Murder: True Crime Stories - UNSOLVED: Casino Heir: Ted Binion Pt. 1

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

Ted Binion was 21 when he took over the casino floor at Binion's Horseshoe, the no-limits gambling hall his father Benny built in Las Vegas, and he ran it for 30 years. By March 1998, regulators had revoked his gaming license for good. That July, he had 24 tons of silver buried 12 feet underground on a lot in Pahrump. That September, he was found dead on a mattress in his den, an empty bottle of Xanax beside him, and police called it an overdose and left without sealing the room. Two days later, deputies found three men digging up his silver, and within a year the coroner had reclassified his death and two people were facing murder charges. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces Ted Binion and the gambling empire he grew up inside, the addiction and mob ties that cost him the casino, and the unsecured house that shaped every question asked about his death ever since. Please note, this episode contains discussion of substance abuse and suicide and may not be suitable for all audiences.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hey everyone, Carter here. I am hosting a new show called What the Fact with my co-host, Connor Tomlinson, who you might know and love from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. Every week, we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Connor brings the tangents and an infectious energy that will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What The Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube. at What the Fact Pod. This is Crime House. A will only covers the things you can put a number on. The house, the accounts, whatever is sitting in the safe.

Everything else, reputations, habits gets handed down too, but nobody ever signs for it. Ted Binion got all of that from his father. He got a casino on Fremont Street, a last name that opened every door in Las Vegas and a talent for business that everybody agreed was the real gift. Ted took over that casino floor at 21 years old and ran it for the next 30 years. But he couldn't hold on to it. By the summer of 1998, Ted had lost the license and the casino, so that July, he acted on another habit he got from his father.

the idea that the only safe place for money is somewhere you can put your hands on it. Ted hauled 24 tons of silver bars and coins out to a vacant lot in the desert and buried them 12 feet down. He never got the chance to dig them back up. And by September, somebody else was out in the desert with a backhoe. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end, but you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come at every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look.

Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time. Plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go tocrimehouseplus.com or tap, try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. Before we start, please note that this episode includes discussions of

drug addiction, domestic violence, and death by suicide. If you, or someone you know, is struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, you can call or text 9-88 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline. Please listen with care. This is the first of two episodes on the 1998 death of Ted Binyon, a Las Vegas casino air at the center of the most closely watched murder trial the city had ever seen. Today, I'll introduce you to Ted, a man who grew up inside his father's gambling empire, then spent his adult life losing his grip on it. I'll take you through his final months and his last day, and I'll tell you what happened afterward, when almost everybody except the police came to believe he'd been murdered. Next time, I'll take you through the two trials that

followed. Two juries looked at the same body, the same photographs, and a lot of the same witnesses. Somehow they came back with opposite answers. And decades later, the city of Las Vegas still isn't sure what's actually happened to Ted. All that and more coming up. If you walked into Binions Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas in the 1970s or 80s, chances were you'd spot the casino manager out on the floor. He'd be wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, and if you look close enough, you'd see a pistol tucked into his jeans. That was Ted Binion. He drove a pickup around town with his dog riding next to him. He could work out the odds on almost any bet in his head, usually faster than the person making it, and he could spot a cheater from across a crowded room. He never cared

that much about school, but he read American history constantly, and he could walk you through the battles of the Civil War in detail. So, Ted was a hard man to sum up, and the people who knew him best reached for different ways when they tried. Harry Claiborne was the Binion family lawyer for more than 40 years, and he said Ted's father put it to him directly. Ted was the best in the business. Another friend, a lawyer named David Chesnoff, called Ted a cowboy, and probably the most worldly man he'd ever met. He'd learned all of it from the man who built the place. Ted's father was Lester Ben Binion, born in 1904 near Pilot Grove, Texas. Everyone knew him as Benny. He liked to say he'd never set foot in a classroom. What he did learn, he learned

in 1920s Dallas from an older gambler who ran a dice game out of a downtown hotel. Benny turned out to have a real head for numbers. In those games, his job was to cover the bets himself and pay them out fairly. That left him an edge of about 1.5%. That sounds like almost nothing, but it tipped his way every time, and over the years, it made him rich. By the early 1930s, Benny was running the illegal game. gambling business in Dallas, and he held on to it with a gun. In 1931, he was convicted of killing a liquor smuggler named Frank Bolding.

