The first time I felt afraid of Jimmy, we were already engaged. He read me the newspaper articles out loud, every single one about the murdered women found around Clearwater. He sat there in our living room, the pug curled up on his lap, and he read me the details of how they’d been found, where, what was done to them. I remember thinking how strange it was that he wanted to share that with me.
“I feel sorry for them, Jimmy,” I said. “They’re still somebody’s child. There’s still a possibility they could get clean and do great things. ”
He just nodded and folded the paper.
I didn’t know then that he was reading about his own work. I didn’t know that the women he read about so solemnly were women he had already killed. —
Back in February of 1994, I was walking down a street in Clearwater when Jimmy turned the corner. He was a construction worker, big and strong, and he looked at me with a kind of urgency that I had learned to recognize.
“Come on, hurry up,” he said. He wanted to pay me extra to come to his house in Dunedin, about twenty miles away. That wasn’t unusual. The men who paid extra always wanted something more, something private, something away from the street.
So I went with him. After the deed was done, he drove me back. The whole way, I talked. I couldn’t stop myself.
I told him how sick I was of this life, how I wanted to get clean, how I hated what I had become. I had run away from home when I was fourteen years old. I had ended up with some Italians out in New York and Cali, Colombia, bringing drugs in. Then I became addicted to the drugs, and things got progressively worse, and I ended up on the street getting money from men.
It’s something I’m deeply ashamed of, but men had always pursued me. Making money was all about drugs, especially here in South Florida. Jimmy listened. He didn’t say much, but he listened.
A couple of days later, he came back. He found me on the street again. “You serious about getting clean? ” he asked.
“Yeah, I am,” I said. “Grab your stuff. ”
I grabbed a couple of clothes, put them in a bag, and off we went to Dunedin, Florida. I squirmed around on his very uncomfortable couch for three or four days, going through withdrawal.
Then I got up, and I started feeling better. He was kind to me. He gave me room and space to grow, to experiment with who I wanted to be and who I was inside. I had never had that before.
—
After a few weeks of dating, Jimmy wanted to meet my family. That was a big deal. I had never brought a man home before. Not once.
I told my mother I had met somebody and wanted to come and introduce him to us. She was surprised, and so was my sister Tamara, who was a serving police officer. It was the first time I’d ever brought somebody to meet them. I found Jimmy to be articulate, intelligent, interesting, and interested.
I was very surprised, but happy. I was happy that my sister had found somebody. It wasn’t just my mother and sister who were fond of him. My mom had a pug named Princess Penny Pickles.
When my mother got sick and moved in with us, Terry and Jimmy took the dog. Jimmy loved that dog, and the dog loved Jimmy. We spoiled that dog terribly. Jimmy, the pug, and I moved into an apartment just northeast of Clearwater in 1994.
Clearwater was sort of an old Florida sailing town, but it had been lately rocked by a lot of growth as a result of suburban sprawl. Crack cocaine was big. There were a lot of addicts who were willing to do anything to get their hands on the drug, including abasing themselves through prostitution. I knew that world intimately.
I had lived in it. I was trying to leave it all behind. —
In July of 1994, Pinellas County police were called to a vacant lot in downtown Clearwater. A body had been discovered.
Fingerprint records revealed her to be LaDonna Stella, a thirty-five-year-old waitress and dancer who had been working as a sex worker, partly to sustain a drug habit. She liked disco dancing. She was a mother of three. The police were not in any doubt that she died from strangulation.
But they couldn’t even find what had become of her clothes and her purse. Eventually, the case faded from view as they went on to other investigations. A year later, on October 20, 1995, they found another body. Wendy Evans, forty-two years old.
She was last seen hitchhiking along North Fort Harrison Avenue in downtown Clearwater. She had had some drug problems. She was trying to get clean. The body had been dumped like garbage by the roadside.
She had been strangled and beaten to death. Weeks later, they found Peggy Ann Alt. She was in her forties, working as a sex worker. She had been last seen on the same street as LaDonna Stella and Wendy Evans.
She was also a drug user. Her body was found in almost identical circumstances, left in an industrial area. The body had been lying there so long that decomposition had occurred, so it was difficult to tell much about how she had died. She had apparently been beaten and strangled.
