Richard Tabler Execution In 2025 + Last Meal + Last Words | Texas Death Row Inmate
On February 13th, 2025, Richard Tabler, a spree killer, was executed in Texas for the cold-blooded murders of four people over just two days. In this video, we’ll uncover his final 24 hours, his last words, his last meal, and the brutal crimes that kept him on death row for 19 years. It was just after 6:00 p.m. at the Huntsville unit.
The air was still, the sky darkening behind razor wire, and stone. Inside, 46-year-old Richard Lee Tabler lay strapped to a gurnie. 4 years he’d worn the label monster. 4 years he never apologized. And now the state of Texas was finally going to make sure he’d never kill again. He had no special last meal. Texas banned the tradition in 2011.
So Tabler ate what every other inmate had: salsbury steak, green beans, mashed potatoes, and cornbread. He barely touched it. At 6:11 p.m., the first drug entered his veins. His breathing slowed, his fingers twitched, and then his chest went still. Richard Tabler was pronounced dead at 6:38 p.m., just 5 days before what would have been his 46th birthday.
But to understand how we got here, we have to go back to 2004 to a strip club, a phone call, and a trail of bodies that started it all. It was a cold Friday night in Khen, Texas. November 26th, 2004. Muhammad Aminina Ramuni, 28, a well-known manager at a local strip club, was expecting a quick meetup. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a deal on some stereo equipment.
His friend, 25-year-old Hayam Frank Zed, offered to give him a ride. They had no idea they were driving straight into an ambush. Waiting for them in the dark was 25-year-old Richard Aaron Tabler sitting inside a pickup truck with an 18-year-old Fort Hood soldier named Timothy Payne. Tabler was fidgeting.
He had a 9 mm pistol tucked under his shirt and a camcorder ready to record what was about to happen. But this wasn’t random. Weeks earlier, Tabler had lost his job at the club Ramuni managed. The two men had buted heads and things turned ugly. Tabler claimed Ramuni threatened to wipe out his family for $10.
That was all the justification Tabler needed. On November 18th, he started preparing to kill, buying a gun, a camcorder, and a truck to carry it all out. Now, on November 26th, Ramuni pulled into the parking lot, trusting, unaware. Zed was behind the wheel. As soon as they parked, Tabler raised his gun and fired first at Zed, shooting him dead in the driver’s seat. Then he turned to Ramuni.
The first shot didn’t kill him. Ramuni groaned, “Still alive, so Tabler opened the door, dragged his broken body out onto the pavement and delivered the final shot at point blank range.” Payne videotaped parts of it, and later showed the tape to a friend before destroying it. Tabler rummaged through the car, stealing Ramon’s wallet and a black bag.
Then they drove off like nothing happened. That night, Tabler did something unexpected. He called the Bell County Sheriff’s Office himself. Come direct. He claimed responsibility for the murders, then promised more. It wasn’t a confession. It was a threat. And 2 days later, he kept it. It was Sunday, November 28th.
Tabler had written out a hit list. 11 names, all of them connected to Ramun’s club. All of them marked for death. That night, he called out two of those names. 18-year-old Tiffany Lorraine Dodson and 16-year-old Amanda Benfield. Both were dancers at the club. Both barely out of girlhood. Tabler lured them with the promise of drugs.
Told them he had something good. They followed him out past the city limits toward a quiet lake surrounded by brush and silence. Maybe they thought it was a party. Maybe they trusted him. Maybe they were just trying to survive in a world that hadn’t protected them. They never saw it coming. Tabler turned the gun on them and fired again and again.
The girls collapsed near the water, bleeding out beneath the moonlight. Then he left them there in the dirt and the dark, and drove away. And again, he called the sheriff’s office, told them two more were dead. He demanded they shut down the club, warned that if they didn’t, he’d kill again. Everyone on that list, even the police. It wasn’t just murder.
It was psychological warfare. The next day, an employee of the US Army Corps of Engineers stumbled across the bodies. Datson was quickly identified, but Benfield’s name remained a mystery for days. She was a runaway, just 16, far from home, unclaimed, unrecognized. It wasn’t until December 4th that police confirmed who she was.
By then, she had already been buried in case files and autopsy photos. In 48 hours, Richard Tabler had taken four lives. Two men, two girls, each killing deliberate, each one colder than the last. And he wasn’t done taunting the system yet. There was no dramatic manhunt. Richard Tabler was arrested later that same day, November 28th, 2004, for unrelated felony theft charges.
