Robert Fratta Police Officer Turned killer Executed For Hiring Teenage Hitman To Kill His Wife – 

Now, I’m counting. What is your emergency?  Yeah, but I’m just shooting, please.  Okay, do you know of anybody who shot?  is down in her garage. She’s been shot two times or two shots.  Farah Fratta was 33 years old and she was in the middle of a bitter custody battle for her three children. Her marriage was ending.

 Her estranged husband wanted the kids and the fight had dragged on for two years with no end in sight. On the evening of November 9th, 1994, she did something completely ordinary in the middle of all of it. She went and got her hair cut. She pulled into the driveway of her home in Atascocita, Texas, a quiet Houston suburb, stepped out of her car and walked toward her garage.

 Someone was waiting for her in the backyard. Neighbors across the street heard a shot, then a scream, then a second shot.  There’s still a person out there. There’s a black gentleman. He’s wearing a black shirt and a black pants. A lady is down in her garage. She’s been shot two times or two shots.  By the time anyone reached her, Farah Fratta was lying on the ground beside her car, shot twice in the head.

 She never made it inside her own house. The man who arranged that killing was her estranged husband, a public safety officer, a man who wore a badge, who had sworn an oath, and who had spent months telling people around him that he wanted his wife dead. His name was Robert Allen Fratta and on January 10th, 2023, 28 years after Farah was killed, he was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas.

 He was 65 years old. In this video, we’re going to go through the full story, who Farah was, what Fratta did, and how he did it, what happened at trial, twice, the controversies that followed him to the death chamber, what he was served as his last meal, and what happened inside that execution room in his final moments.

 Robert Allen Fratta was born on February 22nd, 1957. He worked as a public safety officer for Missouri City, a suburb southwest of Houston. On paper, he was exactly the kind of man a community puts its trust in. He carried a badge. He showed up to work. He had a family. He and Farah Baquer married in 1983. Farah had been born in Guildford, Surrey, in England.

 She had made her life in Texas. Together, they had three children, two sons and a daughter. For the purposes of this video, we are not going to spend a lot of time on Robert Fratta’s background. What matters is what the marriage became and what he chose to do when it fell apart. In March 1992, Farah filed for divorce.

 Court filings alleged that Robert Fratta had made bizarre and deviant sexual demands throughout the marriage. The proceedings were contentious from the start. And the central fight, the one that consumed both of them for the next two years, was custody of their children. That custody battle is what prosecutors would come to argue was the engine behind everything that followed.

 Because somewhere in the middle of that divorce, Robert Fratta stopped trying to win in court and started asking people if they knew anyone who could kill his wife. This was not a crime of impulse. That is one of the things that makes it what it is. Fratta did not act in anger in a single moment. He constructed a plan. He recruited people.

 He put pieces in place over time, and then he made sure he was somewhere else when it happened. Co-workers and friends later testified that Fratta had told them on multiple occasions that he wanted Farah dead. He was not quiet about it. He floated the idea directly, asked people if they knew anyone who could do the job.

 When no one moved on it, he reportedly told at least one person that he would handle it himself if he had to. He didn’t handle it himself. He approached his neighbor, Joseph Pricedash. Pricedash became the middleman, and Pricedash went out and found the shooter, a teenager named Howard Guidry, who was 18 years old at the time.

 Three men, a simple arrangement. Fratta would organize it, Pricedash would coordinate it, and Guidry would pull the trigger. The target was Farah. The motive was the custody battle. If Farah was dead, the divorce was over. The custody fight was over, and Fratta, by his own calculation, would win. On the night of November 9th, 1994, Howard Guidry hid himself in the backyard of Farah Fratta’s home in Atascocita and waited.

PART 2 🎉

 Farah had been out. She had gotten her hair cut. She came home the way anyone comes home after an ordinary evening without any reason to suspect what was waiting for her. She stepped out of her car. Guidry was already in position. Neighbors Laura and Darren Holscher, across the street, heard what they later described as a pop, then a scream, then another shot.

Laura told CBS’s 48 Hours that she looked out the window and saw Farah fall. She and her husband called 911. She stayed on the line with the dispatcher, narrating what she could see in real time. While she was on that call, she saw a man hiding behind a tree. Farrah Fratta had been shot twice in the head.

