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What Happened to Sharon Randolph: The Twisted Story of The Widower

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When Dan Slepian got a tip about a “really weird case” brewing in Las Vegas, he was intrigued.

But, as the Dateline producer recalls in the new Netflix documentary The Widower: ‘Til Death Do Us Part, he had no idea he was about to embark on a nearly two-decade journey when he first heard about the murder of Sharon Randolph.

On May 8, 2008, at around 8:30 p.m., the 57-year-old was fatally shot in the Las Vegas home she shared with her husband Thomas Randolph. Also shot dead at the scene was Michael Miller, 38, who—according to prosecutors who later tried Randolph for murder—had been hired by Randolph to kill Sharon so that the widower could collect on four life insurance policies.

A ski mask and a bag of jewelry were found next to Miller’s body in the garage, but former Las Vegas Police Detective Dean O’Kelley, the lead investigator on the case, said in the documentary that Randolph’s story—his wife was shot by an intruder and he killed the intruder—and the evidence were “not adding up.”

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Slepian, who said he was granted “complete unfettered access” to O’Kelley’s investigation, started chronicling the case for Dateline practically from day one.

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They soon learned that Sharon had been Randolph’s sixth wife. While one died of cancer, only two of his previous five wives were still living. And, Randolph had been acquitted in 1989 in Utah of the murder of his second wife, Beckie Gault, after being accused of attempting to hire a hitman to kill her.

Randolph, who’s currently serving a 60-year prison sentence for the murders of Sharon and Miller, has maintained his innocence throughout, saying during his various trials and in numerous interviews with Slepian over the years that he did not kill anyone.

“I didn’t do nothin’,” the now-71-year-old told the journalist in a jailhouse interview while awaiting trial for the Vegas slayings. “I’m the victim in this.”

Read on for more details about the bizarre true story behind Netflix’s The Widower, now streaming:

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What happened to Thomas Randolph’s wife Sharon Randolph?Sharon Causse met Thomas Randolph on Match.com in the summer of 2005 and, after a cruise to Mexico in 2006, she informed her daughter, Colleen Beyer, that they were married. They swapped vows again in Las Vegas in March 2007.”Who’s this guy, you know?” Colleen told Dateline producer Dan Slepian, per archival footage shown in the 2026 Netflix documentary The Widower: ‘Til Death Do Us Part. “He moved all his stuff in, very quick.” And, Colleen said, “They fought all the time.”In a call he made to 911 from their Las Vegas home on the night of May 8, 2008, per a recording played in The Widower, Randolph said that his wife had been “shot bad” and he had just shot a man. (The deceased was identified as Michael Miller, 38.)”He’s in the garage,” Randolph said. “I know him. Mike, I don’t know his last name.”

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During a videotaped walk-through of the house with police a week later, as seen in The Widower, Randolph said that he had pulled into the garage with Sharon, but she went into the house first while he finished listening to a song in the car.When he went inside, he said, “she’s lying there” in the hallway. Then, Randolph continued, he thought he “saw a shadow” out of the corner of his eye, so he grabbed a gun from the closet in a room off the hall, and “I don’t know if I shot him once, twice.”Former Las Vegas Police Detective Dean O’Kelley said in the documentary that he thought it was suspicious that most of the shell casings were found in the garage, where Miller’s body was lying alongside a ski mask and a bag of jewelry, while Randolph told police he fired his gun in the hall before chasing him into the garage. And, the detective noted, if an intruder had entered through the back door, why wouldn’t he have run out the same way when he heard the garage door opening at the front of the house?But while O’Kelley said he noticed “red flags,” there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest Randolph at the time.

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What was Michael Miller’s connection to Thomas Randolph?Miller’s brothers Rufus Miller and Reco Miller, as well as his friend Judy Archie, told O’Kelley that Mike had moved to Las Vegas to seek a better life and he’d said he was making $600 a week working as a handyman, per archival interviews shown in The Widower.Reco said that Mike told him he got a gun “from the white guy” he was working for, and Judy told O’Kelley that Mike told her “the guy said he’d pay him to kill his wife.”O’Kelley testified before a grand jury in December 2008, per the Las Vegas Review-Journal, that Sharon was killed with a .38-caliber revolver that belonged to the Randolphs.And, the detective testified, a neighbor told police that he heard gunshots at about 8:30 p.m., but Randolph didn’t call 911 until 8:45 p.m.

