An earlier version of this essay appeared in the April 2000 issue of Playboy.
It was a romance that began the way many romances begin in Las Vegas—in a strip club. This was not in the new Las Vegas, the one that’s like a Disney theme park, the Las Vegas that has day-care centers and G-rated entertainment. It was in the other Vegas, the Vegas of martinis and fast talk and shady deals and lap dances. The Vegas where business partners are beaten over the head with telephone books, where the mayor is a former Mob lawyer; where men are called Fat Herbie and Tony the Ant, and where you don’t want to step on the wrong toes. This was in the Vegas of breast implants and motel room trysts and rich older men who like their girls pretty and young—the Vegas where nobody is really surprised when a romance that began in a strip club ends in murder.
In March of 2000, when a 28-year-old former topless dancer named Sandra Murphy went on trial (along with co-defendant and purported new lover Rick Tabish, 35) for the murder of 55-year-old casino heir Lonnie “Ted” Binion, it was, for some, just another local spectacle, an erupting volcano or pirate gunboat battle or six-story laser-light show. But once upon a time, what Sandy Murphy and Binion had was real, or as real as anything gets in this town. Neither of them cared what anyone else thought, or that it had started, like so many of the relationships in Binion’s life, with him handing her money.
Back on that February night in 1995, several dancers had been hanging out with Binion and Fat Herbie Blitzstein in a booth at Cheetah’s Topless Club. Apart from family, most of the people in Binion’s life, the people he called friends, were either wiseguys like BIitzstein or people in his employ. Many worked for his family’s casino, the Horseshoe, from which he was banned at the time, his gaming license suspended because he had a drug habit he couldn’t kick. Toward the end of the evening, when Binion and Blitzstein were slightly drunk and tired and getting ready to head out to their limo. Binion handed the one he’d been calling Sandy a couple of grand and said, “This is for you, honey.”
It wasn’t just that she had “nice titties,” as Binion liked to call them. It was that he got a kick out of her smart-mouthed flirtiness. But goddamn if she didn’t take that $2000 and throw it right back in his face, saying, “I don’t want your fucking money.” Later, when Binion told Sid Lewis, a former pit boss at the Horseshoe and his onetime main running mate, what he liked about Sandy Murphy, what made her special, he pointed to that. It just tickled him. “You can’t tell me she doesn’t dig me, Sid. I mean, she threw that cash right back in my face. She didn’t want my money.” Lewis suggested that it might be calculated, part of her scam, but Binion, whose personal fortune was estimated at between $30 million and $50 million, disagreed. No one was that good of an actress.
So that’s how it began. As for the timing, well, Ted Binion’s wife—yes, we’re in that kind of story—the blonde and beautiful Doris Kilmer would dispute Ted’s later contention that when he hooked up with Sandy, Doris was going hot and heavy with her personal trainer and was on the verge of leaving the marriage. In Doris’ version of events, she was the long-suffering wife who had tolerated his heroin addiction and philandering for years, and it wasn’t until she heard him making plans to spend time with Sandy at his ranch in Pahrump, Nevada, about 45 miles west of Las Vegas, that she gave up on him. Eventually, Doris took their daughter Bonnie, then 15, and decamped. Not long after, Sandy Murphy moved into Binion’s gated, ranch-style Palomino Lane mansion in downtown Las Vegas.
This was in the Vegas of breast implants and motel room trysts and rich older men who like their girls pretty and young—the Vegas where nobody is really surprised when a romance that began in a strip club ends in murder.Through most of his life, Ted Binion was a man for whom a higher purpose had proved elusive. He was a man who knew how to enjoy himself, and he was an optimist. But it would be a stretch to say he was happy. His father, Benny, who died in 1989, was a Las Vegas legend, an uneducated bootlegger and numbers racket guy who had moved his family to Vegas from Dallas in the Forties to get into the casino business. Benny’s reputation in Dallas as a cold-blooded killer followed him to his grave, but age and great wealth have a way of turning a tough character into a lovable one. By the time of his death, Benny, in his trademark white Stetson and gold-buttoned cowboy shirt, was regarded with enormous affection by his adopted city. Moreover, the Horseshoe, the casino he’d started, had achieved worldwide attention as the home of the annual World Series of Poker, an event he’d dreamed up.
