JUST IN: Texas Executes Ex-Missouri City Police Officer Robert Alan Fratta — “That Depends”…
To a close friend, he said plainly, “I’ll just kill her, and I’ll do my time, and when I get out, I’ll have my kids.” Months before Farah was killed, she had called 911 after waking to find a masked intruder standing over her with a stun gun inside her home. Detective Larry Davis of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office responded. He believed Farah.
He went to Robert directly and told him, “I know what you’re up to, and it’s not going to work. You need to leave her alone.” Robert ignored him. At the President and First Lady Health Club, Robert eventually crossed paths with Joseph Andrew Price Dash. Price Dash was 38 years old, had a criminal record, and did not walk away from the conversation.
He listened. Price Dash lived in an apartment complex next door to an 18-year-old named Howard Paul Guidry, born April 15th, 1976, who had already drawn attention from Houston police and was willing to take the job. The agreed payment was $1,000 in cash and a Jeep. Robert explained there would be more.
He expected to access Farah’s life insurance proceeds and an overseas trust account set up for the children. The offer later climbed to $5,000. The murder weapon required no acquisition. Robert had purchased a .38 caliber Charter Arms revolver back in 1982. In 1993, Farah had asked her father, Lex Baugher, to take that gun and hold it for her.
She did not feel safe with it in the house. Lex kept it. In the summer of 1994, at Robert’s request, Lex returned it. Price Dash had a girlfriend named Mary Gip. She lived with him. She knew both Robert and Farah from the same gym. She would later become the most important witness in this entire case. But that comes later.
By the fall of 1994, the plan was in place. All Robert needed was the right night. November 9th, 1994 was a Wednesday. That evening, Robert Fratta sat down for dinner with Farah and their three children, 7-year-old Bradley, 6-year-old Daniel, and 4-year-old Amber, at the family home in Atascocita, Texas. After dinner, Robert took the children out.
The two younger ones went to the church nursery. Bradley attended a catechism class. Robert stayed for a parents’ meeting. What witnesses remembered about that night at the church was not that Robert attended. It was how he behaved while he was there. A church office worker named Deborah Normile later testified that between 7:30 and 8:00 that evening, Robert came into the church office multiple times to use the phone.
He would return a page, stand at the phone, and wait for it to ring back. This happened repeatedly. His 7-year-old son, Bradley, also recalled that after leaving the church and stopping at a restaurant, Robert left their booth at least twice to make calls from a payphone nearby. For a man building an alibi, he was unusually active on the phone that night.
Meanwhile, Farah had plans of her own. She went out to get her hair cut. When she finished, she drove back to 1318 Napier Lane and pulled her red Mustang convertible into the garage. Howard Guidry was already on the property. Joseph Price Dash had dropped him off and parked nearby. Guidry had been positioned near the backyard, waiting. At 7:38 p.m.
, neighbor Laura Holscher was across the street nursing her infant son when she looked out her window and saw Farah pull into the garage. She heard a sharp sound. She saw Farah fall. Then she heard a second shot. Holscher called 911 immediately. Her recording is part of the court archive. She told the dispatcher she had just witnessed the shooting.
She described seeing a black male dressed in black who had appeared to be lying in wait. She watched him run from the property and get into a silver car with one burned-out headlight. A second person was behind the wheel. The car drove away. Farah was still in her garage. Holscher’s husband crossed the street.
Crime scene investigators, Deputy J.D. Farrell and Sergeant Harry Ficarri, arrived shortly after. Farah was alive but unresponsive. She was airlifted by Life Flight to Memorial Hermann Hospital. She was pronounced dead upon arrival. She was 33 years old. During the autopsy, the medical examiner recovered one full bullet and one partial bullet from Farah’s body.
Investigators also collected bullet fragments from the garage floor and from a life preserver that had been hanging on the garage wall. Every piece of physical evidence recovered that night would later become critical to the prosecution’s case. Less than an hour after the shooting, while Farah was still at the hospital, Robert arrived at the scene with all three children.
Bradley Fratta, then 7 years old, later described it as a chaotic scene. Sergeant Harry Ficarri noted on the record that Robert was not asking questions a person would normally ask upon learning their wife had just been attacked. When investigators searched Robert’s vehicle that night, they found $1,000 in cash inside the glove compartment.
Robert told detectives it was money he had set aside for a new carpet. Farah’s parents, Lex and Betty Baugher, were contacted and rushed to the scene. Lex Baugher later recalled the moment he arrived. His first words to investigators were, “Where is that son of a bitch?” He said he knew immediately that Robert had something to do with it.
