Original subtitles

Randolph is accused of murdering his wife, Becky, in 1986, and what police

thought at first was a suicide.

It was like a moral victory when they finally charged him.

But prosecutors say that Randolph had been planning his wife's murder since

the beginning of their three-year marriage.

My story was the only thing that proved the truth, that he killed her.

If it didn't work out, he was going to kill me.

We all tried to go. My grandma was there every day. My mom was there every day at

the trial.

The jury, they fucking hated me.

He has always said inappropriate, crazy things. And I think that's what he

fails to understand.

You have to know your audience.

My name is Beth Karras.

I'm a former prosecutor, and I've been a legal analyst for three decades.

You know, I've been around.

I can tell a creep.

And Thomas Randolph is a creep.

Creeps make good TV.

But what's fascinating about this case isn't just thomas randolph's persona

but that he knows enough about the law to make it challenging for police

and prosecutors wow he's really smart

i don't know if anybody's noticed that but he's scary smart

he was pre-law which i found

Kind of strange considering the path that he chose in life.

So you wanted to be a lawyer?

I wanted to be a lawyer.

I worked a lawyer for 20 years.

He was smarter than the normal criminal because he worked for a law office.

He was extremely arrogant, extremely confident.

He knows the justice system. He knew lawyers, judges, police officers.

He was very connected in the law, which made him dangerous.

I was not confident going in that he would be found guilty because he would

boast about how much he knew in the criminal law and how he could get away

with anything if he wanted to.

Even with Randolph's sharp legal mind, he had an obstacle in his path.

Eric Tarantino.

The state needed my testimony to convict Tom.

Nobody else was there the whole time. That was me and Tom.

I held the key to everything.

Tarantino lied to make himself sound like a big shot and to get revenge on

me. He thought I was sleeping with his wife.

My wife couldn't stand him.

I stepped forward for nothing more than what was morally right.

He killed an innocent woman.

Everything he said is a lie.

There wasn't one thing he said that was true.

The truth was going to come out. He did not want that to happen.

I told the prosecutors there was no doubt in my mind he was going to try and

kill me.

And I was right.

During the trial, I did some stupid stuff and was charged with witness

tampering. Randolph decided if he can eliminate Eric Tarantino, the state of

Utah can't convict him.

While I was waiting for the trial, somebody put an undercover detective

next to Tom in the cell. He wound up hiring that detective.

To kill me.

As terrifying as it was, it was a relief. I was like, see, I told you.

Tom's girlfriend collected $10

,000 in cash and the title to a brand new vehicle as payment for the contract

on my life.

Obviously, hiring a hitman to kill the state star witness does not bode well

for Randolph's claims of innocence, but the jury's not going to hear this.

Witness tampering is a charge separate from the murder case.

It was an entirely separate issue, which I never understood.

It was obvious that Tom was guilty. It wasn't fair.

The day that I walked into that courtroom, I was nervous as hell.

Having to look at him sitting in front of me was one of the scariest things I

did.

That face, the same face that he had the day he told me he was going to kill me

if I didn't kill Becky.

I took the stand and gave my testimony.

I looked at the jury several times.

That was all I could do.

I wasn't there to tell a story or make a movie. I was there to tell the truth.

Becky.

deserve to die.

The fact that I was part of that will haunt me for the rest of my days.

Tarantino testified that he would be paid $10,000 out of Becky's life

insurance benefits and that Randolph would use the rest to fund a drug

empire.

This is all about life insurance and money.

That's part of why he didn't wander around anymore.

The insurance.

Tom did get the life insurance money.

Two policies up to $500,000.

Everybody was a little upset about that.

Not that they wanted the money, but that, oh my gosh, maybe there's a reason

why she's dead now is because he had all this money on her.

His motive was money.

His method was any means necessary.

Eric Tarantino said yesterday that Randolph talked about killing his wife

and making it look like suicide.

