Twenty years after killing his strip club manager and another man, a man on death row in Texas begged for forgiveness and mouthed one last word before being put to death.
It was also said that Richard Lee Tabler, 46, had found God while he was in jail for 20 years. He had killed two teenage dancers at the club.
As he sat on the gurney in the death chamber, Tabler spoke to the families of his victims who were watching through a window. “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,” he said. “No amount of my apologies will ever return them to you.”
He told the families of the victims that he felt bad about what he did every day. He also thanked the jail staff for being kind and showing that he could “change and become a better man and rehabilitate.”
Tabler said he was sorry several more times and that it was the start of a new life in heaven.
“I am finished,” he told the director at the Huntsville state prison, and as the drugs started to pour into his body, he said, “I’m sorry.”
Then Tabler started to breathe quickly. Everything stopped moving after about a dozen breaths.
Tabler lured Mohammed-Amine Rahmouni, 28, and Haitham Zayed, 25, to a rural area near Killeen in Central Texas on Thanksgiving 2004, where he shot and killed them. He did this by saying they were there to buy stolen stereo equipment.
They had a fight over Rahmouni, who was a co-owner of a club called TeaZers.
Rahmouni is said to have told investigators that for $10 he could “wipe out” Tabler’s family.
After two days, Tabler killed Tiffany Loraine Dotson, an 18-year-old dancer at the club, and Amanda Benefield, a 16-year-old dancer. He said he had been seeing both of them.
Paul McWilliams, who prosecuted Tabler almost twenty years ago, told USA Today that since he was already on death row for killing the two men, there was no need to go after him for killing the young women.
“They killed the men with all the cold blood they could muster,” McWilliams said. “Killing the girls made no sense at all. There was no reason at all for that.”
James Dotson’s dad, George, was one of the witnesses. He wouldn’t say anything about Tabler’s sorry, saying that he needed time to think about what he had just seen but was glad to have seen it.
He said, “I couldn’t wait.” “It took me 20 years to get here.”
“Today is for Tiffany,” Tom Newton, who is her uncle, said. “And this is justice.”
During Tabler’s sentencing part of the trial, prosecutors played written and videotaped statements in which he said he killed Dotson and Benefield because he was afraid they would tell other people that he killed the men.
Tabler had asked the courts more than once to end his cases and put him to death. His defenders were not sure if he was mentally fit to stand trial.
He made a huge lockdown in the state’s 150,000-inmate jail system in 2008 when he brought a cell phone into the state penitentiary in Huntsville and started calling then-state Sen. John Whitmire, who is now the mayor of Houston, and threatening to kill him.
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