By Molly Goddard
9:25am PST, Feb 13, 2025
Richard Lee Tabler is set to be executed by the state on Thursday, February 13, in Texas.
The convict, 46, has been behind bars for 20 years after he took the lives of four people in November 2004. However, during his time in prison, he's reformed himself into a completely different being than the person who committed the heinous
crimes decades ago.
Join us to hear how Tabler turned his life around before he's set to die by lethal injection…
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"The man I was 20 years ago is not the man I am today," the prisoner told
USA Today.
Tabler came from a troubled home where he struggled to feel loved by his father and dealt with the fallout of his parent's divorce.
"I started doing whatever the h— I wanted to do. I had no direction and nobody cared about me so, why should I care about myself," he wrote in his 2021 memoir,
Within the Shadows of Life. Tabler recalled how he "ended up getting mixed up with the wrong crowd and doing
drugs at a very young age."
By the age of 25, Tabler said he "needed the drugs" to make
some money.
Unfortunately, this led to the night he shot and killed strip club owner
Mohamed-Amine Rahmouni and his friend
Haitham Frank Zayed after they allegedly threatened to kill Tabler's loved ones for $10. Two days later, the Texas native murdered his former lover and dancer at the club,
Tiffany Loraine Dotson, 18, as well as 16-year-old
Amanda Benefield, after they began to question him about the crimes.
"I was filled inside with nothing but rage and hate towards everyone, including myself," he recalled of why he did it.
"He understands that he had no right to take his victims away from their loved ones and feels terrible about the pain he caused these families," his
attorney,
Peter Walker, stated in a clemency petition.
As a Death Row inmate, Tabler has done his best to find the small things to appreciate, as he fostered an animal he found while cleaning his prison cell.
"He embraced that little skink, trained it to crawl on him and it would crawl all on his arms, sit on his shirt, crawl up on his head and sit there," his mother told the outlet. "The guards in there couldn't believe that Richard had raised this little skink."
Tabler also became a minister and now leads a spiritual group of fellow prisoners. He's also focused on his artwork, even illustrating a self-portrait for his mom.
"I'm unable to get over the hatred for myself, for the pain I caused so many and my loved ones," he penned in his tell-all.
When Tabler takes his final breath, his mother and his loved ones will be by his side. "He didn't want us to be at the execution," his sister revealed. "And I'm like, 'No, we're going to be there.' My mom's point was, 'You're not going to
die alone. I want our faces to be the last faces you see.'"
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In one of his
final statements, Tabler made clear, "I take full responsibility for my actions of 20 years ago and sadly, I can't go back in time and just walk away."
"A lot of people cannot understand how I can have such peace and joy in my heart in the face of my own death, but I know it's the strength, grace and mercy of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who has been with me every step of the way," he continued. "The day of my execution is the beginning of my real life."
