31 “I Don’t Want to Tell You Anything …”

As December unfolded, Randy went back to the routines he had established before marrying Jan. Greg went back to the babysitter Randy had been using before Jan put her foot down. He continued to work on the trucks at Vitamilk. And he continued to see Tim Brocato.

Tim was very troubled. He asked Randy what had happened to Jan, and Randy gave him a terse description. When Tim pressed for more details, Randy clammed up. Tim realized Randy didn’t want to talk about it. But Tim noticed changes in Randy’s behavior. Randy seemed very nervous, keyed up. He would sit for hours in the darkness, not sleeping. He frequently threw up and was convinced someone was watching his house.

Tim finally had to admit it: he was pretty sure Randy had killed Jan. The Halloween talk about killing wives, followed by Jan’s fearful dream, and then Jan’s death, convinced Tim that Randy had murdered her. So Tim was afraid of Randy; his friend seemed capable of anything, especially now that he was so edgy. Randy, Tim remember, was the guy who could sneak up on someone and garrote them without a second thought. Hadn’t Randy done those things in Vietnam? To babies, even?

By the first week in December, Undersheriff Blaisdale had talked to Steve and Shelly Anderson, the hikers on Beacon Rock. The Andersons told Blaisdale about their encounter with Randy on the trail.

Randy had acted “confused,” the Andersons said, and had asked them if they had seen his wife, saying she had “disappeared” while trying to take a picture, and that he was afraid she might have fallen. Blaisdale noticed the discrepancies in the story, but did not immediately recognize their significance. Everyone agreed that Randy initially seemed to be in some sort of panic, and it was always possible that because of the trauma of the events, the Andersons themselves may have gotten confused about what Randy said. But Blaisdale still smelled something rotten about the incident and was determined to keep on digging.

Throughout December, Blaisdale interviewed people in Seattle who had known Randy and Jan. It didn’t take him very long to reach Louise Mitchell.

Mitchell was hardly Randy’s biggest fan, but she wasn’t able to tell Blaisdale anything that shed much light on the possibility of murder. And the more Blaisdale dug into Jan’s past life, the more he realized that it was possible that Jan might have killed herself. At one time, Blaisdale discovered, Jan had felt suicidal in Dallas.

Louise Mitchell told Blaisdale Randy and Jan’s marriage seemed to be good, that she knew of no violence between them. But, Louise said, she felt that Jan wasn’t entirely happy in the marriage. She’d lost her independence, Louise told Blaisdale, and was beginning to feel that she’d gone into the marriage too quickly. Louise told Blaisdale about Randy’s “war record,” and told him that Randy did have a violent temper and could be capable of violence. Louise thought that Randy had once been arrested for assault. Louise told Blaisdale about the life insurance; Jan had told her about the policy, but Louise wasn’t sure exactly how much it was for, although it was in the thousands, she believed. The insurance, she said, might have been Randy’s prior to the marriage.

Louise also complained that Randy hadn’t bothered to tell her about Jan’s death, that she’d had to call him. Louise told Blaisdale that Jan was worried that Randy had been seeing another woman, Greg’s former babysitter, and gave the undersheriff the woman’s name. She didn’t know what to think, Louise concluded. If Randy did have something to do with Jan’s death, she hoped Blaisdale would be able to prove it.

Just before Christmas, an investigator for the life insurance company came to see Randy. Randy answered all of the man’s questions but didn’t volunteer much information. He told the investigator that Jan had slipped on some pine needles as she went over the cliff. That was pretty specific, and completely different than what Randy had told Steve and Shelly Anderson. The investigator thought that Randy’s statements to the Andersons might have been made under emotional distress and therefore not very accurate. However, this Randy, the investigator thought, was calm and collected. “His answers were very brief, very concise,” the investigator later recalled. “He didn’t elaborate on any, any statements whatsoever.”

Randy seemed very cold, very matter of fact, the investigator thought. The investigator filled out a report, wrote a statement of Randy’s version of the events, and had Randy sign both. He left.

Meanwhile, Randy continued to see Greg’s babysitter when her husband was not around. The husband, however, had grown suspicious of his wife’s behavior around Randy over the previous year; she became teasing and more flirtatious when Randy was around. The husband confronted his wife and accused her of having an affair with Randy, but she denied it, telling him he was imagining things.

