A rose for her grave : and other true cases--Anne Rule's Crime Files: Vol. 1 by Rule Ann

Author:Rule, Ann
Format: epub
Tags: Roth, Randy, Murder, Criminals
Publisher: New York : Pocket Books
Published: 1992-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

By the time Randy Roth's trial date fast approached in early 1992, Detective Randy Mullinax had interviewed seventy people; Detective Sue Peters had made 498 entries of phone calls, interviews, and actions taken in the case and produced results similar to the old Russian diminishing peasant puzzle, where each doll holds a smaller doll inside—a case within a case within a case within a case. Their investigation had gone from accidental death to possible foul play to similar "transactions" in the past to murder charges, and the two detectives had uncovered side issues of insurance fraud, robbery, child abuse, and all manner of con games. To muddy up their investigative waters, Randy Roth had proved to be a man who stepped from one phase of his life into the next as if moving through an invisible curtain. Each phase meant a new woman and often a new job, new friends, a new house. The only real constant in his life was his son Greg, whom he alternately pampered and disciplined with harshness that bordered on cruelty.

If anyone knew just who Randy Roth was, Sue Peters and Randy Mullinax did. And yet they wondered if it was possible for any human being to really know what forces drove him.

He was really Randolph G. Roth and nobody else; they had tracked him from his birth on December 26, 1954. He was a skilled mechanic. He had been married four times, divorced twice, widowed twice.

And he hated women. If he did not harm them physically, he left each woman who cared for him worse off in some way.

The question was, as it always was, why?

Gordon and Lizabeth Roth had come from Bismarck, North Dakota, to the Seattle area sometime in the late 1950's. Randy would have been five or six then. His brother David was born in Richardton, North Dakota, a crossroads with 600 citizens, three years later. No one could really say what the Roth siblings' childhoods had been like. Randy had told Ben and Marta Goodwin that he had been forced to kneel for hours on a hard floor. Were those memories true? Or were they simply part of the elaborate life story he had manufactured out of whole cloth? Randy's tales of childhood punishment would never be corroborated, but something had gone terribly wrong; both of Gordon and Lizabeth Roth's sons had been arrested for the murder of a woman. One had long since been convicted and the other was now awaiting trial.

The King County detective team could find little evidence of family solidarity among the Roths. Randy had shut the door against one sister and her babies on Christmas Eve. He had told so many lies about his mother that his friends really didn't know if she was dead or alive.

The Roths had apparently been staunch Catholics, but that hadn't prevented Gordon, a plumber, from leaving Lizabeth in 1971. Randy would have been about sixteen then. Gordon was ordered to pay his ex-wife $375 a month in child support. It wasn't enough; Lizabeth qualified for welfare.

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