20 Semper Fi

In light of Randy’s subsequent claims of military valor—indeed, his use of his Marine background to convince scores of his friends, girlfriends, acquaintances, enemies, and even his wives that he was one tough cookie—Randy’s entire military experience is striking for how different it really was.

It wasn’t just that Randy had never been in combat, let alone Vietnam, despite his war stories; instead, the reality of Randy’s Marine Corps experience exposes him as a person who was simply incapable of adjusting to a situation over which he had no control.

For most of his life, Randy had hidden his vulnerabilities by asserting himself, by acting violent, and by committing outrageous acts that brought him admiration or at least fear; but in the Marines nobody feared the Wrath of Randy, and anti-social behavior was met with merciless discipline. In the Marines, Randy was “the lowest of the low,” as he later put it, and that more than anything else Randy simply could not tolerate.

Meanwhile, Randy’s attitude of defensive, posed superiority isolated him from his fellow Marines; indeed, it appears that he didn’t have one single friend by the end of his service career. Less than one year after he reported for boot camp, Randy was begging for help from his mother, his girlfriend, his congressman, anyone who could get him out of the corps.

The first ninety days of Randy’s Marine career were spent at the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot in San Diego, California, a huge installation near the San Diego airport where recruits were hazed by drill instructors, conditioned unmercifully, and where efforts were made to sever the bonds between the recruits and their girlfriends and families. For some reason, Randy was never able to cast loose of those connections to his old way of living.

Within two days of joining the Marines, Randy was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like it. Everywhere he went, somebody was yelling at him, calling him “slime” or “worm” or even worse. For someone who hated being ridiculed, the Marine Corps Recruit Depot was not a benign environment.

Every morning, a drill instructor ran through the barracks, getting everyone up at 5 A.M. The recruits had just two minutes to get dressed and to make their beds before inspection. Much of the rest of the day was spent in physical conditioning, rifle drills and studying military manuals. Just about the only conversation Randy had consisted of the words “sir yes sir,” “sir no sir,” and growling. All of his hair was gone, and soon Randy’s ears were sunburned and bleeding. The slightest transgression of the rules was met with harsh physical conditioning punishment. Once Randy allowed himself a small smile of pride as he handled his rifle in drills. The D.I. caught him, cursed him for being happy and made him perform 500 squat-thrusts. “The sarge said ‘We don’t need any bleep bleep bleep bleep happy bleeping bleeps,’” Randy later recounted.

But Randy was better off than many of his fellow recruits, in part because of the way he had honed his own physical condition before joining. By mid-October, Randy was outperforming many of the other recruits in rope-climbing, running the depot’s obstacle course and similar exercises. After several weeks, Randy was made the guide of his platoon, which put him in the front rank. Ordinarily he would have been at the back of the platoon, where the Marines always put the smaller recruits, but being brought to the front was an honor.

However, by mid-November Randy was back in the rear again. “Well, I’m not the guide of the platoon anymore (not for awhile anyway),” he reported to Terri. “I had a little run-in with some guys from another platoon and they got hurt so the platoon commander is giving me time to settle down.” Apparently, Randy’s penchant for control through threatened violence was leading to excesses of his authority.

That so much is known about Randy’s short-lived Marine career is primarily due to a fluke. As police were working to reassemble Randy’s past in the summer of 1991, they were contacted by Terri, who gave the detectives an unexpected break.

Although sixteen years had gone by, Terri had kept a near-complete collection of sixty-six letters written to her by Randy during the entire eleven months of his Marine Corps service. And while the letters weren’t ultimately needed in prosecuting the case against Randy for Cindy’s death, they did provide a detailed look at what Randy’s military career was really like, and how Randy worked when he was dealing with an audience of one.

The Randy-Terri letters are also remarkable for the insights they provide into Randy’s personality while under the stress of Marine training and service. The letters show that as Randy’s Marine career progressed, he grew progressively more isolated; as the isolation grew, Randy’s need to control increased even as the scope of people and events he could control diminished. As Randy’s compulsion to control grew more virulent, violent fantasies began appearing, as if Randy could somehow restore his own damaged self-esteem by claiming ever larger acts of aggression, eventually including descriptions of battles that never happened and heroic acts that never occurred.

At the same time, several major themes run through the letters that later appeared in Randy’s adult behavior.

The first was Randy’s unremitting struggle to define his self-image. That definition was in direct relationship with the fluctuations in Randy’s control over the events of his life. At times, Randy displayed a remarkable degree of insight into his own personality, recognizing that his problems were rooted in his own confusion about who he was and how an adult should act.

For most of his life, Randy had centered his identity around his brusque, macho exterior, which in turn was tied to his risk-taking anti-social behavior, or his capacity for getting even, which ordinarily led others to validate the mask that Randy sought to wear.

