Crime Immemorial

Fifty-six-year-old schoolteacher Lillian Elizabeth Hedman Randolph had not had very good luck with the men in her life. Her beloved first husband Bob O’Hara, with whom she had two children, had died of an accidental fall at the couple’s home in 1945.
Five years after that, Lillian married again, this time to a man named Roy Chalman, and gave birth to two more children. However, after Chalman returned from the Korean War, he had changed into a cruel, abusive shell of his former self, and Lillian divorced him in 1956.

Nearly two years passed, during which time an old acquaintance of Lillian’s—a wealthy businessman named Howard Randolph—made increasingly aggressive attempts at wooing her. Randolph was not only known to be a chronic womanizer, but those who had business dealings with him and his statewide poultry, egg and butter empire classified him as ruthless, cut-throat, and perfectly willing to operate outside of the law.

Lillian needed a lot of convincing before she would agree to wed Howard Randolph. On the one hand, she knew of his reputation around Iowa, but on the other, she was rapidly running out of funds from her first husband’s life insurance policy, and the salary from the part-time teaching job she’d been able to secure wasn’t going to be enough to support her four children on her own. Besides, Randolph had promised her not only all the luxuries a woman could want, but he also agreed to legally adopt Lillian’s children and pay for all their college educations. Lillian finally relented in 1958, and married him.

Almost immediately, though, she realized her tragic mistake. Randolph did make good on his promise to adopt the children, but all of his other proclamations had been nothing but a parade of falsehoods. Even though he had promised to buy Lillian a new car, for instance, he later balked, and instead restricted her use of his car, forcing her to walk or rely on neighbors when she wanted to go shopping or to church. He also forbade her from traveling to see her relatives, and wouldn’t give her money for necessities, even though he was known to be spending lavish sums on his various mistresses at the time.

Worst of all, Randolph had started to become emotionally and physically abusive, and harbored unwholesome obsessions with Lillian’s younger daughters, Wendy and Vicki, who were becoming teenagers. Lillian had reached the end of her rope and asked for a divorce, though Randolph refused to concede. However, the court granted her separate maintenance, meaning that she was legally still married to Randolph, but that he was no longer allowed in their home and would be forced to pay a substantial sum in alimony.

Finally free, Lillian went about living the life that had been denied her for so long, visiting her two grown children and her other relatives in neighboring towns, and even considering taking a job elsewhere and moving away from the place that held so many bad memories.

May 2nd, 1965 was Mother’s Day, and Lillian had spent the morning with her two teenaged girls at church. After the three of them arrived home, Howard Randolph dropped by the house to pick up the girls and take them to the Ice Follies in Des Moines. Lillian was planning to do a few chores at home while the girls were away, and then go back to church with them later for a special Mother’s Day dinner being held there.

Later that evening, at about six p.m., Randolph dropped Wendy and Vicki off at his former home, though he evidently heeded the court’s ruling and did not go inside. The teenaged girls noticed that their mother’s car was not in the driveway, which they thought was a little strange. Stranger still was that when they explored the house, they discovered that a pot of coffee was still brewing on the stove, but that Lillian Randolph was nowhere to be found.

The girls phoned the police, who found no obvious signs of violence at the home, but nonetheless immediately issued a missing persons report. As the investigation unfolded over the next several days, some sinister clues about Lillian’s disappearance began coming to light.

For example, Wendy and Vicki both remembered seeing a late model white Cadillac pulling into the driveway of their home just after their stepfather had picked them up for the Ice Follies on Sunday. They hadn’t thought a great deal about it at the time, but now the implications of the incident seemed ominous.

Once this nugget of information became public, several individuals also came forward and informed police that they had seen a similar white Cadillac in the area multiple times in the days before Lillian vanished, and that its occupants had consisted of two dark-haired, “swarthy” looking men who locals had never seen before. A few other witnesses claimed they had seen two men matching this description sitting at a golf course near the Randolph home, a spot from which the property could have been easily monitored.

The inquiry proceeded along this line until the morning of May 11th, when Lillian’s 1965 Dodge Coronet was found abandoned in the parking lot of the Des Moines Municipal Airport, more than sixty miles away from her home. The keys were still in the ignition, and Lillian’s purse, containing eleven dollars in cash, was recovered from beneath the driver’s seat.

Not surprisingly, a grisly discovery awaited investigators in the vehicle’s trunk. Crammed in beside the spare tire was the dead body of Lillian Randolph, still clad in the outfit she’d been wearing when her daughters had last seen her on Mother’s Day, nine days earlier. She had been stabbed multiple times, in an efficient manner that suggested her killer or killers had been professionals. She had not been raped.

Though authorities briefly looked into a link between the murder of Lillian Randolph and that of Janice Snow from the previous April, it was quickly determined that the two slayings were likely unconnected, and indeed, almost from the moment Lillian’s body was found, police suspected Howard Randolph of hiring hit men to do away with his “troublesome” wife.

To that end, detectives attempted to locate the alleged perpetrators and their white Cadillac, all the while trying to establish some relationship between these unknown individuals and the man who had purportedly hired them, but evidence was frustratingly nebulous. Howard Randolph’s movements and phone records in the days leading up to the murder were suggestive of his guilt, as was the fact that one of the potential suspects in the slaying worked at Randolph’s company, but police could find nothing solid to hang their case on.

Although Howard Randolph did attempt thereafter to regain custody of his teenaged stepdaughters, the court ultimately denied his motions. The sisters first went to live with their older brother Hank, after which Wendy subsequently turned eighteen and moved out on her own, while the younger Vicki was adopted by a family friend. Lillian Randolph herself was buried under her maiden name, Lillian Hedman, in her hometown of Duluth, Minnesota.

More than two decades after the murder, the district attorney informed Lillian’s surviving family that they now had enough evidence to charge Howard Randolph with the crime. Lillian’s daughter Wendy, who by now had a one-year-old daughter of her own, agreed to testify about her stepfather’s abusive behavior at the anticipated trial.

Sadly for the family, the hoped-for arrest never came, and in 1994, