Murder: True Crime Stories - UNSOLVED: Casino Heir: Ted Binion Pt. 2

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the two Las Vegas murder trials that reached opposite verdicts on how Ted Binion died. In March 1999, the Clark County coroner changed the ruling on Binion's death from undetermined to homicide, and prosecutors charged his girlfriend Sandy Murphy and her lover Rick Tabish with murder. The state's theory was that Binion had been forced to swallow a lethal dose of heroin, or suffocated, or both, and the state's own two pathologists never agreed on which. A jury convicted the pair in 2000. Three years later the Nevada Supreme Court threw the convictions out over how the trial had been run, and in 2004 a second jury heard much of the same evidence and acquitted them of murder, while convicting them of taking the silver. More than twenty years after that acquittal, no one has been convicted in Ted Binion's death, and the question of whether he was killed at all has never been settled. 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. We tend to treat a verdict as gospel.

You put 12 people in a room, they take as long as they take, and whatever they decide, that's what happened. That's the deal all of us have agreed to. But what if two juries look at the same case and come back with two completely different verdicts? That's what happened in the death of Ted Binion.

same body, same photographs, the same judge on the bench both times, a lot of the same expert witnesses, some of them reading the same reports as the first time. What changed was everything around them. And by the time it was over, two juries had left Las Vegas with two different answers about how Ted Binion died, and no way to reconcile them. Decades later, we're still arguing about which, one of them got it right. 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 out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that, deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crimehouse 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 to crimehouse.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 second of two episodes on the 1998 death of Ted Binion, a Las Vegas casino air at the center of the most closely watched murder trial, the city had ever seen. Last time, I told you about Ted, the son of a Las Vegas casino legend

who lost his gaming license, his job, and his share of the family business in the spring of 1998. That September, he was found dead on the floor of his den and the police called it an overdose. Almost nobody who knew Ted, believe that. Today, I'll walk you through the theory

that turned Ted's overdose into a murder charge. I'll take you inside both trials and the four years in between when the whole case came apart and got put back together. And they'll tell you why. Twelve people who heard almost the same evidence came back with the opposite answer. All that and more coming up. On March 15, 1999, the Clark County Corner's office ruled Ted Binion's death a homicide. For six months, there had been no official crime to charge. charge anybody with. Now there was one and the district attorney's office moved fast.

A homicide detective named James Bouchek and a prosecutor named David Roger put together the document you need before you can arrest somebody for murder, a sworn affidavit laying out the whole case. There's ran 109 pages and Bouchek didn't hedge. He wrote that the scene at Ted's house had been staged and that whoever staged it had left Ted in a position no overdose victim would have died in. By the last week of June, District Attorney Stuart Bell had signed off on it. But Bell didn't want to arrest anybody yet, and he had a practical reason. The two suspects were Sandy Murphy, who was in Las Vegas, and Rick Tabish, who was still going back and forth to Montana. Grabbed just one, and they could spend months in court dragging the second one back to Nevada,

so they waited until both of them were in town. Sure enough, on June 24, 1999, 27-year-old Sandy Murphy and 34-year-old Rick Tabish were arrested at a Las Vegas grocery store and charged with murder. The case against them came from the autopsy. Dr. Larry Sims, Clark County's chief medical examiner, had found lethal levels of heroin and Xanax in Ted's stomach. That detail carried the whole case because Ted didn't swallow heroin. He smoked it. Sims concluded that somebody had made Ted take the drugs that killed him. That August, the case went in front of a judge adhering to decide whether there was enough evidence for a trial.

