A Twisted Nightmare - Part 3 - The Murder of Beckie Gault

Episode # 32 - The Black Widower - Part 3 - Beckie Gault

When the story around Sharon Randolph’s murder seemed to be increasingly full of holes, the investigation into Tom Randolph led investigators to find out about the 5 previous wives that Tom Randolph had had and sent them down the rabbit hole trying to learn more about his history and to interview the two women who had lived through being married to Tom.

Tom Randolph’s second marriage to Beckie Gault is a much longer story than the others, and just as tragic and horrifying. It's truly hard to fathom what this man has demonstrated that he is capable of. As before you'll recognize his patterns of abuse and manipulation that he is somehow so adept at.

[Shaun] 

Hi and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, where we focus on domestic violence, missing persons, and unsolved cases. I’m your host, Shaun, and with me as always, is the one and only John.

[John] 

I am the only John in the room.

[Shaun] 

This week we are bringing you Part 3 of our 4-part series on the Black Widower, Thomas Randolph. If you haven’t listened to parts 1 and 2, we recommend you do so before listening to this one.

We talked about Tom Randolph’s wives numbers 1,3,4 and 5 last week and the patterns are pretty clear. His first and fourth wives survived to tell the tale and became important sources of information for the detectives to establish their understanding of his patterns.

Do you want to start us off and tell us about his second wife, Bechie Gault?

[John] 

Of course. Rebecca (Beckie) Rae Gault was born December 28th, 1957 in Salt Lake City Utah. Her mom’s name was Martha Gault, and she had 3 siblings. Two brothers, Tony and Steven Gault,  a sister, Denice McGraw. And at least one cousin. 

Her cousin said that Beckie was a jokester, a prankster, and was always “the life of the party”. She was always fun to be around, and she loved spending time with her family. She always had time to chat if you were having a bad day, and she said she was the rock of the family group.

As you expect, Tom married Beckie shortly after they met. In fact, they were married on April 18th 1982, the very day that Tom’s divorce from Karthryn became final. At the time, Tom was 27, and Beckie was 25.

The two seemed happy at first according to Beckie’s family members, but of course that would all soon change. Tom was out of work, and you can probably guess what he did to bring in money. He started selling drugs, as he always did. (You can start to see why many newspaper articles on Tom simply refer to him as “drug dealer Tom Randolph” because that was, as we’ve said, the only job he ever held consistently.

[Shaun] 

When the money got tight, Tom got more and more abusive toward Beckie. Kathryn told investigators that Tom was a control freak and was a master at psychological abuse. His plan always seemed to be to break his wife down and make her feel worthless about absolutely everything, likely to make her easier to control.

That’s a common thing in relationships marked with domestic abuse. It obviously doesn't need to be physical abuse, it can also be psychological abuse, financial abuse, or a combination of them.

According to Beckie’s family, Tom went even further though. We know he was a lifelong drug dealer, but apparently psychologically torturing Beckie wasn't enough. He also got her addicted to drugs including cocaine.

With money scarce, Tom turned to Beckie’s aunt Rosalie for a loan. Apparently the drug business wasn't quite enough to sustain his lifestyle. He got a loan from her aunt, but instead of paying their bills, he paid the life insurance premium on the life insurance policy that he took out on Beckie right after they were married. Reporting on the size of the life insurance policy varies, with some saying it was a $250,000 policy and some saying it was as high as $530,000

Beckie grew depressed and miserable, but she was afraid of what Tom might do if she left.

[John] 

In desperation, Beckie reached out to Kathryn, Tom’s first wife for advice. They knew eachother because they’d cross paths when dropping off Justice and Krista. Katheryn told the detectives that Beckie had a lot of anxiety and fear about Tom, and that she told Beckie she needed to get out… that she needed to make a plan, but warned her not to let Tom know what the plans were.

She also said that she knew that Tom would get enraged if he knew the two were talking to each other.. And she expressed that she was genuinely frightened for Beckie.

In interviews, Tom talked about Becky in a way that makes it clear how he thought of her. It’s the type of description that might be taken as something other than the backhanded insult it was.

He said “Beckie was whatever I wanted her to be. I could call up and say Beckie, I want steak tonight and I want you to dress up as a clown to serve it to me.. And she would say ‘do you mean a sexy clown or do you want me to have big shoes and the honk honk nose?” “She didnt deserve me cheating on her”

[Shaun] 

As this time, Tom was much younger, and this was only his second wife, of course, and as things were getting worse, he came up with a plan that he’d repeat at least two more times in his life. He decided to find a person that he thought he could groom to murder Beckie.

Tom hired Eric Tarantino in the summer of 1984 as his handyman initially knowing that he wanted to groom him to be his flunkie/hitman in training. As with the others, he introduced the idea of killing Beckie slowly. 