Betty Bocker made it to the hospital. She found her daughter before the life flight team had left. She later said Farah’s eyes were still open. She reached out and closed them. Within days of the funeral, Robert contacted Farah’s life insurance company to file a claim. When the representative told him the policy could not be paid out immediately because the death had been classified as a homicide, Robert became angry and ended the call.
The day after the murder, Robert drove to the tanning salon where his acquaintance James Potorski worked. After tanning, he approached Potorski and gave him a specific set of instructions, exactly what to say to investigators if they ever came asking questions about the night Farah was killed. Investigators were already asking.
Sergeant Danny Ray Billingsley of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department was assigned to lead the investigation into Farah Fratta’s death. What he inherited was a forensic problem. The crime scene had yielded almost nothing usable. No fingerprints. No weapon. The only physical evidence was Laura Holscher’s 911 recording and the bullet fragments recovered from the garage and during the autopsy.
Robert Fratta had a confirmed alibi. Multiple witnesses had placed him at the church with his three children at the time of the shooting. Without physical evidence connecting him to the crime, investigators could not move on him. But his behavior was impossible to ignore. When Robert walked out of his interrogation at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office the day after Farah’s death, television cameras from KHOU were positioned outside.
Robert did not walk out looking like a grieving husband. Detective Larry Davis, who was present, described what he saw directly. He said Robert swaggered toward the cameras and smiled. Davis said he was just happy-go-lucky, cheesing at the camera, giving every indication that he believed he was going to get away with it. Sergeant John Denholm, another investigator on the case, told reporters at the time that Robert had been, in his words, “real amused by this whole thing.
” During a formal follow-up interview, investigators put a direct question to Robert. They asked him what he believed should happen to someone who takes another person’s life. Robert answered without hesitation. He said they should rot in prison forever. The detective then asked what he thought should happen to a husband who kills his wife. Robert paused. He smirked.
Then he said, “That depends.” That exchange was documented. Though it went nowhere legally. A smirk is not evidence. Lex and Betty Bocker, unwilling to wait in silence, offered a $5,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest of their daughter’s killer. No credible tips came in. In December 1994, Family Court Judge Robert Inohoza ruled on the custody matter.
He awarded full custodial rights to Lex and Betty Bocker. Robert was given supervised visitation every Saturday and a daily 15-minute phone call with the children. Judge Inohoza formally reprimanded Robert as an unfit parent, citing his alleged connection to Farah’s death. Missouri City followed shortly after by terminating his employment entirely.
Social worker Judy Cox was assigned to monitor Robert’s visits with Bradley, Daniel, and Amber. She documented those sessions carefully. During one visit, 7-year-old Bradley looked at his father and asked him directly why he had so much money in his car the night his mother was shot. Robert did not answer the question. Robert was also taken to court for failing to pay child support in the months following Farah’s death.
A judge found him in contempt and ordered him to pay $3,000 or face prison. He complied by cashing in his Missouri City retirement account, which had accumulated to $23,600. For months, Sergeant Billingsley’s team worked every angle they had. Then on March 1st, 1995, a bank robbery on the other side of Houston changed everything.
Howard Paul Guidry 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. The weapon was submitted for ballistic testing. The results confirmed it was the same firearm used in the shooting at 13718 Napier Lane on November 9th, 1994.
A federal firearms trace on the weapon’s registration led directly to one name. Robert Allen Fratta had purchased that revolver in 1982. Lex Bocker subsequently confirmed to investigators that it was the same gun Farah had asked him to hold for safekeeping in 1993. The gun he had returned to Robert in the summer of 1994.
On March 3rd or 4th, 1995, a woman named Mary Gip contacted Detective George Ronald Roberts of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department. She told him Howard Guidry had been involved in Farah Fratta’s murder. Detectives Roberts and Hoffman brought Guidry in for questioning. He confessed. He named Joseph Andrew Pridash as the man who organized the operation, drove him to the location, and recovered him afterward.
He named Robert Allen Fratta as the man who ordered and paid for it all. Court records also confirmed that after the murder, Pridash had been seen at the President and First Lady Health Club, the same gym where he and Robert were both members, establishing their continued contact after Farah was killed. In May 1995, Joseph Andrew Pridash was arrested at his Houston home.
Officers recovered additional firearms on the property and seized his vehicle, believed to be the car used to leave the scene on November 9th. In June 1995, Robert Allen Fratta was arrested at his home in Missouri City. He did not resist. He showed no surprise. He was, as investigators had come to expect from him, completely calm. All three men were charged with capital murder.
