He Had Six Wives. Four Died. Was He a Serial Killer?
One of the biggest benefits of the internet is that it affords people the ability to Google individuals they’ve begun dating to see if there are horrific skeletons in their closets. That resource would have been invaluable to at least some of the six women who married Thomas Randolph, a Nevada man whose spouses had a strange habit of turning up dead after he had taken out multiple, sizable life insurance policies on them. Randolph’s messy past earned him the nickname the “Black Widower,” and it came to a head with the demise of his sixth (and, to date, final) wife Sharon, who on May 8, 2008, became the latest of his partners to lose her life under mysterious circumstances.
Over the course of three episodes that are guided by prison interviews with its homicidal subject, ID’s The Black Widower: The Six Wives of Thomas Randolph (July 15) details the bizarre saga of Randolph, who claimed that on that fateful 2008 evening, he and Sharon opted to skip a movie and return home to have sex. When he entered the house shortly after her, Randolph says he found her lying motionless on the floor, at which point he became spooked and grabbed his gun. When he spotted a masked intruder, he opened fire in his hallway, killing the man. A 911 call played at the outset of the docuseries sums up his version of events, with Randolph making clear that he had felled a stranger who appeared to have shot his wife.
As it turned out, that person was Mike Miller, a handyman whom Randolph had hired to do various odd jobs around the couple’s Las Vegas residence. A bag of jewelry lying beside Mike suggested that he had been robbing the home when Sharon arrived, and thus he had killed her in a surprised panic. From the moment he stepped inside the residence, however, Las Vegas Detective Dean O’Kelly thought something was off about the entire scene. And in the wake of his initial interview with Randolph, he had the grieving husband visit the house to record a video walkthrough of what had taken place. Much of that footage is replayed in The Black Widower, and it paints Randolph in an unflattering light, not only because he seems out of it (the result of drugs), but because he discusses Sharon—and the grossness of trying to resuscitate her—in a cold, unemotional manner.