While Netflix has really fallen off due to every studio yanking back their content for their own services, they've managed to remain pretty steady on the true crime documentary front and their latest, The Widower: 'Til Death Do Us Part, is more of the same, though that's a good thing.
It's the story of Thomas Randolph, who came home with his wife, Sharon, in May 2008 to find, according to him, a handyman they'd hired, Michael Miller, robbing their home and when they interrupted his burgling he shot Sharon. Anderson then got a gun and shot Miller dead. What seemed to be an open and shut case of self-defense didn't sit right with Las Vegas Police Detective Dean O'Kelley. If Miller broke in the back door, why didn't he just flee that way when the couple came home instead of trying to exit via the front? Why was his ski mask beside his body when Randolph said he was wearing it? Why were all the shell casings in the garage when Randolph said he fired from inside the house?
Enter Dateline NBC producer Dan Slepian, who was tipped by LVPD contacts whom he'd worked with in the past, and decided to go see what was going on with this case and was given unprecedented access to follow and tape the detectives as they dug into the case. Randolph, they discovered had been married six times over a 33 year span and that four of his wives were now dead, including Sharon. This leads the detectives and Slepian to fly all over the country interviewing family members and surviving ex-wives to piece together a portrait of a cocky charmer who somehow got a lot of ladies to swoon for him. He'd load them up with life insurance then begin grooming others to kill them.
All along Slepian taped many interviews with Randolph in an attempt to figure out what made this guy tick and how he managed to manipulate people and the legal system himself to delay or avoid accountability. Slepian had done many pieces about those wrongly convicted, but here was a guy who the system couldn't seem to nail.
Director Chris Smith (Tiger King) has a wealth of Slepian's footage to work with and he keeps the knotty narrative understandable, but left some nagging questions like what happened to all the insurance and legal settlement money Randolph was collecting (he was living with his weird mother in Utah when arrested) or some of the forensics details. This was probably in order to hold the running time for this tale which transpired over 15 years(!) to a tidy 90 minutes, but it would've been nice to have some more details.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.
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