I remember when the first trial was going on, I was in Laughlin, NV and that court case was all over the news and on Court TV all day. His girlfriend, Sandy, and her lover, Rick, were convicted of murdering him either thru forced drug overdose or suffocating him. Four years later, the two have been acquitted of his murder.
Ted Binion's family was found to have paid many people to testify AGAINST the defense. Now the prosecution cannot hire people to give a witness against someone (except in the case of "expert witnesses), so it was crucial that someone else paid. The Binion family wanted someone to pay for the death of the drug addict. After all, who wants to admit that someone would kill themselves with an overdose? Especially a multi-millionaire who was HOOKED on drugs.
Was anybody else following this case??
Binion was found dead in his Las Vegas estate in 1998. Authorities initially suspected that the death of the longtime heroin addict was an overdose, but investigators soon became suspicious of Binion's live-in girlfriend, Murphy, and her secret lover, Montana trucking company owner Tabish.A cloudy cause of death for Ted Binion, a contaminated crime scene and prosecution witnesses who simply could not be believed.
Jurors in the Binion murder trial said recently that those were the reasons they acquitted Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish of murder.
"I think it is real important that if someone is going to say someone's been murdered, you've got to find out how the guy actually died," jury forewoman Paulina Oliver said. "How do you expect a jury to say murder when you don't really know for sure if it was burking or overdose?"
Binion juror Michael Mooneyham agreed, saying the case was a convoluted set of facts that left him with reasonable doubt.
"The simple reason is you have an overdose, and six months later it comes to homicide," Mooneyham said of Binion's cause of death. "You have, God forbid, how many people tromping through (Binion's) house? How could anyone go through and even figure out from the start what was going on?"
Oliver, Mooneyham and two other Binion jurors, Patricia Estes and Stacy Juarez, said the original vote in the Binion jury room was seven for acquittal and five for guilt on the murder charges.
But through a gradual assessment of the evidence, they said the five who originally voted for guilt agreed to vote not guilty.
"I don't think he was murdered," Juarez said. "He wasn't murdered."
Cause of death
Among the reasons for their suspicions:
Tabish was caught stealing Binion's silver fortune from a Nye County vault the day after the death; the two suspects were carrying out a secret love affair; witnesses said Tabish talked about plotting the killing; and Murphy was videotaped storming through Binion's house the day after Binion died, claiming that his estate was stealing items rightfully belonging to her.
Murphy and Tabish were convicted of murder and theft charges by a jury during a first trial in 2000. But the convictions were overturned on appeal, and last year a second trial resulted in Tabish and Murphy's acquittal on murder charges.
The two were convicted again of theft charges for stealing Binion's silver.
The jury foreman in the first trial said jurors placed a great deal of weight on the testimony of Dr. Michael Baden, a New York forensic pathologist who concluded that Binion was murdered. Specifically, Baden said Binion died from burking, a centuries-old form of suffocation designed to leave few marks.
Jurors in the second trial simply didn't believe it.
"Baden was a joke," Juarez said.
"Baden was an idiot," Estes said.
Juarez said she was skeptical about Baden's testimony because he said a hand probably had been placed over Binion's mouth during the murder, but she said there was no evidence to support that.
"With the hand over the mouth, you would have had abrasions on the inside of your mouth, and they found nothing on the inside of the mouth," Juarez said.
Another aspect of Baden's testimony found doubtful by the jurors was Baden's claim that red marks on Binion's chest were button marks pressed into the skin by Binion's killers as they put weight on his chest.
"They looked like a blister," Oliver said of the marks. "It was pretty obvious that it wasn't a button mark. I didn't understand why the (medical) examiner took biopsies of the bruises, but he wouldn't take (biopsies) of those marks. He didn't think they were important or something."
Mooneyham said he doubted that the red marks were button marks because the shirt Binion was wearing was destroyed and thus couldn't be examined.
"If those were so important, why did they take the shirt?" Mooneyham said.
The crime scene also presented problems for jurors. They said the police waited too long to collect evidence and treat the home as a murder scene, allowing numerous people to come into the home and contaminate potential evidence.