Over the years, he shot at least two business rivals and scared off a lot more. He had a rule about it, and he said it out loud, Get to your enemies before they get to you. Two Dallas prosecutors came after him for years. and eventually the pressure got to be too much. So in 1946, Benny packed up and moved his family to a place where the thing he was best at happened to be legal. Las Vegas in 1946 was a thin string of joints on the highway to Los Angeles.

Benny fit right in. In 1951, he bought a club on Fremont Street called the Eldorado and renamed it, the horseshoe. He ran it on one simple idea. No limits. Whatever your first bet was, that was your limit. If you wanted to put a million dollars on one roll, the dice, Benny would cover it. Las Vegas still tells the story about the man who walked in with a suitcase and did exactly that and lost. There was no spa at the horseshoe, no showroom, no barbershop, no orchestra. Benny said he didn't want to see his money blown out the end of some

guy's trumpet. Instead, he gave the drinks away to anybody who was playing, sold a $2 steak late at night and kept a pot of chili going made from a recipe he picked up in the Dallas County jail. When Steve Wynn told him he was going to build a 2,000-room hotel across the street, Benny put an arm around his shoulder and told him that was great. They could sleep in Wynn's place and gamble in his. Benny also knew how to give people something to talk about. In 1970, he bought the right to a poker tournament from a casino owner up in Reno, moved it to the horseshoe, and opened it to anybody who could put up the entry fee. That tournament was the World Series of Poker. Once a year, every serious card player in the country came downtown to Benny's place for the

event. Ted grew up hosting it. That was the family business, and growing up and it meant learning young that some people might want to hurt you. Benny and his wife Teddy Jane had five kids. Ted, his older brother Jack, and three girls, Barbara, Brenda, and Becky. The house Benny bought them was a 4,500 square foot place on six acres on Bonanza Road, and he built it like a fortress. There was a barn outback, and he told his kids that if there was ever an attack from the air, That's where they should go.

That sounds paranoid until you get to 1950. Benny had an old Dallas rival named Herbert Noble, who everybody called the cat that year. Texas police arrested him as he was getting ready to fly to Las Vegas with two bombs mounted in his plane. The next year, somebody killed the cat with a bomb in his mailbox. Everyone assumed Benny had arranged it. Nobody ever proved it. Then in 1953, the Dallas prosecutors finally landed a punch. Benny was convicted of income tax evasion and gambling charges going back to his

years in Texas, and he went away for 42 months. He came home in 1957, and he never held a gaming license again. Barely slowed him down. The family. kept him on the payroll for decades as a consultant and everyone in Las Vegas understood who was actually in charge. For the rest of his life, the man whose name was in gold lights over Fremont Street sat at a corner table in his own coffee shop and watched the action. His wife worked the cashier's cage, the barred window where a casino keeps its money, and the people who ran the place were his sons. Jack took over as press. president in 1963 at 26 years old. Ted got his gaming license the following year and became

casino manager at 21. For three decades after that, Ted did the job the way his father had done it. He worked the busy hours, greeted the big spenders, handled the troublemakers, and became the face people expected to see when they walked through the door. He was also an hour. He was also an avid, and he had been one long before he ever got the job. Ted started with marijuana, moved through opium and LSD, and landed on black tar heroin while he was still a teenager. He hated needles, so he never injected it. He heated it on foil and breathed in the smoke, which people call chasing the dragon. Claybourne said Benny was devastated when he found out. The old man hated drugs more than just about anything, and there was nothing he could do about it. And Ted wasn't the

only one of Benny's kids using. In 1983, Benny's oldest daughter Barbara died of a drug overdose at 49. The people closest to the family believed she'd taken her own life. She left behind three sons. So this was a family who knew addiction could ruin someone's life. But try as he might, Ted couldn't kick the habit, not even when he had a family of his own. He met a woman named Doris in 1965, and they married in 1980. They had a daughter named Bonnie. Years later, Doris took the witness stand and described what those years were like. She said Ted used heroin every day from 1980 to 1987. In 1983, she took their little girl and left. Ted told her he'd shoot himself if she didn't come home. He also promised to quit. So she came back and not much changed. He kept drinking,

