48 Hours: Thou Shalt Not Kill - Who was Farah Fratta and what happened to her? Disturbing details of the 1994 murder, revealed 

CBS' documentary news series 48 Hours revisited the brutal murder of Farah Fratta in an episode titled 'Thou Shalt Not Kill', which aired in 2010.

Farah Fratta, a 33-year-old wife and mother of three, was gunned down in her Texas home. She was in the middle of a messy divorce with Robert Alan Fratta, who was her husband for 11 years. Additionally, the couple was also fighting a custody battle for their three children in court.

Thou Shalt Not Kill revisits how Robert Fratta, a police officer, conspired in the murder of his wife with two accomplices and used God and his three children as alibis. Was he ever caught?

Read on to know all the details of Farah Fratta's 1994 murder as shown on 48 Hours.

48 Hours revisited the disturbing details of Farah Fratta's 1994 murder

Farah had confided about Robert's strange and sick s*xual demands to her best friend Kitty Waters Sneed. While Robert was the image of an ideal husband and a law-abiding police officer, he had twisted s*xual needs that he projected onto his wife.

On 48 hours, Kitty also revealed how months before her murder, Farah Fratta had called 911 in a panic state, after a masked man broke into her house and stunned her with a stun gun in front of her three young children.

On November 9, 1994, while Robert was out with their children (in church), Farah Fratta went for a haircut in the late evening. This was when a hitman and a getaway driver hid in her garage, waiting for her arrival. After Farah Fratta parked her car in the garage, the perpetrator fired two shots in her head and fled from the scene with the driver. While Farah's neighbour and her parents arrived on the scene and found her alive, she eventually succumbed to her gunshots.

Det. Larry Davis, who was investigating Farah Fratta's murder, said on 48 Hours that he was confident that Robert had killed his wife. Not only was he cheeky and indifferent to his wife's death, but he had a solid alibi as he was in church with his three children when his wife was being murdered. Additionally, many of Robert's friends from the gym also revealed how he had repeatedly 'joked' about 'killing' his wife. But since they did not consider his ramblings as a threat, they did not report it to the police.

After days of investigation, Det. Larry and his team finally got a breakthrough when they questioned some church ladies who remembered Robert taking many calls on the night of his wife's murder. Those calls were traced to a woman named Mary Gipp, whose boyfriend was an ex-con man named Joseph Prystash, Fratta's neighbour. While Larry was convinced that Robert had killed his wife with Joseph's help, they had no evidence and had to release the suspect.

48 Hours: How was Farah Fratta's husband caught?

As Det. Larry told on 48 Hours, they believed that Mary Gipp was the 'key to this case,' but she was not ready to reveal any information. It was only after four months following Farah Fratta's murder, on March 1, 1995, when gunman Howard Paul Guidry was arrested in an unrelated bank robbery, did Gipp confessed that Guidry was Farah Fratta's shooter.

They also discovered a .38 caliber Charter Arms revolver from his backpack, which partially matched the bullet fragments found in Farah's garage. After Guidry's arrest for Farah Fratta's murder, the police used Gipp, Prystash and Guidry's testimonies to prove Robert was the real mastermind behind this killing.

On April 18, 1996, Robert Fratta was finally found guilty of his wife's murder conspiracy. He was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection on January 10, 2023. Prystash and Guidry were also found guilty of capital murder in separate trials and were sentenced to death. As shown on 48 Hours, Prystash died before his execution in 2025 and Guidry is on death row in Allan B. Polunsky Unit.

You can stream 48 Hours: Thou Shalt Not Kill on Paramount+.

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Also Read: Dateline: Deadly Mischief - Who was Daniel Markel and what happened to him?

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