The final chapter of a nearly three-decade-long legal saga closed Tuesday night in Huntsville, Texas, as former Missouri City police officer Robert Allen Fratta was executed by lethal injection for orchestrating the 1994 murder of his wife, Farah Fratta Baugher. Fratta, 66, offered no final statement as the lethal dose of pentobarbital began to flow, his silence a stark contrast to the years of legal battles and the violent crime that had consumed his life. He was pronounced dead at 7:49 p.
m. inside the state execution chamber at the Huntsville Unit, ending a case that had drawn national attention for its chilling details and the extraordinary lengths to which Fratta went to build an alibi while his wife was gunned down in her own garage.
The execution proceeded after a dramatic day of last-minute legal maneuvers. A state district judge had issued a temporary civil injunction earlier Tuesday, seeking to halt the execution over concerns about the expiration date of the pentobarbital used in the lethal injection process. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals swiftly overturned that injunction within hours, and the U.
S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, clearing the path for the state to carry out the sentence. Fratta, who had maintained his innocence for nearly 30 years, had exhausted his final appeals.
In a pre-execution interview, he had described his death sentence as enlightening, but he continued to profess that he had nothing to do with his wife’s death.
The crime that led to Fratta’s death sentence was a calculated act of domestic violence and conspiracy. On November 9, 1994, Farah Fratta, a 33-year-old mother of three and a former American Airlines ticketing officer who had emigrated from England, returned home to her residence in Atascocita, Texas, after getting her hair cut. As she pulled her red Mustang convertible into the garage, a gunman was lying in wait.
Neighbor Laura Holscher, who was across the street nursing her infant, heard a sharp sound, saw Farah fall, and then heard a second shot. She immediately called 911, describing a black male dressed in black who ran from the property and got into a silver car with a burned-out headlight. Farah was airlifted to Memorial Hermann Hospital but was pronounced dead upon arrival.
The medical examiner recovered one full bullet and one partial bullet from her body, along with fragments from the garage floor.
At the time of the shooting, Robert Fratta was at a church with the couple’s three children, ages 7, 6, and 4. He had taken them to a church event, a fact that would become the cornerstone of his alibi. But investigators quickly noted his behavior was anything but that of a grieving husband.
He had never taken the children to church before and never did again. A church office worker testified that between 7:30 and 8:00 p. m.
that evening, Fratta came into the office multiple times to use the phone, returning pages and waiting for calls. His 7-year-old son, Bradley, also recalled his father leaving their booth at a restaurant at least twice to make calls from a payphone. For a man building an alibi, he was unusually active on the phone that night.
The investigation into Farah’s murder initially stalled. The crime scene yielded almost no usable physical evidence, no fingerprints, no weapon. Robert Fratta had a confirmed alibi.
But his behavior was impossible to ignore. When he walked out of his interrogation at the Harris County Sheriff’s office the day after the murder, television cameras captured him swaggering toward the lens and smiling. Detective Larry Davis, who was present, described the moment as a man who believed he was going to get away with it.
Sergeant John Denholm told reporters that Fratta had been real amused by this whole thing. During a formal follow-up interview, when detectives asked what should happen to a husband who kills his wife, Fratta paused, smirked, and said, That depends.
The break in the case came months later, on March 1, 1995, when Howard Paul Guidry, an 18-year-old with a criminal record, was arrested following a chase after an attempted bank robbery. When officers searched him, they found a . 38 caliber Charter Arms revolver in his backpack.
Ballistic testing confirmed it was the same weapon used in Farah’s murder. A federal firearms trace on the weapon led directly to Robert Fratta, who had purchased it in 1982. Farah had asked her father, Lex Booker, to hold the gun for safekeeping in 1993, but at Robert’s request, Lex returned it in the summer of 1994.
The gun had been in Fratta’s possession before the murder.
Guidry confessed to the murder, naming Joseph Andrew Price Dash as the man who organized the operation and drove him to the scene, and Robert Fratta as the man who ordered and paid for it all. Price Dash was arrested in May 1995, and Fratta was arrested in June 1995. All three were charged with capital murder.