kept using, and kept going out to bars and clubs late at night. Doris also described what the house was like. There was a shotgun under the bed and on each side of it. There was a shotgun under the bed and on each side of it. there was also a handgun on the nightstand and Ted hid cash all over the place. Dora said he usually had $50,000 or more sitting around and that he once stashed a quarter of a million dollars in the top of a boat motor. Their daughter Bonnie later testified that she used to find her father's money in bathroom drawers in suit pockets, in an urn in his den and in the cooler of his boat. For years, the family kept all of it quiet, but the heroin was harder to hide.

In 1987, Ted was convicted of drug possession and the state suspended his gaming license that kicked off a fight with Nevada gaming regulators that ran on and off for 11 years. Three years later, in 1990, The FBI charged Ted and seven other horseshoe employees with beating and robbing players the casino suspected of cheating at blackjack. Every one of the men they were accused of beating was black. Federal prosecutors mishandled the case and it never went to trial, but Ted lost his license again anyway.

He got it back in 1993 and lost it again in 1994. That suspension was supposed to last 18 months. Instead, the Nevada Gaming Commission just kept it going with no end date. At one point, they barred him from setting foot inside his own family's casino at all, because by then, the regulators had a different problem with Ted. He couldn't stay away from mobsters. He'd loaned $100,000 to a man they identified as a Kansas City mob. figure and he'd gotten close to a Chicago man named Herbert Blitzstein who everyone in town called

Fat Herbie. Blitzstein had once been the top man in Las Vegas for the mob enforcer Tony Spolotra and he made loans at illegal interest rates and ran an insurance scam out of an auto repair shop. After the police connected Ted to Blitzstein, he didn't try to hide any of it. Ted admitted he'd had dinner with Blitzstein and had let his shop work on his cars. Ted also said they'd gone around to adult clubs together and that he'd once given the man a gold watch. In December of 1996, Nevada regulators put Blitzstein in the state's Black Book. That's the official list of people who are banned from every casino in Nevada. At that point, Ted broke off contact, but it was already too late for him, and it was definitely too late for Blitzstein.

On January 6, 1997, Fat Herbie was shot to death in his own home, as part of a move by mobsters from Los Angeles and Buffalo to take over his business. About a month later, homicide detectives came to Ted with a warning. There were rumors that he was a target to. They told him. He was a target two. They told him he ought to get out of Las Vegas until it passed. But legally, he couldn't. Under the terms of his suspension, he had to give urine tests three times a week, plus random ones on top of that. Claiborne, the family lawyer, spent that stretch trying to get Ted out of Las Vegas for his own safety, and he couldn't manage it. Three months after that warning, somebody drove past the house and sprayed it with bullets. One went through the front door.

door. Ted was home at the time. Nobody was hurt and the shooting was never solved. Even then, he still couldn't leave. Somebody wanted him dead. The state wanted his license, and the one thing holding him up in Las Vegas was a cup he had to fill three times a week. Ted tried everything to beat those tests. At one point, he shaved off every hair on his body, so there'd be nothing left for a hair test to find. It didn't work. On Monday, March 23, 1998, the Nevada Gaming Commission held a hearing that ran nine hours.

At the end of it, the commissioners voted four to zero to revoke Ted's license permanently. They also ordered him to sell his 20% stake in his father's casino. Ted told reporters on the way out that it wasn't the end of the world. He had no clue how wrong he was.

Jeffrey hears his mother's screams from the household intercom. He finds his brother Christopher standing over his mother's body. His brother says, I've killed mom and dad. But Christopher also dies in the same manner as his parents. And suspicion falls on Jeffrey. Did he kill Christopher in a fit of rage? Or did Jeffrey murder all three of them? Who killed Stephen and Helen Gillum?

Christopher or Jeffrey? Join us as we go over all of the evidence from multiple trials and even statements from family members. Perhaps you can determine who killed the Gillams and why. Listen to the Gillum Family Murders episode right now from Generation Y, where we look into the why of true crime. Wherever you listen to podcasts. In March of 1998, after an 11-year fight,

Nevada regulator stripped Ted Binion of his gaming license and forced him to sell his share of Binion's horseshoe. At 54 years old, he was out of the only business he'd ever worked in, and he was losing it at the worst possible moment, because his own family had spent the previous two years tearing the casino apart. Benny died on Christmas Day of 1989. Teddy Jane held on for another five years, and once she was gone, The Binion kids went to war over what their parents had left them. In January of 1996, Becky sued her brother Jack and asked a court to remove him as president. A judge made the two of them temporary co-presidents and said every big decision had to be unanimous,

which froze the company solid. For the next year and a half, it got worse and it got public. Becky filed papers accusing Jack of letting the horseshoe bleed, while he built casinos in other states. Jack said the deadlock Becky created was what caused the losses in the first place. Ted had to watch all of it from the sidelines because his suspension meant he couldn't sit on the board

or vote his own shares. The Gaming Commission's order in the spring of 1998 finally broke the stalemate because now Ted's 20% had to be sold. Over that summer in a series of deals, Jack bought out their sister Brenda and Ted, then sold all of it, plus his own share, to Becky. She got complete control of the horseshoe for $20 million, paid out over two years. By some estimates, the place was worth four times that, but for Ted, that wasn't what hurt the most.

Brenda was the executor of their mother's estate, and she had sold the families' Montana ranch the previous year. It was about 90,000 acres, and Ted had spent his summer there since he was a boy. Friends said it broke his heart. The only saving grace was the fact that he still had the silver. Ted had been collecting since he was a teenager, antique guns, rare coins, old casino chips. Then he started buying silver bars and inherited his mother's coin collection on top of that. By 1998, it added up to roughly 24 tons of metal, and it had been sitting in two vaults inside the horseshoe. Now that he was cut off from the casino, all of it had to come out. So it got loaded up and hauled to Ted's house where it sat in his

garage while he worked out what to do with it. What he decided to do was put it in the ground. That was how his mind had always worked. It's why he kept tens of thousands in cash around the house. He trusted dirt more than he trusted banks or people. Ted owned a vacant lot out in Perump, a desert town about 60 miles west of Las Vegas, near where his family used to keep another ranch. So he hired a contractor to build him a concrete vault there 12 feet down. down. The contractor was a man named Rick Tabish. Tabish was from Missoula, Montana, my hometown,

where he worked in trucking and construction. He'd come to Las Vegas in the mid-1990s looking for jobs. The two of them met in 1997 when Ted hired him to haul sand off one of his properties. They got friendly and before long, Tabish was a regular at Ted's house on Palomino. lane. And on July 4th, 1998, Tabish and his crew moved the silver out of Ted's garage and sealed it into the ground. Now, if you're picturing something hidden, that is not what Ted built. He put the vault in plain sight on purpose, on the busiest road in Perump, between a Burger King and a casino. That way, anybody digging would be seen by every car going past.

And he didn't stop there. Sometime in late August or early September, Ted called the Nye County Sheriff's Office himself, told them what was buried on his lot, and asked them to keep an eye on the place. Back in Las Vegas, Ted wasn't living alone. The house on Palomino Lane had been his endoruses. She'd spent more than a decade living

with his addiction and in March of 1995 she moved out for good. The divorce came through the following year and Doris left with a settlement of around $5 million. She testified later that by the time she left, Ted had already been sleeping with someone else. Her name was Sandy Murphy. She'd come to Las Vegas from Southern California in February of 1994. She grew up in Downing, she grew up in Downing, the daughter of a repo man and a stay-at-home mom in a house her parents bought in 1974 and never left. At 17, she was runner-up in a local beauty pageant. She never finished high school because she'd gotten pulled into a car accessories business with a family friend. She got to Nevada and lost her savings in the casinos, at least $12,000 of it.

