35 Burgled

By late August of 1988, Randy was again in trouble at work. For some time he’d been feuding with several of his coworkers, including the parts manager and at least one dispatcher, the service representative who took the orders for car repairs from the customers. On one occasion, Randy challenged one of the dispatchers, a man in his sixties, to a fight. The frictions continued to build; as far as the parts manager was concerned, Randy was a know-it-all jerk who liked to act tough and cause everyone problems. Thus, in early September, Randy was fired.

Randy’s initial reaction to his loss of income was to call Mary Jo and ask her for money. Mary Jo gave him $500. Randy applied for unemployment benefits, but they wouldn’t be approved for a week. What to do? Randy called Mary Jo again, but now Mary Jo was tapped out. Randy asked her if he could sell the player piano she’d left at his house. When Mary Jo said no, Randy criticized her for being too materialistic.

Later, when reviewing Randy’s life and his behavioral pattern, Peters and Mullinax noticed that Randy’s predilection for breaking the law seemed to surface every time Randy ran into major financial difficulties: he robbed the tire store when it looked like he was going to have to become a teenage father in 1973; he burgled the Kirkbride residence after he’d lost his job at the gas station in 1974; he had Janis’ car “stolen” in early 1981 to escape the car payments; he might have shoved Janis over the cliff in late 1981 when the house payments got to be too much; he advised Tim Brocato to break into his own house to establish an insurance claim in 1985; and he “invested” in Donna Clift in 1985 just as he was about to be fired at Vitamilk, an investment which paid off in a new job at Cascade Ford.

Now, in September 1988, Randy returned to the Brocato model, just as he had told the Goodwins’ daughter he would do if things got tough.

On September 17, 1988, five days after Randy made his claim for unemployment benefits, the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Department received a call reporting a burglary at Randy’s house. Randy met the deputy sheriff and told him what he thought had happened.

Randy said he’d been away from home from about noon until eleven that night and had returned to find that someone had broken a rear window in the garage, then backed up a trailer to the rear of the garage by using the power line access road. Then the burglars had cleaned out the garage and the house, Randy said. He’d already contacted the neighbors, Randy said, but nobody saw anything.

The deputy sheriff looked over the scene, noticing numerous upended drawers and a depression in the backyard where it appeared someone could have backed up as many as several vehicles. Despite the vast amount of property that appeared to have been carted off, the burglary looked routine to the officer. Randy told the deputy that all of his extensive tool collection had been taken, but didn’t say how much the tools were worth. He said two chain saws were gone, a safe, $960 in cash, a television, Greg’s Nintendo game, and numerous other items. The carpet was torn up in two different places. It looked like it had been cut with a knife, then peeled back. The deputy filled out a routine report of the burglary, gave a copy to Randy and told him to file a detailed list of the items taken in the next few days. The deputy left without questioning any of the neighbors. Had he done so, he would have discovered that Marta Goodwin, living right next door, had never talked to Randy that night, despite Randy’s assurances to the police that none of the neighbors heard a thing.

Randy’s burglary was the talk of the neighborhood the following day. Marta Goodwin heard about it from Randy himself.

“He said he had gone down to Renton to help a friend work on a car, and that he had come home and found that his belongings were all gone,” Marta recalled later. “And it scared me because—I said, ‘Well, what time was this?’ And he said, ‘Well, it was between eleven and twelve o’clock.’

“And I said, ‘Gosh, that’s really bad because I was right in the bedroom the whole time and I didn’t hear anything. That really scares me that these people were in my backyard and I didn’t know it.’”

What also scared Marta Goodwin was that none of the Goodwins’ three dogs barked, and neither did Randy’s big German shepherd, Jackson, who usually barked all the time.

Marta asked Randy why Jackson hadn’t barked. Randy told her that Jackson had been drugged by the burglars, and that he’d found Jackson passed out in the back of his house when he got home.

Several days later, the Goodwins’ daughter—by this time fifteen years old and living elsewhere—stopped in at the Goodwins’ and was told about the burglary. That didn’t surprise her at all, she said; Randy had told her months ago that he intended to rob himself. Then the Goodwins’ daughter told her family exactly what Randy had said he would do, right down to the broken window and the torn carpet.

But because of the girl’s often emotional dealings with Randy, none of the Goodwins initially believed her. And in fact, Ben Goodwin advised her to say nothing to anyone about it; he was afraid that his stepdaughter’s love-hate feelings for Randy were causing her to make up the entire story. If it got around that she was saying such things, Ben believed, it might be considered legal slander.

Thus, several months later, after Randy put in a claim for $57,000 in losses from the burglary, neither Ben nor Marta said anything about what their daughter believed to the insurance investigators, who had become suspicious that Randy was trying to cheat on his policy.

The insurance investigation, which was ultimately to result in a lengthy lawsuit between Randy and the insurance company, brought an end to the friendship between Randy and Ben Goodwin.

Ben had been visiting a relative in California when the burglary took place. Afterward, when Randy made his claim that nearly $40,000 in tools was taken from his garage, he listed Ben as a witness that he indeed had had an extensive tool collection.

The insurance investigator dropped in on the Goodwins to verify Randy’s claim. Ben said he’d seen a lot of tools at Randy’s house when they worked on cars together. The investigators accepted that, and then spent a fair amount of time talking to Marta about Marta’s family in Nebraska. The investigator left about an hour later.

But Randy had been watching the Goodwins’ house and clocking the time the investigator spent with the Goodwins. Doubtless he was worried that Ben and Marta had repeated to the investigator what he had previously told the Goodwins’ daughter about robbing himself. Later, Randy confronted Ben.

“Randy got real cold to me after he [the investigator] came to our house,” Ben recalled later. “He got real vindictive to me one day out in the yard. About how the investigator was in my house for more than an hour, and what the hell did I have to talk to an investigator about him for over an hour?” Ben denied the investigator was in his house for so long. But Randy was sure Ben had cast suspicion on him, especially after the insurance company balked on paying off.

With his insurance scam temporarily derailed, Randy had to find a job. After about six weeks of unemployment, Randy found work as a truck driver in late December. When that job petered out, Randy went back on unemployment. Meanwhile, Ben Goodwin and the other Goodwins began noticing that some of the items they thought had been taken in Randy’s burglary were starting to appear again in Randy’s house. Over the next few months, as more and more of Randy’s supposedly stolen possessions came filtering back, Ben and Marta began to conclude that perhaps their daughter had been telling the truth about Randy all the time—about everything.

In early March of 1989, Randy got a new mechanic’s job at another Ford dealership, this one in Seattle. Suddenly, Randy had tools again, and at least an income. But Randy was by now looking for something better. He was looking for another mate.