CLEARFIELD — Police have arrested a man suspected in a double-murder in Las Vegas — a crime similar to one he was acquitted of here in the 1980s.
Thomas William Randolph, 53, was arrested Thursday on a warrant for murder in connection with a home invasion robbery in Nevada that left his wife and a handyman dead. A grand jury indictment alleges it was really a plot to kill the woman.
Randolph was arrested at his parents' home Thursday morning. Clearfield police officers and detectives from the Las Vegas Metro Police Department knocked on the door to serve the warrant.
"He answered the door. There was a little bit of a struggle," assistant Clearfield police chief Greg Krusi said. "He didn't comply with the arrest, and he was Tasered as a result of that."
Randolph's family declined to comment on the arrest.
The Las Vegas indictment accuses Randolph of hiring Michael James Miller to kill his wife, Sharon Causse Randolph, 57. On May 8, the indictment said, Randolph waited outside his home as his wife went in and encountered Miller.
"The defendant's accomplice, Michael James Miller, acting in the role of a burglar, shot Sharon Causse Randolph in the head pursuant to the agreement and plan of the defendant and his accomplice Michael James Miller," the indictment states.
Miller was then shot and killed in the garage, police said, and Randolph staged it to appear like he shot and killed the intruder during a scuffle over the gun. Officers have suggested it was part of a scheme to collect on Sharon Randolph's life insurance policy. Her obituary said she married him in 2006 in Mexico, sealing their vows again in Las Vegas in 2007.
The crime is similar to one that Thomas Randolph was acquitted of in 1989. He was accused of shooting his wife, Rebecca Randolph, in 1986 in a plot to collect on a $250,000 insurance policy.
Deseret News stories from the time said that Rebecca Randolph was found dead in her Clearfield home, shot once in the head. Randolph's trial famously included Davis County prosecutors playing the Rod Stewart song "Foolish Behavior," about a man who plots to kill his wife and makes it appear as a suicide. A witness testified that Randolph played an imaginary guitar and sang along while plotting Rebecca Randolph's death.
Randolph's attorneys claimed her death was a suicide and she was a cocaine addict. A jury ultimately agreed and acquitted him.
Randolph did end up pleading guilty to a count of witness tampering, a third-degree felony, for offering an undercover police officer $10,000 to kill the chief witness against him. He was sentenced to serve prison time, according to Deseret News archives.
Krusi said he could not discuss the 1986 case because of a judicial expungement order. Randolph's prison record was also expunged.
Randolph may appear in 2nd District Court in Farmington on Friday where the issue of extradition is expected to be brought up. Until then, he is being held in the Davis County Jail without bail.
E-mail: bwinslow@desnews.com