But what was seen as outrageous or even funny in junior high school became obnoxious in high school, as the circle Randy could affect with such behavior grew larger. By the time Randy was in the Marines, the circle was vastly larger; no one was going to be either impressed or intimidated by Randy’s antics or posturings, and that sort of behavior usually netted painful disapproval and discipline. In short, Randy was having a hard time growing up.

Randy realized this, the letters show, but was at a loss over what to do about it. Certainly he wasn’t capable of taking advice from people he felt were constantly belittling him, although on several occasions Marine Corps noncoms tried to help Randy by showing him possibilities he couldn’t see for himself.

“My sergeant made me go to a sociology class so I would be easier to work with. He says I’m too isolated and mistrusting of my peers,” Randy wrote on one occasion. On another, a sergeant tried to convince Randy to extend his enlistment for a year so he could qualify for the jet mechanic training Randy wanted, but Randy didn’t want to do it.

The letters also show that Randy’s feelings toward himself and his role in the Marines waxed and waned based on his relative success or failure in the corps. In the initial stages of boot camp, when Randy was doing well, he sounded aggressive, bragging, and the corps was great: he was by God a U.S. Marine; but later, when things went badly, it was because he was a mess, or more often, because the corps itself was a mess and a fraud.

One of Randy’s biggest disappointments was in finding out that he would not receive any skills training. Randy was sure the recruiter had lied to him. “I’ve really been feeling down since Thursday,” he wrote in late November of 1973. “It looks like I’ve wasted two years when I signed up in the Marine Corps.”

Eventually the corps assigned Randy to clerk school, where he studied typing. For someone like Randy, who yearned to define himself by acts of derring-do, riding a typewriter was “sissy” work, a painful reminder of the “four eyes” taunts. Randy hated it.

As Randy became more miserable in the corps, his need to control Terri grew more acute. One of the most striking aspects of the letters is Randy’s incessant protestations of love for Terri—repeated so often that it ultimately becomes a burden for Terri, an obligation, and thus a form of control. His entire future was in Terri’s hands, Randy whined in virtually every letter; he did not know what he would do if she broke off with him. Terri had the power to ruin his life. Coupled with the violent imagery Randy also included in his letters, Randy’s bleatings had the quiet undercurrent of a threat.

“You know honey, I’ve been thinking about it a lot and it’s really great that you’re trusting, devoted and loyal enough to stay with me and always love me while I’m in here. I’ve talked to a lot of guys and found out that their girlfriends left them after they joined the service because they felt it was necessary to have someone there at all times to love them,” Randy wrote.

While putting that burden on Terri, Randy also generated a steady stream of commands, directions, orders, advice and warnings, even down to instructions as to what clothes she must wear or not wear, or how she must act with other people. In this way, Randy tried to maintain control over Terri in much the same way he would later attempt to control his wives.

Likewise, Randy’s fearful jealousy is a constant theme. In almost every letter, Randy threatens great bodily harm to anyone who tries to move in on Terri; if Terri doesn’t do what Randy wants her to do, he promises “to turn you over my knee,” “give you a spanking,” or makes some similar dominating threat. “I got a right to protect what’s mine,” Randy wrote, as if Terri were a thing or a piece of property.

Another major theme is Randy’s own disparagement of himself, which became a constant tone as Randy’s year in the Marines progressed: he’s a mess, no one could possibly love him, he’s confused, a misfit and outcast. All of this worked, as Randy instinctively knew it would, both as an excuse for his failures in the corps as well as a snare to bind Terri closer to him.

By making Terri aware of these feelings, Randy was trying to insure that Terri would never think of leaving him. After all, it was Terri who believed that through her love she could somehow transform Randy, make him greater than he was, and if Terri did anything to damage Randy’s self-esteem, she would be acting contrary to her own view of herself.

But the letters also show that Randy felt far more comfortable expressing love for Terri on paper from twelve hundred miles away than he did in person. It was almost as if it was not Terri that he cared for as much as simply possessing her.

Throughout the fall, Randy wrote that he was looking forward to seeing Terri on his Christmas leave. All of his letters discussed possible plans for the two of them during the furlough. But judging from the letters Randy sent afterward, the leave was less than a success.

To Terri, Randy seemed distant and preoccupied. Despite the talk about rings and marriage, in the actual event Randy didn’t seem very enthusiastic. Randy spent much of his time with his friend Mike, working on Mike’s car. Worse, Terri discovered that Randy had seen Jan Johnson while he was home.

But as soon as he was back in San Diego, Randy tried to smooth things over. “The whole time I was home on leave I wanted to ask you to get engaged but I wasn’t really sure whether I should or not,” Randy wrote afterward. And, “That hurt bad when you told me I was neglecting you because I didn’t think so, but I guess it looked that way.…”

After leaving boot camp, Randy was assigned to Camp Pendleton, where he would study typing. Randy was miserable. It was like the corps was saying that he was too little to be a real Marine, and that all he was good for was typing in some office. From his assignment to the clerk school on, Randy’s unhappiness in the Marines steadily increased. As his unhappiness grew, so did his isolation, his concurrent violent fantasies and dependence on the emotional sustenance provided by his relationship with Terri.