Well, Tarantino was accusing me of hiring him to kill Becky in all these

different ways, and it's just none of that stuff is true.

Everything was calculated. Everything was procedural to a T. We rehearsed day

after day after day.

Let's go camping, and my gun will accidentally go off and hit her in the

head. Having her slip and fall in the bathtub.

A break-in, shooting Becky.

Switching her medications.

The fire.

having the truck roll over in a camping accident.

And it was every day, it was a constant rehearsal of one scenario or another.

After a while, it was like we had gone hunting.

Tom and his wife, my wife, myself.

When we went to get in the truck, the blazer, the back was down and I went to

slide my rifle into the case.

Becky was sitting in the seat in front of the gun.

And as I slid, went to slide the gun in, my hand was on the trigger.

And I'm thinking, just end it. Do this and get it over with.

Get away from this guy.

And Becky turned around and grabbed the end of the gun.

And I looked at her and I'm like, what are you doing?

And she goes, I'm going to help you put it in the case. I go, you never grab a

gun that's in somebody's hand.

And my wife looked at me and she said, Eric, get your finger off the trigger.

But my wife looked at me and she knew I was this close to pulling that trigger.

I was ashamed that I was there.

I didn't want to do this. I didn't know how to get out of it.

It was like, I've got to get away from this. I've got to run.

I've got to do something because it was getting too close. We were almost at the

point where she was going to die.

He was pushing and it was getting, it was going to happen.

He was going to say, this is the day we're going to do this.

To him, it was a game. And to me, it was like, So much mental angst. A year of

this practicing murdering an innocent woman.

A friend of mine. I'm losing my shit.

I'm coming unglued.

If jurors believe Tarantino, case closed.

Game over. Randolph's gone.

We were thinking, oh, you finally got caught.

You're not going to get away with this.

And then the defense called Thomas Randolph to the stand.

This was pretty unusual. Defendants usually don't testify in their own

defense. Randolph testified Becky became horribly addicted to cocaine after he

showed her how to smoke it. She would go for days and days doing nothing but

cocaine, Randolph said.

And when she didn't have the drug, he said she would throw a rage.

We all knew that wasn't true.

It's just a lie of him trying to cover his bases, but he could be very

persuasive.

Defense lawyers have no mercy.

All they're paid to do is get their client off.

I don't like the fact that they discredit her in the way they did, and I

think somebody should have been able to stand up and say otherwise.

The idea is that if the defense can dirty up Becky's reputation enough, then

suicide looks more and more plausible.

But there's more to the defense's strategy than simply discrediting Becky.

When Becky actually died, I had been in jail.

He had an alibi.

He told them that he needed to come home. He said, I'll be right there, and

he did.

That made me an alibi witness.

He told me he wanted to take my car

and go down and get some Pepsi's.

When you hear Randolph's alibi, it sounds pretty convincing.

But remember, Becky was found in a cold room on a cold water bed, which lowered

her body temperature.

And according to the medical examiner, she could have died at any point in a 24

-hour period. And Randolph's alibi does not cover that whole time period.

As far as Tom having an alibi, it was well planned.

Tom knew the law.

Tom knew what he had to do to get picked up.

He's manipulative and he knows how to tell a good story.

And I think that maybe Tom killed her, then went out and got drunk, got picked

up on purpose.

He may have fired the shot before he went to the bar or before he got the

DUI.

At the end of the day, he doesn't have an airtight alibi for when the fatal

gunshot wound could have been fired into Becky's head.

The trial lasts eight days, and the jury deliberates for

four and a half hours.

When they came back, none of them would look at me, which made me very uneasy.

Jurors ruled Becky Randolph died from her own hand, not by her husband's.

Becky's relatives cried as Randolph was declared innocent.

The verdict does not change their minds that Becky was murdered.

How many people have to die at Tom's hands before something's done about

them? I know in my heart he killed her.

It was like a knife in the heart when he got acquitted.

