Inside The 15-Year Investigation of Thomas Randolph, Netflix’s The Widower

Thomas Randolph spent 15 years evading justice for the May 8, 2008, murder of his sixth wife, Sharon Causse, while Dateline NBC producer Dan Slepian documented the investigation. While Randolph maintained his innocence through multiple trials and appeals, investigators uncovered a decades-long pattern of suspicious deaths involving his previous wives and life insurance payouts. On the night of May 8, 2008, Thomas Randolph called 911 to report that he had shot an intruder who had killed his wife, Sharon Causse, following a Mother’s Day dinner. Randolph claimed he stayed in the car to listen to the radio while Causse went inside their Las Vegas home, where she was shot by a masked intruder carrying a bag of jewelry. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department detective Dean O’Kelley quickly identified major inconsistencies in Randolph’s account. Investigators noted that the intruder’s ski mask was found on the garage floor without any blood on it, multiple rounds were fired in the hallway without leaving bullet casings, and a neighbor heard gunshots at 8:33 p.m., while Randolph’s 911 call did not happen until 8:45 p.m. Veteran Dateline NBC producer Dan Slepian learned about the case the next day from an LVPD homicide colleague and began filming real-time investigations. Slepian and O’Kelley eventually uncovered that Randolph was a former paralegal who received life-insurance payouts after three of his previous wives all died under suspicious circumstances. The investigation expanded as Slepian and O’Kelley examined Randolph’s past marriages. Randolph’s first wife, Kathy, shared that he had taken out a life insurance policy on her after their 1975 marriage before she filed for divorce. Steve Thomas, who later married Kathy, told investigators that Randolph had previously tried to groom him to kill Kathy. In 1983, on the same day his divorce from Kathy was finalized, Randolph married his second wife, Becky Gault. Gault died of a gunshot wound to the head inside her Utah home, in a death initially ruled a suicide. Her death was reclassified in 1988 after Randolph collected a $500,000 life-insurance payout. During Randolph’s 1988 murder trial for Gault’s death, his friend and handyman Eric Tarantino testified that Randolph had hired him to plan Gault’s murder for six months. A jury acquitted Randolph of the murder charge, though he was later convicted of witness tampering for offering an undercover cop money to kill Tarantino. Subsequent marriages ended under similarly strange circumstances. Gaynal Allmon divorced Randolph after he took out a life insurance policy on her. Frances Randolph suffered a heart condition and died after Randolph selected her doctor. Police arrested Randolph in January 2009 at his mother’s home in Utah. He was finally brought to trial in June 2017, where a jury found him guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of first-degree murder, resulting in a death sentence. The Nevada Supreme Court reversed the conviction and death sentence in 2020, ruling that the trial should not have admitted evidence from Becky Gault’s case. During his 2023 retrial, Dean O’Kelley testified about the case inconsistencies alongside Randolph’s reenactment video, leading a jury to convict him. Netflix adapted the 15-year investigation into the documentary The Widower, featuring Slepian’s real-time footage and interviews. Thomas Randolph, now 71, is serving a sentence of 60 years to life at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada.