Randy Roth
Randy apparently bonded with his father more closely and remained in touch with him throughout his life while snubbing his mother, telling friends she was dead or mentally unstable.
Lizabeth Roth would later claim that her husband had been a strict, abusive parent who discouraged his sons from displaying any emotion and if they'd grown up lacking in empathy for other people, it was not her fault.
After graduating Meadowdale High School in 1973, Roth enlisted in the Marine Corps, wanting to emulate his movie hero Billy Jack.
In addition, Kirkbride told them about the service station robbery two years earlier, which she said happened because she'd gotten pregnant and Roth needed money to get her an abortion.
Marrying a serviceman, she gave birth to a daughter Jalina while stationed in Germany, but the marriage ended in divorce and Janis took her infant child to the West Coast seeking to begin a new life.
Police and rescue workers were unable to locate the body for several hours after the fall, and it was later determined that it would have been virtually impossible for her to have fallen from where Roth claimed the accident occurred.
[1][3] Roth arranged the same day to have his wife cremated and filed a claim on her life insurance policy early the next morning, while failing to contact her friends and family and inform them of her death.
The Roths and Goodwins remained good friends for most of the following six years, but Randy secretly seduced their teenage daughter, Brittany, with the promise of eventually marrying her when she was 18.
Roth also told numerous fictitious tales of serving in Vietnam, making his brief stint as a Marine Corps file clerk appear as if he had been in action similar to movies like Hamburger Hill.
Roth also upset the Goodwins with his harsh discipline of Gregg and after their son Ryan informed school counselors, he was put on probation by Child Protective Services for six months.
Since she refused to marry a divorced man due to her religious beliefs, Randy Roth told her nothing about his marriages except that Janis Miranda had accidentally fallen to her death.
[1] Roth's apparent lack of emotion and contradicting versions of how events had unfolded immediately led investigators to consider him a suspect, but there was no solid evidence that she had been forcibly drowned.
Almost three months after the drowning, Roth apparently believed he was once again not going to be charged, and was therefore quite surprised on October 8 when police detectives showed up at Bill Pierre Ford to arrest him on suspicion of murder and that they had obtained a search warrant, thereby allowing them unfettered access to his home.
They began to uncover evidence that Roth's motive was primarily financial, and that he had repeatedly attempted to defraud insurance companies and had stolen from his employers and nearly every job he had ever held.
Roth's tax returns over the last decade showed that he typically averaged $20,000-$30,000 in annual income, well below what was needed for his lifestyle and that most of his money had come from insurance payments.
Roth had planned to adopt Cynthia's sons and raise them as his own while also collecting survivor's benefits for them and he was surprised and outraged to learn that she'd named Lori Baker as the legal guardian of them in the event of her death.
Shortly after Tyson and Rylie went to live with Lori Baker, Roth put the Woodinville home back on the market at a lower price than he'd paid for it, in an apparent desire to unload it as quickly as possible.
Speaking to investigators, Lori Baker talked about the safe deposit box and Cynthia's depressed, diminished personality in the final months of her life.
He regularly spanked the boys and Gregg with a belt, or would force them to perform dozens of squat thrusts if they misbehaved, even making them stand outside in their underwear during wintertime and kneel on gravel.
When the investigators talked to the boys themselves, they confirmed Roth's harsh punishments and also admitted that they'd seen him stealing items from Bill Pierre Ford numerous times.
Roth was not happy at learning that he wouldn't get custody of Tyson and Rylie and when the latter showed up with Lori Baker to collect theirs and Cynthia's belongings, he only grudgingly let them into the house.
Talks with Roth's co-workers from Bill Pierre Ford found that he'd been in the habit of telling them exceptionally cruel things about Cynthia and that he referred to their marriage as merely a "contract" he planned to do away with on their first anniversary.
Given the apparent pattern and the volume of witnesses to other criminal behaviors they were able to convince a judge to issue warrants for the arrest of Roth and a search of his home in Woodinville.
There were no firearms in the house, but Roth had a closet full of Japanese throwing stars, nunchucks, knives, and homemade weapons such as baseball bats with nails driven into them.
There was also a note she'd written to remind Roth of a local clinic holding PTSD therapy sessions for veterans, as she, like all of his wives, believed that he was suffering psychological distress from serving in Vietnam.
Several reenactments undertaken at Lake Sammamish determined that it was virtually impossible to generate sufficient wake to flip the raft used by the Roths with type of powerboat used on the day of the drowning.
[1] Jalina Miranda, daughter of Janis Roth, described how her mother had shown her a hidden envelope with money in it only a few days before her fatal fall from Beacon Rock.
Tyson and Rylie Baumgartner testified about their stepfather's abusive parenting and his theft of automobile parts, along with their recollections of the day their mother died and Roth's unconcerned, unemotional behavior.
[11] After the trial, Roth agreed to a plea bargain on additional theft charges stemming from the stolen materials and equipment discovered during the initial search of his home.
A Rose for Her Grave by Seattle based true crime writer Ann Rule profiles several murders of women but devotes 341 pages solely to the Roth case.
