Tuesday, July 8, 2003 | 11:23 a.m.
This column is for Herb Sachs, who is working to overturn Sandy Murphy's conviction in the 1998 slaying of wealthy gambling figure Ted Binion.
Sachs sent me a letter last week claiming that I was incorrect when I pointed out that Murphy once danced topless at Cheetahs nightclub.
He also made other statements he couldn't back up, such as suggesting that Binion's sister Becky Behnen topped the list of people with motives to kill her brother.
Behnen, who runs Binion's Horseshoe downtown, called that accusation ludicrous, but declined to mix it up with Sachs.
She said her legendary father, Horseshoe founder Benny Binion, once told her never to get involved in a "pissing contest with a skunk."
The Binion patriarch never gave me that advice, and I prefer to believe that Sachs was just being ignorant about the personal exploits of his client.
Whether or not Murphy was a stripper has no bearing on Ted Binion's slaying, and it isn't figuring into the Nevada Supreme Court's debate over whether to grant Murphy a new trial.
But for some reason, Murphy continues to make it a public issue. She continues to deny her Cheetahs association, even to the point of misleading her own lawyer about it.
Her dancing, however, is not one of the many mysteries surrounding the Binion case. It is documented in her own sworn deposition, which Sachs said he hasn't seen.
Sachs wouldn't have been so quick to cry foul on Murphy's behalf if he had read the 1996 deposition, which was given in Binion's divorce case. Murphy acknowledged under oath that she danced at the club during a two-week period in March 1995 to recover $13,000 in gambling losses.
I read the 102-page document and wrote a story about it in October 1999, several months after Murphy was arrested on murder charges. Josh Landish, the attorney who took Murphy's deposition, also testified on the first day of the murder trial in April 2000 that Murphy had acknowledged taking the stage at Cheetahs.
To save Sachs some reading time, here are the relevant excerpts from the deposition:
"Did you dance at any time?" Landish asked.
"Yeah, on a couple of occasions," Murphy responded.
"Where did you dance?"
"On stage," she said. "And I probably did like two or three table dances ... in the VIP room."
"Did you dance covered or topless?"
"In the VIP room, I danced covered, but on stage, I danced topless," she said.
Murphy even described the outfit she wore.
"I had American flag shorts with blue stars on them," she said. "I looked exactly like a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, exact replica."
We have to assume that Murphy was telling the truth in the deposition, because her trial attorney, who was not Sachs, never corrected the record during his cross-examination of Landish.
But why wasn't Murphy more candid with Sachs? Why didn't Sachs know about the deposition before he spouted off?
A little enlightenment would have saved Sachs the embarrassment of looking foolish.
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