 She was pronounced dead at the scene. She was 33 years old. For months, the investigation went nowhere. There were no immediate arrests. No one walked into a police station. The case sat cold while Farrah’s father, Lex Docker, took in his three grandchildren and began the work of raising them without their mother. What eventually broke the case open had nothing to do with the murder investigation itself.

Howard Guidry was arrested for an unrelated bank robbery. While investigators were building that case, something connected him to November 9th, 1994. That thread was pulled. It led to Joseph Pricedash, and Pricedash led directly to Robert Fratta. Both Pricedash and Guidry eventually confessed to their roles in the murder, and both of them implicated Robert Fratta as the man who had set the entire thing in motion.

 All three men were arrested. All three were charged with capital murder, and all three would eventually be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in separate proceedings. The case against Fratta was built. What happened next in the courtroom is where things became significantly more complicated. Robert Fratta’s first trial took place in 1996.

He was convicted of capital murder. He was sentenced to death, and then a federal judge threw it out. The ruling hinged on the confessions from Pricedash and Guidry. Those confessions had been admitted into evidence at Fratta’s trial, but critically, neither man had taken the witness stand. Neither had testified in person.

 That meant Fratta had never been able to confront the witnesses against him. Courts ruled this was a violation of his Sixth Amendment rights. The conviction was overturned. In that same ruling, the judge made a point of documenting what the trial evidence had shown about Robert Fratta. He wrote that the record reflected Fratta to be egotistical, misogynistic, and vile with a callous desire to kill his wife.

 That was a federal judge writing that into a legal opinion, not a tabloid. A federal judge. Fratta was retried in 2009. The second trial relied heavily on the testimony of a woman named Mary Gip. Her account proved central to the prosecution’s case. A second jury heard the evidence. A second jury convicted Robert Fratta of capital murder.

 A second jury sentenced him to death. He had now been found guilty by two completely separate juries more than a decade apart. He continued to maintain his innocence. In the years that followed his second conviction, Fratta’s legal team pursued appeals on several fronts. Two of those arguments are worth understanding before we get to the execution.

 The first was about a witness and what she may have been made to forget. Fratta’s attorneys argued that a key eyewitness in the case had been hypnotized by investigators prior to trial and that this fact had been withheld from the defense. The argument was that the hypnosis had caused the witness to alter her original account. In her initial statement, she had reported seeing two men at the scene along with a getaway driver.

 After being hypnotized, that account changed. The defense argued this was a Brady violation, a failure to disclose material evidence that could have affected the outcome of the trial. The prosecution maintained they had not been aware of the hypnosis at the time. Courts reviewed the claim and were not persuaded to halt the execution.

 The second controversy had nothing to do with guilt or innocence. It was about the drugs. Texas had for years been extending the expiration dates on its pentobarbital supply, the only drug it uses in executions, because pharmacies had increasingly refused to provide execution drugs. Rather than sourcing fresh stock, the state would retest the potency levels and push the expiration date forward.

 Fratta joined two other condemned inmates, Wesley Ruiz and John Balentine, in filing a civil lawsuit arguing that the practice violated state pharmaceutical laws and constituted cruel and unusual punishment. They claimed old, potentially degraded drugs could cause unnecessary suffering. What happened on the day of Fratta’s execution because of that lawsuit is one of the more unusual procedural sequences in recent Texas death penalty history.

 A Travis County District Judge, Catherine Mauzy, issued a temporary injunction. For a moment, a real, concrete moment, it appeared the execution would be stopped. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals moved quickly to overturn it. The State Supreme Court rejected another appeal.

 The US Supreme Court declined to intervene. The execution was delayed by just over 1 hour. Then it proceeded, January 10th, 2023. It was the first execution in Texas that year, the second in the United States. Robert Allen Fratta, 65 years old, nearly three decades on death row, was brought into the death chamber at the Huntsville Unit.

 He was strapped to the gurney. Intravenous needles were placed in each arm. His only witness was his spiritual advisor, Barry Brown. On the other side of the glass, watching, were Andy Kahan, director of victim services and advocacy for Crime Stoppers of Houston, Fratta’s brother Zane Baquer, and Robert Fratta’s own elder son, Bradley Baquer.

