One of the biggest benefits of the internet is that it affords people the ability to Google individuals they’ve begun dating to see if there are horrific skeletons in their closets. That resource would have been invaluable to at least some of the six women who married Thomas Randolph, a Nevada man whose spouses had a strange habit of turning up dead after he had taken out multiple, sizable life insurance policies on them. Randolph’s messy past earned him the nickname the “Black Widower,” and it came to a head with the demise of his sixth (and, to date, final) wife Sharon, who on May 8, 2008, became the latest of his partners to lose her life under mysterious circumstances.
Over the course of three episodes that are guided by prison interviews with its homicidal subject, ID’s The Black Widower: The Six Wives of Thomas Randolph (July 15) details the bizarre saga of Randolph, who claimed that on that fateful 2008 evening, he and Sharon opted to skip a movie and return home to have sex. When he entered the house shortly after her, Randolph says he found her lying motionless on the floor, at which point he became spooked and grabbed his gun. When he spotted a masked intruder, he opened fire in his hallway, killing the man. A 911 call played at the outset of the docuseries sums up his version of events, with Randolph making clear that he had felled a stranger who appeared to have shot his wife.
As it turned out, that person was Mike Miller, a handyman whom Randolph had hired to do various odd jobs around the couple’s Las Vegas residence. A bag of jewelry lying beside Mike suggested that he had been robbing the home when Sharon arrived, and thus he had killed her in a surprised panic. From the moment he stepped inside the residence, however, Las Vegas Detective Dean O’Kelly thought something was off about the entire scene. And in the wake of his initial interview with Randolph, he had the grieving husband visit the house to record a video walkthrough of what had taken place. Much of that footage is replayed in The Black Widower, and it paints Randolph in an unflattering light, not only because he seems out of it (the result of drugs), but because he discusses Sharon—and the grossness of trying to resuscitate her—in a cold, unemotional manner.
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Discrepancies between Randolph’s various statements and the evidence at hand suggested to O’Kelly that Randolph had hired Mike Miller to kill Sharon, and then he’d murdered Mike to cover his tracks. As for a motive, Randolph had taken out five life insurance policies on Sharon, and as explicated by ID’s docuseries, that turned out to be his common tactic. The Black Widower soon flashes back to Randolph’s early days with first wife Kathy, who agrees to be interviewed but demands that her face be blacked out because she wants to maintain her privacy. She met Randolph in Utah, where his “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” lifestyle wasn’t appreciated by the state’s Mormon community. They had two children, the second of whom, Krista, participates, admitting that Randolph was a loving father if also a troublemaker who habitually did and said the wrong things.
Randolph and Kathy’s seven-year marriage was mostly unhappy, to a considerable degree because he was a serial womanizer (“I’ve always cheated on my wives, but they love me!”), an arrogant blowhard (“I’m cocky. I’m a smart motherfucker”), and a drug user and dealer who loved the “thrill” of making money by breaking the law. The day their divorce was finalized, Randolph married second wife Becky Gault, whose cousins contend that Randolph controlled her, got her hooked on narcotics, and physically abused her. On Nov. 7, 1986, a depressed Becky left a birthday party to return home, where Randolph alleges that they got into an argument and he told her to follow through on her threats to kill herself. Later that day, she was found dead in her bedroom of a gunshot wound which investigators initially ruled was self-inflicted.
Over a year later, police reconsidered that conclusion thanks to Eric Tarantino, Randolph’s former co-worker and friend, who revealed that Randolph had enlisted him to murder Becky, but that he had bailed on the plot at the last minute. This bombshell was central to Randolph’s ensuing trial for Becky’s murder, which ended in a stunning not guilty verdict (even though Randolph had additionally tried to hire a cop to kill Eric!).
Free to live on the payouts from Becky’s life insurance policy, Randolph continued to marry. While his third wife died of cancer, his fourth wife Gayna Allmon recounts how she fled him after he almost killed her with a stray bullet (after, you guessed it, making her take out life insurance policies that named him as beneficiary). His fifth wife Frances—who had a heart condition—passed away in the hospital under shady circumstances that have made her daughter Rachel believe that Randolph was responsible.
Together, this paints a rather ugly portrait of Randolph, and the man’s interviews throughout The Black Widower: The Six Wives of Thomas Randolph do him no favors, showing him to be a brazenly egotistical lout who’s “the luckiest son of a gun there is.” After cataloging his many apparent misdeeds, the series spends its third installment documenting Randolph’s second trial for the death of Sharon—since his first conviction for the crime was overturned by the Nevada Supreme Court, which decided that evidence from Becky’s trial should not have been admitted in Sharon’s case. The intricacies of this prosecution are reasonably engaging, and despite typically soundbite-y commentary from legal expert Beth Karas, the proceedings’ satisfying conclusion indicates that at least some of the time, juries get things right.
Nonetheless, the most astonishing takeaway from this entire ordeal may be that justice is often jeopardized by legal rules and regulations that stand in opposition to basic notions of fairness and logic. Randolph may be behind bars, yet given how successfully he’s gamed the system in the past—and therefore kept talk about his modus operandi out of the courtroom—it’s fair to wonder if there isn’t another upcoming chapter to this story.
