Randy Roth (born December 26, 1954) is a convicted murderer and thief from Washington. He was convicted of the 1991 murder of his fourth wife, Cynthia Baumgartner Roth, and he was suspected of murdering his second wife, Janis Roth, in 1981, but was never tried. In both deaths, he was the only witness. He claimed the activities that led to the deaths were the ideas of his deceased wives (“romantic” notions in both cases) and he had the bodies cremated as quickly as could be arranged. He was also convicted of stealing in the form of defrauding insurers and the Social Security Administration. In 1975, he was sentenced to one year for theft, then in 1992 was sentenced to 50 years for first degree murder.Ann Rule, A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases. At least two true crime books are based on Roth's crimes, A Rose for Her Grave by Ann Rule and Fatal Charm by Carlton Smith.Richard Seven, "Two New Books Profile Randy Roth" The Seattle Times (August 2, 1993)
Early life and family Randy Roth was born December 26, 1954, one of five children of Gordon and Lizabeth Roth. The family moved from North Dakota to Washington in the late 50s. Randy and his brother David, also a convicted murderer, later gave conflicting reports on the nature of their upbringing. David claimed their father was abusive and their mother supportive. Randy apparently bonded with his father more closely and remained in touch with him throughout his life while snubbing his mother, telling friends she was dead or mentally unstable. The Roths were practicing Catholics, but they nonetheless divorced in 1971. In 1977, David Roth was charged with the murder of a hitchhiking girl he picked up. The trial lasted from November 1979 to March 1980 and ended with a conviction; he served 26 years for the murder of Elizabeth Roberts.
Lizabeth Roth would later claim that her husband had been a strict, abusive parent who discouraged his sons from displaying any emotion and if they'd grown up lacking in empathy for other people, it was not her fault. Friends of Randy Roth would also describe his extreme misogyny and dislike of women or anything feminine. Only women who were submissive and did not challenge him met his approval.
According to former girlfriends, Randy had developed a reputation by high school of being a bully and a punk who enjoyed playing cruel pranks on others. He was dominating and controlling of his girlfriends, and his male friends were only those who toadied to him. He enjoyed fixing cars and driving them recklessly on country back roads. After graduating Meadowdale High School in 1973, Roth enlisted in the Marine Corps, wanting to emulate his movie hero Billy Jack. Shortly before his deployment he robbed a service station where he had previously been employed, but he was not charged with the crime at that time. Roth was disappointed at his time in the Marines as he ended up serving as a file clerk in Okinawa rather than the combat action he'd fantasized about. After less than a year, he was discharged when his mother (who was living on welfare) wrote a letter to the service protesting that it was a hardship to have him gone and he was needed home to support her.
Upon returning home, he became engaged to a girl named Terri Kirkbride. Her parents let Roth live in an empty house they were selling, but she broke off the relationship after finding another woman's purse in the house. A few months later, her parents' home was robbed and she told police that Roth was responsible. In addition, Kirkbride told them about the service station robbery two years earlier, which she said happened because she'd gotten pregnant and Roth needed money to get her an abortion. Charges related to the previous stick-up were dropped, and Roth served only two weeks in jail. Shortly after being released, Roth married the other woman he'd been seeing (Donna Sanchez). She gave birth to a son Gregg in 1978. Shortly thereafter and without any explanation, he filed for divorce and obtained custody of Gregg. Donna Sanchez retained visitation rights and periodically came to visit her son and former husband over the years.
Janis Roth
In early 1981, Randy Roth met Janis Miranda, also a divorced single parent, and they married that March. She had come from an impoverished upbringing in Texas, raised by a mother who labored to support her several children after their alcoholic father abandoned them. Marrying a serviceman, she gave birth to a daughter Jalina while stationed in Germany, but the marriage ended in divorce and Janis took her infant child to the West Coast seeking to begin a new life. Randy insisted on ample life insurance for his new wife as they were buying a house together and he told her he wanted to be able to pay the mortgage if the worst should come to pass. Janis had been extremely excited about her new husband, but after a few months, her friends started to notice that she was acting very strange and wary of everything. Shortly after the wedding, her Ford Pinto vanished and was later discovered in a field with its engine missing. She and Randy collected insurance money from the incident.