Determining when Peggy died required an entomologist. Judging by the development of insect activity, they concluded she was killed between October 30 and November 4, 1995. Given the similarities between the three murders, the sex workers in the Clearwater area were terrified. After Peggy’s body turned up, a shock ran through the rest of the women who usually worked the North Fort Harrison Avenue area.
They actually stopped working. They abandoned that strip of pavement out of fear. They figured this was a bad sign for everybody. Detectives were becoming increasingly concerned that an active serial killer was stalking the streets of Clearwater.
But they had little evidence to work with. —
I kept reading the newspaper articles to myself after Jimmy finished with them. I couldn’t stop thinking about those women. I had been one of them once.
I knew the danger of that life, the vulnerability that came with standing on a corner waiting for a stranger to pull up. I knew how easily a woman could disappear. Jimmy and I got engaged in early 1996. I was happy.
I thought I had finally found a way out. I had a man who provided for me, who didn’t hit me, who seemed to genuinely care. We had our pug, Princess Penny Pickles. We had an apartment.
We had a future. The news reports were getting worse. On January 18, 1996, three weeks after Peggy Ann Alt’s body was uncovered, Pinellas County police received more heartbreaking news. The body of a fourth woman had been found.
Her nude body was discovered behind a store in Palm Harbor, north of Clearwater. She had died in a similar fashion to the previous victims. She was strangled to death. The woman was identified as twenty-seven-year-old Cynthia Pugh.
She was another sex worker, but slightly different from the others. Yes, she was funding a drug habit, but she was living with her parents. When Cynthia disappeared, her parents reported it that night, which was very significant. Police knew Cynthia from previous encounters and were swiftly able to link her body to the missing person’s report.
There were striking similarities in the lifestyles and deposition sites of Cynthia Pugh, LaDonna Stella, Wendy Evans, and Peggy Darnell. They were all white women. All four had been beaten and strangled, all within a very small radius. They were all on the fringes of society.
Pinellas County police suspected they were no longer working on four separate homicides, but rather dealing with an active serial killer. The cases were combined into one investigation. I remember Jimmy reading that article to me too. I remember the look on his face, calm and focused.
“They’ll catch him,” he said. “I hope so,” I said. —
The case finally started to gain traction when investigators got a crucial lead on some physical evidence they’d found at the crime scene of Wendy Evans back in October. They had found pink carpet fibers and dog hair in the area.
But there had been rain, and the rain turned the area into mud. In the mud, they found a tire track. It would be months later before police were able to identify the unique imprints on the tire track. It was a very distinctive set of tire tracks belonging to a very particular kind of tire which had only recently been on sale.
Investigators discovered that only one set of these specific tires had been sold in the Pinellas County area. They were able to track down the owner of the vehicle, the one vehicle in the area that had gotten that set of tires. And that turned out to be me. I didn’t know anything about it.
I just knew my truck had tires that needed to be serviced. On May 6, 1996, the manager of the tire dealer called me. “I sold you recalls,” he said. “If I don’t get those tires back in here tomorrow, I’m going to lose my job.
”
“Oh, no, buddy,” I said. “I’ll be in there. ”
I brought the truck in the next day. They grabbed the tires off the truck without me knowing it and matched them to the tire print that was left where Wendy Evans’s body was found.
I had no idea. Not one clue. —
As they set up surveillance on my apartment, detectives discovered that I was living with a man. And that man was the one driving the truck.
As they plumbed his background, they discovered it was Jimmy Randall. Jimmy, who had been imprisoned in Massachusetts for attacking his ex-wife. Jimmy, who had served five years for kidnapping and sexual battery. Jimmy, who was supposed to be on probation but had failed to report to his probation officer and instead fled the state two years before I met him.
That was when everything started to fall apart. With confirmation that the truck had been in downtown Clearwater when Wendy was murdered, police started taking witness statements from sex workers in the area. They took a picture of the truck and showed it to a number of women. Many of them recognized it.
They remembered that there had been a warning that had gone around to the various women to say, “Don’t mess with this guy. He’s a bad ride. ”
Meaning, he will hurt you. They knew to avoid that particular truck when they saw it coming.
I didn’t know any of this. I was living with a monster and I didn’t know it. —
As detectives began plotting their next move, they took a closer look at some evidence they’d unearthed at Cynthia Pugh’s crime scene back in January. There were bits of forensic evidence present on her nude body.
