Texas Executes Via Lethal Injection Ex-Cop Who Hired Hitmen To Kill Wife

Texas has executed a former police officer who organized the killing of his estranged wife nearly 30 years ago.

Robert Fratta was pronounced dead shortly before 7:50 p.m. Tuesday after he received a lethal injection at Texas' state penitentiary in Huntsville, the Associated Press reported.

The 65-year-old hired two people to kill his estranged wife, Farah Fratta, in 1994 amid a contentious divorce and custody battle.

The gunman, Howard Guidry, shot Farah twice in the head in her home's garage in the Houston suburb of Atascocita in November of that year.

Robert, then a public safety officer for Missouri City, was sentenced to death in 1996 in connection to the killing.

Guidry and Robert's middleman, Joseph Prystash, were also sent to death row.

A federal judge later overturned Robert's conviction, but he was retried and resentenced to death in 2009.

Robert had long maintained his innocence.

His death was delayed for little more than an hour until the last final-day appeals cleared the U.S. Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals.

Austin civil court judge Catherine Mauzy issued a temporary injunction Tuesday in a lawsuit where Robert and three other Texas death row inmates sought for the state to stop using what they alleged were expired and unsafe execution drugs.

However, the Texas Supreme Court overturned the injunction.

In their appeals, Robert's lawyers argued prosecutors withheld evidence that a trial witness had been hypnotized by investigators.

This resulted in the witness changing her initial account of the incident that there were two men and a getaway driver, Robert's defense claimed.

"This would have undermined the State's case, which depended on just two men committing the act and depended on linking [Robert] to both," his lawyers wrote in their appeal.

Prosecutors, for their part, argued that the hypnosis produced no new information and identification.

Robert had also repeatedly expressed his desire to see his wife dead and asked several acquaintances if they knew anyone who would kill her, they said.

"I'll just kill her, and I'll do my time, and when I get out, I'll have my kids," he told one friend, according to court records.

Robert was the first inmate to be put to death in Texas this year and the second in the United States.

Another eight executions are scheduled in the state this year.