Unlike the gambling palaces of the Strip that seduce with spectacle and fantasy, the Horseshoe, situated in downtown Las Vegas, was conceived by Benny as a no-frills joint for serious gamblers. He did install red carpeting, which distinguished it initially from the “sawdust joints” that were his neighbors. But no floor shows or music or anything else was there to distract from the purpose at hand: gambling. With its cozy saloon atmosphere, the Horseshoe’s appeal was down-home and friendly. And Benny gave better odds and higher limits than any other place in town. In the Seventies, because of his own problems with the law, Benny put his two sons, Jack and Ted, in charge of the casino’s operations. When a gambler named William Lee Bergstrom walked in off the desert one day in 1980 wanting to wager $777,000 on a single throw of the dice, it was Ted, as the floor boss, who approved the bet. Bergstrom won his bet and split town triumphant. But several years later, he returned and wagered a million dollars in a similar all-or-nothing roll of the dice. This time, however, he lost and subsequently committed suicide.
Ted was cut in the mold of his father. For all his wealth, he favored jeans and cowboy boots and pickup trucks. He was a horse lover and fisherman, an insatiable reader and history buff, a collector of coins, Bonsai trees, guns, women—anything rare and beautiful. He was a man of enthusiasms, always saying about this or that, “Isn’t this great? Isn’t that the greatest?” And there was nothing in life he loved more than running the floor at the Horseshoe. It was his calling and his passion. He loved hanging out with high rollers because at heart he was a gambler himself. Always going for the rush, always pushing things to their limits.
One bookmaker who knew Ted described him as being “on the Full Vegas Plan: strippers, gambling and drugs.” As a rich man, he could indulge himself to the fullest. The problem was that it eventually cost him more than money. In 1987, gaming authorities suspended Binion’s casino operator’s license after he was busted buying heroin. “That took a big toll on him,” says his friend Sid Lewis. “Ted running a casino, that was his lifeblood. There was nobody that could hold a candle to him in that business, no one who had guts like him—except for Benny. High rollers would come in from all over the world, and Ted would never back down—you know, book it, book it. A million-dollar bet? Book it. Just like his dad.”
Barred from working in the business he loved, barred from even entering the casino of which he owned 20 percent, Ted became obsessed with getting his license back. His battle with the Nevada Gaming Control Board would last years and cost him millions in legal fees.
Binion’s mother, Teddy Jane, whom he adored, had died the year before he met Sandy. Her death, coupled with his new and unhappy obsession to get back his gaming license, had Ted’s moods swinging between mania and depression. Forced by the GCB to submit to weekly drug tests, he managed to stay off heroin. But he was letting himself go in other ways, wearing the same clothes for days in a row, neglecting to comb his hair or shave. He was also drinking heavily and sleeping apart from his wife, Doris.
Sandy Murphy appeared at a moment when Binion was in dire need of good cheer. Her attentions lifted him up, gave him a new outlook. She bought him that Des’ree CD, the one with the song that goes, “You gotta be hard, you gotta be tough, you gotta be stronger…” and she’d get him pumped up, singing along with it. He started paying more attention to his appearance, got a haircut, began wearing nicer clothes. He took Sandy on trips to his ranch in Montana and the ranch in Pahrump. “Sandy was his girl,” says a friend. “And it wasn’t just that she supported his efforts to get his license back. She did a lot of nice things for him. She got his house straight and set up for him. She entertained for him. It was almost, like, cute. She was trying real hard to have a normal existence. And Ted was not the easiest guy to do that with.”
On the other hand, the California-born Murphy, daughter of a repo man, was a bit of a handful herself. She didn’t take shit from anyone—which, again, was what Binion liked about her. But her being 23, with that body, and him 51 and rich, well a lot of people thought they knew what that was about. Binion’s sister Becky Behnen didn’t like Sandy off the bat, thought her too crass and materialistic. Binion’s then-15-year-old daughter, Bonnie, who was staying at the Palomino mansion with Ted and Sandy, made scant effort to disguise her dislike for her father’s new girlfriend. Bonnie later told private investigator Tom Dillard that she didn’t want “basically a whore living in our house.”
The fact was that Sandy, who had been runner-up in the Miss Bellflower beauty pageant when she was in high school, had always had a taste for nice clothes, expensive cars and the fast life. With Ted, she got the lifestyle she’d always wanted.