To make it back, she took a job at a top-list. club called Cheetos. Ted was a customer there. He was 28 years older than she was. Once Doris moved out, Sandy moved in. And for a while, the life Ted gave her was the one people picture when they think of Las Vegas money. He bought her a Mercedes and handed her a credit card, and they ate at the best restaurants in town. She redid the house. pulled out the carpet and put in marble and ordered new furniture from Italy. She started handling his banking and taking his calls. Years later, Sandy would call Ted the love of her life,

but that house wasn't a happy place and the ugly part of it belongs here too. One of Ted's friends said he saw Sandy with a bruised face and a clump of her hair missing, and that Sandy told him Ted had done it. Ted's gardener, Tom Loveday, said she took a lot of abuse from him. It lines up with what Doris had said about her own years with Ted. By 1998, whatever the two of them had was mostly over. They were sleeping in separate rooms, and by then, Sandy had moved on. She was already seeing Rick Tabish.

Ted had introduced them himself. That July, after Rick sealed the vault, he and Sandy flew to Los Angeles and checked into a Beverly Hills Hotel as husband and wife. Rick didn't seem to care that he was already married. His wife and their two young children were still in Missoula, and by that summer he was hardly ever there. Years later, testifying about the affair, Rick said Ted had gone cold on Sandy and with, was pushing her away. He said that somewhere in there he'd fallen in love with her. It must have stung, but Ted had other things on his mind. On that September, he was talking to lawyers about another run at getting his gaming license back. He was talking to a real estate broker about

buying properties that could hold casinos. He was talking to a journalist about writing a book on his father's life. He wrote a check for a million dollars to open in a house. He wrote a check for a million to open a new investment account. And he gave $40,000 to the Las Vegas mayor's campaign for governor. At the same time, Ted was getting ready to end things with Sandy. He told friends it was coming, and at some point that summer, he walked through the house and emptied every gun in it. When his maid asked about it, he told her he was afraid Sandy might be. shoot him. And he'd already started rearranging what he was going to leave behind. Back in July, right after the silver went into the ground, Ted rewrote his will, cutting several old friends

out by name and leaving most of the estate to his daughter, Bonnie. Sandy got $300,000, the house on Palomino Lane and everything inside it. Then, on September 16th, 1998, Ted called his estate lawyer James Brown and told him to take Sandy out of it. Later that same day, a ranch hand was up at the house and watched Ted gesture towards Sandy and Rick sitting in the next room. He heard Ted say the two of them had gotten him the best stuff he'd had in a long time, which the ranch hen took to mean heroin. That night, Ted's regular dealer delivered 12 balloons of black tar heroin. Ted tipped him with 30 tablets out of a bottle of Xanax he just had refilled. That was Wednesday night. The next morning,

Thursday, September 17th, 1998, Sandy called the maid and told her Ted wasn't feeling well and not to come in. But the gardener came anyway, and Tom Loveday immediately noticed two things he hadn't seen before in the 12 years he'd been cutting that grass. The drapes across the front of the house were closed,

and the dogs were behaving strangely. Nobody outside the house saw Ted at all that morning. Around noon, his real estate broker called about the properties they'd been discussing, and Sandy told him, was still asleep and couldn't be disturbed. Nearly four hours later at about 3.54 p.m., Sandy Murphy called 911.

She was hysterical, and she told the dispatcher her husband had stopped breathing. She and Ted weren't married, but that's how she said it. Las Vegas Fire Department paramedics pulled up three minutes later. Inside the 6,700 square foot house, In the middle of the den, Ted Binion was lying face up on a mattress on the floor, partly covered by a sleeping bag.

There was foam at his mouth. Beside him was an empty bottle of Xanax in a bathroom nearby. Officers found heroin smoking paraphernalia and traces of the drug. The paramedics tried to revive him. They couldn't. Police officers came, took photographs of the body and the room, and then left. Nobody sealed the den. Nobody treated the house like a crime scene, because as far as anyone there could tell, it wasn't one.

Homicide Lieutenant Wayne Peterson said it plainly. There was absolutely no evidence at the scene to suggest foul play. Ted's body was taken to the Clark County Coroner's Office, Sandy was hysterical enough that paramedics took her to Valley Hospital to be sedated, and she spent the night there. Back at the house, Ted's friends kept turning up all evening trying to find out what had happened. One of them was Rick Tabish. He told her a reporter, he'd been on his way to the airport to fly home to his family in Montana when he heard the news, so he came over instead. He called it a tragedy.