But by then, police were already suspicious. The threatening calls he made to the sheriff’s office and the connection to the slain girls pointed directly at him. As investigators dug deeper, it didn’t take long before Tabler’s involvement in the brutal double homicide became impossible to ignore. Before the crime, he was just a boy.
Richard Lee Tabler was born on February 5th, 1979 in Terry County, California into a household already teetering on the edge. His mother, Lorraine, had not planned to have him. And according to court records, his father, Robert Tabler, made it painfully clear that he didn’t want the child. While Lorraine was pregnant, Robert pressured her to get an abortion.
She refused, but his resentment never went away. It would linger like a shadow over Richard’s earliest years. Robert was rarely present, working long hours, traveling constantly, drinking too much, and carrying on multiple affairs. He didn’t hold his son. He didn’t teach him. He wasn’t there. Lorraine wasn’t much more present either.
Caught up in her own work life and overwhelmed, she often left young Richard in the care of his older brother and sister. The house never felt like home. And by the time he was 10 years old, Lorraine packed up and left for good. Without a stable mother or an emotionally present father, Richard was shuffled between states.
Sometimes he lived with his mother in Florida or Nevada, but most of the time he stayed with his father in California. The instability followed him into school. He struggled to concentrate, failed the third grade, and had few if any friends. At age 12, he was diagnosed with ADHD.
His family described him as a good-natured child with a short fuse. But inside, Richard was already unraveling. He craved attention, structure, anything that resembled love. Instead, he learned to survive alone. By adulthood, that loneliness had hardened. Richard was in a relationship with a woman who had a young daughter, but even that didn’t last.
They broke up not long before he was arrested for murder. His criminal record began stacking up quickly. He was convicted in California for seconddegree burglary, then again for assaulting a police officer and escaping custody. In 2003, he violated parole and was rearrested. While handcuffed, he kicked the window out of a patrol car, then later threatened to harm his parole officer and his family.
He wasn’t just angry anymore. He was dangerous. There was a history of violence and control simmering under the surface. And on one tragic weekend in 2004, it finally exploded for lives would be taken and Richard Tabler would go from broken child to convicted killer on his way to death row. Richard Tabler didn’t get far.
Hours after gunning down Tiffany Dodson and Amanda Benfield, he was arrested, but not for murder. That night, November 28th, 2004, police picked him up on unrelated felony theft charges. But investigators already had questions. The threatening calls to the sheriff’s office, his past connection to the teaser strip club, it all pointed to him.
By the next morning, Tabler was in an interrogation room. He didn’t break quickly. He was questioned for hours. But eventually, under the weight of it all, he confessed. Cold, straightforward. He admitted to killing all four victims, Ramuni, Zed, Datson, and Benfield. He even named 18-year-old Timothy Payne, a Fort Hood soldier, as his accomplice in the first two murders.
Payne was arrested soon after. The two were formally charged with capital murder on November 30th, 2004 for the Thanksgiving double homicide. Then on December 10th, Tabler was separately charged with capital murder for the killings of Dodson and Benfield. But not long after that, Tabler changed his story. He recanted his confession.
Claimed he never pulled the trigger. Never killed anyone, but the damage was done. A grand jury indicted both men in February 2005. Despite pleading not guilty, the prosecution announced it would seek the death penalty for Tabler. His defense team argued diminished responsibility. The judge rejected it. The trial for the first two murders began in March 2007.
Within 3 days, the jury returned a verdict guilty. And on April 2nd, 2007, Richard Tabler was sentenced to death. To this day, he’s never been tried for the murders of Tiffany Dodson and Amanda Benfield. As for Timothy Payne, he was tried separately, convicted of capital murder, and sentenced to life in prison. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2044.
But for Richard Tabler, there would be no second chance. Only a death row cell and 19 years to wait for it to end. After receiving two death sentences in 2007, Richard Tabler was sent to the Allen B. Palinsky unit, Texas notorious death row facility. A year later, following a suicide attempt, he was briefly moved to the Jester 4 unit for mental health treatment.
Over the next decade, Tabler continued to appeal his convictions for the Thanksgiving double murder while also committing further crimes behind bars. At times, Tabler claimed he wanted to die, even writing to judges asking to wave his appeals. In 2008 and again in 2010, he requested immediate execution only to change his mind later.
These repeated reversals triggered hearings to determine his mental competency with one such evaluation occurring in 2011. In 2012 and again in 2013, Tabler insisted on ending his appeals, but his attorneys pushed back, arguing he was not mentally fit to make that decision. Tabler filed his first appeal in December 2009, which the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected.