Despite the stipulation by the GCB that he divorce himself completely from the Horseshoe during his suspension, Ted let Sandy use Horseshoe limos and cell phones, made sure security guards were available to run errands for her, and gave her a line of credit at the casino, along with a credit card (she reportedly rang up an average of $5000 a month buying clothes from Neiman Marcus and Versace). They ate at posh restaurants like Nicky Blair’s and Aristocrat, rubbed elbows with Las Vegas VIPs and politicians, and went to casino openings. Friends say the two regularly partied all night and slept all day.
The glamour and good times had an ugly flip-side. Binion was a mean, abusive drunk. There were physical beatings, black eyes, bruises. And Sandy didn’t take it passively. If Ted would punch her, she would punch him right back. Or kick him, or scratch him, or pack up her things and threaten to leave. One time, after he’d busted up her face and pulled out a hank of hair, he got back into her good graces by buying her a brand-new 1997 black Mercedes at a cost of $97,300. Unfortunately, Sandy couldn’t drive it off the lot. Her license had been suspended for driving under the influence. Ironically, given his own problems, Ted paid $15,000 for her to attend Sober Living by the Sea, a substance abuse rehabilitation center in Newport Beach, California, to fulfill her DWI sentence.
Ted’s romance with Sandy might have had its share of drama, but the bickering within the Binion clan was worthy of an old episode of Dallas. Ever since Teddy Jane’s death, Binion’s sister Becky had been waging a war against her brother Jack, president of the Horseshoe. Becky thought Jack was funneling money from the Horseshoe into the casinos he had opened on his own in Mississippi and Louisiana. The only way she could think to stop him was by taking control of the Horseshoe. So she took the fight to court.
In 1998, the suit was settled, bitterly, with Becky the putative winner. As part of the terms, Jack had to buy out Ted’s and another sister’s interests, then sell them to Becky for a $20 million note. She had to make good on the note at the end of two years or the Horseshoe would revert to Jack. For Ted, who kept a large collection of silver coins and bullion in one of the Horseshoe’s basement vaults, it meant, among other things, that he would have to find another storage space.
The solution to the problem arrived in the person of Rick Tabish. Ted struck up a conversation with him one night in the men’s room at an old-time Vegas joint called Piero’s on Paradise Road. The 32-year-old Tabish was entertaining, a “young, sharp guy,” as Binion called him. On their way back into the dining room, Ted invited Tabish to join him for a drink. Rick accepted. The two talked about Montana, where Tabish was from, and their love of fishing and the natural beauty of Big Sky country. Tabish, like Binion, had grown up privileged, in his case the son of a wealthy Missoula gasoline distributor. A star linebacker on his high school football team, Rick had a wild side off the field that included drinking, brawling, and a taste for crime. Family pull helped get him out of a couple of skirmishes with the law—an aggravated assault charge and the theft of a $600,000 painting from a family friend—but not even his father’s influence could save him when he got busted for sending a quarter pound of coke from Arizona to Missoula via Federal Express. Rick pleaded guilty and served nine months in the Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge.
When he got out of prison, Tabish cleaned up his act. He landed a construction job with a reputable company and later married the boss’ daughter, Mary Jo Rehbein. Husband and wife started a trucking company that was successful, but several other ventures did less well. In 1997, the ambitious Tabish traveled to Nevada with the understanding that he would move Mary Jo and their two kids down as soon as he was established.
Ted Binion was exactly the kind of man Tabish had come to Vegas looking to meet, and Binion took a liking to Tabish, who no doubt reminded him of himself at a younger age.Ted Binion was exactly the kind of man Tabish had come to Vegas looking to meet, and Binion took a liking to Tabish, who no doubt reminded him of himself at a younger age. During the months that followed, Rick became a frequent visitor at the Palomino Lane mansion. He got to know Sandy. He heard about Ted’s problems with the gaming commission and with his sister Becky. He heard about the hoard of silver in the basement. He was also around when Ted got the news in May 1998 that he had lost his 11-year battle against the gaming commission and had his license permanently revoked.
