JUST IN: Texas Executes Ex-Missouri City Police Officer Robert Alan Fratta“That Depends”

Make no mistake about it, Bob Fratta is the epitome of an atomic bomb and he exploded in a family. Houston Crime Stoppers Andy Khan was with the family when Bob Fratta was executed for the 1994 murder of his estranged wife, Farah Fratta. He was a coward in 1994 and 28 years plus later he is still was a coward.

 The couple was in the middle of a contentious divorce and custody battle over their three children. Bob Fratta’s intensifying sexual appetites prompted the divorce. Bob Fratta was convicted of hiring Joseph Price Dash and Howard Guidry to kill Farah Fratta. Farah Fratta’s life was negotiated down to a thousand dollars and a car. For this, she was murdered.

 Khan was with the family in Huntsville fulfilling a promise he made to Farah’s father, Lex Backer, before he died in 2018. >> I made him a promise when his health was failing that I would be here today and I just want Lex to know that we honored your promise. And finally we got justice for your beautiful daughter.

 Khan also noted that Bob Fratta didn’t acknowledge Farah’s brother or his own son when given a chance to make a final statement. He stayed silent. And he still chose the coward’s way out. He could have said, “I’m sorry.” November 9th, 1994. Atascocita, Texas. A quiet suburb just outside of Houston. A woman pulls into her garage after a long day. She steps out of her car.

 She never makes it inside. Farah Fratta, 33 years old, mother of three shot twice in the head in her own driveway. The man police would come to believe was responsible he wasn’t hiding in the shadows that night. He was at church with their children. His name was Robert Allen Fratta former public safety officer a man who wore a badge, a man who coached Little League a man his neighbors waved to every morning and according to prosecutors, a man who spent months shopping for someone willing to kill his wife for a thousand dollars and a Jeep.

Defense. To understand the murder of Farah Fratta, you have to first understand the man accused of orchestrating it. Robert Allen Fratta was born February 22nd, 1957. By the early 1980s, he had built what looked, from the outside, like a model life. He worked as a public safety officer in Missouri City, Texas, a role that combined the duties of a police officer and a firefighter.

He was known in the community. People trusted him. In 1983, he married Farah Fahmida Backer, a British-born woman who had grown up in Guildford, Surrey, England. Together, they had three children, two boys and a girl. But behind closed doors, the marriage was a different story. According to court documents, Farah alleged that Robert made bizarre and increasingly disturbing demands throughout their marriage.

By March 1992, she had seen enough. She filed for divorce. What followed was two years of bitter legal warfare. Custody hearings, depositions, character attacks and according to co-workers and friends who would later testify something far more chilling. Robert Fratta, on multiple occasions, openly speaking about wanting his wife dead.

Had his wife murdered to settle a divorce, something that millions of Americans go through. It was a premeditated crime. It involved two other people, a middleman and a shooter. And the victim, Farah Fratta’s life was negotiated down to a thousand dollars and a car. For this, she was murdered. Court records show that Fratta had approached multiple people about killing Farah.

Some laughed it off. Some walked away. One didn’t. The divorce battle. The divorce and custody trial was scheduled for late November 1994. He, Fratta, had everything to lose. Farah was seeking full custody of the children. Their marriage had been described in court as deeply dysfunctional and multiple witnesses were prepared to testify against Fratta’s fitness as a parent.

By the fall of 1994, the noose was tightening around Fratta’s world. The divorce was almost finalized. The custody trial was weeks away and the woman at the center of it all was still very much alive. That, according to prosecutors, is what made Robert Fratta decide that Farah Fratta needed to die before that trial ever happened.

To have someone killed, you need three things a motive, money and someone willing to pull the trigger. Robert Fratta, prosecutors argued, had all three. Joseph Price Dash, the middleman. Joseph Andrew Price Dash was born September 5th, 1956. He was Robert Fratta’s neighbor. “You go work out, buddy.

” Someone in Fratta’s orbit who apparently crossed the line from acquaintance to co-conspirator. According to testimony presented at trial, Price Dash agreed to serve as the middleman. His job was not to pull the trigger himself, it was to find someone who would. For that, he turned to an 18-year-old named Howard Guidry. Howard Guidry.

The gunman. Howard Paul Guidry was born April 15th, 1976. He was just 18 years old in the fall of 1994. Price Dash recruited him to carry out the actual killing. The payment? One thousand dollars and a Jeep. On the night of November 9th, 1994 Price Dash drove Guidry to the Fratta home in Atascocita and dropped him off.

Then, he waited. Farah Fratta arrived home that evening and pulled into her garage. As she stepped out of her car Howard Guidry shot her twice in the head at close range. She died at the scene. Price Dash picked Guidry up afterward. The murder had taken minutes. Meanwhile Robert Fratta was at Wednesday evening church classes with their three children ages seven, six and four.