 A man who had grown up without his mother because of what his father ordered, who had been raised by his maternal grandfather, who was now in Huntsville, Texas, standing on the other side of a pane of glass, watching his father be executed. Both names, both sides, one room. Barry Brown prayed over Fratta for approximately 3 minutes before the execution began.

 His prayer book was on the pillow next to Fratta’s head. His right hand rested on Fratta’s right hand. He asked God to be merciful to Bobby. He asked for peace for hearts that had been broken, for those who had already grieved, and for those who would grieve in the days ahead. Then the warden asked Robert Fratta if he had any final words. Fratta said, “No.

” The pentobarbital began flowing. Fratta took a deep breath. He snored loudly six times. All movement stopped. At 7:49 p.m., 24 minutes after the drug began, Robert Allen Fratta was pronounced dead. Andy Kahan spoke to reporters afterward. He was direct. He said Robert Fratta was a coward in 1994 when he arranged the murder of his wife.

And that he was a coward again that night when he had one final opportunity to acknowledge the son sitting right there watching and chose to say nothing. Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg noted that two separate juries had tried Fratta, convicted him, and sentenced him to death.

 She said there was no question about his guilt. Tonight, she said, “Justice was had.” Here is something many viewers do not know. Texas no longer offers condemned inmates a customized final meal. The practice was abolished in September 2011. And the reason it was abolished is its own story. Lawrence Russell Brewer, a man executed for the racially motivated dragging murder of James Byrd Jr.

, was offered a last meal by the state of Texas, as was tradition. He ordered an enormous spread, two chicken fried steaks, a triple meat bacon cheeseburger, a pound of barbecue, fried okra, three fajitas, a meat lover’s pizza, a pint of ice cream, and peanut butter fudge. Then he refused to eat a single bite of it. State Senator John Whitmire, who chaired the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, wrote a letter to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice demanding the tradition be ended.

 The TDCJ executive director agreed immediately. Effective from that point forward, every condemned inmate in Texas received whatever meal was served to the rest of the unit that day, whatever was on the menu. Robert Fratta had been on death row since the late 1990s. When he walked into that death chamber in January 2023, he had not been offered a special last meal.

 He ate whatever every other inmate ate [music] that day, a standard prison tray, nothing more. Two days before his execution, Fratta gave a recorded interview with Death Penalty Action. In it, he said something worth noting. He said he had once believed in capital punishment. As a police officer, he had supported the death penalty without much thought.

 But after nearly three decades waiting on death row, watching the calendar, knowing the date, knowing the time, his view had changed. “Knowing the day and time that you’re going to die, and it’s just prolonged.” He said, “Everything that we get put through beforehand, this is torture.” He maintained his innocence to the end. He said the system had failed to properly hear his claims.

 He said he was ready to go, not because he was at peace, but because the waiting had become unbearable. There is one final piece of this story worth knowing before we close. Fratta’s father, Lex Baquer, never saw this day. He had taken in all three grandchildren after Fratta was killed and raised them with his wife. He waited years for the legal process to run its course.

 He died in 2018, five years before the execution he had spent decades waiting for. Joseph Prystash, the man who served as the middleman who recruited Howard Guidry and connected him to Robert Fratta, died on death row in June 2025 before his own execution could be carried out. The cause was not publicly disclosed. Howard Guidry, the man who hid in Fratta Fratta’s backyard and pulled the trigger, remains on death row at the Polunsky Unit as of this recording.

Fratta Fratta was 33 years old. She had three children. She had filed for divorce because she wanted out of marriage that had become something she could no longer live with. She was doing the ordinary difficult human thing of trying to rebuild. She went to get her hair cut. She came home and someone her husband had hired was waiting for her in the dark.

 Her children grew up without her. Her father spent years raising those children before he died without seeing justice served. Her brother drove to Huntsville, Texas and stood behind a pane of glass to watch the man responsible take his final breath. Whether you believe the system ultimately worked in this case or whether the hypnosis claim and the two trials raise questions you can’t let go of, this story leaves something behind that doesn’t resolve cleanly.

 So, here is the question I want to leave you with. When Robert Fratta said, “No.” Was that the response of a man who had genuinely given up on a system he believed had failed him? Or was it the final choice of someone who had never, at any point, taken responsibility for what he did to Farah Fratta and to the children they raised together? Leave your thoughts below.

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