Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Should the jury know that he was acquitted of murder?

Accused of killing his wife, one man’s trial may hinge on the death of a previous spouse

Thomas Randolph

Thomas Randolph

Thomas Randolph

A week after his wife was killed, Thomas Randolph describes on videotape what happened to police.

Stefany Miley

Stefany Miley

Thomas Randolph was nonchalant for a handcuffed man charged with murder, again.

“Nice to see you!” he said, shuffling into Utah Judge Rodney Page’s courtroom. Randolph was being extradited to Las Vegas, where police blame him for two homicides — of his wife, and the guy he persuaded to kill her.

“I’m sorry,” he told the judge, “I didn’t send you a Christmas card.”

Page presided over Randolph’s past murder trial, in 1989, when he was accused of killing a previous wife.

That time, Randolph was acquitted. This time, he said, will be no different. It’s the same allegation, he told Page, “and it’s gonna have the same result.”

What happened before, Randolph assumes, will happen again.

But that’s also the logic of Clark County prosecutors: If you kill one wife, you’ll kill another.

The pattern is going to repeat in someone’s favor — whose favor will likely depend on what Las Vegas jurors learn about Randolph’s past. His wives died in similar circumstances almost two decades apart, but where their cases share the same strength, suspicious deaths, they share the same weakness, circumstantial evidence.

In September, Deputy District Attorney Robert Daskas asked the court to admit evidence of Randolph’s “prior bad acts” in the current case. He thinks jurors will see Randolph’s new murder charge more accurately through the lens of the past one.

The stakes are high. Randolph is facing the death penalty. And the law is clear: A person’s past can be used to show motive, intent, knowledge and what lawyers carefully call “absence of accident” — almost anything, really, except the defendant’s criminal character. Attorneys can’t argue that committing one crime means you’re likely to commit another.

In December, Judge Stefany Miley will decide whether jurors learn of Randolph’s past murder charge. The entire case may hinge on her ruling. Daskas won’t talk to the Sun, but Randolph’s attorneys, Yale Galanter (yes, he represented O.J. Simpson) and E. Brent Bryson, are frank — their defense will be shaped by the judge’s decision, and they want her decision to be “no.” These are always nuanced arguments, but this time it’s particularly complicated.

Randolph took advantage of his right, as an acquitted man, to have the Utah case sealed.

But what’s wiped from the court record doesn’t vanish. Old witnesses and attorneys are still around, newspaper articles don’t get dusty online, and TV footage from the first trial ricochets off the current case. In one interview, the mother of Randolph’s first dead wife told Utah reporters: “He’s guilty, and he’s just going to kill somebody else’s daughter, so beware.”

•••

Randolph is standing in a white tile hallway.

He’s a mouth breather, a hot wheeze the microphone catches and then drops. Between blinks, his eyes hover half-shut. His hair, shirt and skin are shades of gray. In front of a focused camera, Randolph seems blurred.

He’s 54. His back hurts. He doesn’t want to be filmed. He’s here, the same place and time his wife and friend were killed one week earlier, to waltz cops through his version of events with cameras rolling.

Randolph married Sharon Cause in 2007. She was his sixth wife. They met online two years earlier, according to Sharon’s daughter, who told a grand jury the couple had been fighting May 8 last year, the day Sharon was killed holding a doggy bag with leftover lobster and steak.

This is what Randolph told police: The couple went out to dinner that Thursday evening, then to a gas station one mile from their home to buy fuel in preparation for a Friday trip to Utah, to visit his parents.

After dinner, Randolph pulled into their driveway, stopped the car, punched the garage clicker, and waited for Sharon to walk in. The garage was too tight for her to get out of the car otherwise. So Randolph waited, listening to music, then drove forward, parked, closed the garage door and walked inside.

Sharon was face down and bleeding. She had been shot in the head. Then Randolph saw a shadow down the hall. He ducked into a side room, grabbed a handgun from the closet, turned around, and found himself facing a masked man who also appeared to be holding a gun. Randolph shot — in the video re-enactment, he yells “bam! bam! bam!, one for each bullet — as the masked man fled toward the garage and fell.