Ted was devastated, though he had no one to blame but himself. He had disregarded the gaming commission’s stipulation that he have nothing to do with the Horseshoe. Beyond the little things, he had been guilty of instructing a Horseshoe employee to cash $11,000 in checks for his buddy Blitzstein, a lieutenant of Chicago mobster Tony “The Ant” Spilotro. He had spent quality time with a wiseguy named Pete Ribaste, of the Kansas City Mob. And he had twice failed drug hair-tests despite his efforts to thwart the tests by having a barber shave off all his head and body hair. It’s hard to fathom that a guy as smart as Binion was could be so stupid and self-destructive. But Ted was a gambler, and, like every true gambler, he just liked living on the edge.
With the fallout from the GBC’s ruling came the imperative to move his silver out of the Horseshoe. Ted turned to his new buddy Tabish, who in addition to his trucking company, did contracting work. Ted had decided that he wanted to build an underground vault near his ranch in Pahrump, Nevada, to store the coins and bullion. Following Ted’s instructions, Tabish dug the vault right off the main road, in a dusty patch of desert property Ted owned between a Burger King and Terrible Herbst’s casino.
On a typically hot desert evening in July 1998, Binion and Tabish, along with members of Tabish’s work crew, hauled the 48,000 pounds of silver to Pahrump. Tabish would recall later that they were “like a bunch of cowboys in the night. Teddy wearing a bulletproof vest and guns on his hips.”
Back in Las Vegas, Binion told his friends he was going to find other things to do with his life now that he could no longer work in the casino business. He was going to buy another ranch somewhere. He was going to write a book about his dad. Or make a movie. Instead, he started smoking heroin again.
On September 17, 1998, Emergency Medical Technicians, responding to a call at Binion’s Palomino Lane mansion, encountered a hysterical Sandy Murphy running toward them, yelling, “He’s stopped breathing! He’s stopped breathing!” Entering the house, they found Binion’s motionless body in the den, laid out on a sleeping bag, surrounded by foil wrappers, half a red balloon, and an empty bottle of Xanax. When one of the EMTs told Sandy that Binion was dead, she became so distraught that she had to be hospitalized and sedated.
The front-page story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal the next morning featured a large photo of Binion, moonfaced, with thinning curls, under the headline, “Ted Binion: Troubled Gambling Figure Dies.” A smaller photo, taken hours after his death, showed two of his friends consoling each other in front of his home. One of the men was a “shaken” Rick Tabish. He’s quoted saying his friend’s death was a “tragedy, because I know he was trying really hard to change his life.”
Entering the house, they found Binion’s motionless body in the den, laid out on a sleeping bag, surrounded by foil wrappers, half a red balloon, and an empty bottle of Xanax.Less than 36 hours later, Tabish was caught in the middle of the night in Pahrump, having just excavated the dead man’s silver from the underground vault Tabish had built for him. The bullion was valued at $7 million.
Tabish tried some fast-talking, standing there in the middle of the night next to a couple of earthmovers and a dump truck. At first, he told Sergeant Ed Howard that he and his buddies—an employee of his trucking company, Mike Milot, and Binion’s Pahrump ranch manager, David Mattsen—were moving some concrete. Then, after Howard discovered the silver in the truck, Tabish admitted that he had lied. He said he was a friend of Binion’s. He had built the vault for Ted, who had asked him to make sure that when he died, his ex-wife didn’t get her hands on his silver. Tabish assured Howard that “Wade knows all about it.” “Wade” was Nye County Sheriff Wade Lieseke, and according to Tabish, they had talked several times that day. Cellular records would back him up.
When Sheriff Lieseke was called to the scene that night by Sergeant Howard, Tabish did not receive quite the support he’d predicted. There is a dispute between Lieseke and his deputies as to what the sheriff’s role actually was—he claims he ordered the arrest, they claim that he was “very nervous” and initially tried to talk them out of it. Either way, Tabish and his cohorts were eventually arrested and charged with the attempted theft of Binion’s silver.
The Las Vegas police, at that point, did not consider Binion’s death a homicide, but Becky Behnen did. She didn’t believe that Ted died of an overdose of Xanax because, according to her, he never used pills. In fact, Ted had obtained a 120-pill bottle of Xanax the day before his death by getting a prescription from his next-door neighbor, Dr. Enrique La-Cayo. It was a practice that wasn’t new to either of them. Nevertheless, at Becky’s instigation, Ted’s estate hired Vegas cop turned private eye Tom Dillard to begin an investigation, and, eventually, the police and district attorney’s office got on board. With the help of evidence Dillard uncovered, the police were persuaded that Ted’s death was, indeed, murder.
