43 Nothing There

The same morning, the day after Randy’s arrest, the prosecutor’s office filed its information formally charging Randy with first degree murder. Brenneman attached a nineteen-page affidavit of probable cause to the official charge. The affidavit outlined the facts of the state’s case against Randy and included the background of Randy’s marriages to Donna Sanchez Roth, Janis Miranda Roth, Donna Clift Roth, as well as his courtship of Mary Jo Phillips, his seduction of the Goodwins’ underage daughter, and his approaches to Stacey Reese, including the invitation to Reno less than a week after Cindy’s death.

The facts about Jan’s death at Beacon Rock in 1981 were recounted. The witnesses to Randy’s behavior at Lake Sammamish were quoted, as were the observations of paramedics and hospital workers. But Brenneman didn’t specifically spell out how all these events tended to show Randy’s guilt in the death of Cindy; instead, Brenneman’s recitation of Randy’s history was meant to be taken together as powerful circumstantial evidence that Randy had indeed murdered his last wife. Brenneman asked that bail for Randy be set at one million dollars.

As George Cody read over Brenneman’s affidavit, he was almost instantly aware of what his strategy would have to be. Cody believed that the whole case against Randy was based on fate, on circumstances, most prominently the death of Jan Roth a decade earlier.

Just as Lee Yates had predicted months earlier, Cody concluded that much of that evidence, maybe all of it, would never be allowed to come before a jury.

How could Jan’s death be proof of what happened to Cindy? Randy hadn’t even known Cindy when Jan died, Cody reasoned; he would have had no way of foreseeing what would happen a decade in the future, so the two events were completely unconnected. And if they were unconnected, the first event couldn’t be included in a trial on the second.

What, after all, was the relevance of Janis Roth’s death to the death of Cindy Roth? Just because a man had two wives die in tragic accidents didn’t mean that he had killed either one of them, Cody knew he would argue.

The state, Cody concluded, was attempting to bootstrap its case by circular reasoning: we know Randy killed Cindy because Jan is dead, and we know he killed Jan because Cindy is dead. That just wasn’t allowed.

Cody thought the prosecution’s case would therefore collapse. This was the purpose the “prior bad acts” rules of the evidence code, Cody thought: to prevent a prosecutor from using unrelated facts that might tend to make a defendant look bad as a means of convicting in a completely separate case.

Furthermore, thought Cody, where was the proof that Cindy had actually been murdered? Hadn’t the medical examiner already ruled that Cindy’s death was the result of an accidental drowning? The law compelled the prosecutor to present evidence that a murder had in fact taken place.

This was the so-called corpus delicti rule—requiring that not only that a dead body must exist, but evidence that the dead person has died from obviously criminal means.

In the case of Cindy, that simply wasn’t available, Cody concluded. No one was saying, for example, that they saw Randy hold Cindy under the water until she was dead. Nor was there any physical evidence to show the drowning had been anything other than a tragic accident.

Nor would the observations of Randy’s emotionless behavior at the beach and at the hospital be admissible. As Yates had predicted, Cody believed those accounts would be ruled out as “opinion testimony.” What relevance did those accounts have, anyway? Since when was it a crime to show no emotion?

Still other portions of the story of Randy as proposed by Brenneman would similarly have to be withheld from a jury, Cody believed. The best thing to do, he reasoned, would be to force the state to put its case on trial before they were completely ready, then fall upon its disparate, hard-to-connect facts and attack them one by one until the whole thing fell apart.

“There’s nothing there,” Cody told others.

Meanwhile, Lori Baker was hearing some disturbing stories about Randy’s activities immediately prior to his arrest. As the personal representative of Cindy’s estate and the guardian of Tyson and Rylie, Lori had a duty to prevent Randy from selling the estate’s assets and keeping all of the money for himself.

Randy had already listed the Woodinville house for sale, even though he hadn’t put any money into it. Lori discovered that Randy had listed the house for $225,000—fully $50,000 less than what Cindy and he had paid for it a year earlier. Lori had a sharp dispute with Randy over the telephone about the sale before his arrest; Randy told Lori again that with Tyson and Rylie and their Social Security payments gone, he couldn’t afford to make the payments by himself. He wanted to sell the house and buy another one, he said.

As September unfolded, Lori learned that Randy had been selling other items, as well: the Isuzu Trooper, the four four-wheelers, the small bulldozer, and the $15,000 pickup truck Randy had bought the prior December. All of these vehicles were community property, Lori believed. Randy, she thought, had to be stopped before he completely gutted the value of the estate.

She consulted a lawyer, and four days after Randy was arrested, she sued Randy to have all the property declared community property, to force an accounting from Randy on what he had already sold, and to force him to disgorge any money he’d obtained from the sale of any items.

A few days later, Lori obtained the keys to the safe deposit box she had once rented with Cindy. She’d been curious for weeks about the box, ever since Randy had insisted to her in early August that there was no such box.

Lori knew there was a box, because she’d been there with Cindy and had even signed papers relinquishing her interest in the box over to Randy. After Cindy died and Randy began insisting there was no box, Lori had checked with the bank. Yes, the box did exist, but the bank refused to allow her to open it without Randy also being present. Randy, of course, said the box didn’t exist. It was a frustrating Catch 22.

The last time she’d been to the box with Cindy, it had contained a copy of Cindy’s will, wedding rings from Cindy’s marriage to Tom, a valuable pocket watch, some investment papers, and several other items Cindy wanted to give to Tyson and Rylie when they were older.

Now, with Randy in jail and Lori officially Cindy’s personal representative, Lori finally got permission from the bank to open the box to see if Cindy’s will was in it. On October 18, 1991, Lori went to the bank. Accompanied by two bank officials, Lori unlocked the box and looked inside. There was nothing there; it was completely empty.

Lori asked the bank people to find out the name of the last person who opened the box. The officials checked. The last person to open the box had been Randy Roth, on July 25, 1991—two days after Cindy’s death, and about two weeks before Randy insisted to Lori that the box did not exist. Lori now concluded that Randy had rushed to the bank after Cindy’s death to destroy the will.