Robert Fratta was executed Tuesday at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville for the capital murder of his wife, Farah Fratta.

“Two juries, one in 1996 and another in a re-trial in 2009, found Robert Fratta guilty of hiring two men to kill his wife, and both juries sentenced him to death,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “Robert Fratta showed that he was the worst of the worst through the cowardly act of hiring others to do his dirty work and then hiding behind his position of authority as a law-enforcement officer to try to escape responsibility.”

Fratta, a public safety officer in Missouri City, masterminded the plot to kill his wife because the two were divorcing and were going through a bitter custody battle over their three children. Fratta hired an acquaintance, Joseph Prystash, to coordinate the murder. Prystash then hired his neighbor, Howard Guidry, who fatally shot 34-year-old Farah Fratta in her garage as she arrived home on Nov. 9, 1994. The couple’s children were 3, 6 and 8 when their mother was killed.

Robert Fratta was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1996. After a successful appeal, he received a re-trial and was again sentenced to death in 2009.