By EMANUELLA GRINBERG and IVY BROWN
LAS VEGAS (Court TV) — Jury selection is underway for a Nevada man facing a retrial for the 2008 shooting deaths of his wife and the hitman he allegedly conspired with to kill her.
Thomas Randolph was sentenced to death in 2017 for the murders of his sixth wife, Sharon Randolph, and hitman Michael Miller. His conviction was overturned in 2021, after the state’s highest court found the district court abused its discretion in admitting prior-bad-act evidence at trial.
In this Wednesday, July 5, 2017 photo, Thomas Randolph walks into the courtroom before he was sentenced to death by jurors during the penalty phase of his murder trial at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas. (Patrick Connolly/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
Randolph’s case was the focus of the Dateline docuseries “The Widower.” The defendant was married six times, and “four of his wives died under mysterious circumstances,” reported Oxygen. Outside of his Nevada conviction, Randolph was once a suspect in the 1986 death of his second wife, Becky Gault, in Utah. He was acquitted of all charges in Gault’s death in 1988.
During his Nevada trial, prosecutors relied heavily on evidence from the Utah trial, including testimony from the man Randolph allegedly tried to recruit to kill Gault.
According to court documents, on the evening of May 8, 2008, Randolph called 911 to report that a masked intruder shot his sixth wife and that he shot and killed the intruder. Randolph recognized the intruder as 38-year-old Michael Miller, a person he befriended a few months before and with whom prosecutors say he developed an extensive, secretive relationship.
A Clark County jury convicted Randolph of murder and conspiracy charges in June 2017 for the deaths of Michael Miller and Sharon Randolph and recommended two death sentences. After his conviction was overturned in 2021, the case was remanded for a new trial, setting the State for a do-over.
Court TV is covering the proceedings beginning with opening statements, which are expected to begin on Thursday.
