On May 9, 2008, first responders in Las Vegas, Nevada received a confusing 9-1-1 call from resident Thomas Randolph. Randolph, 53 at the time, told police he and his wife, Sharon Causse, had returned home from dinner to see a masked intruder in their
home. He said that Causse, 57, had gone into the house first. But when Randolph walked inside, he found Causse shot on the ground and a man in a ski mask holding a gun.
Randolph grabbed his gun and fired multiple times, telling police he struck a man — who he later realized was his handyman, Michael Miller — in the head. But as police began investigating what Randolph insisted was a crime of self-defense, they found new information that made them critical of Randolph’s testimony: Causse wasn’t his first dead wife.
Directed by Chris Smith (Tiger King), Netflix’s new documentary The Widower: ‘Til Death Do Us Part explores the almost two decades it took the Las Vegas Metro Police Department to uncover Randolph’s long criminal history — all centered around his past marriages. Four of his six wives, including Causse, died under mysterious circumstances, eventually earning Randolph the nickname “The Black Widower” from the press.
Randolph was arrested in 2009 and charged in Causse and Miller’s death. But prosecutors took several years to gather enough evidence, and legal delays continued to push his trial back. In 2017, he was convicted of murder, and sentenced to death row. The documentary features interviews with people in Randolph’s life, friends and family members of his alleged victims, and footage and interviews with the investigative team that eventually put him behind bars.
Dateline producer Dan Slepian, who worked on the case alongside the Las Vegas Metro Police and was one of the only journalists Randolph agreed to meet with. “Randolph is the most unusual murder defendant I’ve ever covered by far,” Slepian told People.
Randolph’s statements and the crime scene didn’t match
Slepian first heard about the case from a contact in the Las Vegas Metro Police Department, days after Causse’s death. A producer for Dateline, Slepian often covered true-crime cases, and was intrigued by the details of Randolph’s interviews with police. In the days after Causse’s death, police detectives interviewed Randolph multiple times, both at the station and at the house he shared with Causse. In those interviews, there were clear inconsistencies between Randolph’s descriptions of what happened that night, and the physical evidence police gathered.
“My responsibility as the lead investigator is to document the crime scene,” Las Vegas detective Dean O’Kelley says in the documentary. “And right out of the gate there were things that weren’t adding up.”
Randolph told police that he fired at Miller as he ran toward the door that led to the garage. But the layout of the house meant that if someone was trying to escape, the easiest option would have been the back door. Randolph said Miller was masked when he entered the house and was still wearing the mask when he shot him. But police noted that Miller was shot in the forehead, and the ski mask was found on the floor of Randolph’s garage clean of any blood or bullet holes.
Randolph gave multiple confusing and often contradictory interviews to police. In one interview, police brought him back to the home and filmed him recreating the scene, mimicking grabbing his gun, finding Causse, firing off the shots that killed Miller in the hallway, and then calling 9-1-1. But there was only a single bullet in the hallway. Most of the gun residue, casings, and bullet holes were found in the garage. In the tape of the 9-1-1 call, Randolph can be heard disregarding paramedic’s orders, giving Causse chest compressions even after he was instructed to not touch the body. When police pulled up phone records, they showed it took Randolph almost 11 minutes after the shooting for him to call 9-1-1.
Causse’ daughter, Colleen Beyers, was immediately suspicious of Randolph
Colleen Beyers, Causse’s only child, told investigators that she was always suspicious of Randolph and his intentions with her mother.
The couple met on Match.com in 2005 and immediately got serious. After going on a cruise to Mexico in 2007, the couple came back married. “I was just like, ‘Oh God, who is this guy,” Beyers says in the documentary. “He looked a little wild. It was very quick.”
Three months into their marriage, Causse updated her will, leaving almost everything to Randolph. (Randolph also opened three life insurance policies for his new wife, worth around $350,000 total.) But when things got rocky, she secretly wrote a new one, making Beyers her sole beneficiary and special administrator. She told her daughter she made the change in secret because she was worried about how Randolph would react and felt like she was in danger.
“They fought all the time,” Beyers says in the documentary. “When my mom’s friend called me, cause she saw the news that a woman was killed on that street, I just knew right then it had to have been my mom.”
Following Causse’s death, Beyers told investigators that Randolph had begun leaving her increasingly threatening messages about Causse’s home and property. At one point, she called police to help kick him out of Causse’s home. As his erratic behavior continued, police began to suspect that Randolph had hired Miller to kill Causse, but double crossed him to avoid payment.
Randolph had been discussing murder-for-hire for decades
When police spoke to Miller’s friends and family, several individuals mentioned feeling odd or unsettled about Randolph and Miller’s interactions. Randolph had hired Miller as a handyman, and paid him $600 a week, but the pair spoke on the phone more frequently than Miller’s family considered necessary. Judy Archie, an old friend of Miller’s, told police that Miller had told her Randolph asked him to kill his wife. But since she didn’t witness the conversation, police say in the documentary that any judge would consider it hearsay and inadmissible.