The key witness was Mary Gip, Price Dash’s girlfriend, who had lived with him and knew both Robert and Farah from the same gym. She had overheard Price Dash on the phone with Robert multiple times in the weeks before the murder. On the night of the murder, she came home to find Guidry dressed in black on the front steps.
Price Dash arrived shortly after, placed the revolver in the bedroom, and emptied the shell casings into the kitchen trash. He told her what happened. Mary did not call the police, later explaining, I could have.
I really just didn’t want to deal with it. But before the night was over, she wrote down the serial number from the revolver, a number that would later match the murder weapon exactly.
Robert Fratta went to trial first in 1996. The jury convicted him after less than one hour of deliberation, and he was sentenced to death. Price Dash was convicted after just 17 minutes of deliberation and also sentenced to death.
Guidry was convicted in 1997 and sentenced to death. But in 2007, U. S.
District Judge Melinda Harmon overturned Fratta’s conviction, ruling that the prosecution had relied on the custodial confessions of Price Dash and Guidry, neither of whom testified at trial, violating Fratta’s Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses. In her written opinion, Judge Harmon described the trial record as showing Fratta to be egotistical, misogynistic, and vile, with a callous desire to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his wife, but she overturned his conviction regardless because the law required it.
His retrial began in May 2009. The confessions were barred. The prosecution rebuilt its case around Mary Gip, the physical evidence, and witness testimony.
Bradley, Daniel, and Amber, all now using the surname Booker, testified against their father. The defense argued brain injury and emotional instability. The prosecution called him a calculated narcissist.
On May 14, 2009, the jury convicted Fratta for the second time. On May 29, 2009, he was sentenced to death again. The judge issued an order barring Fratta from profiting from the case in any form, the first such order in Texas capital case history.
Outside the courthouse, Lex Booker, Farah’s father, said simply, He is a monster.
Fratta spent nearly 14 years on death row after his 2009 sentencing. He maintained his innocence throughout. In a 2019 filing to the U.
S. Supreme Court, he wrote, I am completely innocent of my wife Farah’s death. Yet here I sit on Texas death row.
His final legal effort argued that a key trial witness had been hypnotized by investigators, altering her recollection of events. The Supreme Court rejected it. On execution day, spiritual adviser Barry Brown prayed over Fratta for three minutes inside the execution chamber.
Behind the glass stood Bradley Booker, Farah’s eldest son, now 35 years old, and Zane Booker, Farah’s brother. Andy Kahan and Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg were also present. Fratta never looked at either of them.
When the warden asked if he had a final statement, Fratta said one word, No.
Andy Kahan spoke afterward, saying Fratta had been a coward in 1994 when he arranged the murder, and 28 years later, he was still a coward. Offered a final chance to acknowledge his son who was watching, and he chose silence instead. Joseph Andrew Price Dash died on death row on June 19, 2025, before an execution date was ever scheduled for him.
Howard Paul Guidry remains on death row as of 2025 with no execution date set. The life insurance policy Fratta had tried to collect days after Farah’s death was never paid to him. One hundred thousand dollars eventually went to Lex and Betty Booker to be used for the three children.
Bradley, Daniel, and Amber were raised by their grandparents. Lex Booker died in 2018, never seeing the execution he had waited for. Betty Booker had said years earlier that seeing Fratta on that table would be justice for her.
There was one more chapter to this case that rarely gets mentioned. A former law enforcement officer named Bill Planter was separately arrested for approaching Lex Booker and asking his permission to arrange Fratta’s death. Planter was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
In February 2000, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals acquitted him on appeal, and he was released. Farah Fratta was 33 years old when she died. She had 19 days left before her divorce would have been finalized.
Her children grew up without her. And the man who made that happen spent his final moment on Earth in silence. Not because he had nothing to say, but because to the very end, he chose himself over everyone else.