There, prosecutors called a witness who was about to make things complicated. Dr. Michael Badden was one of the most famous forensic pathologists in America. He'd done more than 20,000 autopsies over a period of 40 years or so. He ran forensic sciences for the New York State Police. He hosted a show on HBO, and he testified in some of the biggest cases in the country, including O.J. Simpson's. Bodden came into this case from the private side. Ted's family hired him to look at the death,

and prosecutors picked him up as a witness later. He never examined Ted's body, because it was in the ground before anybody hired him. What he had were the autopsy photographs, the toxicology, the medical records, and the police reports. At the preliminary hearing, Bodden laid out what he saw in those photographs. He pointed to tiny broken blood vessels under Ted's eyelids,

scrapes around his mouth and nose and bruising on his wrists. He also said there were two small red marks on his chest, which he described as button-shaped. Then he explained what he thought put them there, and he used a word most people in that courtroom had never heard. of. Burking. It goes back to Edinburgh, Scotland. In the 1820s, a man named William Burke and a partner killed people and sold the bodies to medical schools, and they worked out a method. One of them would clamp a hand over the victim's nose and mouth. The other would sit on the

chest so the person couldn't pull in a breath. Done that way, someone dies of asphyxia. Burke was eventually hanged. Baden told the courtroom that part of what makes Burkeing attractive to a killer is that it leaves almost nothing behind on the body, which was why the drugs mattered so much. Bodden looked at the same toxicology Sims had, and he told the court those levels of heroin and Xanax shouldn't have killed anybody. To him, that meant somebody had held Ted down by the wrists, hard enough to leave the bruises, while somebody else covered his nose and mouth and put weight on his chest, maybe with a knee. The state's two doctors were now fully contradicting each other.

Both of them called it murder, but they couldn't agree on the method. David Roger, the prosecutor who'd built the case, was sitting in that courtroom listening to it. He leaned over to David Wall, the lawyer trying it alongside him, and said he thought Bodden was right. From then on, prosecutors leaned on Baden's theory, mostly because of his experience. But they never dropped Sims. Both doctors were still going to testify. The defense was also hearing all of this, and for them the testimony was good news.

Bill Terry, who represented both defendants at different points, remember that Bodden's first report never mentioned burking at all. Terry said the defense lawyers just looked. looked at each other and immediately knew what to do with the new information. In the run-up to the trial, Sandy's lawyer, John Momat, told her reporter, quote, it just widens the gap in the state's two theories they should choose. But Sandy and Rick weren't the only ones being charged. Several other defendants went through that preliminary hearing, including the two men caught at the vault with Rick. The hearing ran for weeks. In the end,

Justice of the Peace Jennifer Toliotti ruled there was enough to send all the defendants to trial. The trial opened at the end of March 2000 in the courtroom of District Judge Joseph Bonaventure. But the prosecutors didn't charge the murder on its own. They filed one document covering three separate sets of crimes and took all of it to one jury at the same time. The first set was Ted's death at his house on Palomino Lane. The second was the silver taken out of the vault in Perump two days later, and the third set was against Rick alone. In July of 1998, two months before Ted died,

a Las Vegas businessman named Leo Casey said Rick and another man kidnapped him at gunpoint. Casey and Rick ran a sandpit together, a site mined for construction. sand and they'd been fighting over the money from it. Now in Nevada you can bundle charges like that together as long as the crimes are connected. Prosecutors said these were. According to them, all three came from the same place. Rick Tabish needed money and this was what he did to get it. Meanwhile, the defense said the crimes weren't connected at all and asked Bonaventure, over and over to try the Casey case on its own. He said no every time.

So one jury sat there and heard all three. The trial was unlike anything Las Vegas had ever seen. The courtroom was full every day. Bill Terry said people recognized him while he was out grocery shopping. Bonaventure decided early that he wasn't going to let the circus run his courtroom. He told himself he'd treat it like any other trial. set the rules and keep things moving. He picked a jury in under four days.

Roger gave the state's opening, and he started by getting out in front of something. He told the jury that Ted Binion was not a saint, but he was a human being. The trial ran six weeks, and the state called 115 witnesses. Doris Binion, Ted's ex-wife, went first and described their marriage and his addiction.