You think it's over with, and then you have to go through.

All of that same pain.

It's tough.

We were all very angry.

Very angry.

It brings back a lot of emotion.

Tom killed Becky, period.

I just need to thank the jury for being so attentive.

How are you feeling?

Wonderful.

When I heard the verdict, I go get me out of here now.

My life flashed before my eyes.

It was, to me, it was my death sentence.

I think it's very unfair and unjust.

He's guilty.

And he's just going to kill somebody else's daughter, so beware.

I just still get amazed when I read these items, wondering how he ever got

away with it.

This is really hard.

He's... I just, I can't, it just enrages me to think about Tom.

The detectives told me that the reason that they had such a hard time

convicting Tom was because the evidence was not available to them.

I believe that was because the initial scene was never treated as a homicide.

And so the magic window of when you forensically process a

primary death scene is kind of lost.

Nothing was secured at the crime scene.

Nothing was taped off. People were in and out. Later, they couldn't find the

bullet where the bullet may have landed. And I think that Tom actually came back

that night.

took all the evidence, repainted the walls, everything.

I couldn't understand why the jury would leave this guy.

I can understand why Becky's family were disappointed.

But despite Tarantino's strong testimony, Randolph had an alibi, and

there was a lack of physical evidence.

But a few months later, they got him on witness tampering.

I think I was mad at my dad because I thought he was going to get out when

they found him not guilty. And then all of a sudden, he went to prison.

I don't remember exactly what she told me at the time, but I just remember my

mom kept it pretty PC.

At that point, when we had to go to the jail, it was between glass.

I remember I had this mirror in my room, my bedroom, and I think I had somehow

a... like, a toy phone or a fake phone or something.

And I remember... sitting in front of the mirror, pretending that this mirror

was glass, and I was, like, sitting in the mirror on a fake phone, practicing

how I was gonna, like, chew my dad out for, like, you know, how dare you, like,

try to hurt somebody or, like, and just how disappointed I was.

I just remember being really mad at him.

But...

I never told him.

Kids would say things to me like, your dad's a bad man, your dad sells drugs.

It hurt my feelings and it made me mad. They were talking about my dad as he was

this bad guy.

In the Randolph household, it was, he was set up by police because he sold

lots of drugs.

I didn't spend weekends with friends playing with Barbies. I spent weekends

driving with my grandparents, his mom and dad, and my brother to go visit him

in prison.

I never questioned his innocence.

And then, at the beginning of 1992, Randolph is released from prison.

Without delay, he dives right back into the old lifestyle of drugs and women and

partying, living off the remains of Becky's life insurance.

The summer he got out, he started to date again.

A lot of partying, a lot of wild stuff with a lot of women.

I know that because I used to try to spy.

My dad would pop up at some point and be like, oh, another wife.

I remember asking him why I was getting married so many times.

It doesn't make sense to me.

Just date.

I like somebody and I think, you know, let's take it to the next step.

And usually it's not me, it's them saying, I became bisexual for you, I do

the grooming, I have no pubic hair, I got a tattoo for Christ's sake, I want

to be with you.

Lee was a smart one. She knows I'm going to have sex with other women, and she's

going to have sex with other women. But things didn't work out. And again, maybe

that's my fault. Too much sex drugs and rock and roll.

Leona was a flash in the pan. Their relationship didn't even last a year.

But when you look at her story and how it played out, it's really an

interesting window into how the media treated Thomas Randolph.

I'm nervous.

I have been nervous. I couldn't hardly eat my lunch.

To be honest with you, all that to do with Tom was such bad memories for me

that, I mean, I just wanted to forget about the whole situation.

I was in my 40s. We just recently had been divorced.

I was hoping to meet somebody new and just to have somebody to go out and do

different things with.

I met Tom through a newspaper ad.

He was good-looking and very charming.

And things progressed rather quickly because he was calling me all the time

and wanting to meet up, bringing flowers in to me, buying really nice gifts and

things of that vector.