Nine months later, in June 1999, having put together their case, metro police nabbed Murphy and Tabish (who was out of jail on the silver robbery thanks to a $100,000 bail bond posted by Murphy) as the two were wheeling a shopping cart down the aisle of a supermarket in Henderson, Nevada. The charge: that they had conspired to murder Binion by forcing him to ingest “a lethal combination of heroin and Xanax.”
The motive was money, of course—and love. In addition to the silver Tabish had been caught stealing, Murphy stood to inherit $300,000 and the Palomino Lane mansion. The prosecution would provide a story along with the money angle—the story of an affair between Murphy and Tabish. Months of investigation had produced a wealth of details. Secret phone calls. Weekends at the Beverly Hills and Peninsula hotels in California. A cabana boy named Dante Cabanas who saw Sandy and Tabish share a towel. A masseuse who remembered Sandy and Tabish as the people to whom he gave in-room massages. A Neiman Marcus salesman who sold Sandy men’s Gucci jeans in Tabish’s size (on Binion’s credit card). A manicurist who, while doing Sandy’s nails a week before Binion’s death, heard an “intoxicated” Sandy say Binion was going to die of a drug overdose “within three weeks,” and that her new boyfriend “Richard” was going to go out to the desert and dig up money and silver that Binion had buried there. And five months after Ted’s death, on February 19, there were the detectives armed with a search warrant, who would show up at Sandy’s apartment at seven in the morning and discover Rick Tabish there with her.
The state had witnesses ready to testify that Ted Binion was on the verge of kicking Sandy Murphy out of his house and out of his life. That he was convinced she was stepping out on him and had hired a detective to tail her. That he went around his house unloading his many guns because he was concerned, as he told maid Mary Montoya-Gascoigne, that Sandy would “pick up one and shoot him.” That he called his attorney James Brown, who told police that the night before Ted died, he had asked Brown to write Sandy out of his will “if she doesn’t kill me tonight.” They had statements attesting to Sandy Murphy’s materialism, her desperation not to lose the luxuries to which she’d grown accustomed and the lengths to which she’d go to keep them (including recording and listening to Binion’s phone calls, possibly with an eye toward blackmail).
The evidence against Tabish was even more explosive. Despite ownership of several companies, a leased plane and full-time pilot, Tabish had severe liquidity problems. His companies’ checks had started to bounce in the summer of 1998. The IRS slapped a tax lien against his Missoula home. There was a loan of $200,000 from Bank West of Nevada that was coming due on September 19, two days after Binion’s death. Most damaging were witnesses whose stories would depict Tabish as a man willing to go to any lengths to get what he wanted.
One of those witnesses, a business associate of Tabish’s named Leo Casey, told a tale that was right out of a Scorsese movie: Two months before Binion’s death, Tabish and a crony, Steven Wadkins, drove Casey out to Jean, Nevada, 40 miles south of Vegas, ostensibly to inspect some equipment at a sandpit business in which they all had an interest. Instead, Tabish and Wadkins restrained Casey in a pair of thumbcuffs, slammed him repeatedly in the head with a phone book, stuck a gun in his mouth and, ultimately, dug a shallow grave with a front-end loader and threatened to bury him alive unless he signed a document saying he had embezzled money from them and would surrender his interests in the sandpit. Casey signed the document.
As if Casey’s story weren’t damaging enough, there was Kurt Gratzer, a childhood friend and former employee of Tabish, who said that a month before Binion died, Tabish had offered Gratzer money to kill the former casino owner. The two discussed various methods, including staging Binion’s death as a suicide. Ultimately, Gratzer decided not to do it.
Many in Las Vegas considered the case open and shut. In truth, the physical evidence left a lot to be desired. The most damaging elements of the state’s case involved things Tabish and Murphy said or did in front of other people. But some of those people—Gratzer and Casey, in particular—had credibility problems. Casey, who had been accused, in various lawsuits, of shady business dealings, was also accused of perjuring himself during the preliminary hearing. Gratzer, who had cut an immunity deal with the state, merely came off as a dangerous wacko. On the witness stand, a pulse working away in his jaw, Gratzer had stared menacingly at the judge and contradicted prior statements he’d made before a grand jury. During breaks, he stood at military parade rest.