According to Eric, Tom would actually sing songs about killing Becky, like the extremely weird song by Rod Stewart called “Foolish Behavior” which is about someone killing their wife and making it look like suicide, and getting away with it.

He had promised Tarantino “a portion of the life insurance money” for killing her.

Eventually, they only talked about killing Beckie, in fact if Tarantino tried to talk about anything else, Tom would get enraged.

Throughout the summer, the two brainstormed a variety of horrific ways they could have Tarantino murder Beckie and get away with it. They thought of things like 

• Setting fire to the couple’s trailer with Beckie inside
• Killing her in a car crash
• Taking a camping trip together, and parking the car on a hill, and then once Beckie was asleep in the tent, allowing the car to roll over her while she slept
• A hunting “accident”
• Pushing Beckie off a cliff into a raging river where she couldn't be recovered
• Switching her medications
• Knocking her out with chloroform, and making it look as if she’d fallen in the bathtub

In the end, Tom decided that staging a burglary was the way to go. The plan would be for Eric to kill her in the burglary, and then “shoot him in the leg or rear end” to really sell it.

[John] 

In the end, Eric couldn't and wouldn't go through with it, and he told Tom that. As you’d expect that didn't go over well. He told Tom that he wouldn't go through with it, and Tom freaked out, severely beating him.

He beat him so badly that he had an injured spleen, torn back muscles, and other serious injuries. Tom then put Tarantino in his car and drove him to his wife’s workplace, continuing the beating and just leaving him in the parking lot. Randolph then walked into his wife’s workplace and dropped off the bloody gloves he was wearing as he beat Eric on the counter where she worked.

Tarantino had to be hospitalized, of course, but after his release... Just a few hours later, Tom found him and beat him AGAIN, and stole his pain medications. He threatened to kill Tarantino if he told anyone about the beatings.

You might wonder how Tom got away with this, but remember that Tom was extremely charming, and grew up in the area so he had great relationships with the police and judges throughout Clearfield.

Eric Tarantino was just another victim of Tom Randolph’s violence and manipulation. One police officer compared Tarantino’s experience to “battered women’s syndrome”, noting that today we’d call that phenomenon "Trauma Response to Domestic Violence". Eric felt powerless in his relationship with Tom fearing for his life. He had no one to turn to and nowhere to go.

That really parallels the experience of many people in Tom’s life

[Shaun] 

Given what we know about Beckie, it isn't surprising that Eric grew to care about her and obviously was repulsed by the idea of murdering her for Tom for insurance money. He ended up warning her that Tom was planning to kill her, and then skipped town, going all the way to New Hampshire fearing Tom’s reprisal.

On November 7th, 1986, Tarantino got a call with news he was dreading. He was told that Becky was dead, allegedly by suicide from a self-inflicted single gunshot wound to the head.

According to Tom, Beckie had threatened to kill herself the night before she died. Allegedly Tom wouldn't allow her to go with him to Salt Lake City to buy cocaine, which they were both addicted to. He claimed that he found her in their bed with the pistol in her hand, neatly tucked in the covers. Tom said he moved the gun (no idea why) and then chose to drive to his father’s house to call 911. He made another call to his attorney, and the police found him at his father’s house.

There was a suicide note recovered, but Beckie’s family outright rejected the idea that she would ever commit suicide, and regarding Tom saying she had been addicted to drugs, they responded that “she was, but TOM got her addicted to drugs”. They also pointed out that she had seen a substance abuse counselor the day before she died. Allegedly the counselor said Tom had called and said of Beckie that people “will get what’s coming to them.”

Tom collected $250,000 in insurance money just 13 days later.

In testimony in 2017, Tom had this to say about Beckie’s alleged suicide “The last I talked to her, I gave her the ultimatum, said, I am so sick and tired of hearing about how you want to kill yourself. If you want to kill yourself, do it, do it and put it out. Everybody out of their misery… And I had to do was just hug her, say I love you. Everything will be OK. I think and I said there's some rope downstairs from, you know, I rappelled and stuff, and so I think there's some of my rope downstairs, maybe you just hang yourself.”

A medical examiner ruled the death a suicide but allowed for the possibility of homicide. Investigators including Detective Scott Connelly were suspicious of a few items that weren't adding up, and continued the investigation into what they called “other factors”

[John] 

Thomas was charged with Becky’s murder as a first-degree criminal homicide on December 8th, 1988, more than two years after her death. He was also charged with a second-degree felony charge of filing a false insurance claim. If found guilty he would potentially face the death penalty.

You'll understand why in a minute, but the records on the trial are scarce. The trial was presided over by a Judge named Rodney Page, and the star witness for the prosecution was of course Eric Tarantino who told the whole story about how Tom had tried to recruit him to murder Becky, and then when he refused, how Tom had beaten him severely enough to land him in the hospital.

