Question of the Day - 06 July 2022

On Sept. 17, 1998, Ted Binion, 55, died of unnatural causes.

Binion's live-in girlfriend, Sandy Murphy, and her boyfriend on the side, Rick Tabish, were accused of murdering him.

During the seven-week trial, several medical experts testified that Binion died from an overdose of heroin, Xanax, and Valium. One expert claimed he was suffocated.

In May 2000, the pair was convicted of murder. Rick Tabish was sentenced to at least 25 years in prison, while Murphy received a minimum 22-year sentence.

Then, 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 of extorting a business associate, for which he was serving a two- to 10-year sentence and wasn’t eligible for bail.

Murphy and 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.

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, meanwhile, remained free on bail pending her appeal of the latest conviction. With credit earned for nearly four years already served in prison, the most she could have ended up serving if her appeal failed was about 13 more months. But in April 2005, Murphy was given credit for time served. Subsequently, she pretty much dropped out of the public eye. In 2006, a mutual friend introduced her to Kevin Pieropan, the owner of an art gallery in Laguna Beach, California, whom she married. She took up painting, has two children, and last we heard, was suing Nevada "for damages for malicious prosecution and wrongful imprisonment," but was mostly looking for a vindication. 

Rick Tabish had served three years in a Nevada maximum-security prison in Ely, 250 miles northeast of Las Vegas, before being paroled on the extortion conviction. However, he was transferred to the medium-security prison in Indian Springs, 25 miles northwest of Las Vegas, having to serve more time for his use of a deadly weapon in that case. Tabish was paroled and released in 2010 after spending 11 years in prison. He immediately moved back to Montana and worked in his family’s petroleum business, paying them back for the $3 million they spent on his defense.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal caught up with Tabish last February and published an update.

"The 56-year-old Montana man has spent a decade remaking his past into a career as a business executive." Tabish is the president of Montana-based FX Solutions, a cryptocurrency and construction company (according to FederalPay.org, the company received a $650,000 federal Paycheck Protection Program for 49 employees). He's also apparently "overseeing" construction of a $2 billion data center in North Dakota and has been praised by that state's governor as having built "an incredible reputation" in the past 10 years. 

For his part, Tabish, married with two young children, told the R-J, "Everything I do is good stuff. I hang around quality people, no drugs, no idiots.”