At Camp Pendleton, Randy spent some of his off-hours in the nearby town of Oceanside, attending a martial arts facility, or dojo. Both Randy and Terri were interested in martial arts; Randy even told Terri that he had once studied with Bruce Lee, a martial arts expert who went on to become a famous movie star before dying of apparent head injuries in the late 1970s.

In late January, Randy wrote Terri about a big fight in the dojo, one in which Randy supposedly caused serious injuries to “five big hippies” who came in to watch the “‘ballerina girls practice.’” In the course of the fight, someone broke a chair across his back, Randy wrote, but he still got the upper hand.

Three of the hippies were sent to the hospital, Randy said, and the instructor at the dojo wanted Randy arrested. Eventually, however, the charges were dropped.

Just how much of this story was true was hard to say. Probably if Randy had really been hit over the back with a chair he would have been in the hospital himself. It is the sort of scene one sees in movies, but in the movies the chairs are made to come apart. In real life, a chair can break a person’s back or at least severely damage their kidneys.

In any event, however, from late January forward to the end of Randy’s military career, almost all of his letters recounted some sort of violent encounter, almost as a counterpoint to the unhappiness and belittlement Randy kept feeling. Years later, Terri came to believe that much of this reported violence might have existed only in Randy’s imagination. Bored and frustrated as a clerk, Randy’s legend-making machinery began working overtime.

By early February, Randy was more depressed than ever. While his typing skills had increased to twenty-two words per minute, he had just learned that he would be sent to a unit on Okinawa, farther than ever from Lynnwood, his car and the legend Randy had worked so hard in high school to create for himself.

By this time, Randy was sure the Marines were not for him. After discussing his situation with his chaplain, Randy decided to try to get a discharge. The way to do that, he reasoned, would be to have Lizabeth send a letter to the Marines contending that Randy was needed at home to help support Lizabeth and the other Roth children.

But before he could put his plan into effect, Randy was shipped to Okinawa, and there he began to sound increasingly desperate and worried that his unit would soon be sent into the field.

Randy was assigned to the headquarters platoon of M Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment of the Third Marine Division. While it was true that the company would have to go into the field, it was only Okinawa, not Hue in the Tet Offensive. Being part of the headquarters platoon also meant Randy’s unit would have to do less maneuvering than the other units in the company and would have first crack at most of the amenities. Other Marines looked down on the members of the headquarters platoon as almost-Marines who couldn’t quite hack it. None of this helped make Randy feel better about himself.

Randy was working mostly in the company clerk’s office at a place called Camp Hanson on Okinawa. Because the headquarters platoon was considered the lower class of the unit, Randy and his fellows found themselves drawing much of the guard duty. That kept them awake much of the night and caused them to fall further behind during the day with their regular duties. The farther behind they got, the more they were ridiculed. The whole thing was a vicious circle, Randy concluded. He continued to resent the Marine system and remained isolated in his macho protective armor from even his fellow sufferers.

As soon as word got around that Randy wanted out, Randy’s relationship with his fellow Marines went completely in the dumper.

“This place is just like hell,” Randy reported. “Drug overdoses, murder, everything.… I only hope I can get out before I change too much because I can feel it already, filling me with resentment and hate.” The noncoms were riding him unmercifully, Randy said, because of his discharge request. Randy often spent his off-hours sitting atop his locker, fantasizing. Most of the other Marines thought he was crazy, and soon Randy began signing his letters to Terri, “Randy, the Crazy One.”

“Everyone notices me, but only because I’m inferior,” Randy wrote, and then added, almost prophetically: “Someday when God decides to take a hold of me everybody is going to know it. I’ve got to have been put here for some purpose.… Most of my life has been one fall after another.”

By early April, Randy noted that if his hardship discharge request was not approved he would have to ask for an unsuitability discharge. That, he told Terri, would require him to see a “crazy doctor.”

But all Randy’s talk about his unhappiness and his desire for a discharge troubled Terri. She talked to people she trusted, most of whom told her that Randy would be making a big mistake to get out of the Marines before his time was up. He would regret it all his life, Terri was told. Terri wrote back to Randy, reporting these reactions and suggesting that he consider sticking it out.

For awhile Randy stabilized, writing to Terri that while he still wanted a discharge, he now thought he could make it if he had to.

Still, the reports of violent episodes continued. Randy wrote Terri about several fights he had with other Marines. And in late April, Randy wrote that he had gone into town with two other Marines and had been attacked by eight Japanese civilians. One Marine he was with had his knee and his arm broken and suffered a fractured skull, Randy wrote. He himself was hit with a pipe that fractured his cheekbone. Randy claimed to have laid out four of the eight attackers. The Japanese police wanted to arrest him for his brutality, Randy said, but decided not to after learning that the eight Japanese were the aggressors. One of the attackers, Randy claimed, was in critical condition with a broken neck.

Whether any of this happened or was just a figment of Randy’s imagination remains unclear, although, as Detectives Peters and Mullinax later discovered, there didn’t seem to be any official Marine report of such an incident involving Randy.

What does seem clear about the reports of fights is that Randy was almost pathetically eager to have Terri see him as a powerful figure. That was made even more clear in another letter Randy wrote in late April, in which Randy described a fantasy that involved Terri.

In that fantasy, Randy became “Sir Randolph,” a romantic knight errant mounted on a long, gleaming motorcycle chopper. Terri is working at the snack bar at a Lynnwood roller-skating rink, a local teen hangout, when suddenly Sir Randolph on his “Mighty blue Chopper” crashes through the doors of the rink, pulls a wheelstand across the floor, and skids to a halt in front of the snack bar.

“You can see fear in the eyes of all the boys at the counter as he dismounts his bike,” Randy reported.

Sir Randolph pulls off his helmet and lets his dark hair fall to his shoulders (Randy hated his Marine haircut and wore a wig to hide it when he was home on leave). “The death-defying look on his face causes them all to scatter as he walks forward toward the beautiful woman at the snack bar,” Randy wrote. In this manner, Sir Randolph rescues Terri from the roller rink, puts her “gently” on the chopper, “and gives a cold defiant look to the people around them” before burning rubber out of the establishment.

The significance of this fantasy is that it shows Randy’s yearning to be back in an environment where he had status, or at least the belief that he had status, as Randy the Wrathful of Lynnwood.

But a second significance is also apparent: the point of the fantasy is not to be with Terri but rather to impress “all the boys at the counter.” Terri is an object necessary to fulfill Randy’s fantasy of gaining the fear and awe of “all the boys.”

Despite Terri’s advice, Randy continued to work on his hardship discharge. Meanwhile, whether it was because he wanted to convince Terri it was the right thing to do, or because of his deep psychological need to impress others, in early May Randy outdid himself. But first, in a letter postmarked May 9, 1974, however, Randy provided a subtle tipoff: he advised Terri to stand by for new adventures from Sir Randolph.

But it wasn’t Sir Randolph talking in the next letter: Randy told Terri he was part of a force of twelve hundred Marines who had been flown into Vietnam, and then trucked to a village “somewhere between Laos and Cambodia, that covers a big area, but I forgot the exact name.” A firefight ensued, Randy wrote, and two Marines were killed and four were wounded. Randy killed a North Vietnamese Army regular with his entrenching tool, he wrote. “Hell couldn’t be any worse than this place,” he said.

Three days later, in another letter, Randy said his unit was still fighting in Vietnam, but that now he was up for two medals for “something crazy I did the other night.” He had managed to save a major and two captains from getting killed, he said.

“We all still can’t believe we’re here when the war is supposed to be over,” Randy wrote. Years later, no one else believed it either.

Significantly, another letter postmarked May 21, 1974, makes no mention of Vietnam at all. Instead, the letter was filled with the self-disparagement that Randy sometimes succumbed to when depressed. But then the next letter, postmarked May 23, recounted a huge fight in Vietnam.

In this battle, Randy claimed his unit was overrun by the North Vietnamese Army, who outnumbered them twelve to one.

“It was one of the worst fights I can imagine,” Randy wrote (with unintentional accuracy), “and 85 of our men got blown to shreds and more than 40 were injured.” Eventually the Marines’ perimeter collapsed, and Randy and his comrades-in-mind were forced to use their bayonets in close combat, he said. “We fought like savage animals,” Randy wrote. A few days later, everyone went back to Okinawa, he wrote.

Altogether, Randy claimed to have spent two weeks in Vietnam, even sending Terri a snapshot of the terrain taken from the air that he identified as a place called “Dak Pek.” He told Terri that he and several other Marines were able to get a day off from the fighting to drive into Saigon to develop the picture, which was certainly thoughtful of the NVA, particularly since the Laos-Cambodia border was nearly two hundred and fifty miles from the South Vietnamese capital.

A close reading of Randy’s letters therefore clearly shows that Randy’s combat was all in his mind. But to be sure, Detectives Peters and Mullinax checked with the Marines and pulled Randy’s service record. There was no evidence that Randy ever left Okinawa. Still later, the falsity of these stories was made apparent when Randy’s lawyers succeeded in getting all mention of Randy’s entire Marine career, such as it was, suppressed at his trial. Had Randy really been in combat, it might have helped provide a delayed-stress defense to the charge of murder.