Binion’s death not initially investigated as a homicide

Monday, Aug. 6, 2001 | 10:40 a.m.

Editor's note: This is the second in a series of seven excerpts from the new book, "Murder in Sin City: The Death of a Las Vegas Casino Boss." The book was written by Jeff German, the Sun's senior investigative reporter. The series, exclusive to the Sun, will run daily through Friday and conclude on Sunday.

"Murder in Sin City" is the inside story of the biggest murder case of all time in Las Vegas, the slaying of former Horseshoe Club executive Ted Binion, one of a dying breed of colorful casino bosses.

An ultimate Las Vegas insider, Binion met his demise at the hands of two outsiders, his live-in girlfriend, Sandy Murphy, a beautiful one-time topless dancer, and her new lover, Rick Tabish, a married Montana contractor.

The book takes the reader into the heart of the well-publicized investigation and details a classic story of love, betrayal, murder and greed.

When Wayne Petersen arrived at the homicide bureau about 7:30 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 21, 1998, he was having second thoughts about not assigning members of his unit to the scene of Ted Binion's death four days earlier.

As he began his day, Petersen got the feeling he soon would be embarking on one of his more challenging cases.

Binion's sister, Becky Behnen, who knew about the stormy relationship between Binion and his girlfriend, Sandy Murphy, publicly was putting pressure on police to treat her brother's death as a homicide. And over the weekend Binion friend Rick Tabish and his cohorts were arrested in Pahrump for digging up and trying to steal the gambling figure's $6 million silver fortune.

"In 20-20 hindsight I would have liked to have been at the (death) scene," Petersen said. "It would have made our job much easier."

But Petersen didn't send any of his people to Binion's home the afternoon of Sept. 17. He had received reports at the scene from Sgt. Jim Young, a general assignment detective who had told him there were no obvious signs of trauma on Binion's body. When Young saw the empty bottle of Xanax nearby, he had even more reason to suspect that Binion, a man with a long history of drug abuse, was the victim of an overdose.

Young also told Petersen that the death scene appeared to have been cleaned up -- something that family members frequently do in drug overdoses before police arrive.

By Monday morning, having spent considerable time in Pahrump over the weekend taking care of Binion's affairs, estate attorneys Richard Wright and James J. Brown were ready to push for a homicide investigation. What they learned in Pahrump left little doubt in their minds that their friend had met with foul play.

Wright and Brown showed up at Petersen's office about 9:30 a.m. to make their pitch. Petersen had brought in one of his sergeants, Ken Hefner, to listen with him.

One of the first things Brown did during the half-hour meeting was disclose the chilling details of his telephone conversation with Binion the afternoon before Binion's death. In the conversation Binion had instructed Brown to take Murphy out of his will if she didn't kill him that evening.

Wright told Petersen and Hefner that Binion had asked him the day before he died for the name of a private detective he could hire to follow Murphy.

And the two lawyers said that many of Binion's valuables were missing from his home. Though he was known to keep a lot of cash on hand, they said, none was found at the house. Binion's collection of rare coins and currency dating back to the Civil War also was gone.

Wright and Brown also reported that Nye County sheriff's deputies told them about a love letter they had found from Murphy to Tabish in Tabish's briefcase after his arrest on the silver theft charges.

Deputies also had told the attorneys that they seized $3,200 in sequentially numbered $100 bills from Tabish and his employee, Michael Milot. Wright said the serial numbers on the crisp bills were similar to the numbers on $40,000 in $100 bills he had brought to Binion a week earlier for a planned political campaign contribution.

To Wright and Brown, questions about Binion's death rapidly were mounting.

"It became clear to us that police needed to take some affirmative steps toward an investigation," Brown said.

But after the attorneys finished making their case, they got the impression Petersen and Hefner weren't all that interested.

"I thought they were courteous, but weren't going to do anything," Wright said. "I felt like they were giving us lip service and that this wasn't a high priority for them."

Added Brown: "We walked away feeling that they were not going to pursue any kind of investigation until they were forced to by an autopsy showing a clear homicide."

Petersen told the lawyers he wanted to wait until the results of the toxicology tests on fluids taken from Binion's body were known in the next couple of weeks before moving ahead with a full-blown murder investigation.

"That Monday morning I wasn't convinced," Petersen said. "We didn't have the evidence from the autopsy or anything else. It just wasn't clear at that point exactly how he died."

Despite the lack of evidence, Petersen assigned the case to Hefner and two of his top detectives, James Buczek and Tom Thowsen, after the lawyers had left the homicide bureau.

Though he played it cool to Wright and Brown, Petersen indeed had concerns about the way Binion had died.

But before taking the plunge, he wanted to be sure in his own mind that Murphy and Tabish had killed Binion and weren't just opportunists taking advantage of a drug addict after his death.

"There certainly were lots of suspicious circumstances that needed further investigation," he said.

Petersen said Chief Medical Examiner Lary Simms didn't discover anything at the autopsy that led to the undisputed conclusion that Binion had been the victim of a homicide.

But Simms did find 40 milligrams of a mysterious gray-brown fluid in his stomach that he had sent out for tests. He also found unusual marks on Binion's body that he thought could have occurred immediately before or after Binion's death.

There also were two different patterns of fixed lividity on Binion's body. Blood had settled on the right side and both sides of his back, which confirmed to Simms that the body had been in two different positions after his death and had been moved.

Wright and Brown, meanwhile, had hired a locksmith to drill open Binion's safe in his garage.

By 3 p.m., after two hours of work, the safe was opened and to their amazement it was empty except for one dime in the center of the floor. Tabish had left one silver dollar in the middle of the underground vault in Pahrump after he had dug up the buried coins and bars.

"I was expecting to find everything inside the safe," Wright said. "That was a real shock."

Wright and Brown saw the empty safe as further evidence that they needed to conduct their own investigation into Binion's death.

"The police weren't treating it as diligently as we would have liked them to treat it," Wright said. "It was clear to us that time was being wasted, and if we wanted something done, we'd have to do it ourselves."

After conferring with Jack Binion, who was preparing for his brother's funeral the next day, the decision was made to hire private detective Tom Dillard, a former homicide cop, to conduct the estate's own investigation.

"Murder in Sin City" by Jeff German is available for $6.99 at all major bookstores in the greater Las Vegas area and around the country. It is published by Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers in New York.

TUESDAY:

Lead homicide detective James Buczek finally gets his chance to confront the two people he believed killed Ted Binion.