Mary Gip was not a stranger to any of this. She knew Robert. She knew Farah. She worked out at the same gym and lived with Joseph Pridash. In the weeks before November 9th, she had overheard Pridash on the phone with Robert multiple times. She regularly watched Pridash and Guidry, who lived next door, talking on the apartment balcony.
She understood something was being arranged. She said nothing. On the night of the murder, Mary came home from work to find Guidry sitting on the front steps dressed entirely in black. Pridash arrived shortly after, went inside, placed the revolver in the bedroom, and emptied the shell casings into the kitchen trash.
Then he told her what happened. Mary did not call the police. She later explained it this way, “I could have. I really just didn’t want to deal with it. It’s easier just to not do anything.” But before the night was over, she wrote down the serial number from the revolver. She could not fully explain why.
That number would later match the murder weapon exactly. She stayed silent for months. It was only after Detective Ronnie Roberts warned her she could face accomplice charges that she gave a full statement. The phone calls, the balcony conversations, what she witnessed that night, and that serial number. At trial, the jury was instructed to first determine whether Mary was an accomplice.
If she was, her testimony required independent corroboration. The ballistics, phone records, and additional witnesses provided it. Robert went to trial first, represented by Michael Charlton and John Ackerman, with prosecutor Kelly Siegler leading the case. On April 17th, 1996, after less than 1 hour of deliberation, the jury convicted him.
He was sentenced to death on May 3rd, 1996. Pridash was convicted on July 8th, 1996, after just 17 minutes of deliberation, and sentenced to death August 2nd. Guidry was convicted in March 1997 and sentenced to death on April 16th, 1997. Legal expert Carmen Roe later noted it was exceptionally rare for all three conspirators in a solicitation case to receive death sentences.
Then everything was upended. On October 1st, 2007, US District Judge Melinda Harmon overturned Robert’s conviction. Her ruling found that the prosecution had relied on the custodial confessions of Pridash and Guidry, neither of whom testified at trial, violating Robert’s Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses. In her written opinion, Judge Harmon described the trial record as showing Robert to be egotistical, misogynistic, and vile, with a callous desire to kill his wife.
She overturned his conviction regardless. The law required it. His retrial began May 5th, 2009 before Judge Belinda Hill. The confessions were barred. The prosecution rebuilt entirely around Mary Gip, the physical evidence, and witness testimony. Bradley, Daniel, and Amber, all now using the surname Bocker, testified against their father.
The defense argued brain injury and emotional instability. The prosecution called him a calculated narcissist. On May 14th, 2009, the jury convicted Robert for the second time. On May 29th, 2009, he was sentenced to death again. The judge issued an order barring Robert from profiting from the case in any form.
Andy Kahan confirmed it was the first such order in Texas capital case history. Outside the courthouse, Lex Bocker said simply, “He is a monster.” Robert Allen Fratta spent nearly 14 years on death row after his 2009 sentencing. He maintained his innocence throughout. In a 2019 filing to the United States Supreme Court, he wrote, “I am completely innocent of my wife Farah’s death.
Yet, here I sit on Texas death row.” In a pre-execution interview, he described his death sentence as enlightening. 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, January 10th, 2023, Judge Katherine Mazzi issued a temporary civil injunction attempting to halt the procedure over concerns about expired pentobarbital.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals lifted it within hours. The Supreme Court declined to intervene. That evening, spiritual advisor Barry Brown prayed over Robert for 3 minutes inside the execution chamber. Behind the glass stood Bradley Bocker, Farah’s eldest son, now 35 years old, and Zane Bocker, Farah’s brother.
Andy Kahan and Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg were also present. Robert never looked at either of them. When the warden asked if he had a final statement, Robert said one word, “No.” At 7:49 p.m., TDCJ Communications Director Amanda Hernandez confirmed Robert Allen Fratta was pronounced dead. Andy Kahan spoke afterward.
He said Robert 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 19th, 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 Robert had tried to collect days after Farah’s death was never paid to him. $100,000 eventually went to Lex and Betty Bocker to be used for the three children. Bradley, Daniel, and Amber were raised by their grandparents. Lex Bocker died in 2018, never seeing the execution he had waited for.
Betty Bocker had said years earlier that seeing Robert 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 Bocker and asking his permission to arrange Robert’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. 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. If this case stayed with you, drop a comment below. Tell me what moment in this story you found hardest to process. This channel covers cases like this one because they deserve more than a headline. Every name, every verified fact, every person who was failed, and every person who fought back.
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