Then came the maid who testified that, Sandy had sent her home early and told her not to come in the next day, and the gardener testified about the drapes being shut. Then Ted's estate lawyer, James Brown, told the jury about the phone call. Brown said that on September 16th, the day before Ted died, Ted called him about the will and said, quote, take Sandy out of the will if she doesn't kill me tonight. If I'm dead, you'll know what happened. The jury also watched the videotape of Sandy walking through the house the day after Ted died, and the moment she slides a wine glass off the counter into her purse, Ted's daughter, Bonnie testified that things were missing from the house, cash antique coins, a collection of rare

coins and old currency her father kept in the den worth about $300,000. In prosecutors, walk the jury through Rick Tabish's finances, because remember, they were arguing that money was his motive for killing Ted. It turned out, Rick had defaulted on debts running into the hundreds of thousands. He owed the IRS something close to a million dollars, and he had a $200,000 banknote that was due on September 18, 1998. That was the day after Ted Binion died. The state also called witnesses,

who said the two defendants had talked about the crimes beforehand. One of them was a hairdresser, who said Sandy had told her that Rick planned to take Silver out of the vault and that Sandy stood to come into a lot of money. Another said Sandy had talked about Ted overdosing soon and what she'd get when he did. Then there was Kurt Gratzer, a former Army Ranger who'd known Rick back in Montana. Gratzer testified that Rick had talked to

him about killing Ted and had asked for his help doing it. Prosecutors also argued that Rick kept working the case from jail. They told the jury he'd been coaching witnesses about what to say and dangling money at them. After all of that, the jury heard from Leo Casey. Casey testified that Rick and another man forced him at gunpoint to drive about 20 miles out to the sand pit in Gene, Nevada. He said they beat him around the head with a phone book. He said they held a gun to his head, pushed a knife up under his fingernails, and locked a set of thumb cuffs on him. He said they threatened to kill him,

then started digging a shallow grave with excavating equipment while he watched. After that, they drove him back in. to town, took him to a lawyer's office, and had him signed papers handing over his share of the pit. Casey said his hands were still bleeding while he signed. All of that came out in the same courtroom from the same witness stand as the evidence about how Ted Binion died. One jury heard both. And in closing, a prosecutor stood up and drew the line between the two out loud. He told the jury to compare them. Leo Casey, an older gentleman, Ted Binion, an older gentleman. Both of them owed Rick Tabish money. Casey put in thumb cuffs,

Ted's wrists restrained. Casey beaten in a way that left no marks. Ted suffocated in a way that left no marks. The state came back to Ted's phone call, too. After repeating what Ted told his lawyer, a prosecutor turned to the jury and said, quote, truer words were never spoken. Nine women and three men had sat through all six weeks of testimony. They went out and stayed out for eight days,

which was a Clark County record at the time. On May 19, 2000, they came back. Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish were both guilty of first-degree murder. Rick was convicted on 11 felony counts in all. Sandy was convicted on six. That verdict would hold for three years. The Let's Read podcast features a wide array of horror stories, ranging from true crime and paranormal encounters to creepy personal experiences,

making it a must listen for, fans of the genre. Many of the stories are submitted by listeners, providing a diverse and authentic range of terrifying tales that resonate with a broad audience. Hosted by Joel, whose storytelling prowess creates an immersive and chilling listening experience, perfect for fans who love to be on the edge of their seats. Dive into a rich archive of episodes with spine-tingling stories that include everything from haunted houses and ghost sightings to unsighted. settling 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. In May of 2000, a Las Vegas jury convicted Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish of murdering Ted Binion. They came back that September to be sentenced. District Judge Joseph Bonaventure sentenced Rick first.

He got life with a chance at parole after 25 years. Then he turned to Sandy. He told her she'd broken the trust between two people who are supposed to love each other. He called it the ultimate. betrayal. He gave the 28-year-old life with the possibility of parole after 20 years for the murder, plus two to ten more for burglary. That meant she was staring down at least 22 years before she could ask to get out. But Sandy Murphy wasn't going to take the sentence or the conviction lying down. From the county jail, she called a Harvard law professor named Alan Dershowitz and asked him to

take her appeal. Dershowitz was one of the best known appellate lawyers in the country. He taught at Harvard since he was 25 and had spent decades taking cases other lawyers wouldn't touch, including O.J. Simpsons. Dershowitz has said he gets hundreds of letters a month from people in prison and answers, almost none of them. But he answered this one. He said Sandy sent him 30 pages that were so passionate and so persuasive, one that she'd basically written the brief herself. He took the case, and in 2001, he filed her appeal with the Nevada Supreme Court. Now, I want to slow down here because what happened next usually gets described as a technicality. That undersells it. An appeal isn't a do-over. Nobody at the Nevada Supreme Court was

deciding whether Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish killed Ted Binion. The only question in front of those justices was whether the trial they got was a fair one. On July 14th, 2003, the majority of the justices said it wasn't. They gave two reasons. The first was Leo Casey. The state's argument for bundling everything together was that it all came down to the same thing, money and greed. The court's answer was that money and greed connect an enormous number of crimes, and that isn't enough to try them side by side. The two incidents were 50 days apart, and they had almost nothing in common. One man got beaten with a phone book, the other supposedly died of a forced overdose or suffocation or both, and that mattered here because one of those cases was a lot more solid than the other.

And the evidence that Rick Tabish beat Leo Casey was strong. The evidence that anybody murdered Ted Binion was thin, and every bit of it was circumstantial. No witness, no confession, no physical proof, just circumstances stacked up and read a certain way. Both were put in front of a jury. What happened was that the strong case held up the weak one. And the court had a word for that, spillover. The risk isn't that jurors get confused. It's that they decide the man in front of them is bad and convict him of the second thing because of the first. The justices also pointed out that something had happened in Bonaventure's own courtroom. Late in the trial, he'd said out loud that he should have separated the cases.

But Leo Casey was only half of it. The second reason the convictions came apart was Ted's phone call. Normally a witness can't get up and repeat what a dead man told him because the dead man can't be cross-examined about it. There's a narrow exception for showing what somebody was thinking or feeling at the time, and that exception applied here. The defense was arguing Ted killed himself, so his state of mind was the whole ballgame, but the exception comes with a condition attached. The judge has to tell the jury what they can and can't do with it. For example, you may treat this as evidence of what Ted was feeling.

you may not treat it as evidence of what Sandy Murphy did. The instruction was never given. Nobody ever told the jury where the line was. And then the state stood up in closing, repeated Ted's sentence about Sandy killing him, and told the jury that truer words were never spoken. That's a prosecutor asking 12 people to take a dead man's guess as fact. So here's what the appeals court actually ruled.

Every conviction tied to Ted's death was thrown out, including the murder and the theft of the silver. Sandy and Rick would get a new trial in front of a new jury, and that jury would never hear Leo Casey's name or Ted's phone call. What the ruling did not do was set them free. The defense had asked for that, arguing the state never proved a crime happened at all. if the justices agreed, that meant the case was over for good. No retrial, no second chance. The court called it a close question, given Ted's heroin habit, but it ruled that Bodden's testimony was enough for a jury to reasonably conclude

somebody had been killed. And another piece of the original conviction also survived, Rick would keep serving his sentence for kidnapping and beating Leo Casey. The justices settled one more question while they were at it. The jurors didn't all have to agree on how Ted was killed in this new trial. Some could believe he was forcibly overdosed, and others could believe he was suffocated, as long as all 12 agreed that a criminal act caused his death. But the decision to have a new trial wasn't unanimous.

Two of the seven justices thought the convictions should have been left exactly as they were. Justice William Maupin wrote the longest opinion in the case, and he used it to lay the state's evidence out and to end. He pointed to the maid, the drapes, the missing valuables, the phone calls that stopped, Rick's debts, the trip to Beverly Hills, the wine glass, and the purse. Read one at a time, any of those has an innocent explanation.

Read together, Maupin thought they pointed, in one direction. And then he turned to the timing. Moppin laid out what the defense was really asking a jury to believe, that Ted had supposedly chosen to kill himself on the exact day his relationship with Sandy was ending, which was also the last day she and Rick could still get at his money. It was also a week when Ted was making plans,

trying to win his gaming license back, looking at property to buy and putting money into a governor's race. Mopin closed by saying the record supported the state's theory, that a helpless man had been attacked by a pair of opportunists who were after his money. So the same court that throughout the verdict also said in writing that a jury could reasonably have reached it. The reaction to the news came the same morning. Roger said his office was disappointed and would retry the case as soon as it could.