He was sitting in a parents meeting repeatedly stepping out to make and receive phone calls. He had what appeared to be an airtight alibi. He was smiling when police first came to speak with him. Cameras caught him swaggering, almost grinning, as he walked into his interrogation. One detective would later recall thinking “This man believes he got away with it.

” A neighbor sees everything. But Robert Fratta had not accounted for one thing. A neighbor across the street had been sitting at her window nursing her infant son when Farah pulled into the garage that night. She heard two loud pops. She saw enough to begin unraveling the story. Still, the case went cold for months.

With no direct physical evidence tying Fratta to the scene, investigators had little to work with. Fratta had been at the church. He hadn’t fired the weapon himself. The murder weapon was missing. And Howard Guidry had slipped quietly back into the city. For months, Farah’s family waited. Her parents, Lex and Betty Backer took in their three grandchildren while detectives worked the case.

 And Robert Fratta, the man many believed had ordered the hit walked free. March 1st, 1995. Four months after the murder of Farah Fratta Howard Paul Guidry was arrested for an unrelated bank robbery. It was a routine arrest. A young man caught on camera, apprehended quickly. The police searching his backpack found a .

38 caliber Charter Arms revolver. They ran the gun. The ballistics matched the weapon used to kill Farah Fratta. Everything broke open from there. A few days after Guidry’s arrest, a woman named Mary Gip Joseph Price Dash’s girlfriend came forward. She told police everything. She said Guidry had been hired by Price Dash who had been hired by Robert Fratta to kill his wife.

She described the payment, a thousand dollars and a Jeep. She described conversations she had witnessed and overheard. Guidry was charged with capital murder. Price Dash was arrested. And Robert Fratta, the man who had smiled his way through interrogation four months earlier was taken into custody. When police arrived at Fratta’s door with an arrest warrant his long-projected confidence reportedly crumbled.

 And he was fired from his job as a public safety officer. The family court, citing his alleged involvement in the murder granted full custody of the three Fratta children to their maternal grandparents Lex and Betty Backer. Fratta was granted only supervised visitation one Saturday a week and 15-minute daily phone calls. Family court judge Robert Hinojosa reportedly told Fratta directly that he was unfit as a parent.

The criminal cases against Robert Fratta, Joseph Prystash, and Howard Guidry would wind through the Texas court system for years. All three were tried separately. All three were convicted of capital murder. All three were sentenced to death. But the road to those sentences was far from smooth. Fratta’s first trial, 1996.

Robert Fratta went to trial in 1996. The prosecutors built their case around testimony from co-workers who had heard Fratta discuss wanting Farah dead, the eyewitness neighbor, and critically, the confessions of Prystash and Guidry, who had both admitted their roles and implicated Fratta. Jurors convicted Fratta in about an hour.

But the conviction didn’t stick. Fratta’s attorneys appealed on the grounds that Prystash and Guidry had not testified in person, meaning Fratta had been denied his constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him. Their statements had been read into evidence through third parties. Courts ultimately agreed.

Fratta’s conviction was overturned. He was granted a new trial. The second trial, 2009. In May 2009, Robert Fratta stood trial again. This time, the prosecution rebuilt their case more carefully, navigating the confrontation clause issues that had derailed the first conviction. Once again, jurors found him guilty of capital murder.

On June 1st, 2009, the trial court sentenced Fratta to death. Defense attorneys had urged the jury to consider a life sentence, pointing to Fratta’s reportedly model behavior during his more than 15 years of incarceration awaiting retrial. The jury was unmoved. A decade of appeals. After his second death sentence, Fratta’s legal team launched a series of appeals that would stretch over a decade.

 His attorneys raised multiple issues, including the argument that the state had obtained his conviction through unconstitutional tactics. Among their most pointed claims, that investigators had used hypnosis on a key eyewitness, altering her memory in ways that benefited the prosecution, and that this had been deliberately hidden from Fratta’s defense team.

They also argued that prosecutors had obtained Fratta’s conviction in part by granting immunity to an accomplice in exchange for her testimony without fully disclosing the terms of that deal. And they alleged that a juror who voted to convict Fratta had prior knowledge of the case, destroying the presumption of innocence before the trial even began.

In May 2018, Fratta’s federal appeal was dismissed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In January 2019, the US Supreme Court declined to hear his case. His legal options were nearly exhausted. Robert Allen Fratta had spent over two decades on death row maintaining his innocence every single day. By July 2022, the machinery of Texas justice was moving toward its conclusion.

On October 12th, 2022, a Texas judge signed Fratta’s death warrant. His execution was scheduled for January 10th, 2023. Fratta’s legal team mounted one final offensive. They filed a lawsuit alongside two other condemned inmates arguing that the state of Texas intended to execute them using expired lethal injection drugs, a violation they argued of both state law and the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

The claim wasn’t frivolous. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice had for years been extending the use by dates of its pentobarbital supply by retesting potency levels. As fewer pharmacies had become willing to provide drugs for executions, TDCJ had stretched its existing stock further and further past original expiration dates.

