The man charged with murdering a 25 year old on the Boise Greenbelt earlier this week is being held without bond after making his initial court appearance Friday afternoon.
Prosecutors said 41-year-old Ross Wardlaw stabbed Jordan Harbst to death, who was traveling home along the Greenbelt early Monday morning.
Harbst had been spending time with a friend downtown when prosecutors said Wardlaw “ambushed” him, took him off his scooter and eventually killed him by stabbing him through the heart with a fixed-blade knife.
Officials said Wardlaw, who has been homeless for more than a decade, confessed to police, saying he was paranoid that people on scooters were after him.
Calling him a “danger to everyone,” prosecutors requested he be held in custody without bond.
David Smethers, a public defender, said his office will ask to revisit the bond issue at Wardlaw’s preliminary hearing, which is set for July 20 at 8:30 a.m.
Wardlaw has a lengthy criminal record, including several misdemeanor battery convictions, one of which involved him punching his mother in the face.
Court records show he pleaded guilty to aggravated battery in 2004 and eventually violated the terms of his probation, earning him a seven-year stint at the state penitentiary.
Judges typically sentenced him to short jail sentences, which were often suspended, or they released him with credit for time served.
One sentence ordered him to take eight hours of anger management classes, which court records show he never attended.
Most recently, Wardlaw faced felony assault and battery charges in 2025 for allegedly assaulting another homeless man and threatening to stab a shelter worker with a knife.
A psychologist initially found him mentally unfit to stand trial in that case and a judge committed him to State Hospital South.
During that stay, he wrote a letter to the judge calling himself a “strange bird/duck/Aryan Knight” and stating the treatments he received are unconstitutional and a “violation of human rights.”
Wardlaw eventually took the case to trial this past May, in which a jury acquitted him of all charges.
When he appeared in his own defense on the witness stand, Wardlaw said the other man had stolen one of his notebooks, which he said documented his life from 2022 to 2024.
“An investigator should be able to go through that notebook and discover links to certain crimes that have involved me,” he said.
Wardlaw said the FBI “could be” involved but didn’t want to speculate.
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