The defense leaned hard into the idea that it was a suicide, and said that she was depressed and was “seeing her life crumbling around her” 

One of the investigators testified that it made no sense even physically. The angle in which Becky was found, the gun's positioning, and the bullet's entry angle were essentially an impossible angle. She would have had to shoot herself with the gun upside down in an area of her head very very difficult to reach. It just made no sense.

The case lasted about two weeks with 6 days of testimony and on Friday, April 14th, 1989, the jury returned a straight not guilty verdict in only 4 hours.

At the end of a murder trial where someone is acquitted of murder, if you’re familiar with true crime and know anything about court proceedings, that’s the time when a defendant is usually just released.

Well, in Tom’s case, as you may have come to expect even this early in his unbelievably murderous life, there is much more to even this part of the story.

[Shaun] 

Without  Eric Tarantino’s detailed testimony, it would have been extremely hard to come close to finding Tom guilty of murder. Tom knew that and given what you know about him by now you can probably guess what his solution to the “Eric” problem was. 

If you said “Hire a hitman to murder Eric”, you’re absolutely correct. 

Unbelievably, while incarcerated pending the beginning of his first-degree murder trial for killing his wife Becky for shooting her in the head Tom Randolph hatched a plan to have Eric Tarantino killed. Of course, this wasn't the first time and certainly wasn't the last time this kind of an idea came to him.

This time, his plan was to locate a hitman, and offer him $10,000 to kill Eric.

He mentioned his idea to a fellow inmate in the jail who promptly informed the police, who set up a sting operation. The hitman Tom got in contact with was actually an undercover police officer. The officer and he spoke on the phone, and the officer asked “Are you sure you want this guy whacked?” and of course Tom said yes. There is a recording of this conversation that was played at the trial. It seems quite clear.

Tom sent the woman who at the time was his girlfriend Wendy Moore to bring the payment (which included the title to Tom’s car plus a promise of a future cash payment) to the alleged hitman. It's worth noting here that she brought her young child along with her, and it was not at all clear if she knew what she was delivering or to whom. 

When the exchange was made Tom was charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Wendy was charged in connection with the crime also. He ended up pleading guilty to felony witness tampering in return for having a drug charge against him  and the case against Wendy dropped). The judge ordered Tom to serve “between 0 and 5 years in prison and get a $1000 fine) 

According to Utah law though, because he was found not guilty of the murder, he was able to get the murder case expunged from his record. 

It's unclear if Tom ever spent any significant time in prison for the “witness tampering”. His lawyer argues that the conversation between him and the undercover cop was ambiguous and could have had to do with a drug deal instead of a plot to murder Tarantino.

[John] 

Thomas wasn't done though. When he was acquitted, he promptly filed a 2.7 million dollar suit in February of 1990 individually naming 9 defendants in the Utah legal system, including the lead detective on the case, Scott Connelly. 

He was looking for $250,000 in punitive damages (the variety of damage meant to  punish the defendants for their behavior), and $50,000 in compensatory damages (those are for things like real economic damage for things like loss of work time, and also for things like pain and suffering)

In the suit he claimed that he was wrongfully prosecuted and subject to illegal search and seizure, denied his right to due process, and privacy, and on and on) He also specifically named the district attorney claiming he had a conflict of interest because his wife worked in the probation and parole office.. Saying that he made “slanderous comments” that affected how his parole was evaluated.

In November of 1991, he ended up settling not for $2.7 million but for $7500. A Davis County sheriff’s deputy, police detective Scott Connelly, and Davis County each paid $2750

[Shaun] 

That brings us back to 2009 and the continuing investigation that Las Vegas Metro Police detectives O’Kelley and Wilson were engaged in. It took them months of research chasing down information in Utah, North Carolina, Indiana, and Washington State among other places, but they were finally able to convince the Las Vegas District Attorney’s office to arrest Tom Randolph for the double homicide of Mike Miller and his wife Sharon Randolph.

Based on interviews with O’Kelley, it was clear that they were ready to bring Tom in. Everyone was feeling extremely frustrated he was still free in the face of what they saw as a very clear case and fact pattern.

Colleen was especially eager for Tom to be behind bars.. She had been afraid for her and her family’s safety for a while since the murder.

The Las Vegas detectives worked with the Clearfield Utah police on the arrest. You can bet that Clearfield police remembered Tom well given all he had gotten up to over the years.

They arrested him on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at his parents’ house in Clearfield and actually had to taser him when he wouldn't comply and show the police his hands. 

He was hiding one hand behind the door of his parents’ house ominously, and the officers had to act out of concern for their safety, knowing they were apprehending a dangerous criminal and charging him with a double homicide.

Next week we’ll cover the neverending delays that Tom engaged in to delay actually going on trial for murder, the trial itself, and the aftermath. 

Unbelievably Tom’s story didnt really end until April of 2024, 17 years after he arranged the murder of Sharon Randolph. The delay of justice in this case is an outrage with Tom making a mockery of the legal system at every turn.

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