4 Randy’s Story

As Maureen Devinck sensed, Patti Schultz suspected and Mike Helbock knew, Cindy Roth was beyond saving. Shortly after 6:30 P.M., the pretty young mother was declared dead. Tyson and Rylie Baumgartner were orphans.

Like most major hospitals, Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Washington employed a social worker to help family members cope with grief. D’Vorah Kost was with Randy and the boys when the doctors told them Cindy was gone. The boys were in heavy shock. Tears streamed down their faces. Neither said anything, and Randy said nothing to them. It seemed to Kost that the boys were in one world, Randy in another. It was hard to believe they were even related.

Randy looked angry, Kost thought. He seemed very tight, almost sullen. Kost thought he was feeling defensive. He was still wearing his sunglasses. “I couldn’t save her,” he said several times to no one in particular.

Officials from the county medical examiner’s office arrived. Randy briefly described what happened at the lake. Then a detective from the Redmond Police Department came into the room, and Randy told the story again. “I’m not wearing these dark glasses to hide anything from you,” Randy told him. The detective didn’t say anything to that. Instead, he asked Randy to write a statement. Randy finished the statement a few minutes after seven P.M.

“We arrived at the lake approx 2:30 P.M., then needed to inflate the raft and inner tubes for the kids so it was sometime after 3:00 when we reached the beach,” Randy wrote. “The two boys were going to float in the swim area as they had done with their mom before. Cindy asked me to row to the east side of the lake where it would be more romantic. I said it looks like a long way, she replied you’re strong, you can do it. We rowed to the other side and paddled around awhile and started back. She asked if I would like to cool off with a swim and I said okay. We swam for about ten minutes and she said the cool water was giving her a cramp in her leg.

“I said let’s head back. We were at the side of the raft where she was holding onto the rope and I said hang on, I’ll go around and hold the other side so you can get in. As I was working my way around a wake from a passing boat about 50–100 yds away went by and the raft turned over on top of her. She coughed once and I hurried to right the raft which took about 30 seconds. She was already floating face down and I couldn’t get her into the raft from the water. I managed to climb in and pulled her aboard and proceeded to row to the beach side where help could be found. Upon beaching a lifeguard was summoned by my son Tyson who was on shore and she started CPR.”

The man from the medical examiner’s office told Randy an autopsy would have to be performed on Cindy. “I don’t want one,” Randy said. Sorry, said the official; there wasn’t any choice in the matter. Under the law, any unexpected, unattended death required an autopsy.

Now Kost asked if she could call someone for them, and the boys said they wanted to talk to their grandparents, Cindy’s mother and father. But Randy reminded them that Cindy’s parents were visiting relatives in North Dakota and couldn’t be reached. Randy said he would call Cindy’s brother, instead. Kost offered Randy some pamphlets on grief and counseling facilities. Randy took the handouts but didn’t seem very interested in them. Just after 7:30 P.M., Randy and the boys left the hospital.

At that point, the detective told Randy he wanted to impound the raft. Randy became very upset on hearing this, the detective later recalled, wanting to know why the police wanted it and saying the police had no right to take it. Cindy had been dead for less than an hour.

Redmond Police Detective Larry Conrad thought Randy’s behavior was highly unusual. As he looked over the written statement, Conrad couldn’t help feeling that his description of the drowning just didn’t sound right.

The medical people were convinced that Cindy had been without oxygen for a substantial period of time. Why hadn’t Randy called for help? There were scores of boats on the lake. Why hadn’t he waved to any of them? Anyway, could a wake from a powerboat really have flipped the raft over? But most of all, there was Randy’s demeanor. Calmly deflating the raft while his wife lay dying seemed peculiar, to say the least. And there was Randy’s opposition to an autopsy.

Further, when Conrad thought about Randy’s story, he was struck by the fact that all of the fateful decisions seemed to have been made by the dead woman: it was her idea to go to the lake, it was her idea to row to the other shore, it was her idea to go swimming. Randy made himself sound powerless, helpless, a mere hapless bystander. He hadn’t comforted the boys; he hadn’t cried himself. Instead, he appeared focused on mundane, pragmatic, mechanical tasks. To Conrad, the picture simply had too many broken pieces.