On the day after Thanksgiving 1981, Randy Roth took Janis hiking at Beacon Rock, where she plummeted to her death. There were no witnesses to the fall besides Roth and the stories he told to others about the incident were contradictory. Police and rescue workers were unable to locate the body for several hours after the fall, and it was later determined that it would have been virtually impossible for her to have fallen from where Roth claimed the accident occurred. Although some suspicion was raised at the time that Roth had pushed his wife, there did not seem to be sufficient evidence to proceed with an arrest and trial. A police detective interviewed Roth in his home two months after Janis's death, but failed to obtain any meaningful information.Richard Seven, "The Undoing Of Randy Roth – How Detectives Built Their Case Against Killer" The Seattle Times (April 25, 1992) Roth arranged the same day to have his wife cremated and filed a claim on her life insurance policy early the next morning, while failing to contact her friends and family and inform them of her death. He also planned to adopt her daughter Jalina, however Janis had already arranged that the girl was to be raised by her family in Texas should something happen to her.
For the next years after Janis's death, Randy Roth devoted himself to working as a mechanic and raising his son. He moved to a new house in Mountlake Terrace, where he befriended his neighbor Ben Goodwin and his family. The Roths and Goodwins remained good friends for most of the following six years, but Randy secretly seduced their teenage daughter, Brittany, with the promise of eventually marrying her when she was 18. Roth also told numerous fictitious tales of serving in Vietnam, making his brief stint as a Marine Corps file clerk appear as if he had been in action similar to movies like Hamburger Hill. Ben Goodwin, who was a Vietnam vet, became suspicious of Roth's stories. The latter never told his age to anyone, but Goodwin was skeptical that he'd really served in Vietnam.
Roth also upset the Goodwins with his harsh discipline of Gregg and after their son Ryan informed school counselors, he was put on probation by Child Protective Services for six months.
In 1985, Roth married twenty-one-year old Donna Clift, another divorced mother with a small child. Donna had gotten pregnant with her daughter, Brittany, while still in high school. Donna and Brittany's father married, but the marriage fell apart, and she moved from her native Arizona to Washington. Randy quickly talked her into marrying him, but as usual didn't tell her his age or much about his life beyond various contradictory stories. He upset Donna by playing various mean-spirited jokes on her 3-year-old daughter and becoming cold and aloof after the honeymoon. When Roth proposed adopting Brittany and becoming her legal guardian, Donna refused. While he wasn't home, she looked at some of his personal documents and tax returns in an effort to find out whatever secrets he was keeping from her. After only three months, their marriage ended when a family rafting trip on the Skykomish River ended in disaster. Randy went out with Donna alone on an inflatable raft, which he attempted to steer through the rapids into sharp rocks. A terrified Donna immediately filed for divorce afterwards.
Not long afterwards, he befriended Mary Jo Phillips, a divorced mother of three children. Roth became engaged to her, but abruptly broke it off when he found that she'd been treated for cancer once before and wasn't insurable.
Cynthia Roth Roth remained single until 1990, when he met Cynthia Loucks Baumgartner at one of his son's Little League games. Born in 1957, she was the child of an older couple who had a teenage son and had been trying unsuccessfully for years to have another baby. Raised in a deeply religious family, she married Tom Baumgartner at the age of 21, and their sons, Tyson and Rylie, were born in 1979 and 1981, respectively. Tom worked hard as a parcel carrier for the USPS to provide for his family, but in 1985 he suddenly came down with Hodgkin's Disease and died at the age of 29. Cynthia was well provided for with various survivors' benefits and the support of her family and close friend Lori Baker, and so she didn't need to work. Since she refused to marry a divorced man due to her religious beliefs, Randy Roth told her nothing about his marriages except that Janis Miranda had accidentally fallen to her death. That August, the two abruptly ran off to Las Vegas to get married, something that shocked Cynthia's family. Randy Roth quickly put up his house for sale and purchased a big new home in Woodinville where he moved with his new enlarged family. Cynthia gradually became aware that Roth felt a need to control every aspect of her life, and did not want her doing anything on her own. Friends noticed her appearance and her housekeeping, which had always been beyond reproach in the past, were given less and less attention, and that Cynthia seemed to regret her marriage to Roth. Roth was also physically and mentally abusive to all three boys.Jolayne Houtz, "Cynthia Roth's Young Sons Adjusting, But Still Grieving" The Seattle Times (July 23, 1992)
On July 23, 1991, just a few weeks short of their first wedding anniversary, the couple took Cynthia's two sons on a day trip to Lake Sammamish, the same lake where Ted Bundy had abducted two young women years earlier. As on the day of the Bundy abductions, it was a scorching hot summer day, with temperatures around the 90 °F mark when the Roths arrived and the beach was crowded. Randy and Cynthia left the boys to play in the designated swimming area while they paddled their inflatable raft into deeper waters. Several hours later Randy Roth returned with an unresponsive Cynthia lying in the raft. She was treated at the scene, but all efforts were unsuccessful and after being taken to a hospital, was pronounced dead. Roth claimed that the wake from a speedboat had caused the raft to flip while Cynthia was swimming next to it and she had drowned as a result.