance, Steelman shot her in the head, ending her life.
The bodies of Katherine Mestites and Robert Robbins were discovered on October 28, 1973. Their murders were just two of the seventeen committed by Gretzler and Steelman across Arizona and California. The pair's rampage of violence and robbery continued until their eventual capture in California. Following their arrest, both men confessed to the string of murders. For their crimes, Douglas Gretzler and Willie Steelman were tried and convicted. Gretzler was ultimately sentenced to death and was executed in 1998. Steelman, also sentenced to death, died of liver disease while on death row in 1986.