Rings and necklaces.

It was kind of flattering at first, I have to admit.

He wanted to be around me all the time.

But there was a lot of times that I couldn't meet up with him because I had

late nights and I was busy with doing other things.

And then, of course, I mean, he would come by my job site.

I had to tell him he had to stop because I was working with patients.

It was like being really super possessive.

In just a short period of time, he had asked me to marry him, and I thought, I

don't even know you well enough yet to marry you.

And then he got a little aggravated at that.

We kept wanting to pursue as far as getting married.

And I don't know why I did it, but I went ahead and said, fine. We didn't

have an extravagant wedding or anything of that factor.

We just went to the courthouse and got married.

We hadn't been married very long at all, and he mentioned to me about wanting to

protect my kids if anything ever happened. It really amazed me that he

was thinking about my children.

And we did go see a friend of his, and he did set up a life insurance policy.

I went ahead and signed it. It was several hundred thousand dollars.

And then there started, there was some red flags.

After just a couple of minutes, I went into the bathroom and it was an ungodly

smell. And he was acting really weird.

And then I found out that he was sniffing gun cleaning solvent.

He couldn't even hardly stand up straight.

Everything started to change.

And then there was this shooting incident.

One day, we were sitting at the dining room table and he was just acting kind

of like different.

He was cleaning a gun.

a few feet of where I was sitting, I was very nervous.

And it actually went off.

He could have killed me.

After the incident, when the gun went off in the kitchen, I was actually

scared. I was scared for my life at that point in time.

She's dramatic.

She's needy as hell.

I just, it sickens me.

After that incident, that's when I had a friend come and I picked up my stuff and

I left.

I quit my job and everything and left and went into hiding.

When you look at Gayna's story, you have to ask yourself, is a pattern starting

to emerge here? I mean, this guy's had multiple wives with top dollar insurance

policies, gun violence.

I mean, what's going on?

I do feel like I was very lucky.

I wanted to hurry up and get the divorce finalized because I was concerned about

the life insurance policy.

And at that point in time, I was willing to sign it because he was in a

relationship with Francis, with whom he married after me.

And then I never saw and heard from him again.

But before I left...

I took the wedding rings to a drawer and had all the diamonds taken out and had

cubics put in and gave them back to him. Because, I mean, there was some good

-sized diamonds in there. I pawned them and got a couple thousand dollars for

it. I just thought that was fair play.

I had asked him one time afterwards, like, well, what happened with Gayna?

Why'd you guys get divorced? And all he said was, she likes country and I like

rock and roll.

But... If I asked about anything regarding why he

divorced other women, it was always their fault, and he would just always

say something disparaging.

And so I don't know that I wanted to hear that, so I stopped asking questions

after a while.

that ever happened to him.

I would have loved to have had her for a daughter.

Mom says, you know, I know you want to be a lawyer, but Francis is a godsend.

So you have to decide.

Do you want to be a lawyer or do you want to be married in love and married

with the best woman there is?

I do remember my dad telling me Francis was the love of his life.

But not only in words, in actions.

Seeing my dad adore Frances.

I think she was different than the others because that's the only time in

my dad's life I remember seeing him stable.

She had a daughter named Rachel, my stepsister.

He was 100% like the role model dad. Made me do my homework, made me brush my

teeth, made me go to bed on time.

everything that I was supposed to do as a kid. So I thought she was amazing.

I loved Frances completely, but Frances was really sick for most of her

life because she had a bad heart.

Frances wasn't feeling good, and she was sleeping a lot.

He took care of her. He did most of the cooking. He cleaned. He done everything

to make it easier for her because she was getting sicker and sicker and

sicker.

She was scared to have heart surgery. That's major surgery.

But she was looking forward to it in a way so she could improve her quality of

life.

When Frances went into the surgery, my dad was a basket case.

She got out of surgery.