Dershowitz called it a just decision and said it gave them a chance to put new information in front of a jury. And this whole time, the other fight was still going, the one over Ted's money. Sandy Murphy had filed her claim against the estate back in November of 1998, and it turned on a technicality that cut her way. Ted told his lawyer to take her out of the will, but nobody ever did it. So the July version still stood, and that version gave her the house on Palomino Lane, everything inside it, and $300,000. A judge handling the estate ruled she was entitled to what the will said.

Ted had told his lawyer too late. But that wasn't the end of the story. The estate's lawyers appealed it, and Ted's sister Becky filed her own separate suit, claiming a lot of his personal property. And there was one thing Sandy had been telling people about that she never got. She believed she was the beneficiary of a $1 million life insurance policy on Ted. It turned out Ted had gotten the paperwork to name her, but died before he signed it. Still, with her conviction erased, Sandy could ask for bail like anybody else waiting on a trial.

In December of 2003, a judge granted it, and she went home to her family in California for Christmas. Rick stayed in prison because he was still serving time on the Leo Casey conviction. And while they waited, the place that made the Binion name worth anything stopped existing. By January of 2004, Benyon's horseshoe was in serious trouble. Becky had bought the casino in 1998, and it had been losing money and falling apart ever since. Eventually, the casino had stopped making payments into the union pension and welfare funds, and the culinary union went to court over it.

On January 9th, federal marshals and IRS agents walked into the horseshoe and seized about a million dollars out of the cashier's cage where the casino kept its money. That wiped out the casino's bankroll. A gambling hall can't operate without money to pay winners, so the horseshoe shut its doors. The hotel closed the next day. More than 800 people lost their jobs.

Two weeks later, Becky agreed to sell it to Herras, one of the biggest casino companies in the country. Harris kept the horseshoe name and the World Series of Poker and turned around and sold the building itself. Meanwhile, Becky's brother Jack, who'd left Vegas and built his own casinos in other states, sold that company to Haras the same year for $1.45 billion. Benny Binion opened that place in 1951.

He was padlocked 53 years later, and his family didn't own a piece of it. The last thing the binion still owned was the question of how Ted died. And in a few weeks, 12 strangers would sit down in a Las Vegas courtroom and answer it. We all experience petty grievances in life.

A bachelorette party that resulted in a runaway bridesmaid. A neighbor who has trained their dog to poo in your yard. An ex-friend who writes a semi-autobiographical book about your friend group and then kills off your character. Maybe these aren't completely relatable, but they are all petty crimes we've investigated on our podcast. I'm Griff, your average biracial, farm-raised, queer actor, and retired model who's living and looking for love in Los Angeles.

And I'm Kira. I'm an S&L writer, a movie writer, a comedian, and I'm the only person pettier than Griff. Petty Crimes is a true crime comedy podcast that exclusively investigates non-crimes, meaning real-life, low-stakes, petty drama that's submitted each week by our listeners and ruled on by us. Some weeks, we're joined by comedian friends. like Ego Wodom, John Marco Seraci, Chloe Feynman, Sarah Sherman, Jeremy Cole Hain, Carl Tart, Lacey Mosley. But most of the time, you're just stuck with us.

If you're the type that tells your boyfriend to shh, so you can ease drop on the T unfolding at the table next to you, you've found your people. Subscribe to Petty Crimes, wherever you get your podcasts. Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish went back on trial for the killing of Ted Binion in October of 2004. 15 months after the Nevada Supreme Court throughout their original murder convictions, Almost everything about the second trial was different, starting with the lawyers. The state had two new prosecutors, Chris Lolly and Robert Dacus. Sandy had new lawyers, Michael Cristali and Mark Sejacy. And Rick brought in Jay Tony Sarah.

He was a defense attorney out of San Francisco with long white hair and raspy voice, who'd won a murder case for a Black Panther leader and had represented the Hell's Angels. The case itself was smaller too. Leo Casey was no longer part of it. Rick was already serving that sentence. And this trial was only about Ted's death and Ted's silver. Now, that meant two separate questions for the jury. Did these two kill Ted Binion and rob his house?