Most damaging were witnesses whose stories would depict Tabish as a man willing to go to any lengths to get what he wanted.Sitting on the other side of a soundproof glass partition in the Clark County Detention Center, Rick Tabish talked to me through a crackly phone that smelled of sour breath. “I’m upset, you know,” he said. “I’m sitting here rotting. I have a wife and two kids. I have a business. And they’re making me look like a shyster, a thief, a gigolo. But this is the kind of stuff that happens in Nevada all the time. Ask anyone. They don’t have any hard evidence, so this is the only way they can make their case.” Tabish’s contention that the Binion estate and the prosecution were trying to railroad him and Sandy Murphy was not wholly outlandish. Yet as we talked, I felt as if I were trying to fight off an overly aggressive salesman. Before our phone line went dead—the prison’s subtle signal that our half-hour was up—Tabish assailed me with a torrent of facts and figures about his financial situation. He told me he was hiring Alan Dershowitz and Barry Scheck to be consulting members of his legal team. He told me he had a solid alibi for where he was at the time of Binion’s death. He explained that the one thin dime that was found in an otherwise empty safe inside Binion’s house and paralleled the single silver dollar that was found inside the empty vault in Pahrump was planted to make it look like it was him.
“But why did you leave the single silver dollar in the vault in the first place?” I asked him.
“That was just one of those things that Teddy and I had always talked about. It was a good luck thing. Nothing more. I mean, do you really think I would have been stupid enough to repeat something like that, you know, like a calling card?”
“What about you and Sandy?”
“We’re good friends. And since all this stuff happened, we’ve gotten even closer. But it’s not what everyone thinks.”
That was something most people were having a hard time believing, not only in light of the evidence but also because of the way the two carried on in court during their preliminary hearing last August, which was televised gavel to gavel on a local cable channel. The hearing also drew national attention from GQ, People, Newsweek, Los Angeles magazine, and 20/20. It wasn’t quite the O.J. spectacle, but it had people talking. Given the number of curious eyes on Sandy and Tabish, you’d think their lawyers would have instructed them about how to behave. Sandy, in particular, was irrepressible, sending Tabish meaningful looks, whispering to him and passing notes.
She wasn’t unaware of being onstage, but her behavior was such a complex mixture of narcissism, manipulation, and naivete that one sometimes got the feeling that hers was a personality formed by watching daytime television and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Her preoccupation with her appearance impelled her, on the first day of the hearing, to spray-paint her house-arrest ankle monitor beige to match her outfit (an act for which the court admonished her). But such superficiality was offset by the tears she shed after seeing death scene photos of Binion and while hearing clinical medical descriptions of how he died. The cynics in attendance may have groaned at Sandy’s histrionics, but her friends, the ones who hadn’t deserted her, maintained that she was “sweet and caring and genuine.” She was the kind of person who, upon hearing someone (in this case, me) sneeze three rows behind her in the courtroom, would turn around and say, “God bless you.”
Still, only a day after her hysterical breakdown following Binion’s death, Sandy was videotaped walking through the Palomino Lane house, taking an inventory of the contents (the probate case over Binion’s will won’t be settled until the conclusion of the murder trial). The tape, made in the presence of attorney James Brown after Sandy had been locked out of the house by the lawyers for the estate, was shown by the prosecution during the preliminary hearing. It depicted an angry Murphy rushing from room to room, opening and closing drawers while the videographer tried to keep up with her. There was a nasty, avaricious edge to Murphy in the tape, though one wonders what it must have been like for her to have been locked out of the house she had lived in for three years and be treated like a criminal.
“I’m sorry, Jimmy, I thought you were my friend and now I don’t know,” Murphy told attorney Brown on the tape. “You’re in here loading up all my fucking shit to give to Doris Binion.” At one point, she reminded the photographer to be sure to get everything on film. “1 want everything shown,” she yelled. “1 don’t want anything missing.” At another, she lifted the lid of a piano bench and extracted a pearl-handled Colt revolver that Binion had hidden there, and said, “I bet they forgot about this one because they weren’t smart enough to fucking look.”
More poignantly, Sandy also said, “1 don’t trust anyone now. I only trusted one person, my old man, and he’s not around to protect me anymore.”
Had Sandy followed the simple advice of one of her former lawyers and mourned appropriately, maybe gotten out of town and kept a low profile following Binion’s death, she and Tabish would be, in the attorney’s words, “big favorites” to win their case.