There was a loud sound. Randolph thought the man was firing at him, so he approached the garage and shot again — bam! bam! Two shots in the head, one above the eyebrow, one next to the ear.

Randolph turned around, searched the house for more people, then dialed 911. The dispatcher told him to give Sharon chest compressions. Randolph couldn’t roll her over. He was worried about the intruder. He went back to the garage. He took a revolver from underneath the man’s body. He went back to Sharon, who had something thick coming out of her mouth, and flipped her over. He started pumping, but his back hurt. Then the police were there.

In the video, Randolph pantomimes his hopeless CPR. He crouches where Sharon fell, near a spot of carpet that’s been cut out — a blank patch that only emphasizes the blood that was there. The detectives press Randolph for information about the man he shot, their positions relative to each other, the timing. Randolph struggles.

“I haven’t shot that many people that I can remember these details that good,” he says.

•••

The intruder Randolph shot was Michael Miller, a 38-year-old man he had met months earlier at a gas station.

The men struck up some kind of friendship, and Miller started working odd jobs around the Randolph house. But there was something feverish between them. Records show Randolph called Miller constantly, three to seven times a day.

Somewhere in their conversations, detectives say, Randolph persuaded Miller to shoot Sharon during a staged burglary. Then, when his wife was dead, Randolph changed the script, killing his only witness.

It’s a big theory, woven out of little inconsistencies.

Detectives put Sharon and Randolph home at roughly 8:30 p.m. Three minutes later, a neighbor across the street hears shots. Everything happened very quickly, Randolph said, two or three minutes, maybe. And yet, it’s 8:44 p.m. when the 911 call is placed. Between his story and the phone records, 10 minutes are missing.

There are problems with Miller’s wounds. The shots he suffered could only be fired from above, police say, at someone who was on the ground. And in the hallway, where Randolph said he shot a standing, masked intruder, there was no blood.

That mask is an issue, too. Police found it next to Miller’s body, without a single bullet hole or trace of blood. This is hard to reconcile with the fact that Miller was shot in the head, twice. If Miller wore the mask, he didn’t have it on when he was shot.

It landed alongside a plastic bag that contained some of Miller’s clothes, Sharon’s jewelry and keys to the house.

Miller knew the couple was leaving for Utah, police say. So why break in before the couple went on vacation?

Beyond these hiccups, however, larger issues loom. The couple had a strained relationship. Sharon’s daughter, Colleen, said Randolph left her mother several times for an old girlfriend; that Sharon took Randolph’s name off the deed to their house; that Sharon didn’t trust her husband; that Randolph had been talking about divorce the day her mother died.

Marriage, he supposedly told Sharon, screwed him in taxes.

And after the shooting, Randolph was more interested in disarming Miller than helping his wife, prosecutors note. During the video re-enactment, they say, Randolph was all business, no grief.

But what bothers police and prosecutors most of all is this: Sharon was worth more dead than alive. Randolph had $400,000 in life insurance on his wife.

And that, investigators thought, sounded familiar.

•••

Randolph married Becky Gault in 1983. Three years later, Randolph called police to report she had committed suicide in their Clearfield, Utah, home.

Newspaper stories from the time, and court documents from Randolph’s current case, paint an abstract picture of what happened.

Becky threatened suicide the day before she died, Randolph said, because he wouldn’t accompany her to Salt Lake City to buy cocaine — a drug Randolph said the couple was addicted to.

Becky persisted, so Randolph testifed, he told her to go ahead and kill herself. Then he left.

The next afternoon, Randolph said, he found Becky in bed, with a pistol in her hand and a gunshot wound in the temple. He tried to move the gun, then drove to his father’s house to call 911. Responding officers found Randolph there, talking on the phone with his attorney.

A medical examiner called the death suicide. Two weeks later, Randolph collected $250,000 in Becky’s insurance benefits. Two years later, he was charged with her homicide. A witness had come forward.

Eric Tarantino worked with Randolph. The men became friends. Tarantino testified that Randolph had started talking about killing Becky. For six months, Tarantino said, he and Randolph plotted her death.

