A Glitzy Cowboy Tale:Ted Binion·Sandy Murphy·Rick Tabish

Lonnie “Ted” Binion grew up in the family that ran Binion’s Horseshoe casino in downtown Las Vegas. His drug use and friendships with organized-crime figures cost him his Nevada gaming license in 1998. In Pahrump he had a 12-foot-deep underground vault built to hold a huge store of silver bars and coins, and the man who built it was Rick Tabish, a Montana contractor who was secretly seeing Binion’s live-in girlfriend, Sandy Murphy.

On September 17, 1998, Binion was found dead in his Las Vegas home with heroin and Xanax in his system. The day before, he had told his lawyer to cut Murphy out of his will if she didn’t kill him that night. Two nights after the death, Nye County deputies found Tabish and others digging up the vault. Prosecutors argued that Tabish and Murphy forced drugs on Binion and smothered him. The defense said he had overdosed.

A jury convicted both of murder in 2000; Murphy received 22 years to life and Tabish 25 years to life. In July 2003 the Nevada Supreme Court threw out those verdicts, citing unfairly joined charges and the handling of Binion’s statement about Murphy. At the November 2004 retrial, jurors acquitted both of murder but convicted them of burglary and grand larceny over the silver. Murphy was sentenced to time served, and Tabish was paroled to Montana in 2010.