As it stands, perhaps the toughest part of the state’s case against Tabish and Murphy was convincing the jury that Binion was in fact murdered.
At the beginning of the preliminary hearing, the prosecution was standing by its theory that Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish had forced Ted Binion to ingest a lethal dose of heroin and Xanax. Mitigating that theory were several problems: (1) Ted Binion was a drug addict; (2) Las Vegas is the suicide capital of America; (3) There was a Binion family history of suicide—Ted’s older sister, Barbara, died of an overdose of codeine in 1983 after blowing off part of her face with a pistol in an earlier attempt; (4) Ted Binion filled a prescription for Xanax pills and had his drug dealer deliver 12 balloons of tar heroin in the hours before his death.
Would a jury be able to say beyond a reasonable doubt that Binion didn’t voluntarily ingest the drugs found in his system? That he was forced to, that he was murdered?
In an effort to sidestep the problems such a theory presented, the Binion estate hired Dr. Michael Baden, who had testified in Simpson’s trial, among others, to serve as an expert witness. Dr. Baden’s opinion, which he had arrived at by examining photos and written records, was that, though Binion had heroin and Xanax in his system, he had not died of a drug overdose, as Chief Medical Examiner Lary Simms determined. Actually, Baden said, Binion had been suffocated. Suffocation solved many problems; it left no room for a jury to doubt and ruled out accident or suicide.
“He gave these guys what they wanted,” Tabish told me from jail. “Baden gave them a murder. And never mind that both the coroner and CME say Binion died of an overdose.”
Will Baden’s testimony do the trick? Or will it backfire and convince a jury that there are forces trying hard to make sure Murphy and Tabish take the fall?
In Vegas, where oddsmakers put up lines on such things, it’s easy to forget that all of this has to do with people’s lives—and deaths. The inevitable carnival of media and marketing that has already sprung up around the case only adds to the neon-lit surrealism. A local radio station recently started a contest for listeners to guess “Who stole Sandy’s panties?” after Murphy’s underwear disappeared from a plastic bag of belongings that she had been forced to check with prison authorities during an incarceration for violating her house arrest. Tabish, who is being held without bail, reportedly swung a deal for the movie rights to his story in exchange for money to pay his legal fees. The producer, Joseph Cusumano, was an associate of slain mobster Tony Spilotro and was the line producer of the film Cotton Club.
Sandy, despite her claim that she now had no one to protect her, managed to find a benefactor to post her bail. William Fuller, a wealthy, mysterious 70-year-old Irishman, apparently took a shine to Sandy after being introduced to her at Aristocrat restaurant. Moved by her plight and not, insist her friends, by anything more, he ponied up her $300,000 bond.
As for Ted Binion, friends say that he always knew he was going to die a gruesome death, whether by his hand or someone else’s. At his funeral, the Doors’ song The End was played over the church sound system. According to his daughter, Bonnie, it was his favorite.
Listen to Jim Morrison’s Seconal-laced voice, and you might get a little shiver. “There’s danger on the edge of town…. Weird scenes inside the gold mine. . . . The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on. He went into the room where his sister lived, and . . . then he paid a visit to his brother. . . . This is the end, my only friend. The end.”
Paranoia and prescience, the twin themes of every gambler’s life, haunted Ted Binion like the ghost of his dead father, right up until the moment he drew his last breath.
Post Script: After the trial, the jury deliberated for eight days—a record at the time—finally coming back with a guilty verdict for both Murphy and Tabish on first-degree murder and other charges. The judge sentenced them to decades in prison, but there were flaws in the trial, and the Nevada Supreme court granted the two a new trial, restricting some of the previous evidence.
The second time around, Murphy and Tabish were acquitted of the murder charge, though they were found guilty of conspiring to commit burglary and grand larceny. Murphy was released from prison four years later, in 2004, and a few years after that, she married an art gallery owner in Laguna Beach, California. A reporter who called the gallery in 2018 to see what Murphy’s life was like today, reached a man who said, “Why don’t you guys get over this story? Talk about Donald Trump. Talk about something else. It’s old news, buddy,” before hanging up.
Rick Tabish walked out of prison a free man in 2010, after serving ten years, and returned to his roots in Missoula, Montana. When reached by phone, he agreed to an interview, but later did not return messages.
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