But murder for hire was something that Randolph started discussing long before he married Causse. In 1975, Randolph married his first wife, Kathy Thomas, when she was 18 and he was 20. The two met through mutual friends, but Thomas says in the documentary that the relationship quickly became controlling and scary. She left Randolph and married their mutual friend, Steve Thomas.
When investigators told the couple about Causse’s death, Steve told police that Randolph approached him several times throughout their friendship and asked if he would ever kill someone for money. “I firmly believe that [Kathy] was the target,” he says in the documentary.
Randolph took out massive insurance policies on all of his wives
During their investigation, police found that Randolph had a pattern of opening policies out on his wives often months before their deaths.
In April 1983, exactly one day after his marriage with Kathy was finalized, Randolph married Beckie Gault. He took out three life insurance policies on her quickly after the marriage. But they had a contentious relationship. Gault, who suffered from depression, told her aunt Rosealie Allred that she was scared of him and he often forced her to sleep with other women. When Gault told her she was going to leave Randolph, Allred told investigators, she was excited for her niece to finally be home. But when she got a call days later, she knew that Gault was dead — and immediately suspected Randolph.
Initial police work ruled the death a suicide. But one detective on the investigative team, Dick Martin, was convinced there was foul play. He noted that the gun was placed in an awkward manner that would have been almost impossible for Gault to pull the trigger. But by the time he obtained a warrant to keep investigating, Randolph had been allowed back into the house. Everything was painted and cleaned, covering up any other potential evidence. Randolph collected close to half a million dollars from Gault’s life insurance policy.
During Martin’s investigation, Eric Tarantino, a former friend of Randolph’s, told police Randolph offered him $10,000 to kill Gault and make the death look accidental. The two of them often “practiced” killing Gault for at least two years, coming up with scenarios that would be easy to pull off or hard to find her body — but Tarantino said he went into hiding because he was afraid of Randolph. Randolph was arrested and charged with Gault’s murder. While he awaited trial, police claimed that he attempted to pay for a hit on Tarantino, who had agreed to testify in the trial. Randolph was found not guilty of Gault’s murder, but spent over a year in jail for witness tampering. After he was released, he sued prosecutors. He settled the lawsuit and his record was expunged.
In 1994, he married Leona Stapleton, who died of cancer after they divorced. But his expunged record meant he was able to date freely without his new romantic partners knowing his past.
“He knew how the system worked. There’s no question about that,” O’Kelley says. “And like everything else he did, he knew how to manipulate things too.”
Family members of Randolph’s dead wives — and his living ones — still have questions
In October 1996, Randolph married Gayna Allmon. In the documentary, she explains that she had no idea he’d spent time in jail, and it wasn’t until he was in a local bar fight that she had contact with police, who warned her that he was suspected of killing multiple wives. She, in turn, told investigators that Randolph had taken out an insurance policy on her.
News about his background made her nervous. But it took a near miss to get her to leave. Once, at their home, Randolph was cleaning his guns when one discharged, almost hitting Allmon. Randolph claimed it was an accident but Allmon says in the documentary that she was “extremely scared” and left him soon after.
In 1997, Randolph married Frances Randolph. The two lived in Indiana. When the documentary team spoke with her family, her sister Hilda Harp said that Randolph convinced Frances to have an elective heart surgery that her doctors had recommended. Tom “hand selected” the doctor that completed the surgery. But after several successful days of recovery, Frances died unexpectedly. The incident was never investigated as a murder, even though her family was convinced something was wrong.
Randolph sued the hospital for malpractice and wrongful death, settling for an undisclosed amount, in addition to Frances’ life insurance money.
“It seems like everybody he’s ever around, these women come up dead. He comes up with money,” Carolyn Austin, Frances’ sister, says in the documentary. “He’s always getting money.”
Randolph maintains his innocence
Even after his arrest in 2009, Randolph maintained that he had not killed Causse and had not hired Miller to kill her. He also said that he had not attempted to kill any of his other wives, often calling witnesses unreliable or accusing them of holding grudges. (He has never been convicted of any of his other wives’ deaths.) In 2017, he was convicted on the murder charges of Causse and Miller and sentenced to death row. But in 2020, the Nevada Supreme Court overruled the convictions — arguing that jurors shouldn’t have been allowed to hear information about Randolph’s previous wives, including Gault, and his time in prison.
Randolph was tried for a second time — with jurors kept from knowing any additional information about his ex-wives or past claims that he discussed muder for hire. In 2023, Randolph was convicted for a second time on one count of conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of murder with use of a deadly weapon, thus ending investigator’s and Beyer’s almost 15 year journey to get justice for Causse and Miller. Randolph is currently serving a 60 years-to-life sentence. He is expected to die in prison.
“Thomas Randolph manipulated the system in a way that I’ve never seen any individual do in three decades of this work,” Slepian says in the documentary. “If it wasn’t for people like Dean and Colleen, Thomas Randolph would be free today.”
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