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What happened to Thomas Randolph’s other wives?Kathy Thomas married Randolph in August 1975 when she was 18 and he was 20. Speaking to O’Kelley and his fellow detective Rob Wilson, as seen in The Widower, she described her ex-husband as “a very charming and witty person,” but also “psychologically scary.”

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After their divorce was finalized in April 1983, Randolph quickly married Beckie Gault in his native Utah.In 1986, Randolph was pulled over for driving erratically and, when police saw he had a bottle of vodka in the car, he spent the night in jail. He called 911 the next morning to report that he’d found his wife dead in bed with a gun in her hand. Gault’s death was ruled a suicide.

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But in 1988, Randolph was arrested on murder charges after Eric Tarantino, a self-described former friend of his, told police that Randolph had asked him to kill Gault. Tarantino, who testified during Randolph’s murder trial, said he went into hiding after he refused, fearing for his life.Randolph pleaded not guilty at trial and in April 1989 he was acquitted of capital murder.

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He married third wife Leona Randolph in March 1994. They moved to Indiana, where he met future fourth wife Gayna Allmon, and they wed in October 1995. (Leona died of cancer years later, according to The Widower.)

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Randolph married his fifth wife, Francis Randolph, in August 1997.Her sisters told O’Kelley, as seen in The Widower, that Francis had a heart condition that required surgery. She got through the procedure, they recalled, but after Randolph initially told them she was doing fine, they got a phone call from the hospital relaying that Francis’ condition had taken a turn, and she died.

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When was Thomas Randolph arrested for the murders of his wife Sharon Randolph and Mike Miller?After hearing about Randolph’s marital history, as well as the allegation he tried to get someone else to kill his second wife, Clark County prosecutors issued a warrant for Randolph’s arrest for the murders of Sharon and Miller.Randolph was arrested at his mother’s Utah home in January 2009 and he remained in jail—maintaining his innocence—until the case finally went to trial in June 2017. O’Kelley had retired from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department by then, but, as he detailed in The Widower, he remained invested in the case.

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What happened at Thomas Randolph’s 2017 murder trial?Prosecutors alleged that, 22 years after trying to get a hitman to kill Beckie Gault, Randolph hired Miller to kill Sharon, then double-crossed him.Tarantino was among several people involved with the Utah case who testified for the prosecution, telling the court that Randolph asked him to kill his second wife in exchange for a cut of her life insurance policy.Randolph was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder in the alleged murder-for-hire scheme and subsequently sentenced to death.But in December 2020, Randolph’s conviction was overturned on appeal. In ordering a new trial, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled that prosecutors should not have been allowed to draw comparisons between the 2008 and 1986 cases, writing in their decision that “the State lured the jury into finding Randolph guilty based on myriad other bad acts that were not even marginally relevant for a nonpropensity purpose, rather than constraining the testimony to evidence relevant to the charged offenses.”

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Where is Thomas Randolph now?When Randolph went on trial again in 2023, the prosecution was not allowed to bring up the death of his second wife or any related allegations.But Randolph was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon and one count of conspiracy to commit murder.In April 2024, Clark County District Court Judge Tierra Jones sentenced Randolph to 60 years to life in prison, saying, “At the end of the day, 24 jurors have decided this case, and I’m here to impose sentence based on what the jury in 2023 decided.”Randolph reiterated in court, “I didn’t kill Sharon. I have nothing to do with this.”He subsequently appealed, but the Nevada Supreme Court upheld his conviction, writing in their Sept. 2 ruling that his myriad legal challenges did not merit a third trial.Randolph, 71, is serving his sentence at Lovelock Correctional Center, according to the Nevada Department of Corrections.And he has never been one to shy away from the spotlight. “I’m addicted to love, I’m a true romantic,” Randolph said of his half-dozen marriages in the 2024 ID docuseries The Black Widower: The Six Wives of Thomas Randolph. “That doesn’t make me a killer.”

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