Thomas Randolph Would Have Gotten Away With Murder if It Hadn't Been for That Darn Ski Mask

In June 2017, Thomas Randolph's murder trial began in Las Vegas, Nev. His long hair, which was usually styled in a mullet, had been cut short. He was in these legal proceedings as he always had been in life: overly confident.

Randolph was accused of killing his sixth wife, Sharon Randolph, as well as a man he claimed was an intruder breaking into their home. This was not the first suspicious death that befell one of his spouses. Where is Thomas Randolph now?

Randolph was interviewed pretty extensively for the Investigation Discovery docuseries, The Black Widower: The Six Wives of Thomas Randolph. In it, you really get the full experience of a man that many believe is a narcissist. This man appears unable to accept responsibility for anything he's done. Despite that, he was found guilty in June 2017 and sentenced to death. The bulk of the state's case rested on the shoulders of a man named Eric Tarantino.

Tarantino worked with Randolph while the latter was married to his second wife Becky Randolph. At the time, Randolph was a pretty successful drug dealer who occasionally used Tarantino as a delivery guy. One day out of the blue, Randolph looked at Tarantino and said, "I want you to kill Becky," then showed him five life insurance policies he had in her name.

The question of prior bad acts came into play during Randolph's 2023 retrial. Back in 1986, he was charged with murdering his second wife Becky but was acquitted. While in jail awaiting trial, Randolph was busted for trying to hire an undercover cop to kill Tarantino so he couldn't testify then. That didn't work out and he was found guilty of witness tampering. While he didn't end up going to prison for killing Becky, he spent six years behind bars for witness tampering.

Terrified, Tarantino went along with it. The two of them spent the better part of a year going over the many different ways this could be achieved. One of them involved having Tarantino pretend to break into their home and shoot Becky. This scenario was relatively close to what happened to Randolph's last wife Sharon. So close, in fact, that Tarantino's testimony helped put his former boss away. That conviction was later reversed.

Because Randolph was acquitted, the Nevada Superior Court decided Tarantino's testimony in the previous trial was inadmissible. In other words, the prior bad acts were not relevant or fair when it came to the retrial. It was now up to the state to use what evidence they had to secure another guilty verdict.

Randolph described himself as a man who loved love, which means staying faithful wasn't in the cards for him. In the retrial, the woman he cheated on Sharon with testified that Randolph asked her to get life insurance policies in his name. This was used to establish a pattern of financial gain. And while this wasn't mentioned in the retrial, it's important to note that Randolph took out life insurance policies for all of his ex-wives.

The night Sharon died, the couple had come from an evening out. She walked into the house first and was shot by an intruder who was then shot by Randolph. This so-called burglar was actually a handyman named Mike Miller who Randolph hired to do work around the house. The state argued that this man was barely doing work for them which led to the robbery. The prosecution was left with forensic evidence.

After the "break-in," Randolph volunteered to be part of a recorded walk-through around his home, with police. It's in this video that he makes numerous mistakes. The biggest being a ski mask found lying next to Miller. Randolph said after he shot Miller, he pulled off a ski mask to see his face. The ski mask had no bullet holes in it. It was a real Scooby-Doo moment that got Randolph another guilty verdict but this time he only got 60 years to life which, at his age, is a death sentence.