10 “Get It All …”

Talking with Mike Grossie convinced Peters she was on the right track. Randy Roth, she concluded, had almost certainly murdered Cindy Roth, probably for insurance money, just as he had killed ten years earlier for the same reason. But believing something and proving it are two entirely different matters. Peters decided to tell her supervisor what she had learned.

“Guess what I found out,” Peters told Sergeant Frank Kinney. “Not only has Randy been married four times, his second wife died and he had a lot of insurance on her. Skamania County has a file on it, and they’re gonna send it up.”

Coincidences do happen, Kinney knew, but the odds of one man having two wives die in recreational accidents one decade apart did seem a bit long. Kinney had already agreed with Peters that Randy’s version of his wife’s death didn’t sound right. Now here was the possibility of a pattern: murder for life insurance proceeds.

But Kinney, a veteran of more than twenty years in police intelligence and investigations, also knew that proving a case involving complex circumstantial evidence—“no smoking gun,” as he later put it, meaning there was no apparent eyewitness to the drowning besides Randy—would probably consume hundreds of hours of investigative time and require a tremendous investment in patience and persistence. It might well be that the only way to solve the case was to confront Randy with information that might lead him to confess.

And if Kinney was any judge of character after two decades as a cop, it didn’t seem very likely that a man who’d murdered once for money was likely to confess to anything. Probably the only way to prove Randy Roth had committed murder would be to enmesh him in the web of his own deceits, to bring out the circumstances that, taken together, could lead only to the unavoidable conclusion that murder had happened.

It might take months, and the major crimes unit was already short-handed. But then, thought Kinney, isn’t that what we’re paid to do? I mean, you can’t go around murdering people, it’s our job to stop that sort of thing and catch you if you do it.

This was a job that looked like it would take more than one person. Kinney turned to a second detective sitting nearby, who had been listening with interest to their conversation, and asked him to back Peters up. Randy Mullinax and Peters had worked together before, and in Kinney’s mind, tended to complement one another. Where Peters tended to be effervescent, enthusiastic and energetic, Mullinax was an expert interrogator and an experienced digger. Peters might get you to talk, but Mullinax could tell if you were lying.

Mullinax was thirty-nine years old. He’d been a policeman since 1978 and a detective for nearly a decade. He was a short, trim man with a high forehead, dark brown hair styled back, and a ready grin. One of his most noticeable attributes was his eyes. They fixed a person in place, so that one could not escape the realization that whatever was being said, a substantial portion of Mullinax’s brain was listening, turning things over, evaluating, searching for meaning and connections, remembering.

From 1984 to 1987, Mullinax had worked on the Green River murders—the worst serial homicide case in the country.

Along with a score of other detectives, Mullinax had patiently reassembled the pasts of dozens of possible suspects, looking for something, anything, that might tie a killer to nearly fifty young victims. Criminal histories, driving records, divorce cases, credit card invoices, interviews with friends and coworkers, bar owners, streetwalkers, all contributed to a mountain of information on possible suspects that was funneled into a gigantic computer database, which Mullinax and others constantly sifted, looking for the one fragment that would tie everything together and bring the case to a conclusion. Although the day never came, those digging skills were exactly what would be required for the Roth case.

A year earlier, Mullinax had solved a kidnapping case that had baffled the police for almost two years. Mullinax first noticed that an earlier kidnapping case in another jurisdiction bore marked similarities in the type of victim. Mullinax sat down with a newspaper reporter and related aspects about one of the kidnappers’ backgrounds that had never been publicly disclosed, in hope that someone who read the paper might recognize the person.

A day later, Mullinax got just one phone call. But that one call delivered a name, and when Mullinax then matched the past of the named man with the kidnapper’s description of himself to his victim, Mullinax was able to arrest the man and get a confession, and thereby arrest two other men and solve the case. It was a matter, Mullinax thought, of collecting background on the suspect and matching it with the background of the perpetrator. Now Mullinax would do the same with Sue Peters on Randy Roth.

“It sounds to me like this guy Roth is a stone cold killer,” Kinney now told Peters and Mullinax. “Let’s get him. Find out everything you can about the guy. Where he banks. His insurance company. Where he grew up. His criminal record. His military record. Who his friends are. What he does with his time. His girl friends. Get it all. Take as long as you need to do it, but do it.”