The seven doses TDCJ had in stock had originally been set to expire two to three years prior. January 10th, 2023. A day of chaos. The day of the execution became one of the most legally chaotic execution days in recent Texas history. Earlier in the day, civil court judge Catherine Mauzy in Austin issued a temporary injunction blocking the execution, ruling that TDCJ likely could not use the expired drugs without violating Texas state law.

For a matter of hours, it appeared Robert Fratta might survive the day. Then, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overruled Judge Mauzy, stating she lacked jurisdiction in the matter. Shortly after, the Texas Supreme Court denied Fratta’s final appeal. The US Supreme Court, earlier that same day, had already declined to intervene.

 The execution would proceed. Farah’s brother, Zane Baquer, and her son, Bradley Baker, were present in the witness room. They had waited nearly 30 years for this moment. Robert Allen Fratta was strapped to the gurney at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He was 65 years old. He had spent more than half his adult life on death row.

He was asked if he had a final statement. He said nothing. He did not acknowledge his son or his former brother-in-law who were watching from behind the glass. At 7:25 p.m., the lethal injection of pentobarbital began. 24 minutes later, at 7:49 p.m. on January 10th, 2023, Robert Allen Fratta was pronounced dead.

Texas had carried out its first execution of the new year. That depends. So, where does that depends come from? During the long years of appeals and media attention surrounding this case, Robert Fratta gave several interviews. In one exchange, when asked directly whether he killed his wife, he reportedly gave an answer that became infamous to those who followed the case.

That depends. Was it a philosophical dodge? A legal strategy coached by attorneys never to make direct admissions? A fragment of something larger taken out of context? Or was it, as prosecutors and Farah’s family believed, the most honest thing Robert Fratta ever said in nearly 30 years? Nobody ever got a cleaner answer than that.

Farah Fratta was 33 years old when she was murdered in her garage on November 9th, 1994. Her youngest child was 4 years old. Her parents, Lex and Betty Baker, raised all three of her children. They gave up their retirement years to pick up the pieces of a family that had been shattered by violence and greed.

Alex Baquer died in 2018, 5 years before he would have seen Robert Fratta’s execution. Betty carried on. Andy Kahan, director of victim services and advocacy for Crime Stoppers of Houston, spoke ahead of the execution. He said he hoped the day would give the children, now adults, the ability to keep moving forward, to not have to think about him anymore.

He said he believed it would play an important part in their healing. The accomplices, Joseph Andrew Prystash, the middleman, was sentenced to death in a separate trial. He spent decades appealing his conviction. He died on death row in June 2025 before the state of Texas could carry out his execution. Howard Paul Guidry, the man who pulled the trigger that night in Farah’s garage, was 18 years old in 1994.

He is still alive, still on death row at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in West Livingston, Texas. His appeal process continues. As of this recording, no execution date has been set. Three men were convicted for the murder of one woman. One was executed by the state. One died in prison. One waits. The questions that linger cold cases like this one always leave threads that never get fully pulled.

Did Robert Fratta get a fair trial? His attorneys raised serious concerns about hypnosis, about witness immunity, about juror bias. Courts at every level reviewed those claims and rejected them. But in capital cases, the consequences of being wrong are permanent and irreversible. Multiple witnesses testified they had personally heard Robert Fratta speak about wanting Farah dead.

 His accomplices both confessed and implicated him directly. The circumstantial and testimonial evidence was substantial. Our jurors in two separate trials, years apart, heard the evidence and convicted him both times. But Robert Allen Fratta went to his death saying none of it was true. Final words. In the end, this case is not just the story of a murder.

 It’s the story of what happens to the people left behind. Three children who grew up without their mother. A grandmother and grandfather who became parents again in their retirement years. A community in suburban Houston that had trusted a man with a badge. A victim whose name, Farah Fratta, deserves to be remembered not just as the person at the center of a true crime documentary, but as a mother, a daughter, a human being whose life was taken from her weeks before a court was supposed to finally set her free.

Farah Fratta was 33 years old. She had her whole life ahead of her. Robert Allen Fratta was 65 years old when the state of Texas ended his. And somewhere in between those two numbers is the full weight of what this case cost. Thank you for watching Cold Case Chronicles. If this documentary moved you, if it made you think, if it made you look twice at a case you thought you knew, then we did our job.

 Drop a comment below. Tell us what you think. Was justice served on January 10th, 2023? Or does the that depends still hang in the air for you? Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell so you never miss a new episode. Cold cases don’t solve themselves, and neither does this channel. Until next time.

Stay curious. Stay skeptical. And never stop asking questions.