By Canadian Press

Texas executes man for 2004 double killing in a dispute with his strip club manager

Feb 13, 2025 | 5:58 PM

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas man who killed his strip club manager and another man, then 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. He is the second person executed in Texas in a little over a week, with two more scheduled by the end of April.

Tabler 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 meeting to buy some stolen stereo equipment that was actually a planned ambush.

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.

Tabler had repeatedly asked the courts that his appeals be dropped and that he be put to death. He also has changed his mind on that point several times, and his attorneys have questioned whether he is mentally competent to make that decision. Tabler’s prison record includes at least two instances of attempted suicide, and he was previously 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 ACLU 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 Fort 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 video 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.

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Vertuno reported from Austin, Texas.

Jim Vertuno And Michael Graczyk, The Associated Press