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‘I Was Really Afraid’: What Do Accused Killer Thomas Randolph's Surviving Wives Say?
Thomas Randolph was convicted of murdering his sixth wife, but that conviction was ultimately overturned. What do his surviving wives say about him?
Matrimony and mortality have gone hand-in-hand for Thomas Randolph, a 66-year-old Nevada man accused of murder. Branded a potential “Black Widower,” he tied the knot with six women and four of them died. Circumstances surrounding their deaths have raised questions, as has the fact that they left behind large life-insurance payouts for Randolph.
Randolph’s striking case is chronicled in a deep-dive docu-series “Dateline Presents: The Widower,” which has been in the making for 13 years and is now airing on Oxygen on Monday, August 16 through Wednesday, August 18 at 8/7c.
In 2017, Randolph was sentenced to death for allegedly killing his sixth wife, Sharon Causse, who was fatally shot in 2008. But in December 2020, his conviction was reversed on appeal by the Nevada Supreme Court because evidence presented at Randolph’s trial concerning the shooting death of former wife Becky Gault, for which Randolph was charged and ultimately acquitted, may have tainted the jury’s objectivity, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported at the time.
A new trial has been ordered for Randolph. Currently, Randolph is being held in High Desert State Prison awaiting it to begin on May 9, 2022, the Clark County District Attorney’s Office told Oxygen.
At the original trial in June 2017 Randolph’s surviving former wives testified against their ex-husband. Will these women testify at the new trial? What will they say? Here’s what they’ve said in the past about the accused “Black Widower.”
At his 2017 trial for Causse’s murder, Kathryn Thomas, his first wife who wed Randolph in 1975 at age 18, testified that her former husband was “controlling, manipulative, and psychologically abusive,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
In a “Dateline” interview, Thomas said Randolph, who was 20 years old when they wed, was a “very charming and witty person and very intelligent.”
But she also acknowledged his dark side and his inability to “hold a steady job for too long.” The first sign of marital trouble, she claimed, came when he hurled a bowl of oatmeal at a wall because it didn’t have sugar on it.
Things “deteriorated from there,” she said, claiming that he began “seeing other women and doing a lot of drugs.” By the time they divorced in April 1983, he had allegedly gotten “really scary.”
In 2017, his third wife, Gayna Allmon, told the court during his trial for Causse's murder that one day when Randolph was cleaning a gun around her the firearm discharged and left a bullet hole in the floor. In her opinion, she testified, Randolph had tried to kill her.
No charges were filed in this incident.
In a “Dateline” interview, Allmon recalled the incident and said that Randolph had claimed that he didn’t realize that the gun was loaded. “I started yelling,” she said. “I was scared … I was extremely scared.”
“It wasn’t too long after that that he went to work and I packed up my stuff,” Allmon said. She basically “went into hiding,” she claimed, and said the divorce couldn’t be finalized fast enough.
To learn more about the case, watch “Dateline Presents: The Widower” on Oxygen. All three parts of the show are also now available to stream on both NBC’s website and on Peacock.
