Texas executes man for 2004 double killing

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A Texas man who killed his strip club manager and another man, and later prompted a massive lockdown of the state prison system when he used a cellphone smuggled onto death row to threaten a lawmaker, was executed Thursday night.

Richard Lee Tabler, 46, was given a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. The time of death was 6:38 p.m. Central time, 15 minutes after a lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital was administered in his arms.

“There is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret my actions,” Tabler said, strapped to the death chamber gurney, looking at relatives of his victims who watched through a window a few feet away.

“I had no right to take your loved ones from you, and I ask and pray, hope and pray, that one day you find it in your hearts to forgive me for those actions,” Tabler said. “No amount of my apologies will ever return them to you.”

He expressed love to his family and friends, lawyers and supporters, and he thanked prison officials for their compassion and “the opportunity to show you that I can change and become a better man and rehabilitate.”

After apologizing several more times and saying this was the beginning of a new life for him in heaven, he told the warden: “I am finished.”

As the drugs began, he mouthed once again, “I’m sorry,” then began breathing quickly. After about a dozen breaths, all movement stopped.

Tabler — the second person executed in Texas in a little over a week, with two more executions scheduled by the end of April — was condemned for the Thanksgiving 2004 shooting deaths of Mohammed-Amine Rahmouni, 28, and Haitham Zayed, 25, in a remote area near Killeen in central Texas.

Rahmouni was the manager of a strip club where Tabler worked until he was banned from the place. Zayed was a friend of Rahmouni, and police said both men were killed in a late-night ambush disguised as a meeting to buy stolen stereo equipment.

Tabler also confessed to killing two teenage girls who worked at the club, Tiffany Dotson, 18, and Amanda Benefield, 16. He was indicted but never tried in their killings.

Dotson’s father, George, was among the witnesses. He declined to comment on Tabler’s apologies, saying he needed time to process what he had just seen but was glad to have seen it.

“I couldn’t wait,” he said. “It took me 20 years to get here.”

“Today is for Tiffany,” said her godfather, Tom Newton. “And this is justice.”

Tabler had repeatedly asked the courts to drop his appeals and that he be put to death. He changed his mind on that point several times, and his attorneys have questioned whether he was mentally competent to make that decision. Tabler’s prison record includes at least two instances of attempted suicide, and he was granted a stay of execution in 2010.

“Petitioner has spent the last twenty years in the Courts, and see’s no point in wasting this Courts time, nor anyone else’s,” Tabler wrote to the state Court of Criminal Appeals on Dec. 9, 2024, after his current execution date was set.

Tabler’s death row phone calls in 2008 to state Sen. John Whitmire, who is now the mayor of Houston, prompted an unprecedented lockdown of more than 150,000 inmates in the the nation’s second-largest prison system. Some were confined to their cells for weeks while officers swept more than 100 prisons to seize hundreds of items of contraband, including cellphones.

Whitmire led a Senate committee with oversight of state prisons, and said at the time that Tabler warned him that he knew the names of his children and where they lived. Whitmire, through a spokesperson at the mayor’s office, declined to comment on Tabler’s pending execution.

The American Civil Liberties Union appealed Tabler’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court last year, claiming he was denied adequate legal representation during his lower court appeals by attorneys who refused to participate in hearings at what they said was his request.

The ACLU appeal argued that Tabler’s attorneys ignored a psychological exam that determined he had a “deep and severe constellation of mental illnesses ” that had been ignored since childhood. The court refused to halt his execution.

The club Tabler worked at was called TeaZers. Investigators said he had a conflict with his boss, Rahmouni, who allegedly said he could have Tabler’s family “wiped out” for $10.

Tabler recruited a friend, Timothy Payne, a soldier at nearby Ft. Cavazos, and lured Rahmouni and Zayed to a meeting under the guise of buying the stolen stereo equipment. Tabler shot them both in their car, then pulled Rahmouni out and had Payne record video of him shooting Rahmouni again.

Tabler later confessed to the killings. During the sentencing phase of his trial, prosecutors introduced Tabler’s written and videotaped statements saying he also killed Dotson and Benefield days later because he was worried they would tell people he killed the men.

Investigators said that before he was arrested, Tabler called the Bell County Sheriff’s Office to taunt deputies about the murders and threatened to kill more employees and undercover law enforcement at the strip club.

Also Thursday, in Florida, a man convicted of killing a husband and wife during a fishing trip at a remote farm while their toddler looked on was put to death by lethal injection in that state’s first execution this year.

Vertuno and Graczyk write for the Associated Press. Graczyk reported from Huntsville and Vertuno from Austin, Texas.