One night in late December or early January, however, the husband came home early from a night school class and discovered Randy and his wife lying in front of the fireplace together. The husband later confronted his wife, who again denied there was anything going on between her and Randy. But the husband didn’t believe her.

The following day, the husband went to Randy’s house and confronted him there.

“I told him that I believed he was seeing my wife and I wanted him to stop,” the husband said later. “And he said to me, ‘No, I wasn’t.’ And I said, ‘I have proof.’ And he said, ‘No, you don’t.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ And then he said, ‘She wanted my attention.’”

“What did you respond?” the husband was asked.

“I told him if he did not stop bringing his son over to babysit and if he did not stay away from our house, I was going to go to the prosecuting attorney who was involved in the death of Jan, and tell them that he was involved with my wife at the time of Jan’s death and was involved with her while they were married.”

Randy again denied having an affair with the man’s wife. But he stopped bringing Greg over for babysitting and he stopped seeing the man’s wife.

“Did you go to the Skamania County sheriff?” the husband was asked years later.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“I was afraid of him,” the husband said.

The Skamania County Sheriff’s Office would likely have been very interested in the husband’s story, however. By early January of 1982, opinion was hardening that Jan’s death was suspicious. By that time, Blaisdale had discovered that Jan had been insured for $100,000, with Randy as the beneficiary. That at least provided a motive for Randy to kill his wife, Blaisdale thought.

In late January, Blaisdale dispatched a Skamania County deputy sheriff, Mike Grossie, to interview Randy at Randy’s Mountlake Terrace house. After Grossie made the appointment, Randy called Tim Brocato and asked him to come over to “watch Greg” while he answered the deputy’s questions. Years later, Marilyn Brenneman would suggest that Randy wanted Tim present so he could make sure Tim didn’t say anything bad about Randy to the Skamania authorities without his knowledge.

Tim tried to eavesdrop on the conversation, but only picked up bits and pieces. One thing Tim apparently did not overhear: Randy told Grossie that he had been in the Marines for only ten months, and that he had seen no combat. Thus, Randy made Louise’s earlier suggestion that Randy might have been a stressed-out war killer seem like some sort of sour-grapes fantasy on Louise’s part. But Tim, not hearing this, continued to believe Randy was a combat veteran for years afterward.

Randy explained about the insurance and said he and Jan both considered it mortgage insurance, to help pay off the house. He confirmed calling the clinic to ask for Jan’s Social Security number. He hadn’t told anyone at the clinic, or Louise Mitchell, about Jan’s death, Randy said, because he “didn’t like to be the bearer of bad news.”

What about the babysitter? Grossie hadn’t talked to the woman’s husband, but knew that Louise had said Jan was suspicious that Randy was having an affair with the babysitter. Randy told Grossie that the babysitter had watched Greg before his marriage to Jan, and that after the marriage the two women had become close friends.

Grossie asked Randy to again describe what happened on Beacon Rock. Grossie wanted to clear up the discrepancy over whether it was Randy or Jan who had been in the lead.

“He also stated that Janis was definitely in front of him on the whole climb and does not know where anyone got the idea that she was behind him in the climb,” Grossie later reported. “He stated that with her in front he felt there was a little more security in case something happened, he would have been able to help her. He stated that when they got up to the top of the shortcut and she made a turn to the right, when she put her left foot down and put her weight on it, her left foot slipped off a rock, causing her to fall and go down off the side of Beacon Rock.” Grossie did not ask Randy any questions about the Andersons’ report that Randy had told them that Jan had simply “disappeared” while she was trying to take a picture.

Grossie did ask Randy to take a polygraph test, however. Randy didn’t want to. “In regards to a polygraph test, Randy stated that he does not feel a polygraph test would be accurate. He stated that he does not want his emotional feelings to be interpreted as incrimination. Randy also stated he felt the polygraph would do more to prove a person guilty than to prove them innocent.

“In conversation with Randy, I could not tell if Randy was genuinely remorseful or if Randy was putting on an act,” Grossie reported.

After Grossie left, Tim tried to talk to Randy about the interview. “Why was he here?” Tim asked. “Why are you being investigated?”

“I don’t want to tell you anything you’d have to lie about later,” Randy told Tim. After that, Tim decided to shut up about Jan. No way was he going incur the Wrath of Randy, Tim decided. No way.