Why A Serial Killer’s Cell Phone Threats from Death Row Haunt Us Today

Texas Senator John Whitmire will never forget the bone-chilling 2008 phone call. “I know your daughters’ names. I know how old they are. I know where they live,” warned the voice of condemned serial killer Richard “Blue” Tabler.
Whitmire heard distinct prison noises as Tabler asked from death row, "Did you hear that? That's a prison.” The rambling calls about conditions were interspersed with threats that continued after officials locked down the entire prison system for weeks to uncover contraband cell phones. How did Tabler terrify a Senator from the supposed secure confines of death row?
I got the inside story for my True Crime Reporter® Podcast about a flood of cell phones flowing into prisons across the United States. “It's an epidemic. Illegal cell phones are a huge threat to security. The convicts can call a victim and use the phones to run criminal enterprises outside the prison walls,” warned John Moriarty, the former Inspector General of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Corrections officers at the Polunksy Prison unit where Tabler is confined on death row discovered a cache of cell phones in early December of 2023.
A load of donated wood for the prison craft shop arrived from a Home Depot in Houston. It contained a hidden compartment in a wooden beam that held thirty new Samsung Galaxy phones and chargers. The Inspector General's investigators arrested a couple that paid for the shipment. The investigation is ongoing.
Moriarty busted serial killer Richard Tabler for making threatening cell phone calls to Senator Whitmire. During a two-month period, Tabler and nine other death row inmates who borrowed his contraband phone racked up 46 hours in calls. Tabler’s mother was arrested for buying the cellphone time.
It prompted the lockdown of 155-thousand inmates as officers conducted a massive search for contraband cell phones across 112 prison units.
Senator Whitmire of Houston the powerful Senate Criminal Justice Committee chairman, said the call “scared the hell out of him,” and it should have.
Tabler executed two men and two teenage girls in a cold-blooded revenge killing spree during the 2004 Thanksgiving holiday in Killeen, Texas.
After his release from a California prison, Tabler moved there to live with his mother and sister, whose husband was a soldier in Iraq.
Tabler befriended a soldier at Fort Hood, the nation’s largest Army Post, and obtained a uniform and a counterfeit military identification card.
He routinely drove through the front gate to sell illicit drugs to soldiers. “I think he liked playing roles. And so he used the military ruse as kind of a rush, said former Bell County Sheriff’s investigator Tim Steglich. “He was going in at five o'clock in the morning on base.”
There, the 25-year-old Tabler met 18-year-old Timothy Doan Payne, an Army private from Missouri. The pair became inseparable and hung out at Teazers, one of the area's most popular topless bars, frequented by soldiers from the base.
Payne, a generous tipper, sat near the stripper pole while Tabler bragged to the dancers that he had been a CIA operative and had gang connections.
Tabler fixated on 16-year-old topless dancer Amber Benefield, a runaway from Louisiana. His boisterous and creepy behavior led the bar’s manager, 25-year-old Mohamed Amine Rahmouni, to ban the ex-con from the bar.
Enraged by getting kicked out and insults from dancers, Tabler drew up a hit list of 12 people for revenge including the manager known as Amine.
With Payne in tow, Tabler lured Amine and his friend to an electric company’s vacant parking lot with the prospect of selling them stolen stereo equipment for $1500.
Before the rendezvous, Tabler told Payne he was going to rob Amine and kill him if he had to. Tabler needed cash to pay a drug dealer.
Amine and a friend arrived at 2:30 AM. Standing at the driver’s side door, Tabler pulled out a Ruger 9MM pistol when they refused to produce the cash. Tabler shot both men in the head where they sat. Payne started freaking out as they rifled through the men’s empty pockets for money.
After pulling the men’s bodies out of the car, Tabler directed Payne to record him with a video camera as he finished off Amine.
With tape rolling, a gurgling sound came from the wounded man’s lips, and he raised his hand. Tabler looked into the camera and declared, “Who’s got the power now!” as he squeezed off a final round point blank, so close to the victim’s head that blood splattered onto his handgun.
The pair took the video to Tabler’s girlfriend’s house. Without an ounce of emotion, still wearing blood-stained shirts, the pair calmly showed the execution to her sitting on the living room couch. Tabler burned the tape afterward and threatened to kill them if they told anyone about it. Tabler’s girlfriend later described the taped murder to a jury.
“He was a bizarre dangerous individual. He was very strange. Something wasn’t right with him. Within two minutes of talking to him, you could tell the guy was off,” recalled Moriarty.
While investigating the murders, Steglich investigated made a shocking discovery. A man called “Blue” was a suspect — none other than Richard Tabler a drug informant for the Killeen Police Department.
When Tabler learned that a pair of dancers at Teazers were spreading the story that he was the triggerman, he hatched a new murder plot.
18-year-old Tiffany Lorraine Dotson, a pretty blonde dancer from California, and the fellow dancer he had fixated on,16-year-old Amanda Benefield, a green-eyed, red-haired runaway called Zoe, were headed to work at an Austin strip club.
Tabler and Payne enticed them to meet first at a state park for a cocaine buy. Tabler executed the pair in their boyfriend’s jeep just as he had shot the strip club’s manager and his friend to death two days earlier.
The killings led to their arrest, but not before Tabler threatened to attack the Bell County Sheriff’s Department. During his interrogation there, Tabler confessed to Steglich eight hours into his interview. Tabler believed all four murders were justified.
“Tabler put up a timeout sign. He was getting nervous, and he said I shot him. I reminded him of his rights, and he revealed he had a list of eight more people he was going to kill.” recalled Steglich.
Timothy Payne received a life sentence for his role in killing the strip club manager and his friend. Now 37, he will become eligible for parole in 2044.
Tabler, now 44, was convicted of capital murder and was sentenced to death in March 2007.
Tabler’s threats against Senator Whitmire did not end with the phone calls. Tabler sent threatening letters to Whitmire, warning that he could get to him anywhere.
A 51-year-old Methodist Chaplain admitted to smuggling Tabler’s letters out of prison for two months. He was supposed to be ministering to the prison’s 2,900 convicts, including 328 men on death row.
Tabler agreed to do an interview with me but was forbidden to meet in person by the prison system because of his disciplinary violations. Now 44, Tabler replied in a typewritten letter to me, that he is working on a faith-based book for teens.
Tabler wrote, “The young man that did this horrible crime back in 2004 is not the same man that you want to interview here at the Polunsky Unit’s Death Row. I just made a mistake and poor judgment and there is not a day that goes by that I don’t beat myself up over it and wish that there was a rewind button so I could return to that night and walk away or be like Jesus and raise the dead, but I cannot.”
It’s impossible to know a man’s heart and if he has truly repented.
But there’s an old saying that Jesus Christ must certainly live in the penitentiary because everybody finds him when they get there.
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