Texas to Execute Ex-cop for Paying 2 People to Murder His Wife: A former suburban Houston police officer who hired two persons to murder his estranged wife over 30 years ago was scheduled to be killed on Tuesday. Amid a bitter divorce and custody battle over their three children, Robert Fratta, 65, is set to be executed by lethal injection for shooting his wife Farah to death in November 1994.
According to the prosecution, Fratta planned the murder-for-hire scheme in which Howard Guidry, the gunman, was hired through an intermediary named Joseph Prystash. In the garage of her home in the Houston neighborhood of Atascocita, Farah Fratta, 33, was shot twice in the head by Guidry. The former Missouri City public safety officer Robert Fratta has always maintained his innocence.
According to court documents, the prosecution claimed that Fratta had repeatedly expressed his desire to see his wife dead and inquired of friends and acquaintances as to whether they knew anyone who could execute her. He allegedly told one friend, “I’ll just kill her, and I’ll do my time, and when I get out, I’ll have my kids.” For the murder, Prystash and Guidry were also placed on death row.
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Attorneys for Fratta have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution that is set to take place at the state prison in Huntsville on Tuesday night. They claim that the prosecution withheld evidence that one eyewitness to the trial had been hypnotized by detectives. They claim it caused her to revise her original memory that she had seen two guys at the crime scene, along with a getaway driver.
Fratta’s attorneys stated in their appeal to the Supreme Court that this would have “undermined the State’s case, which hinged on just two men committing the act and depended on linking Fratta to both.” The prosecution claims that the hypnosis did not result in any new knowledge or identification.
The Supreme Court and lower courts have previously dismissed appeals from Fratta’s attorneys who attempted to have accusations that the jury verdict was based on flawed jury instructions and inadequate evidence reviewed.
Additionally, his defenders attempted to refute the ballistics evidence by claiming that it did not link him to the murder weapon and that one of the jurors in his case was not impartial. Last Thursday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles overwhelmingly rejected Fratta’s request to have his death sentence reduced or to offer him a 60-day reprieve.
Fratta is one of three death row convicts in Texas who have filed a lawsuit to prevent the use of allegedly hazardous and outdated execution medications by the state’s prison system. The top criminal appeals court in Texas last week prohibited the judge in the civil court from making any decisions regarding the lawsuit. On Tuesday, a hearing was scheduled.
Fratta was first given a death sentence in 1996, but a federal judge reversed that decision after concluding that his co-conspirators’ confessions should not have been allowed to be used as evidence. The trial evidence revealed Fratta to be egocentric, sexist, and cruel, with a callous wish to kill his wife, the judge stated in the same sentence.
In 2009, he tried again and was given a new death sentence. To fulfill a promise he made to Farah Fratta’s late father, Lex Baquer, who passed away in 2018, Andy Kahan, director of victim services and advocacy for Crime Stoppers of Houston, who has assisted Farah Fratta’s family throughout the investigation, stated he intends to watch the execution.
The three children of Robert and Farah Fratta were raised by Baquer and his wife. Because everything has always centered on Bob, Kahan added, “I don’t expect anything to come out of Bob that would demonstrate any form of admission or any type of sorrow.”
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The children will be able to “continue living their lives and, at the very least, stop thinking about him” thanks to the execution. I believe that will be crucial to their recovery,” he stated. Fratta would be the second prisoner executed in the United States and the first in Texas this year. Later this year, Texas is expected to carry out another eight executions.