She was talking, but you could tell she didn't feel well.

My dad at this time was very concerned,

constantly by her bedside.

Once she got better from the show, she was talking to me.

I mean, I was happy she was, that she was going to have more energy.

Then Tom came into the room and told me to leave.

30 minutes later, he came into the waiting area, started crying, screaming.

He lost another wife.

I definitely, 100% believe he killed my mom.

There ain't no way you got that much bad damn luck.

He actually sued the hospital and received a sizable settlement in a

wrongful death action.

The settlement could be perceived as the hospital taking accountability for

Frances' death, even though her daughter thinks otherwise.

But the question remains, did he target her because of her heart condition?

Did he see a payday in the not-too-distant future?

For a guy who's supposedly so unlucky, that bad luck is making him rich.

There's an uncontroverted pattern of how Randolph earned his money through these

decades, and that is his wives would die while they were heavily insured. He was

the sole beneficiary, making large amounts of money.

Randolph was awarded $400,000 in the medical malpractice lawsuit, and he also

received almost $18,000 in life insurance proceeds.

He was a sole beneficiary with his mother as the contingent beneficiary.

I got a lot of money from the insurance with Francis and the malpractice

lawsuit. But that has nothing to do with being guilty of anything.

Chief said to me before the surgery, I want to keep as much insurance on me as

I can.

He said my heart won't hold out forever, and I want Tom.

to raise Rachel and not be burdened down with finance.

Tom sued for malpractice.

I got money from the malpractice, but I'd never seen a penny as a life

insurance money, and I was underage, and I feel like I should have.

I'm trying to contact a lawyer and see if I can get that money.

He has life insurance policies out on me, too, and I didn't know about them

until I was over 18.

Life insurance on her teenage daughter?

By the time we get to Frances, this theme of suspicious life insurance

policies is getting a little too obvious to ignore.

Every single wife had life insurance policies, plural, which is an important

fact, and their wives did not know of the existence of those life insurance

policies. In my experience, having...

Life insurance policies on your wife or husband without them knowing is unusual

and suspicious.

Randolph is right. Life insurance policies between a married couple is not

unusual. But it's only when you see the pattern that it starts to raise

questions. And you've got to remember, the former wives, they did not know each

other. They don't know what we know. They don't have that bird's eye view

that we have of these untimely deaths and how he profited from them.

My mom had actually taken a loan out to give Becky money to pay for a life

insurance policy.

And, yes, you have to sign the paperwork that you're agreeing with policy, but

Tom had so much control over Becky, I believe Tom made her get it.

I thought it was strange myself because Becky didn't have any kids.

When I had learned that he had been charged with Becky's murder, one of the

detectives came and got me from work and told me that he had...

still insurance policies on me.

They were just afraid that he would hurt me or the kids in order to collect life

insurance.

I knew Tom had taken out an insurance policy on me. He told me that it was

going to be going to my children, so I didn't hesitate. I went ahead and signed

the insurance policy.

But at that point in time, there was no such thing as the Internet, so... Even

though I was aware of his first wife, I didn't know anything at all about the

trial or anything.

Everybody he's married, he's taken multiple policies out on.

Becky had five insurance policies on her life when she was killed. It was all

about money. It was all about payment from insurance companies for death,

accidental death.

This was a pattern of killing women for money.

It was nothing more than...

and getting away with it.

Once he got away with Becky's murder, it was a game.

He's accused of hiring a man to kill his wife, again, for that insurance money,

and then accused of killing the person who shot her.

Do I think that Thomas Randolph killed all four of his wives? Of course not.

When you take a close look at the evidence, the pattern is pretty damning.

And with that pattern, you have to look at Sharon's murder in a different light.

When Sharon told me that he had life insurance policies on her, I said, that

is a red flag, Sharon. That scares me.

Thomas Randolph has an extreme narcissistic personality and

narcissists will single out their prey.

Tommy, after he moved in with Sharon, became extremely possessive. I would say

obsessive. He wanted all of her time.

He would call the salon anywhere from 15 to 20 times a day.

in the hall and say, Tommy, you have to stop calling.

One day she came into work.

She said, I hurt myself.

And she showed me horrible bruises. And she said, well, Tommy and I went out on

the boat.

Tommy was driving fast.

He made a sharp U-turn and she fell down.

But right away, it was like I got chills going up my spine.

I said, Sharon, I think he's trying to kill you.

Back in the 80s, after Becky's trial ended, I spent the next decades looking

over my shoulder, living in fear and terror.

So when I got the call from Dino Kelly telling me that Sharon had been

murdered, everything came back.

My first question was, how many women are dead?

Then I said, I don't know anything about this case. What happened? They said it

was a burglary.

I knew everything about the crime scene already without seeing it.

It was one of the scenarios that we rehearsed a million times.

And I thought, Becky.

30 years prior.

It was the same thing.

Randolph is accused of a double murder for the deaths of his six, yes, let me

count them, six wives, Sharon, and an alleged hitman Randolph hired to kill

his wife.

My world was flipped upside down again.

Tom was finally going back to trial.

The state wanted me to testify.

This is the second time in Thomas Randolph's life that he's been accused

in the death of a spouse. In the first case, some years back, he was acquitted,

and now he's on trial again.

I felt responsible to step forward for the victims, for my friend Becky,

and for the families, Mike Miller's family.

It has taken a very long time for this case to make it to trial, nine years

since the double murder in the Valley's northwest side. It's a long time for any

type of case.

But Randolph's inability to get along with his defense counsel became a

problem for him.

He hired and fired lawyers because they all said the same thing. You're going to

prison. You're fired. Next.

Next. Next. How many lawyers did he hire and fire? A million.

I was so pissed off. They're idiots.

Finally, he found somebody like, oh, who?

I was one of the two defense attorneys for Thomas Randolph in his 2017 trial.

We were, I believe, their 10th and 11th attorneys that he'd had.

The judge had made it very clear to him that we were his last attorneys that he

was going to have for this trial.

Did you firmly believe in his innocence?

I'm not going to answer any of that.

We're not going to go anywhere near any of that.

This case was a little more complicated because the prosecutors were trying to

bring Becky's case into our trial.

My testimony was key because I had all the answers to what was missing. All

the theories that couldn't be proven, all the methods, all the questions came

from me.

The state needed Eric Tarantino to make their case, but bringing Randolph's

alleged criminal history regarding Becky into court was not that simple. Randolph

was acquitted of Becky's murder.

When a prosecutor attempts to use evidence of another set of

circumstances outside of what they're currently charged with, what's called

prior bad acts.

And the prosecution sought admission of the case involving Becky Randolph's

death to show motive, a common scheme or plan, and introduced the jury to Eric

Tarantino.

After careful deliberation, Judge Stephanie Miley granted the motion,

allowing evidence of Becky's death to be admitted at trial.

That means Eric Tarantino would be allowed to testify.

that we had an uphill battle.

He's the most dangerous person I've ever met in my life.

And if he was acquitted, he'd come directly for me. But I was the only one

that could do this.

Jury selection is underway for Thomas Randolph, the man accused of murdering

his wife and killing the hitman he originally hired to do the job.

He didn't have a right to kill any of those women.

He didn't have the right to do it to Michael Miller.

michael miller died because i ran that's the reason i agreed to testify and put

my life in danger all over again prosecutors believe he got away with

murder but they feel they have enough evidence in this case to make sure he

stays behind bars i'm a little nervous about it all i thought somebody needs to

bring this to justice and bring it to an end Randolph is accused of hiring a

handyman to kill his wife. The shooter, according to Randolph, was an unknown

intruder. After Randolph's wife was shot in May 2008, Randolph killed the gunman,

claiming self-defense.

All right, let's bring the jury in.