28 Trick or Treat

On Halloween night, 1981, Randy and Tim accompanied the kids as they made the rounds of the neighborhood with sacks collecting the evening’s tribute. Randy seemed in a pensive mood, Tim thought.

“Could you kill your wife?” Tim later recalled Randy asking him. Tim looked at Randy as if he were crazy. “What do you mean?” Tim asked, “Well,” said Randy, “I mean, like if there were an invasion or something, and she were going to be captured by the enemy.”

Randy went on to say that Jan had asked him to kill her if she were terminally ill or were about to be captured in an invasion. Tim didn’t give the conversation too much more thought. Later the same night, Randy told Tim that both he and Jan were insured for $100,000 in case anything happened to either one of them.

Tim put this conversation down to idle, crazy talk from Randy—just filling the airwaves, Randy trying to impress Tim with his stark, macho capacity to cope with any eventuality. Tim knew Randy liked to play the bad ass, to seem tough. The kids collected their candy, and later everyone went home.

Yet there was something about the Halloween talk that stuck with Tim in the following weeks. He could see that the marriage between Randy and Jan wasn’t working. It reminded him of Randy and Donna. He knew Randy was cheating on Jan.

Tim liked Jan. To him, she seemed sweet, kind and caring, and more than a little vulnerable. Jan liked to dance, and she was normally a very upbeat personality. But as November of 1981 unfolded, Tim sensed that Jan was becoming increasingly despondent. Tim wasn’t exactly sure what was wrong. Randy looked pretty glum himself. Randy complained Jan wanted to go dancing too often. He was getting sick of it. “Doesn’t sound like you’re happy,” Tim told Randy. “Yeah,” Randy said.

On the weekend before Thanksgiving, Randy asked Tim to use Randy’s car to drop him off at Vitamilk. Randy told Tim he was going hunting, but Tim knew Randy never went hunting. Tim saw Randy get into a car driven by a woman who certainly wasn’t Jan. Tim drove Randy’s car back to Randy’s house, where Jan was waiting. Tim didn’t say anything about Randy’s “hunting trip,” however.

Still, Jan seemed miserably unhappy, very nervous and upset. She told Tim that she’d had a very bad dream the night before. In her dream, Jan said, she had learned that she was going to die.

Three days later, on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Jan asked Jalina to come into the bedroom she shared with Randy at the end of the house. They sat on the bed. Jan told Jalina that she might have to go live with her father—her real father, in Texas.

“I don’t want to, Mommy,” Jalina said.

“If something happens to me,” Jan said, “you might have to.”

“Well, I don’t want to.”

“You might not have any choice,” Jan said.

“Nothing’s going to happen to you, Mommy,” Jalina said again. “Why are you saying that?”

“Well, if it does,” Jan told Jalina, “I want you to know where this is.” And with that, Jan removed the bureau drawer that was built into the wall of the bedroom. She showed Jalina a white envelope that was taped to the wall inside the drawer space.

“If anything ever happens to me, I want you to come and get this,” Jan told her daughter.

“What is it?”

“It’s some of the child support money sent by your real daddy, in Texas,” Jan said, and replaced the drawer. Jan Miranda Roth had been a survivor for too long in her life to not put something aside for emergencies.

On the following day, as she was getting things ready to spend Thanksgiving with Randy’s stepmother Sandy in Washougal—Gordon by this time had separated from Sandy and was living in a different house across the road in Washougal—Jan told Louise on the phone about her dream. Louise later recalled that Jan didn’t really want to go to Washougal for Thanksgiving; she would rather be spending it with Louise and her children. Jan seemed to be thinking about divorcing Randy.

It was probably all her own fault, Jan told Louise; maybe she just wasn’t meant to be married. Jan was reluctant to give up the house, as Randy told her she would have to do if she left him; but maybe she would, anyway. There is something wrong over there, Louise thought as she hung up.