On Sept. 17, 1998, Ted Binion, 55, died of unnatural causes.
In May 2000, Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish were convicted of his murder. Tabish was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, while Murphy received 22 years to life.
In July 2003, the Nevada Supreme Court found fault with the trial on a number of technicalities and overturned the murder convictions, ordering a new trial. In December 2003, Sandy Murphy was granted and posted bail and went home to California for Christmas. Rick Tabish, on the other hand, had also been convicted of lesser charges, for which he was serving a two- to 10-year sentence and wasn't eligible for bail.
Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish were retried in fall 2004. In late November, they were acquitted of murder by a jury unconvinced of foul play and citing, among other things, a contaminated crime scene and prosecution witnesses who simply could not be believed. The defendants were, however, found guilty of conspiring to commit and committing burglary and/or grand larceny. This conviction stemmed from Tabish's attempt to steal $8 million in cash and silver that Ted Binion had buried in an underground vault in Pahrump. Another of Tabish's lesser charges, extortion, was also upheld.
In March 2005, Murphy and Tabish were sentenced to one to five years for their burglary and larceny convictions.
Tabish had to finish serving his sentence for extortion before he could start doing his time for stealing the silver, meaning that he was facing a total of 2 to 15 more years in prison. Murphy remained free on bail pending her appeal of the latest conviction; in April 2005, she was given credit for time served, which discharged her sentence on the theft-related convictions.
After the second trial, Tabish appeared before the parole board three times, but was denied each time. Then, in a January 2009 appearance, the Nevada Parole Board granted him "Parole to Consecutive," meaning the three convictions -- burglary and grand larceny (carrying a minimum sentence of 12 months and a maximum sentence of 60 months) and a use-of-a-deadly-weapon enhancement that doubled the maximum sentence -- could now run concurrently.
Tabish remains in High Desert State Prison in Ely, Nevada, in minimum-security custody; he's eligible for parole in mid-2010. As a result of the case, he was divorced by his wife, who has since remarried, and has no contact with his two children.
Sandy Murphy pretty much dropped out of the public eye. However, in a bizarre small-world incident in July 2007, she and Benny Behnen, nephew of Ted Binion, wound up sitting near each other at Piero's Italian restaurant in Vegas. As reported by Norm Clark, the two got into an "altercation," and "by the time two unidentified NBA coaches broke up the melée, Murphy had a clump of hair ripped from her scalp as she was trying to escape her assailant."
The incident occurred the night before Murphy appeared in District Court in an attempt to gain possession of part of Ten Binion's estate. The request was later denied, but that was the last time Murphy, now 37, made the local press, which reported that she was living in Laguna Beach, Calif., working at her family's mortgage company and as a fine-arts dealer. Tabish confirmed her whereabouts in a recent interview with Channel 8 and said the pair have had no contact since the second trial: "She needed to move on. I needed to move on. It was over with. It was over with the day we were arrested, virtually."
As to "Sex and Lies in Sin City," the 2008 account of the Binion murder and its aftermath starring Matthew Modine and Mena Suvari, it's your typical made-for-TV movie, with the cheese factor that this generally connotes. Murphy allegedly repeatedly contacted the producers and had her character's role "softened" in the final edit. We seem to remember falling asleep when we attempted to watch it and certainly wouldn't take as too factual an account, although it took less liberties than some of its genre.
For a more authentic account of the Binion murder trial, check out Quicksilver, a rivetting account of the courtroom drama as reported by Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist and photographer John L. Smith and Jeff Scheid.