And did they steal the silver out of that vault in the desert? When the lawyers gave their opening statements, the jury got handed two completely different versions. of the same people. Prosecutor Chris Lolly described a couple that was having an affair and figured they could solve their money problems by killing Ted. The defense said both of their clients were doing fine financially and had been trying to help a sick, addicted man,

and they said the simplest point was the one that mattered. There was no real evidence a homicide had ever happened. Montaventure was still the judge. But this time when James Brown took the stand, all he could say was that Ted called him the day before he died, and that because of the call, he moved to take Sandy out of the will. Brown wasn't allowed to describe the conversation itself or quote Ted's words. Alan Dershowitz explained why that mattered so much. Without those things, there was no argument that Sandy wanted Ted dead. The silver charges had a problem of their own, and this jury heard about it.

On the night of the arrests out in Perump, the Nye County Sheriff at the time was a man named Wade Liseki. Lysaki turned up at the vault while his own deputies were making the arrest and told them not to go through with it. He said they didn't have a case. There was a reason he said that. It turned out, Rick had called the sheriff in advance to say he was coming. His own deputies came away suspicious of their own boss, and they said so on the stand. Liseki denied ever authorizing the dig, and prosecutors later said they found no evidence he was involved. But that was the side show.

The murder charge was what everyone had come back for, and to prove it, the state needed 12 people to believe Dr. Michael Baden. Bodden took the stand again in late October and he didn't give an inch. He said Clark County's medical examiner, Dr. Larry Sims, had gotten it wrong. He said the drug levels weren't lethal and he kept coming back to one point. There were no known cases in the United States of anybody dying of an overdose from smoking heroin the way Ted did. Then Rick's lawyer, Tony Sarah, went after him and he started with the weak spot. Baden had never laid eyes on Ted Binion. Everything he'd told two juries he'd worked out from photographs.

Sarah also argued that the batch of black tar heroin Ted bought the night before his death could vary wildly in strength. That meant a dose that had been survivable for years might not be survivable that night. When the doctors were finally finished arguing with each other, the state's whole murder case came down to. to two small red marks on Ted Binion's chest. The state said they were shirt buttons pressed into his skin under the weight of a knee. The defense called expert after expert to say they were something else.

Dermatitis, skin cancer, a burn from a cigarette, a paramedic pressing on his sternum to check whether he was alive, marks that formed after he was already dead. One of those experts was Dr. Cyril Wecht of Pittsburgh, who was about as famous as Bodden and happened to be his friend. Bodden said publicly that he thought Wecht was an outstanding pathologist and that he'd agree with him 99% of the time. This was the other 1%. And then the defense called the strangest witness of the whole trial. The state's own medical examiner, Dr. Larry Sims, the man who'd done the autopsy

testified that the marks on Ted's chest and lips formed after he died. The prosecution's own doctor was contradicting the prosecution's theory. The jury was sent out to deliberate on Friday, November 19th, 2004. They worked all day Saturday, took Sunday off, and came back Monday morning.

At one point, they asked to have testimony read back to them from a fingerprint examiner who told the court that Sandy's and Rick's prince were on a list of Ted's money collection. Then on Tuesday, November 23rd, seven men and five women filed back into Bonaventure's courtroom. The clerk announced their verdict. Sandy and Rick were not guilty of murder, not guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, and not guilty of conspiracy. of robbery. However, they were guilty on all three counts tied to the silver. The courthouse gasped. Sandy Murphy, who was 32 now, broke down on her lawyer's shoulder. Rick Tabish, who was 39, stood up and nodded, then went and held on to his father who was crying.