They buried Ted the following Tuesday, September 22nd. Between 700 and 800 people came, including the mayor, a state senator, and half the casino owners in town. Layed out on the coffin were a pair of boots, cowboy hat, spurs, and a coiled rope. The priest called Ted a man who marched to a different drummer. Then Harry Claiborne got up and told the room, he wanted to add something to that. He said Ted had been about a mile and a half out ahead of the drummer. He also said Ted Binion was the most unforgettable person he had ever known. And although half of Las Vegas turned out to bury him,

nobody from Metro Homicide was working the case because as far as they were concerned, there was nothing to work. A lifelong heroin user had taken too much in his own house, and that was the end of it. but there was a problem with that theory. Ted Binion was buried on a Tuesday, but his silver had come out of the ground the Saturday before.

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Dive into a rich archive of episodes with spine-tingling stories that include everything from haunted houses and ghost sightings to unsettling true crime cases and creepy encounters. Join a vibrant community of horror enthusiasts who engage with the podcast, sharing their own stories and experiences, making it an interactive and dynamic show. Stay tuned for special episodes and theme story collections that explore new and exciting facets of horror storytelling. Search for Let's Read on your favorite podcast platform, and remember to hit follow so you never miss an episode. Ted Binning was buried on Tuesday, September 22nd, 1998, five days after the police looked at his body and saw an overdose. But the Saturday in between is where this story takes a turn.

In the early morning hours of September 19th, Nye County Sheriff's deputies pulled up at a vacant lot in Perump. They found floodlights, a backhoe, a tractor trailer, and three men working a hole in the ground. One of them was Rick Tabish. The other two were Michael Milot, who worked for Rick, and David Mattson, the foreman at Ted's ranch. The vault was open.

Every bar of silver had already been loaded into the trailer except a single silver dollar. Rick told the deputies he was doing exactly what Ted had asked him to do. Ted had given him instructions. If anything ever happened to him, Rick was supposed to get the silver out before the family could keep it from his daughter, Bonnie. When that didn't get him anywhere, he tried something clumsier and told the deputies that Ted's will

left a quarter of a million dollars to the sheriff. All three men were arrested. Two days later, on the day Ted was buried, Sandy Murphy bailed Rick out, putting up her Mercedes and five pieces of jewelry as collateral. Back in Las Vegas, something had already happened that nobody had connected to any of this yet. On September 18th, the day after Ted died, and while the silver was still on the ground, his sister Becky went to a reporter. She told them she wanted her brother's death treated as a homicide until somebody proved otherwise.

She'd never known Ted to take prescription pills. As she put it, Ted himself would have been the first person to tell you that his drug of choice was heroin. And she said her brother knew more about drugs than almost anyone and had been using them for decades. A man like that doesn't take too much by accident. That same day, Clark County's chief medical examiner performed the autopsy. Dr. Larry Sims found marks on Ted's face, chest, and wrists. He photographed all of them. Then he wrote his conclusion.

Ted Binion had died of an overdose. The toxicology showed heroin, Xanax, and Valium in his blood, and a large amount of heroin in his stomach. Sims made one other note, and it pointed away from anything sinister. Heroin users sometimes take Xanax on purpose because it deepens the high, but he couldn't say whether Ted had done it to himself on purpose or by accident. So that was the finding, an overdose, and no way to tell which kind. Almost nobody who'd known Ted accepted it. Terry Claiborne went to the house.

Afterwards, he said the moment he saw the den, he knew the scene. had been staged. A former casino manager at the horseshoe who'd known Ted since high school, put it more simply, he said Ted loved life far too much to kill himself. And there were other details

that bothered people who understood how Ted used. Nobody had ever known him to sleep on the floor, let alone on top of a sleeping bag in the middle of a room. There were traces of heroin on the knife blade in the bathroom, but no trace of it on the,

the pieces of foil he'd used to smoke it. And the autopsy had found a lot of heroin in his stomach. That isn't how a man who'd been smoking it for 40 years took his drugs. Nobody eats black tar heroin. None of that proved anything, but it was enough that the people closest to Ted wouldn't let it go. Two days after the arrests in Perump, Ted's estate lawyers, Richard Wright and James Brown, went to Metro Homicide detectives and asked them to look into how Ted had died. The detectives said they wanted to wait for the results of the drug tests on his body before they got involved. At that meeting, Brown also told the detectives about the phone call he'd gotten from Ted on September 16th, the one where Ted told him to take Sandy out of the will. Brown said Ted

had gone further than that and had predicted that Sandy might try to kill him. When the police didn't move on that information, the estate hired someone who would. Tom Dillard was a retired Las Vegas homicide detective, and he went to work for an estate worth around $55 million, interviewing witnesses and bringing in his own experts. And there was a second fight running along, side all of it. In November of 1998, two months after Ted died,