Though originally scheduled for execution in February 2010, a stay was granted in 2011. Tabler alleged prison officials had coerced him into dropping his appeals. His legal battles continued for years. In 2014 and 2015, the fifth circuit court denied his claims, though some arguments were sent back for further review. In June 2021, the US District Court also rejected his appeal.
On October 19th, 2023, the fifth circuit denied him again. Finally, on October 7th, 2024, the US Supreme Court refused to intervene, leaving Richard Tabler with no remaining options. In October 2008, Richard Tabler’s name hit the headlines again. Not for a new murder, but for something that triggered a full-blown security crisis inside Texas prisons.
Using a smuggled cell phone, Tabler made threatening phone calls to Texas State Senator John Whitmer. He didn’t just rant. He named the senator’s daughters. He mentioned their address. He told Whitmire he knew exactly where his family lived and wanted to go after them. It wasn’t an empty threat. Investigators discovered Tabler had made over 2,800 calls in 30 days.
Sharing the same contraband phone with nine other inmates. That phone had been smuggled in by Tabler’s own mother, who was arrested at a Texas airport just weeks later. She bought airtime and delivered the device right under the noses of prison officials. The scandal triggered a statewide lockdown. But Tabler didn’t stop there.
Even after the phone was confiscated, he began sending handwritten death threats to Senator Whitmer and even to a reporter. In one case, he manipulated a prison chaplain into smuggling the letters out. In 2009, he created a blog while incarcerated, again, threatening Whitmer’s life. By 2012, the death threats hadn’t stopped.
In May 2009, Tabler was officially charged with making terroristic threats and possessing prohibited items. He was sentenced to an additional 10 years behind bars. For a man already waiting to die, Tabler was still stirring fear beyond the prison walls. The sun was setting in Huntsville, Texas. And inside a small concrete cell, 46-year-old Richard Lee Tabler was living out the final hours of his life.
He had less than a day left to breathe, to blink, to pray. In just a few hours, he’d be strapped to a gurnie and pumped full of lethal drugs. Executed for a quadruple homicide that shattered families and shocked Colleh Colleen to its core. But if you’d seen him now, peaceful, quiet, surrounded by letters, sketches, and scripture.
You wouldn’t think he was the same man who once hunted people for sport. A man once so consumed by rage that he would go as far as threatening a powerful Texas lawmaker from inside a prison cell. In the weeks leading up to his death, Richard Tabler had made a decision that surprised even his legal team. He would not fight it anymore.
No appeals, no delays. He was ready. His attorneys, pleading for clemency, described him not as a monster, but a changed man. one who had spent years ministering to other inmates, creating art, writing spiritual reflections, and raising a tiny baby lizard in his death row cell. On February 12th, 2025, the eve of his execution, Tabler’s wife, whom he met through a prison pen pal program, released a public statement on his behalf.
In it, he said he deeply regretted his crimes and was at peace with the life he’d lived since. He acknowledged the pain he caused, but said he hoped people would see who he had become. That same night, his 77-year-old mother, his older sister, and his wife visited him one last time. They all said the same thing. Richard was no longer the cold, violent man who’d gunned down four people in a strip club power play two decades earlier.
They described a man who looked out for weaker inmates, who smiled easily, who had learned to sit in silence and reflect on his sins. By noon on February 13th, the Huntsville unit was quiet and tense. Tabler ate the standard prison food served that day. Salsbury steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, and bread.
His final moments were near. At 6:31 p.m., Richard Lee Tabler was strapped to the execution gurnie. He looked calm, resigned. In his final statement, Tabler asked for forgiveness from the families of his victims, some of whom were in attendance during the execution, according to a statement provided by J. Dan Gum, the spiritual adviser for Tabler’s execution to a group outside the prison.
Tabler also thanked his family, legal team, and the staff on death row for their support. His exact words were, “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret my actions. I had no right to take your loved ones from you, and I ask and pray, hope and pray that one day you find it in your hearts to forgive me for those actions.
” Tabler said, “No amount of my apologies will ever return them to you.” As the lethal drugs began to flow into his veins, Tabler gave his final statement. He expressed remorse. He thanked the officers for their kindness and professionalism. He thanked his lawyers for believing in his transformation. And then softly, he said goodbye.
Just minutes later, he was declared dead. at exactly 6:38 p.m.
