Arizona Torso Murder #2

Marjorie Orbin was a former Las Vegas showgirl. She and Jay Orbin, who ran Jayhawk International, a Native American art business in Phoenix, divorced in 1998 but went on living together as husband and wife while raising their young son. Jay was last heard from on September 8, 2004, his 45th birthday, when he phoned his mother. Marjorie told people he had left on another business trip.

On October 23, 2004, a transient found a large plastic storage tub wrapped in black trash bags in the desert near Tatum and Dynamite boulevards in north Phoenix. Inside was a man’s torso, later identified as Jay. Detectives learned that Marjorie had used his credit card to buy black trash bags and two 50-gallon containers, one of them identical to the tub down to its color and UPC code. They also found she had been draining his money and seeing another man, Larry Weisberg. She was arrested on December 6, 2004.

After an eight-month trial, a Maricopa County jury convicted Marjorie in 2009 of first-degree murder, along with theft and fraud counts. On October 1, 2009, she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed her convictions in November 2011. She has blamed Weisberg, a claim the jury did not accept.