Sandy filed a claim against his estate. So while detectives and a private investigator worked on how Ted had died, lawyers in a different courtroom argued over who got his house and his money. The following summer, there would be a hearing about whether Sandy could move back into Palomino Lane at all. anything either side turned up in one case became ammunition in the other what Dillard turned up came out in pieces

over months he started with the phone records all through the summer of 1998 Sandy and Rick had been calling each other constantly back and forth day after day then came the 17th on the day Ted died the two of them barely spoke.

Dillard also confirmed the trips to Los Angeles. Sandy and Rick had checked into a hotel in Beverly Hills as husband and wife, and they'd done it more than once. The last of those days happened days before Ted died. And he found the people Sandy talked to when Ted wasn't around. She was a regular at the Neiman Marcus Beauty Salon, and the women who worked on her there told investigators she talked about what was coming. She said Ted was going to overdose soon, and she went through with what she stood to collect when he did.

And then there was the tape. The day after Ted died, Sandy came back to the house to collect what she said was hers. Her own lawyer arranged for the whole thing to be videotaped, so there'd be a record that she hadn't taken anything she wasn't entitled to. The camera followed her from room to room while she went through drawers and hidden spots. At one point in the footage, standing in the kitchen, she picks up a wine glass off the counter and slips it into her purse. At the time, nobody thought anything of it, but the wine glass wasn't the only thing that vanished from the house. When the estate had the place inventoried, a lot of what Ted kept there was simply gone. Cash, antique coins, a collection of rare coins and old currency he'd kept in the den worth about $300,000.

His daughter, Bonnie, would testify to all of it. But nobody could say when any of it disappeared because the house was never sealed. It sat open for about four weeks after Ted died, and in that time a lot of people went through it, including the den. By the time, police finally did come back to gather evidence roughly a month had passed. Put the photographs from that second visit next to the ones taken on September 17th, and objects had moved. Simply put, almost nothing about the evidence in this case was clean. Metro Homicide did eventually get involved once the toxicology came back,

but the detectives kept running into the same wall. Lieutenant Peterson laid it out for a reporter. They could show motive. They could show opportunity. What they couldn't show was the mean. They didn't know how Ted Binion had been killed or whether he'd been killed at all. So the district attorney's office took the case somewhere that police couldn't. In December of 1998, three months after Ted died, a chief deputy district attorney named David

Roger brought in a grand jury. He wasn't using it to indict anybody yet. He was using it as a tool because a grand jury can force. people to show up and answer questions, and that was exactly what the investigation needed. Over the next three months, Roger called dozens of witnesses and built up a mountain of material. After that point, all of this had been a private theory that Ted's family was paying for. Now it was inside a government investigation. And somewhere in the middle of it, the medical examiner who had performed the autopsy, Dr. Sim,

sat down with everything Dillard had collected. On March 15th, 1999, the Clark County Corner's office changed the ruling on Ted Binion's death from undetermined to homicide. The finding rested on what Sims had seen on his own table six months earlier. There were lethal levels of heroin and Xanax in Ted's stomach, and Ted didn't swallow heroin. He smoked it.

Sims concluded that somebody had made him take it. Three months after that, on June 24, 1999, detectives arrested Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish and charged them with murder. The state had its ruling, its suspects, and a medical examiner prepared to testify that Ted Binion had been forcibly overdosed. What it didn't have yet was any idea how much trouble that theory

was about to cause. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for part two on the death of Ted Binion and all the people that affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support.

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and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Thursday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pritzpsovsky,

Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara de la Rosa, Claire Schwarzlander, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening, everyone. Before you go, I am hosting a new show with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. It's called What the Fact. Every week we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What The Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What The Fact Pod.