34 For the Birds

For the first three or four months after Donna left, Randy seemed unwilling to accept the situation; at least, that’s the way it seemed to Donna and her stepmother, Judy. They later remembered that Randy often drove by their house and made calls to Donna in an effort to induce her to come back to him. Yet Randy paid for the divorce, because Donna didn’t have any money. Randy later contended none of what Donna and Judy said about this was true, and that he certainly didn’t hang around the Clift house in any sort of attempt to woo Donna back. He was, he said later, just as fed up with Donna as Donna was of him.

Yet there is a similarity in this supposed behavior of Randy to his other relationships, namely, those with Terri McGuire in the 1970s, and later with Mary Jo Phillips in 1986, 1987 and 1988. Marilyn Brenneman later came to believe that Randy didn’t want the women so much as he hated to lose power over someone or something that he had once had in his grasp.

Randy’s stormy relationship with Mary Jo Phillips, which began in the spring of 1986, best illustrated this facet of his character.

Mary Jo was separated from her husband in the spring of 1986. She had five children, three of whom sometimes stayed with their father. Late one evening, after Mary Jo and her children had returned from an outing to the beach, Mary Jo went to the grocery store to pick up some food for a late dinner.

“And I saw this man and boy in every other aisle I happened to go into,” she remembered later. “And I was really windblown, and felt really, really silly. But they always managed to giggle and smile my way.”

Randy the charmer was back.

At the checkstand, Mary Jo saw the man and his son in front of her. “And they kept turning around and looking at me and whispering in each other’s ears and smiling,” she said.

As Mary Jo went to her car with her groceries, the little boy came after her. “Hey lady,” Greg said, “would you please go out with my dad?” And Greg gave Mary Jo their phone number.

Now, enlisting an eight-year-old boy to run interference in an approach to an unknown woman may seem a little unusual. But Mary Jo loved children, and in fact, she owned and managed a daycare center. Somehow, Randy had picked up the message that Greg would be the most effective emissary he could send on his behalf.

Mary Jo did call Randy about a week later. She talked to Greg. “He seemed like a fairly neat little boy,” she said. Mary Jo called again about a week later, and this time Randy had primed his message machine with a personal message for Mary Jo:

“Mary Jo,” the message said, “I’ve got to talk to you. Please leave your name and number.” Mary Jo decided to call Randy back one more time, and finally a date was made.

Randy met Mary Jo at a restaurant. “And when I went out to get in his truck, he took a picture of me and said something to the effect that. ‘I want some proof that I have had such a beautiful lady out with me.’ Really made me feel silly, but at the same time it was real flattering.”

Randy and Mary Jo drove into downtown Seattle. They intended to go to a restaurant, but the place was too crowded, so they took a romantic walk down the beach at Edmonds, along the sound just north of Seattle. The date lasted until about two or three in the morning.

Mary Jo agreed to meet Randy for breakfast on the following Saturday. Mary Jo put on nice clothes and curled her hair to look nice for Randy, because she thought “he was really a nice man.”

“And I opened up the door and he was carrying motorcycle helmets,” Mary Jo said. “And I thought, oh no, motorcycles. That means I’ve got to put this thing on, squish my hair and everything.

“Anyhow, he said, ‘Get your bathing suit.’ It was really a very dominant thing to say.” Randy had discovered a key to Mary Jo. She got her bathing suit. Now Sir Randolph had arrived.

Mary Jo climbed on Randy’s motorcycle and away the couple went, roaring off north toward the town of Bellingham, almost to the Canadian border. In the early afternoon, they stopped at a waterslide amusement park.

As it happened, Mary Jo was terrified of water because of a near-drowning experience as a child. “I didn’t know where we were going until we ultimately ended up there,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of this.’ I tried to make every excuse in the book.” But Randy insisted, and eventually Mary Jo did go into the water. “He made me feel like I should really trust him,” she said.

After that, Mary Jo saw more and more of Randy. “There was a real strong attraction. He was very, very much the gentleman. Only kissed me. He wasn’t all hands or anything like that. It didn’t matter to him that I had five children at the time. He was very respectful. Utterly, completely courteous. Brought me flowers. Always had nice things to say. He was the only person in my whole life that I really felt like I didn’t have to wear makeup around because he felt I was beautiful that way.”

The flowers, at first, came every week, Mary Jo remembered.

