13 Donna #2

The following day, Peters sorted through the county’s old marriage license records and discovered the name of Randy Roth’s third wife—Donna #2, as Peters thought of her.

Donna Clift had been only twenty-two when she’d married Randy in 1985. Randy had told them the previous day that “Dawn” had divorced him in September of the same year, and that she’d left the state. But Peters thought Randy’s fudging of Donna’s name indicated that Randy didn’t want them to talk to the third wife. That made Donna Clift someone Peters did want to talk to.

Peters ran the Clift name through the police computer and came up with information relating to a Judith Clift.

Judy Clift was actually the stepmother of Donna Clift, Peters soon learned. Donna had been married—briefly—to Randy Roth in 1985, Judy confirmed. She too had noticed the news item about Cindy’s drowning. She hadn’t known Cindy, Judy Clift said, but she wasn’t surprised the police wanted to talk to people about Randy. When she heard Randy had remarried in 1990, Judy Clift said, she’d told her husband that Randy’s new wife wouldn’t live a year.

The next day, Peters and Mullinax went to interview Donna Clift at a dry cleaning store where she worked. Randy had been wrong about her leaving the state. Donna was willing, even eager, to talk about her brief marriage to Randy. It had been a strange experience in her life, Donna told them; and in the end, she’d had to get out. Why? Well, said Donna, the whole marriage had been a mistake.

Had Randy ever discussed life insurance with her?

As a matter of fact, he had, Donna told them. But she wasn’t interested in being insured, so they’d never bought any. Not long after that, Randy became completely indifferent to her; that was when she’d moved out. Randy had become impossible to understand.

Donna said Randy had told her his mother and sister were dead. His mother had been driving to the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla when she was killed in a car wreck. His sister had then committed suicide in her mother’s hospital room after she was pronounced dead. Randy told the bizarre story in a complete deadpan. But then, Randy hardly ever displayed emotion.

“I never saw him cry,” Donna told them. “I swear, there was nothing there.

“He told me that he was in Vietnam. And I think it was really bad, because I know when he got out he had to be put in a hospital for three months to be rehabilitated. That’s what he told me. He was in some kind of special forces, that’s all I know.”

Did he ever talk about killing people?

“Yeah,” Donna nodded. “Women and children. He had a thing about coughs. He cannot stand to have or hear anybody cough. And I think when they went in and killed all those women and children, from what he told me, they all had that cough. I don’t know. He was just really weird, you know? To tell me a thing like that.

“I left him,” Donna said. “I’m scared of the guy.”

On the following Monday, the police conducted a test. The question was: did Randy’s raft really flip over in a wake from a powerboat?

To make the test as authentic as possible, Randy’s raft was used. Two county lifeguards were asked to play the roles of Randy and Cindy. The police towed the raft to the middle of the lake and the lifeguards began treading water near the raft while Peters and Mullinax gave directions and watched. A third detective videotaped the test, while a fourth began making passes with his personal seventeen-foot ski boat.

From “fifty to a hundred yards away,” as Randy had described the distance between the boat and the raft on the day Cindy died, the wake from the police boat barely caused the raft to rock, let alone flip over. The detectives ordered the powerboat closer and closer to the raft in an effort to generate a wake large enough to flip the raft over. Finally, the detective’s boat was within ten feet of the raft, roaring by at high speed, churning a wake of nearly two feet.

Yet no matter how hard the two lifeguards tried, they were unable to flip the raft over. The reason, the detectives discovered, was that the flat, inflated bottom of the raft tended to adhere to the water’s surface; indeed, it had been designed partly with that feature in mind. It was only after the lifeguard playing Cindy reached far over the inflated side by nearly climbing into the raft that the raft could be deliberately turned over.

The demonstration seemed to indicate that whatever had happened on the lake, the raft had not turned over. Therefore, it appeared that Randy was lying about that crucial part of his story.

Afterward, Peters drove over to the east side of the lake. She parked her car and began knocking on the doors of the houses up the hill from the water. She wanted to see whether there were any witnesses who had seen Randy and Cindy the day of the drowning. After eight doors, Peters finally encountered one man who remembered seeing the raft the day Cindy died. He never saw the raft flip over, he told Peters.

The next day brought Peters and Mullinax more new leads. Donna Clift called and said that she now remembered the name of Randy’s best friend. Would that be helpful? You bet, said the detectives. The man’s name was Tim Brocato, Donna said, and she remembered also that he was a fireman in Lake Stevens, a town about an hour north of Seattle. Peters called the fire department and left a message for Brocato to call her.

Peters also talked to Patti Schultz, the off-duty paramedic who had worked on Cindy at the lake, who later rode with Randy and the boys to the hospital. Schultz told Peters that Randy told her that he had been trained in CPR. On the drive to the hospital, Randy asked her how long a person’s heart could be stopped before resuscitation was impossible.

And Schultz remembered that Randy had two or three sacks of belongings that were all soaking wet. How could that be if the raft flipped over? If the sacks had been in the raft, wouldn’t they have sunk? If they weren’t in the raft, how did they get wet?

Meanwhile, Peters called Lori Baker. Lori had been doing some more thinking about Randy Roth after her conversation with the detectives two days earlier. She now told Peters that she remembered that Cindy had wanted Randy to sign a prenuptial marriage agreement before the wedding, but that Randy had refused. Lori said she remembered that Cindy told her Randy had complained about the proposal, saying that a marriage without trust was no marriage at all. Cindy had decided not to insist, Lori told Peters.

Now Peters told Lori about the will she and Mullinax had discovered in the Snohomish County records department, the will that awarded custody of Tyson and Rylie, as well as Cindy’s estate, to Lori. Legally, Peters told Baker, it appeared that she was now the foster mother of two boys. What should I do now? Baker asked Peters. Get a lawyer, Peters advised.

Next, Peters called the state Probation Office for information about Randy’s brother—the one who was supposedly in prison for murder. An earlier effort by Mullinax to find out whether the state prison system held an inmate named Roth had been unsuccessful. Peters had the idea that perhaps Brother Roth was out of prison and on probation instead.

The probation system did indeed have a Roth in their computer system. David M. Roth, born in North Dakota in 1957, was still incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Peters called the penitentiary and asked to speak to the counselor assigned David Roth’s case.

David Roth, it turned out, was serving a sentence for first-degree murder. David Roth had strangled a woman in 1977 and then used a rifle to shoot her seven times in the back of the head. After fourteen years, the woman was still unidentified. David Roth had never known the name of the woman he killed. Contrary to what Mary Jo Phillips said Randy told her about the killing, there was nothing in the file about any revenge motive; it appeared the woman had been an innocent hitchhiker. David was scheduled for release in 1997.

Just after lunch, Peters called Cindy’s insurance agent, Bruce Timm, whose name she had obtained from Lori Baker.

After Peters explained why she was calling, Timm said he had already heard from Randy about a possible insurance claim from Cindy’s death. Randy had called him on the Monday after the accident, Timm said. That, of course, was the same morning Peters first interviewed Randy, and the same day as Cindy’s memorial service. To Peters, it was yet another indication that Randy was more interested in money than the fact that his wife had just died.

“How much insurance is there?” Peters asked Timm. The policy was for $250,000, Timm told Peters. But that wasn’t all. Cindy already had an existing $115,000 policy that was completely paid for before she had even met Randy. Timm told Peters he had advised Cindy to keep Tyson and Rylie as the beneficiaries of the earlier policy, but Cindy was insistent on naming Randy as the new beneficiary. That meant Randy stood to collect on both policies, a total of $365,000. There could also be other life insurance he didn’t know about, Timm acknowledged.

What had Randy said about insurance during the interview with them the previous Thursday? Peters looked it up in her notes. Randy had told the detectives he believed he and Cindy had insurance of about $200,000, and that was primarily to protect the mortgage. Now it turned out the life insurance was even more substantial than Randy had admitted. Randy had insurance on Cindy for more than three times the amount of the mortgage.

Now Peters was absolutely sure Randy had a motive for Cindy’s death. No wonder Randy was so methodical when he rowed in toward shore that day at the lake. The longer Cindy went without oxygen, the more blue her face turned, and the greener Randy’s own bank account became. Peters wondered what Randy had been thinking while he watched Cindy on the sand that day at the beach. Die, baby, die, probably.

With Cindy dead, Randy likely thought he was in line to receive assets worth more than half-a-million dollars, not to mention the boys’ Social Security and pension money. That could be why Randy was insisting there was no will. It was almost certainly why Randy was insisting there’d been a terrible accident.