"Everyone who knew Ted Binion knew he was a dope addict, and they looked at him and they said, overdose, out the door," Juarez said.
The jurors said they were offended by the notion that they were impacted by the so-called "CSI" effect, the belief that jurors influenced by the television show are demanding more technical evidence before returning a murder conviction.
However, the jurors acknowledged that the lack of a relevant fingerprint or DNA evidence played a role in their decision.
"It was all circumstantial evidence, and when you do have a lot of circumstantial evidence, you do want to see something forensic," Oliver said. "But if the other pieces had fallen into place, we wouldn't even be talking about forensics."
Oliver and the others said they believe Binion probably died of a drug overdose, although they said some of the other jurors might have felt differently.
"I think it was real obvious that he did it to himself," Oliver said. "He bought those pills, and she (Murphy) didn't even know about it. How were you going to plan all this if you didn't even know he was buying (the drugs)?"
Varied sympathies
Jurors had mixed opinions on Binion the person, who was worth millions but spent much of his time smoking heroin in a bathroom.
"He was a sorrowful soul," Estes said. "He was a drug addict all of his life. I felt sorry for him because he didn't have the strength to kick it or he didn't want to."
Oliver said, however, that she found it hard to feel bad for Binion.
"I thought he used people," Oliver said.
Sympathy for Binion?
"Not at all," she said.
Mooneyham said he thought it was sad that Binion wasn't able to straighten out his life despite all the resources available to him.
"Horseshoe Casino," Mooneyham said. "Why didn't anyone step in and try to help him? He did his own damage to himself. What a waste."
Jurors did acknowledge feeling some sympathy for Murphy.
"She cried a couple of times," Oliver said. "She showed emotions."
"They really had her looking like plain Jane," Mooneyham said. "Toned down. From my point, sitting there looking at her, I was trying to figure out, what did they see in her? What was the big mystique?"
Juarez said a few of the male jurors thought the video taken at Binion's home the day after Binion died made Murphy look greedy. But Juarez said she could relate to Murphy's actions on the tape. If she had lived with a man for three years and then was told that she couldn't go into the house the day after his death by attorneys for her loved one's estate, she would have been outraged, too.
"They were trying to make her out to be this greedy little money-hungry you know what," Juarez said.
"I would have reacted the same way," she said. "I was like, 'No.' I would have done the same thing. You don't tell me I don't live in this house. I've lived in there for three years.' "
Regarding Tabish, few jurors believed the elaborate story he told of how Binion told him to secure Binion's silver in the event of his death.
"That was whacked," Mooneyham said, laughing.
"He was caught red-handed," Oliver said.
"You are a stupid idiot," Juarez said of Tabish and his actions. "Why?"
"I did not like Rick Tabish," Estes said. "I did not like him on the stand. I did not like him sitting there with this smirk on his face."
The jurors also said phone calls between Murphy and Tabish clearly linked her to the silver theft.
The state's witnesses
The jurors said they resoundingly found that the state's most crucial witnesses were simply not believable.
Jurors said they didn't believe Binion estate attorney Jim Brown, who said Binion called him the night before his death and told him to take Murphy out of the will.
Jurors questioned why Brown didn't report the conversation immediately to police.
"If Jim Brown knew that, why didn't he say something to the police (right away)?" Juarez said.
Kurt Gratzer, the Montana resident who said Tabish talked about killing a casino owner in Las Vegas named Ted, was viewed as a lunatic.
"I was afraid to sit right there (next to him)," Juarez said. "I wanted to move. That guy was scary."
The jurors also did not give much weight to the testimony of a salon employee who said Murphy talked about Binion dying of an overdose before his death.
And they questioned why Binion estate private investigator Tom Dillard, who collected much of the evidence against Tabish and Murphy, never testified during the trial.
"We were always wondering, hmmm," Juarez said.
"They kept mentioning his name, and I wanted to see him defend his actions," Estes said. "Was there some good reason why he did what he did, or was he being heavy-handed?"