Later, Randy’s pursuers were to see in this courtship many of the elements of Randy’s pattern—some of the things that Randy did to first entice, then entrap women as his prey. Randy began each of his relationships with unfailing courtesy, romantic expressions, flowers, gifts—whatever it took to convince a woman that she was the only one in the world for him. And in each case, Randy found a hook, something that the woman needed or wanted or wished she had. Randy set the hook deep and began pulling, first gently, then harder.

“It was a very, very intense relationship,” Mary Jo said later. “Incredibly romantic. He had become to me the kind of man that every woman would dream about. He did everything right. He rubbed my back. He combed my hair. He dressed so that he was coordinated with what I was wearing. He showed me off. Made me feel real good. Was always full of compliments.”

With Janis, it had been security. With Donna Clift, it was stability and connection. With Mary Jo, it was romantic passion.

But Randy’s pattern also showed other, less readily apparent aspects of his character; his hatred of makeup—seen later with Cindy, as well—evoked comparisons to his earlier life with Lizabeth, who used makeup heavily, as well as his capacity to use women’s concern for their looks as a mechanism of emotional control.

Most importantly, however, the pattern followed by Randy seemed to indicate that Randy sought out women by some sort of test: what value would those women be to him? Janis, as things turned out, had been worth $107,500 in life insurance proceeds. Donna Clift, while not interested in life insurance, was useful for getting a new job. Now Mary Jo would be similarly useful to Randy. She would give him money because she was in love with him.

After several months of dates, in early July of 1986, Randy asked Mary Jo to move in with him. She agreed. She also started paying Randy $500 a month in rent. Soon Mary Jo brought over her furniture.

“There was,” Mary Jo remembered, “too many of everything, and so it was suggested that—and I don’t remember if it was him or if it was me—that we sell some of these things. I mean, obviously we can’t use them, and if our relationship is going to be permanent, then we don’t need them.” So Mary Jo sold her things. The money went into remodeling Randy’s recreation room and bunkbeds for the kids.

Much later, Randy was to say that he’d had no idea that Mary Jo had five children until the day he arrived to pick up her things.

“It was at a point when I arrived at her house with my truck and trailer to move her stuff that I discovered she had three more children,” he said. “She had two girls and another son from another father, and she also had a very large bird collection. She had, I don’t remember how many cages, but there was over one hundred birds, finches and canaries.”

The kids and the birds, Randy said, were much more than he had expected. “It took a lot of adjusting,” Randy said later in characteristic understatement.

But by early August, Randy and Mary Jo were talking of marriage.

When Randy in the past talked with women about marriage, he seems to have favored a certain code phrase. “I want you to get me your ring size,” he would say. Or, “Tell me your ring size.” Ring size. It was as if Randy believed the words “ring size” was some sort of hypnotic chant capable of beguiling the prey, keeping them transfixed on the big prize: Randy.

But more subtly, it was also a constant test of the relationship temperature for Randy. When, for example, in the mid-1970s Terri McGuire expressed reluctance about rings and engagement and marriage—when she wasn’t eager to engage with Randy in ring fantasies—it was a warning sign to Randy that control was slipping away.

So Randy urged Mary Jo to go to a jewelry store and get measured for a wedding ring. But about this same time, an event occurred which promised to throw off some of Randy’s plans for Mary Jo.

As noted, Mary Jo was, with her estranged husband, part owner and operator of a daycare center. This was not a daycare facility such as that run by Jan, but a former school building with ninety children a day and thirty employees. It was a thriving business. In fact, Mary Jo was making $56,000 a year from her part of the business. That kind of money impressed Randy even more than the rent Mary Jo was willing to give him, Mary Jo realized later.

As her divorce proceeded, Mary Jo and her estranged husband got into a fight over the daycare center. Mary Jo decided to give in.

“Rather than fight over the daycare center through a divorce,” she said, “I sold it to my husband, my ex-husband.” Her ex-husband agreed to pay Mary Jo fifteen hundred dollars a month and provide daycare for the kids.

But when Mary Jo told Randy what she had done, Randy was furious.

“He was real upset that I hadn’t discussed it with him, and I hadn’t. I don’t think he wanted me to get rid of it,” Mary Jo recalled. Randy, she said, was quite aware of how much Mary Jo had been taking in from the day care facility.

Unbeknownst to Randy, however, Mary Jo was becoming ill. About the time Randy was talking about ring size, Mary Jo went to the doctor and discovered that she had cancer. She didn’t tell Randy very much about this, only that she had been feeling a little sick. But when Randy brought up the subject of life insurance, it all came out.