Conrad called his sergeant and filled him in. The sergeant agreed something might be fishy about Randy Roth and the death of his wife of less than one year. But if anything criminal had befallen Cindy Roth, it hadn’t taken place inside the city of Redmond, the sergeant pointed out. The city’s jurisdiction ended at the water’s edge. Whatever happened to Cindy had clearly happened somewhere out in the middle of the lake, and the lake was the territory of the county police. The sergeant called them to tell them they might want to take a hard look at Randy Roth and the death of his recent wife.

Susan Peters was starting up her barbecue at her new home in the foothills southeast of Seattle when the telephone rang shortly after 7:30 P.M. Her father was visiting for a couple of days from eastern Washington State, and Peters was looking forward to a quiet evening at home with her father and a couple of friends.

Peters had been a detective with the King County Police for five years, the last year with the department’s Major Crimes Section. That unit handled all homicides, kidnappings and death investigations. In earlier years, it had investigated the crimes of Ted Bundy, the serial killer, and later, the still unsolved Green River murders. Sudden suspicious deaths, murders and kidnappings, while increasing, were still rare enough to make it uneconomical to have detectives available in the office around the clock. Instead, detectives were assigned after-hours cases on a basis of existing workload, and most frequently, simple availability. Thus, the problems posed by Cindy’s death and Randy Roth’s unusual behavior were routed to the first detective who could be found, who turned out to be Sue Peters.

Peters turned custody of her barbecue over to one of her friends, apologized to her father, and drove to the nearest county police precinct, where she started making telephone calls. She first talked to one of the county’s marine patrol officers, who briefed her on the facts of the drowning as told to her by the Redmond sergeant. Peters learned that a Redmond detective, Larry Conrad, was interviewing Randy at the hospital.

Peters called the hospital and was told that Randy and Conrad had already left. She called the Redmond Department and reached Conrad, who told her all the aspects of the drowning that seemed troubling. Next, Peters discussed the case with her own sergeant. He agreed the whole thing needed a close look, and assigned Peters to work full-time on the case until they could be sure that the death of Cynthia Roth really was an accident and not something more ominous—like murder.

After leaving the hospital, Randy and the boys drove through downtown Bellevue. Rylie was now sobbing as quietly as he could. Later, Rylie would remember Randy telling him to quit crying. “There’s no need to cry,” he said. “Just be quiet. It’s over with, there’s nothing to cry about.”

Much later, Randy would deny having said these things. “I wouldn’t have been that insensitive,” Randy would say. But insensitive was just the impression Randy had already made on countless people that day. Rylie tried hard to hold his tears in. “I tried my hardest,” he said later, “but—I tried not to be loud, but tears still fell down my face.”

Randy pulled into a Burger King, and he and the three boys ordered hamburgers and french fries. Little was said. Afterward, Randy stopped at a nearby market and rented three movies, all of them comedies. Randy and the boys then drove home, a large, two-story, four-bedroom house located on an estate-sized lot in rural Woodinville, about twenty miles northeast of Seattle.

The house was filled with Cindy’s things: an extensive doll collection in glass cases in several rooms, plenty of girlish knickknacks or cute art in various corners. Cindy had painted the house in her favorite colors, pink and mauve. Randy hated it. Now Cindy was gone.

Randy made root beer floats for the boys, made sure the telephone answering machine was on, and put the rental movies into the VCR. The boys watched the movies numbly. Randy had the idea that the movies would help the boys keep their minds off the tragedy. But even in this, Randy’s insensitivity seemed apparent.

As it turned out, one of the movies was Weekend at Bernie’s, a black comedy about two men at a beach resort who manipulate the body of a dead man to convince everyone else that the man is still alive.

For two young boys who had just watched their mother drown, the battering taken by Bernie’s corpse in the movie could hardly have been funny. At one point in the movie, Bernie’s waterlogged body washes ashore, and at another, it is dragged behind a boat at high speed. Tyson tried to laugh along with Randy, but Rylie went up to his room to cry.