They had several ideas: Becky is accidentally shot, Becky drowns, Becky’s medicines are swapped and — yes — Becky is killed by an intruder during a staged burglary.

Tarantino would be paid $10,000 out of the life insurance benefits. Randolph wanted to use the rest, Tarantino said, to fund a drug empire.

But things fell apart. Tarantino told Becky about the plan. Randolph found out and beat him up. Tarantino moved to California before Becky died. He returned to Utah with immunity in exchange for his testimony.

In court, a pathologist said Becky’s autopsy did not eliminate the possibility of homicide, and that a gun could have been placed in her hand, post-mortem. The doctor said he would have been more skeptical had he known about the insurance policies, which paid out for suicide.

Friends and relatives, meanwhile, couldn’t believe she’d kill herself. Becky saw a substance abuse counselor one day before she died. In court, the counselor told jurors the suicide was impossible to accept.

After Becky died, the counselor said, Randolph called with a threat: People like her “will get what’s coming to them.”

If that’s true, she not the only person Randolph was out for.

•••

In the middle of Becky’s murder trial, police say, Randolph tried to have Tarantino killed. He discussed it with another inmate, who told police, who set up a sting.

Posing as a hit man, a detective called Randolph and asked, “Are you sure you want this guy whacked?”

Randolph was sure, the detective testified, and plans were made: A friend of Randolph’s gave the hit man $2,000 and the title to his car.

Randolph was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, which was later reduced to felony witness tampering.

It’s the one charge Randolph pleaded guilty to in connection with Becky’s death — a fact Clark County prosecutors have seized upon.

“Randolph learned from his previous mistake,” Daskas wrote in a court filing. “If he left his co-conspirator alive, as he did his accomplice in Utah, that person could testify against him. Randolph assured that didn’t, and couldn’t, happen in this case the only way he could — by killing Michael Miller.”

•••

Mel Wilson served six terms as head prosecutor for Davis County, Utah. There are only a few trials he’d like to start all over again. Randolph’s is one.

“He was the kind of guy you didn’t want to turn your back on,” Wilson said. “He was without conscience.”

On the stand, Randolph told Wilson he had borrowed against his own life insurance policies to pay Becky’s. When Wilson pressed, Randolph said he hadn’t worked since his wife died, but had bought two houses and a Porsche.

“You talk to him,” Wilson said, “and you want to go home and take a bath.”

Wilson charged Randolph with capital murder, a death penalty case. He now wishes he had gone for something lighter, life behind bars rather than death, maybe. Something easier for jurors to stomach.

John Caine, Randolph’s lawyer, won the case by casting doubt on Becky’s mental state, which was bleak, he said, and “crumbling around her.” Becky had tried to end her life before, Caine said, this time she succeeded.

Four hours of deliberation, and Randolph was acquitted.

The evidence against Randolph was just too circumstantial, Wilson said. Afterward, the prosecutor learned jurors thought Randolph was guilty but weren’t confident enough to have him killed.

Wilson will happily fly to Vegas to help Clark County prosecutors fix his mistakes.

“I’d love to walk into court and see the look on his face,” Wilson said.

•••

“A trial is a strategy game,” UNLV law professor Katherine Kruse said. “It’s also a competition of stories. (Attorneys) are trying to use whatever evidence they can to tell the story that they want.”

Which story the jurors will hear about Randolph remains to be seen. His attorneys insist the old charge is more prejudicial than probative; that linking the two cases isn’t about shedding light, but casting shadows. Besides, they say, Randolph was acquitted, records were sealed, and nobody should to pay twice for one charge.

And yet in the strange way all criminals are linked, a man Randolph will probably never meet may have blown this double indemnity defense. In September, the Nevada Supreme Court considered the case of a Henderson schoolteacher convicted of molesting students, and whether it was fair that the teacher’s prior molestation charges, all sealed and expunged, were used against him later.

The court ruled yes — no seal can erase memories or accusations, the judges noted, and nobody can unring a bell.

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