Pink carpet fibers, dog hair, and a little tiny piece of paper. At the time, the evidence techs didn’t know quite what to make of it. Investigators sent the carpet fibers and the dog hair to a specialist laboratory at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D. C.
, for examination. The case was assigned to Supervisory Special Agent Christopher Hopkins. Pronounced County submitted the evidence to the FBI laboratory. In the submission were envelopes that contained trace evidence, hairs, and some fibers.
He examined them with a comparison microscope. His findings gave the detectives a very precise list of what to look out for. “After examining the trace evidence,” he reported, “I told the detectives that when you’re standing on a pink carpet and there’s a little dog running around barking at you, you’ll know you’re in the right spot. ”
With this in mind, the undercover detectives patrolling outside my apartment devised a rather unorthodox method of obtaining comparison samples.
Two female detectives knocked on my door. They told me they were running a dog washing service. To promote the idea, they were giving away free dog grooming to people they met that day. “We want to practice washing on your dog,” one of them said.
“Can we give your dog a bath? ”
“Yeah, let’s go,” I said. The one girl took Princess Penny Pickles into the tub and started washing her. The other girl, I thought she had a nervous tick.
She kept doing this motion toward the carpet. Then I heard the dog yelp. “What’s going on? ” I said.
“Did you hurt my baby? ”
“Oh, no, no, we’re all done. We’re all done. ”
They got out of there rather quickly.
Later on, I found out those were two detectives. One was pulling the hair out of the dog. The other one with the nervous tick was gathering carpet fibers. The comparison samples were sent to the FBI laboratory.
Christopher Hopkins reached his conclusion. “The dog hairs are consistent with coming from that dog,” he said. “And those carpet fibers are consistent with coming from that carpet. ”
That was exceptionally important.
Those dog hairs and those carpet fibers were evidence of recent contact. Those victims had recent contact in Jimmy’s residence. Our residence. —
On June 27, 1996, detectives questioned Randall at the home he shared with me while I was out of town.
He denied any knowledge of the murders. The reason they didn’t arrest him at that moment was they wanted the truck. They wanted an excuse to take the truck into custody and search it for further evidence. Detectives needed to arrest him while he was driving the truck in order to conduct a warrantless search of the vehicle.
As they got back to their car, they saw him drive off. They knew he already had a warrant out for his arrest for violating his parole in Massachusetts back in 1992. Police had been waiting for the opportune moment to apprehend him. Now was that time.
Jimmy saw the blue lights in his rearview mirror and decided he had to take off. He led police on a reckless high-speed chase until a wrong turn into a cul-de-sac brought it all to a screeching halt. He bailed out of the truck and took off on foot. That led to the largest manhunt in Pinellas County history.
After scaling a ten-foot fence and running into the cover of woodland, James Randall had evaded police capture. Over one hundred officers were brought in to try and locate the man suspected of killing four women. They needed to find him fast. —
I was sitting at the table in my apartment.
Detectives were all asking me questions. I was literally in physical shock. Everything sounded like it was outside of a bubble. I was lost in my own thoughts, trying to answer the questions.
Scared to death. I had never been scared of anything until then. Cops had moved into my house. They told me I couldn’t use the phone.
Couldn’t go anywhere. There were helicopters everywhere. There were people on my roof. The media was out front.
About the third night, it was just starting to get dark. I was starting to go to sleep, and all of a sudden, every hair on my arm stood up. I had goosebumps. I had a fear in the pit of my stomach that was so intense.
I knew Jimmy was here. I told the cops to turn the lights off. They told me I was out of my mind. “You’re just scared,” they said.
“It’s just catching up with you. ”
“No,” I said. “He’s here. ”
My instincts were correct.
With nowhere left to go and famished after four days in the woods, Jimmy had returned to the apartment in search of food. He knocked on the door. A police detective answered. He hit her in the head with a stick and tried to run again.
All of a sudden, everybody bolts. Helicopters are flying. Sirens are going. And I’m there alone.
They left me there. Do they have him? Don’t they have him? A police dog grabbed him and brought him down.
And at that point, he made his one and only statement to the cops. He simply said, “Oh, I’ve been bitten by mosquitoes. I wish you’d caught me earlier. ”
No remorse.
No sympathy for anyone except himself. —
Investigators were certain they had their man. But before they could interview him, they needed to remand him in custody. In order to keep him off the streets, they initially charged him for fleeing authorities, aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer, and the Massachusetts probation violation warrant.
