Netflix has perfected the art of turning real-life horror into compulsively watchable true crime. Its latest entry, The Widower: ’Til Death Do Us Part, examines the unnerving story of Thomas Randolph, a charismatic man who married six times and outlived four wives—three of whom died under suspicious circumstances.
Randolph’s story may already be familiar to viewers who watched NBC producer Dan Slepian’s five-hour 2021 series Dateline: The Widower. The case was also covered in Investigation Discovery’s The Black Widower: The Six Wives of Thomas Randolph, now streaming on HBO Max. But in this 91-minute film, Slepian moves from behind the scenes to center stage. He recounts his extraordinary access to Randolph and to criminal proceedings that stretched across nearly two decades. The documentary revisits Randolph’s alleged crimes, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the earlier series and brings the case up to date with its latest developments.
The film begins with Slepian calling the case “bizarre, insane and surprising”—a description that could apply to countless Netflix true crime productions. In this instance, however, the evidence speaks for itself. Randolph faced the death penalty twice, with 20 years separating the two cases, as the number of dead wives surrounding him continued to grow. Over a decade, Slepian interviewed Randolph repeatedly, sometimes speaking with him by phone for hours. The documentary later identifies Randolph as a textbook narcissist, a characterization reflected in the “cocky” self-image he displayed whenever Slepian’s cameras were rolling.
A word about Slepian is warranted. The veteran Dateline producer is a respected journalist known in part for advocating for people who were wrongfully imprisoned. The documentary is surprisingly restrained about noting that he received a 2024 Pulitzer Prize nomination for the podcast series The Sing Sing Chronicles, which profiles six people who were wrongly convicted.
That background helps explain why Las Vegas detectives contacted Slepian after Randolph’s sixth wife, Sharon Causse, was shot and killed at home in 2008. In a 911 call, Randolph claimed that a handyman, Mike Miller, had shot Causse, forcing Randolph to kill Miller in self-defense. Slepian was allowed to accompany Las Vegas detective Dean O’Kelley during the investigation, gaining unusually broad access to the crime scene and meetings with prosecutors. He also filmed a bizarre police reenactment in which Randolph acted out his version of the night Causse died—a highly theatrical scene that the camera captures in full.
Slepian and O’Kelley discovered that Randolph had purchased life insurance policies on Causse and had initially been named the sole beneficiary of her will. Causse later changed the document to benefit her daughter, Colleen Beyer, after growing fearful of her husband’s aggressive behavior. Beyer emerges as one of the documentary’s central figures and its emotional anchor.
The investigation then turns to Randolph’s earlier marriages. His first and fourth wives are still alive. His second wife was shot and killed in a death investigators believed had been staged to look like suicide; Randolph was acquitted at trial and avoided the death penalty. His third wife died from cancer. His fifth wife died in a hospital following heart surgery, though some people suspected Randolph had played a role in her death. Causse was his sixth wife. Life insurance policies worth hundreds of thousands of dollars had been taken out on each woman, and Randolph collected money after several deaths. He even won a malpractice settlement from the hospital where his fifth wife died.
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The documentary gains momentum as Slepian and O’Kelley travel across the country, collecting accounts from Randolph’s surviving wives, members of Miller’s family and former friends. Some say Randolph offered them a cut of the insurance proceeds if they killed his current wife. Slepian was also filming in 2009, several months after Miller and Causse were killed, when police arrested Randolph at his mother’s home. Officers used a Taser after he refused to follow their orders. Moments later, Slepian interviewed him in the back of a police vehicle as Randolph recovered from the shock.
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For the next seven years, Randolph remained incarcerated while repeatedly hiring and dismissing attorneys just before trial, creating fresh delays each time. Beyer struggled with the trauma of losing her mother and with the absence of any meaningful resolution. Slepian continued visiting Randolph in prison, conducting interview after interview. In 2017, Randolph was convicted and sentenced to death. Slepian’s final interview with him was a tense attempt to secure a confession. Randolph offered none.
Slepian’s crew filmed the entire trial from inside the courtroom. “I thought, ‘This is finally over,’” he recalls. “But that did not last very long.”
Randolph had predicted during one of Slepian’s interviews that the conviction would not stand. He was proved right in 2020, when the Nevada Supreme Court overturned the verdict, ruling that evidence from Randolph’s earlier death-penalty case had improperly influenced the jury. “He played the system like a fiddle,” Slepian says with a sigh. Beyer was devastated.
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Randolph’s second trial did not take place for another three years. This time, prosecutors were barred from presenting information about the Utah case, but the outcome was the same: Randolph was convicted again. Beyer and O’Kelley were in the courtroom, and Slepian’s camera records their visible relief. In the film’s closing commentary, Slepian argues that the justice system is fundamentally broken. Innocent people can struggle for years to get their cases heard, he says, while someone like Randolph—whom the evidence overwhelmingly implicated—could exploit the same system through delay and manipulation.
Randolph has continued fighting. According to the film’s postscript, he sought a third trial, but the Nevada Supreme Court rejected that effort in September 2026.
Randolph, now 71, is serving a 60-year prison sentence.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.