In the spring of 1975, Marty Buccieri walked out of Caesars Palace at the end of his shift, got into his car in the parking lot, and was shot five times in the head. Edward Anthony Buccieri, known as Marty, was fifty-two, a floorman and shift boss at the casino since 1967, and by the account of the Las Vegas Sun a distant relative of the Chicago underboss Fiore "Fifi" Buccieri. A twenty-five-year-old local named Wayne Donald Horton confessed to the killing the following year and pleaded guilty to it. Whether he actually did it has been argued over in Las Vegas ever since.
Horton was born in the city on January 26, 1950, grew up poor, and dropped out of school in the mid-1960s. Before the killings he was a petty criminal, and the charges that accumulated around the murder counts included rape, robbery and kidnapping. No one has ever connected him to anything more organized than that, which is the difficulty at the center of his case.
His first known victim has never been named. Sometime in 1972 or early 1973, depending on which account is followed, he killed a woman in the desert outside Las Vegas. Nothing came of the case at the time. She was recorded with light brown or reddish hair and a single rotated tooth, and she is still carried as an unidentified decedent from Henderson, Nevada, more than fifty years later. Of the four people he pleaded guilty to killing, she is the one nobody has ever been able to give a name back to.
Buccieri died on May 12, 1975. Horton's own account, given after his arrest, was that he had followed the older man out of the casino, pulled open the car door and pointed a pistol at him meaning only to rob him, and that Buccieri had called him names and resisted. He said he had no idea who Buccieri was.
Three months later, on the night of August 8, Horton drank for several hours in a bar downtown and then hailed a cab home. He and the driver, William Tinnell, argued on the way. Horton pulled a gun, made him drive out of the city, shot him, left the body in the Mojave and drove the cab back into town.
That was the mistake that ended it. Witnesses had seen the man who flagged the taxi down, and their description was good enough to bring police to Horton within days. A search of his apartment produced bloodstained clothing of a blood type matching Tinnell's, the gun, and ammunition for it, and a forensic examination indicated the weapon had been fired recently. He was arrested in late August 1975; one database dates his arrest to April 1976, the month of the jail killing. For a time police also looked at him for the death of Delmar Bright, twenty-eight, a doorman at the Fremont Hotel found naked and bound in his apartment on August 11, 1975, because two of Horton's victims had been killed near Fremont Street; he was later eliminated.
He killed his fourth victim while in custody awaiting trial. On April 26, 1976, in a four-man cell at the Clark County jail, Horton and another prisoner, eighteen-year-old Scott Fletcher, stabbed a third cellmate to death during an argument. Calvin Brinson was eighteen or nineteen; the sources differ. He had been held in the same room as a man already facing two murder charges.
What happened next is the reason the Buccieri question has never gone away. Facing a capital case, Horton and his lawyer went to the prosecution with an offer: he would confess in detail to all four killings if the state agreed not to seek the death penalty. It was accepted. On June 5, 1976 he pleaded guilty to the murders of Buccieri and Tinnell; on August 3 he pleaded guilty to the unidentified woman and to Brinson. He received four life sentences without the possibility of parole. A local account of the hearings describes him smiling and laughing as he went through what he had done.
Because he pleaded, there was no trial. No jury weighed the evidence on any of the four counts, no witness was cross-examined, and there is no appellate record, because a man who pleads guilty and does not appeal generates none. The confessions are the case.
And the confessions came with an incentive attached. Horton was being asked to admit to four murders to avoid execution, which gave him no reason at all to separate one from another, whatever the truth of any individual count.
The reason that matters is what was happening around Buccieri in May 1975. He had used his connections to help arrange Teamsters Central States Pension Fund loans to Allen Glick, the chief executive of Argent Corporation, which the Chicago Outfit had installed as the owner of the Stardust, the Hacienda, the Fremont and the Marina. That month Buccieri approached Glick and demanded a thirty-thousand-dollar finder's fee for his help with the loans. He is said to have physically threatened him, in a sauna by one telling. Glick passed the incident to Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, the man actually running the Outfit's interest in the casinos. Buccieri was shot dead days later, and according to the Las Vegas Sun police suspected Tony "the Ant" Spilotro at once.
Rosenthal himself later said Horton had not done it. Working for the FBI as an informant under the code name Achilles, he gave information used to prosecute organized crime figures, and he stated that Buccieri had been killed in a gangland hit, naming Joey Hansen, Paul Schiro and Spilotro. It is an odd claim for Rosenthal to have made. He was the man Glick had gone to about the threat, so an account in which Buccieri was killed for making it points back toward people close to him.
None of it was ever tested. Horton did not move to have his conviction reviewed. The Clark County district attorney took no action. Not every reader of the case has accepted the mob theory either; some who knew the Las Vegas of the period pointed to the small caliber of the weapon as the wrong choice for professional work. Horton confessed and pleaded guilty, the conviction was never challenged by anyone including him, and a federal informant with his own reasons for knowing said the killing belonged to somebody else.
Horton developed a number of health problems in the mid-2000s. He died in prison on January 3, 2010, at fifty-nine. Three of his four victims have names.