I was given further details about his alleged crimes. The officers slapped pictures of dead women in front of me, women with bruised throats. Everything rushed through my head, and I was just backing up, screaming. “No, no, no.
”
It’s true. It’s true. And I knew then that the life I was working so hard to build had just come crumbling down. —
While Jimmy was in custody at the Pinellas County Jail, police encouraged me to visit him.
They wanted me to convince him I was on his side. I went. I don’t know why I went. Maybe I needed to hear it from him.
Maybe I needed him to look me in the eye. One day, I asked him, “Hey, Jimmy, I know you killed this woman. I know you killed this woman. So why didn’t you kill me?
Why not me, huh? Why not me? ”
He looked at me. It looked like he wanted to cry.
But I could tell his little mind was thinking and manipulating the whole time. The only way to communicate with somebody on the other pod was to write backwards on the glass so they could read it. Jimmy wrote backwards on the glass. I hurt others so I would not hurt you.
He barely got the last word out, and I was up, cussing. “You are never going to blame this on me. You did not do this because of me. ”
—
Police caught me and the officers kept slapping pictures of dead women in front of me.
Jimmy denied any involvement in the murders to detectives. On September 17, 1996, nearly eighty days after the arrest, police had enough evidence to indict forty-two-year-old Randall for the murders of Wendy Evans and Cynthia Pugh. Despite original suspicions, there was insufficient evidence to charge him with the murders of LaDonna Stella and Peggy Darnell. LaDonna and Peggy’s murders remain unsolved.
No other suspects have ever been named in relation to their deaths. They charged him with not four murders, they charged him with just two. And I believe he said something like, “Is that all you’re charging me with? ”
And that was the last thing he said to the cops.
—
With a trial on the horizon, the search for evidence continued. The forensic team made a breakthrough. They had been trying to identify the mysterious piece of paper found at the deposition site of Cynthia Pugh, who was murdered back in January 1996. It was a little fleck of cigarette paper.
And I was a smoker. Eventually, detectives were able to collect a DNA sample from me and matched it to the saliva on the piece of paper. With one suspect in custody, detectives needed to determine if I was also involved in the murders. After Jimmy was arrested, I was being processed, meaning they had to take my DNA.
They needed to get samples of my pubic hair, my saliva, my facial hair, my head hair, my fingernails. They needed that to rule out the fact that I was involved in any way. Thankfully, my sister Tamara was also a serving police officer. Her meticulous detective skills meant I was able to be eliminated from the police inquiries.
Thank God my sister kept records. Being a police officer, she’s used to writing everything that happens to her down every day. That came in handy because every time I was out of town was when they found another murdered body. And it wasn’t just my DNA they found on the paper from the cigarette butt.
One detective looked at me and said, “We found your DNA on a cigarette butt, but we found something else, and it’s not human. ”
When I smoked, Princess Penny Pickles would get my cigarette butts and chew on them. The dog’s DNA was on the cigarette paper. That was the one piece of evidence absolutely proving that Cynthia Pugh had been inside Jimmy’s apartment.
Princess Penny Pickles, the dog we spoiled, the dog my mother had given us, was the one who nailed Jimmy Randall. —
Five months later, in February 1997, Randall was put on trial at the Pinellas County Courthouse for the murders of Wendy Evans and Cynthia Pugh. As Randall continued to plead his innocence, prosecutors were keen to establish the extent of his violence in past relationships. Amongst those to testify were his ex-wife Linda and myself, his now ex-fiancée.
The day I testified was the day I got free of any feelings, of any emotions, of any guilt. I recounted a past incident to the court which took place in October 1995, the same month Wendy Evans was murdered. One day, at work, my boss came up behind me and started grinding me. I told Jimmy what happened.
He picked me up by the throat and pinned me against the wall and started screaming at me. “Don’t you ever, ever, ever let anybody take advantage of you like that again. ”
That’s all I remember. When I woke up, he was having sex with what I think he thought was my dead body.
When I opened my eyes, Jimmy was shocked. —
When Jimmy’s ex-wife Linda testified and recalled strikingly similar scenarios from her relationship with him, it became clear to the jury that Jimmy had a deep-rooted desire for sexual strangulation. Linda had first married him back in Massachusetts in the late 1970s. They had two children together.
