39 “I Had a Damn Good Idea”

By the end of the first week of August, 1991, the lines were clearly drawn between Randy and the police.

Randy had talked to his lawyer, George Cody, and Cody wasn’t at all surprised that the police were interested in Randy in connection with Cindy’s death.

“I had a damn good idea of why they wanted to talk to him,” Cody later said. Cody advised Randy to let him handle all the contacts with the police from then on. Cody then talked to Mullinax and began negotiations for the lie detector test. According to Cody, Mullinax told him nothing would happen in the immediate future, so Cody took a short vacation. While he was gone, he read a 19th-century British case about a man who was charged with killing one wife, although evidence had been permitted to show that three others had died in similar circumstances. Cody had an idea the case might be relevant. Randy went back to work. He talked to Stacey Reese.

“Do they think you killed her?” Stacey asked.

“It’s all a matter of interpretation,” Randy told her. But other forces were about to be brought into play.

Just about the time that Peters and Mullinax were driving to Marysville to see Tim Brocato for the first time, the police department issued a request to the public for any information about the events at the lake.

Distributing the request was tantamount to a declaration of war between the police and Randy. Once the police revealed that they were seeking new witnesses, the news media jumped to the not unnatural conclusion that if the police were unsatisfied with the previous explanation of Cindy’s death, there must be something suspicious about it.

Within hours, reporters were calling the Woodinville house demanding to talk to Randy; one television station actually drove to the house and parked out front in a classic news media stakeout. Greg took the calls and immediately phoned Randy at work to tell him the reporters wanted to talk to him about Cindy’s death.

Randy quickly called Cody to ask him what to do, only to learn that Cody was on vacation. Cody’s office was able to reach him later in the afternoon, and after talking with Randy, Cody tried to figure out how to handle this latest development. But Cody, for his part, was furious with Mullinax. He figured the detective had conned him.

That night, Lori Baker called Randy at the Woodinville house and told him about the will, and that she would be the executor as well as guardian for the boys. That meant the boys wouldn’t be coming back, she said. Randy was very silent. They would be over to pick up the boys’ belongings on the following Saturday, Lori added.

The following day, while Cody was rushing back to Seattle from his aborted vacation, Peters and Mullinax met with Brenneman for the first time to discuss the case.

The most important thing, Brenneman said, was to concentrate on the crime itself, the murder. What were the facts of the crime? Would the facts be sufficient to justify a criminal charge, and would the charge stand up in front of a jury?

The raft, Brenneman said, was probably the key. Could the raft have flipped over, as Randy said? Was there anything about the raft itself that might be useful to prove that Randy was lying?

“We’ll need to have a reenactment,” Brenneman told Peters and Mullinax.

“We already have,” they said. The only way they could flip the raft over, the detectives continued, was by very nearly climbing into the craft while violently jerking it with the pure intent to turn it over.

Well, said Brenneman, what about the sacks? Weren’t they substantial evidence that the raft had never flipped? How did Randy manage to gather them all up? Was Cindy lying in the raft choking to death while Randy was swimming around in the lake gathering up all of his precious towels? Could he even physically do that without the towels sinking before he could get to them? And if that hadn’t happened, how did the towels get wet? Did Randy cause them to get wet on purpose? Was that inferential evidence that Randy was lying, an implication that he was already preparing a cover story even while Cindy was dying?

By resolving the central questions about the raft and the drowning, Brenneman told the detectives, it would be possible to move outward to other questions. If Randy was lying, why was he lying? What was in it for him if Cindy drowned? Were there any parallels between the death of Cindy and the death ten years earlier of Janis? Brenneman thought there probably would be.

Well, the man is clever, but he’s not smart, Brenneman thought to herself. Once he’s established a pattern that works, he’s going to follow it to the degree that it makes it clear that this is what happened.

Early that afternoon, Cody called Mullinax. What were the police trying to do to his client? The request to the public for information had caused Randy to be besieged by reporters. A television crew was camped outside his house, for Pete’s sake.

Mullinax was cool toward Cody. They’d only asked for any witnesses who might have seen what happened at the lake to come forward, he said. If the news media read too much into that simple request, well, that was their doing, not the fault of the police.

And by the way, Mullinax continued: while we’re talking, what’s all this about Randy holding a press conference? The media is calling us to ask what we know about what you’re doing.

It wasn’t going to be a press conference, Cody told Mullinax. Because all the reporters had been hounding Randy for statements, Cody told the detective, he’d decided to let Randy answer everyone’s questions once and for all in public. After that, Cody said, the media could take a hike.

Mullinax immediately called Brenneman. Would it be legal, he asked, if the police attended Randy’s press conference? Would it be okay if they taped it? Absolutely, said Brenneman, intrigued with the idea of having a videotape of a raw, uncut Randy Roth to study.

Brenneman had already realized that one of the major keys to the case would be Randy’s personality, and seeing Randy as he really was rather than as he might appear on the nightly news would give her a substantial assist. Mullinax arranged for two detectives in the department’s intelligence unit to pose as Canadian newsmen to tape the event.

Shortly after three that afternoon, a crowd of reporters swarmed into Cody’s law office. Among them were two undercover detectives. Cody realized that the news media was already suspicious of Randy.

The questions came pouring forth. Had Randy sought help? How could his wife have drowned so quickly? Had he tried to give her CPR? Was it true he’d been married before, and that an earlier wife had also died? Was there insurance? Cody began to regret inviting the press and grew surly. When one reporter persisted in asking Randy about his previous marriages, Cody advised Randy not to answer and then invited all the reporters to discuss their marital histories first.

There was nothing suspicious about Cindy’s death, Cody insisted. “Then why are we all here, then?” one reporter asked.

“Hey,” said Cody, “my office called you and said we were going to be here. Why you’re all here is your own business.”

After extended discussion about the events at the lake, someone asked Randy how he felt.

“Will you ever recover, obviously not, you probably don’t think so,” said the reporter. “But do you think life will ever return to normal for you?”

“It’s hard to say,” Randy said. “I could be optimistic and hope so.”

“Will you remarry?”

“That’s impossible to deal with, that idea at this time.”

“You’ve lost two wives, under tragic circumstances, how are you dealing with that emotionally?”

“I’m putting my trust in the Lord, I guess,” Randy said. “I’m hoping that He’ll guide me.”

The following day, August 10, was Saturday. Lori Baker, Tyson and Rylie, Lori’s mother, her brother-in-law and one of Cindy’s cousins arrived at the Woodinville house in a rented truck to pick up the boys’ things. Randy was alone.

“At first he was cordial,” Lori said later. “Like, ‘No problem.’” But when they went into the house, Lori and the boys saw that Randy had gathered up all of Tyson and Rylie’s belongings and had crammed them into plastic garbage sacks, just as he had with Cindy’s stuff the week before.

“Everything was just thrown into the big plastic garbage bags,” Baker recalled. “Rylie had a great big picture, color glossy, it was all crumpled. All of his Ken Griffey Jr. baseball cards were missing. You know, one of them was worth quite a bit, as collector’s cards go. All that was gone and all the stuff was just thrown into the bags.”

Rylie was very upset about this. Randy said he didn’t know anything about the Griffey cards. Then Randy began making a list of the things the kids were taking. But he wouldn’t let the boys take the four-wheeled motorcycles he had bought for them two days after Cindy’s death with Cindy’s money, or their crash helmets, and he wouldn’t let them take Rylie’s piano. Randy told Lori he intended to sell them to make the house payment.

“You can’t sell them, they’re community property,” Lori told Randy. Randy got mad at her.

“You come in and ruin my whole scenario,” Randy told her heatedly. He calmed down a bit and tried to explain.

The house payment was more than he could afford by himself, Randy continued; he’d been counting on the boys’ Social Security checks to make the mortgage payment.

But now that the boys were going to live with Lori, it would be Lori who would be getting the Social Security money, not him, Randy complained, getting mad again. He’d intended to quit his job and take care of the boys, Randy told Lori, but Lori’s assumption of custody had wrecked all of his plans. Now it would be Lori who would get to quit work, he said. Randy accused her of only wanting the boys for the money they could bring in. Lori and her helpers loaded the stuff as fast as they could and got out of there.