“At that point I just laughed,” Mary Jo said later. “I said, ‘I’ve got cancer. I’m not insurable.’”

“What was his response?” Mary Jo was asked.

“He took it real well at that point in time,” she said. “But from there on out, it’s like we started seeing cold spots in our relationship, where for a couple of hours—I mean, this is the man that, you know, he would come home and come bounding up the stairs and say ‘I missed you all day,’ and give me the biggest hug and kiss and caress and make me feel so good—all of a sudden, for three or four or even two hours, it was like I didn’t exist.

“Or he would come home and he wouldn’t talk to me. I had made dinner, and he would go and make something else.

“And it started going so that more and more often as the days went by these cold spots, really cold, got colder and colder and longer and longer and the really warm, hot, passionate spots were less and less and less, until finally I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Mary Jo moved out, taking the birds and kids, but leaving almost all of her remaining furniture and other possessions behind. Later, her cancer went into remission. Randy took many of her belongings to a swap meet and sold them.

Having struck out with Mary Jo, Sir Randolph began looking for new worlds to conquer. It wasn’t long before he decided to invade the world next door—at Ben and Marta Goodwin’s.

For some time, beginning shortly after he met the Goodwins, the Goodwins’ daughter had been babysitting Greg for Randy. She was eleven when Randy met her. Soon she developed a crush on Randy. By 1985, when Randy was married to Donna Clift, the crush was obvious to everyone, including Donna. “I mean, you could tell,” Donna said later.

Now, in late 1986, the Goodwins’ daughter was thirteen. With the departure of Mary Jo, Randy again turned to the teenager to babysit for Greg, who was now nine years old. It wasn’t long before Randy seduced the impressionable young girl.

Years later, Randy’s pursuers were to consider just why Randy did this. It was obvious that the Goodwins’ daughter could provide no monetary incentive to explain Randy’s attentions. She couldn’t be insured, for example, nor could she give him any money.

But conducting a clandestine affair with the teen-aged daughter of his neighbors likely appealed to Randy’s desire for power and status. Not only was he able to capture the undivided and uncritical adoration of their daughter, he was able to put one over on his neighbors. That probably made Randy feel clever, some thought.

Naturally, it didn’t take long for the Goodwins to realize something was up.

Problems began cropping up in the Goodwin household, chiefly between Ben Goodwin and his stepdaughter. Surreptitiously, Randy exacerbated those problems by telling the girl that Ben wasn’t her real father and she didn’t have to do whatever Ben told her to do. That blurred the always delicate relationships inside such second families. Dormant emotional problems began emerging.

Ben and Marta sat down to discuss the situtation with Randy. They believed the problem was that their daughter had developed a teenage crush on their next door neighbor. Randy continually assured them that he was doing nothing to lead their daughter on.

“Randy assured my wife and I … he sat right at our table and we confronted him and said, ‘Randy, we need your help on this. This is a girl who is infatuated with you. And you, quite frankly, you’re not helping matters. You really need to get this under hand.’ And he swore to us that he wasn’t doing anything. That he would take care of it. And it only got worse,” Ben remembered later.

Despite his denials, Randy was making things worse. He had the girl come over to babysit on Saturday nights. Randy would drive away until Greg went to bed, then drive back to his own house, park several blocks away, and sneak back in to see the girl. In this manner, Randy continued to see the Goodwins’ daughter secretly throughout late 1986, through 1987, and into 1988.

Matters grew worse in late 1987, when Randy began courting Mary Jo Phillips again. The Goodwins’ daughter became very upset at this; Randy had promised to marry her when she was eighteen, yet here Randy was still seeing Mary Jo. Mary Jo was oblivious to Randy’s affair with his babysitter.

By June of 1988, the Goodwins’ daughter was emotionally unstable. Randy had made promises to her that he clearly had no intention of keeping. When the girl became upset with his behavior, Randy had the maturity and duplicity to smooth things over and keep her under his thumb. Randy convinced the girl that he was smart, in control, more clever than most men. In such a setting, it appeared, Randy felt comfortable boasting; in June of 1988, Randy confided to the Goodwins’ daughter that if he ever got into new money problems, he would know exactly what to do. He would, Randy said, burgle his own house and turn a huge claim into his homeowner’s insurance company.

First, Randy said, he’d remove all the stuff that he would say had been stolen and put it in a rented storage locker, then he’d break the window in the rear of his garage, and then he would tear up his own carpet and toss his house to provide evidence of the nonexistent burglars’ passage.

As it later turned out, that’s exactly what happened.