Then her best friend Holly Cote disappeared after a night out. Her body was found months later in a dam, naked, strangled, with her hands tied with a purple sock. Jimmy was the last person seen with her. He was questioned, but there was no evidence to charge him.
Linda’s relationship with Jimmy soured after that. He started demanding more sex and was more aggressive toward her. He certainly tried to strangle her on a number of occasions. He got pleasure out of strangling women in the act of sex.
Linda’s response was inevitably, “I can’t stand this. I’m taking the children and going. ”
Which, of course, infuriated Jimmy. Two years later, in July 1986, Jimmy tracked Linda down and attacked her.
He pulled her out of the car, tied her up to a tree, and beat and raped her. He made it clear that he was in charge and he was her master. Then he could do what he wanted with her. That was the point at which she knew she had to get away from him for good.
In 1987, after the brutal assault on Linda, Jimmy was sentenced to up to seven years for her kidnapping and sexual battery. While he was locked away, Linda was finally able to divorce him. He served five years in prison in Massachusetts. When he got out, he was supposed to be on probation.
But he failed to report to his probation officer and instead fled the state. He went to Florida. A new life. A new start.
He moved to the Tampa Bay area to reconstruct houses. There had been a nasty hurricane, and a lot of rebuilding was going to be necessary. So he blended in, a construction worker rebuilding the city, while carrying the urge to strangle women inside him. —
The jury heard all of this.
They heard about manual strangulation being the part of the assault that he was most interested in. The part that gave him the most pleasure. He would get a high from watching somebody struggle to breathe, watch them face to face, watch the life go out of them. FBI agent Christopher Hopkins also testified about his findings in court.
“I testified to the work that I’d done and the reports that I had written about matching the dog hairs recovered from the victims matching the known dog hair samples collected from his dog. Without the trace evidence, it would have been very difficult to tie the victims into that residence and to the defendant. ”
On March 3, 1997, the jury found forty-two-year-old James Randall guilty on two counts of first-degree murder for the killings of Wendy Evans and Cynthia Pugh. On April 4, he was back in court to be sentenced.
Judge Shafer, an expert on the death penalty, took her position seriously. “This is the law,” she said. “I’ve sworn to carry out the law. Therefore, if that’s what’s called for in this case, I’m going to sentence this guy to die.
”
He was sentenced to death. —
But Randall appealed the decision. And in April 2000, the Florida Supreme Court overturned his original convictions. The defense claimed that due to his established fetish for strangling women during sex, there was not enough evidence that he intended to kill his victims.
The deaths were, they argued, accidental. A result of his fetish for sexual strangulation. Randall’s convictions were reduced to two counts of second-degree murder and a life sentence behind bars. The decision wasn’t welcomed by those who knew him best.
“It takes incredible strength to choke somebody to the point where they pass out, let alone to kill them,” I said. “He intentionally kept his upper body super strong to be able to do these things. This is not accidental. I do believe this was premeditated.
”
I came home from work one day, and my answering machine was full of messages from the state attorney’s office, from detectives. “Jimmy’s coming off of death row,” they said. What does that mean? Does that mean he’s going to be in a regular prison where he can escape?
He did not kill those women by accident. You might kill one in that way by accident, but not two. I felt like Jimmy deserved the death penalty. —
The thing I keep coming back to is how close I was to being one of those women.
I was standing on that street corner in Clearwater, doing what those women did, when Jimmy found me. He could have killed me that first night. He could have strangled me in his apartment in Dunedin, and no one would have known. I was in the same situation as Wendy, Cynthia, LaDonna, and Peggy.
I was a sex worker. I had a drug habit. I was on the fringes. But instead, he took me home.
He fed me. He helped me get clean. He bought me a pug. He introduced me to his mother-in-law to be.
He proposed. Why did he spare me? Because he used the others so he wouldn’t hurt me. That’s what he wrote on the glass.
It took the ingenious actions of Pinellas County detectives to put an end to his reign of terror across Clearwater. They used the tire tracks, the carpet fibers, the dog hair, the cigarette paper with the pug’s saliva on it. They used every piece of evidence they could find. He was a dangerous man who would stop at nothing to fulfill his sexual yearning for strangulation, claiming the lives of at least two innocent women.
This undoubtedly makes James Randall one of the world’s most evil killers. And I was engaged to him. I am still getting used to the fact that I survived.