Outside, Rick told reporters this murder thing was behind him. And then the jurors did something that doesn't happen in most cases. They sat down with the reporters and explained themselves. They said they believed Sandy and Rick decided to go after Ted Silver after he died, not before, and that single word is what decided everything. And the sheer number of experts who came in and testified that this wasn't a homicide had created reasonable doubt for them. They said directly that they said directly that they,

They didn't believe in burking. They didn't find the state's witnesses believable either, which is where Kurt Graitzer and his murder plot ended up. Then they turned on the police. Because officers decided in the first hour that Ted had killed himself, nobody secured that house, and the chain of evidence was broken. One juror said there was a lot they should have done and didn't. And the four woman put her finger on the thing that settled it for,

them. She said the jury pretty much felt that those weren't button marks. All that was left was sentencing for the theft, but things got ugly before they ever got that far. In January of 2005, a letter surfaced that Rick's local attorney, Joseph Caramano, had written to Rick's brother. Caramano wanted to bring in a well-known New York lawyer who would go after the prosecutors personally and pressure Bonaventure into a lighter sentence. When Tony Sarah found out he was livid and asked Bonaventure to let him off the case, Bonaventure let him go and said he respected Sarah more for it.

Then he turned on Caramano and said that kind of win-at-all-cost approach is exactly why people hate lawyers. On March 11, 2005, Bonaventure sentenced Rick and Sandy to one to five years for taking the silver. For Rick, that changed nothing. Because the silver was never what was keeping him in prison, the Casey convictions had survived the appeal and he was still serving those.

He'd been locked up since 1999. The parole board turned him down three times. He was finally granted parole in January of 2010 at 44 years old and released to Montana that spring after about a decade inside. For Sandy, the same sentence was the end of it. She'd already been locked up for years between her arrest and her bail,

and that time counted against the one to five. In April, she walked out and moved to California. But she kept fighting. She wanted these silver convictions off her record. In March of 2008, the Nevada Supreme Court upheld them anyway. that November she asked all seven to take another look and they turned her down. She was also still going after Ted's estate and she sued the state for malicious prosecution and false imprisonment trying to get the felony erased.

She kept using one word for what she was after, vindication. She never got it, but she did get to move forward. In 2006, a mutual friend introduced Sandy to an art dealer named Kevin Pierropon, who owned a gallery in Laguna Beach. She went to work there, married him in 2009, and became a partner in the business. She told a magazine she goes to work every day and has a happy life. Rick went home to Missoula. By 2019, he was running a cryptocurrency mining company,

out of Montana. In 2022, he stood at a press conference next to the governor of North Dakota announcing a data center project, the governor called one of the largest in the world. One more name belongs in the story. A reporter named Jeff German covered this case from the first day at the Las Vegas Sun and later the review journal. He worked it through both trials and the appeal, and in 2001, he turned it into a book called Murder in Sin City. Most of what we know about what was said in those courtrooms, we know because he was sitting in them. In September of 2022, Jeff German was stabbed to death outside his home in Las Vegas by a county official he'd been writing about, and we told his story in a two-part episode of this show. So, where does a

all of this leave Ted Binion? Under American law, the question is closed. Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish didn't murder him. They were tried. The jury acquitted them, and nobody else has ever been charged. That's the answer, and it's the only official one there is. What it doesn't give anybody is certainty. Two juries looked at photographs of the same body. and reached opposite conclusions. The state's own doctors never agreed on what killed him. Ted's friend Wayne Newton said he doesn't believe anybody will ever know what actually happened to him. But a couple of things stay true, no matter which verdict you find more convincing.

The police made up their minds in the first hour. They saw a known heroin user dead on his floor with an empty pill bottle next to him, drew the obvious conclusion. Then they went home without sealing the room because of that. Everything that came next was tainted in one way or another. And however you cut it, Ted Binion mostly gets remembered as a list of vices. The heroine, the mobsters, the dancers, the money in the ground. But Ted was also the man his family buried with a pair of boots and a coiled rope laid on the coffin

in front of 800 people. He was Bonnie Binion's father, and most of what he left went to her. Harry Claiborne, who'd known him his whole life, stood up in that church and called him the most unforgettable person he'd ever met. That's the part nobody argued about. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it 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. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your murder, true crime stories, listen to your murder, experience, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, plus ad-free, and early access

to every show across Crime House 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 Friday. 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 Protofsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara Della Rosa, Claire Swarthlander, 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.