Texas death row prisoner dies after more than 30 years behind bars

A Houston-area man convicted of killing his wife died this week after more than 3 decades on death row, marking the 2nd condemned prisoner to die behind bars in the past month. 

Prison officials confirmed that William "Billy the Kid" Mason was taken to the hospital on Wednesday and died of cardiac arrest Friday morning. 

The 71-year-old was originally sent to death row in 1992, after prosecutors said he'd kidnapped his wife and beaten her to death under a bridge because she was playing the radio too loudly. According to court records, her body was found several days later under some logs near the San Jacinto River.

A little over 2 decades after the killing, Mason went back to court for a 2015 retrial following a Supreme Court ruling that found jurors in some capital murder cases hadn't heard important mitigating evidence that might have moved them to vote for life sentences instead of imposing the death penalty. 

At the time, his attorneys argued that it was a case of horrible domestic violence, but that it only rose to the level of capital murder because of the kidnapping. 

"If he had killed her at the house, it wouldn't have been capital murder," Mason's lawyer, Terry Gaiser, told the Chronicle before the 2015 trial. Despite those arguments, Mason was once again sentenced to death. 

Last month, another Harris County death row prisoner – 70-year-old Joseph Prystash – was found dead in his cell at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston. Prison officials attributed his death to natural causes. 

Like Mason, Prystash had been sent to death row in the 1990s. He was convicted of acting as the middleman in the murder-for-hire killing of Farah Fratta, a Missouri City police officer's wife. In 1994, the 34-year-old mother was shot in the head while stepping out of her car inside her garage.

At the time, Farah and her estranged husband, Robert Fratta, were in the midst of a contentious divorce and were slated for a child custody hearing less than 3 weeks after the killing. 

Though Robert was at church at the time of the crime, investigators quickly focused on him as a prime suspect. Before the slaying, he'd reportedly asked around for a hit man, according to authorities. 

He and Prystash were both sentenced to death along with a 3rd man, Howard Guidry, who prosecutors said carried out the killing. Fratta was executed in 2023 while Guidry remains on death row. 

The Harris County District Attorney's Office did not provide a comment. Defense attorneys David Dow and Jeff Newberry – who worked on both men's cases over the years – said they did not have enough details about the deaths to provide comment. 

The recent deaths mark the 3rd and 4th deaths on Texas death row this year. In May, 67-year-old Scott Panetti – a floridly schizophrenic man who tried to subpoena Jesus and John F. Kennedy at his trial – died of acute hypoxic respiratory failure at a prison hospital. His case led to a landmark decision that made it harder for states to execute severely mentally ill people. 

In January, prison records show 66-year-old James Harris, Jr. – a death row inmate from Brazoria County – died of a massive pulmonary thromboembolism. 

The string of natural deaths comes as the death row populations across the country grow older.

Changing legal standards and added scrutiny have increased the average time between sentencing and execution, and a decrease in the number of new death sentences has landed fewer young people on death rows. 

According to federal data, only 2.6% of death row prisoners were over 60 in 2001. By 2021, that age bracket accounted for more than a quarter of condemned prisoners.

Source: houstonchronicle.com, Kim Basinger, July 4, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde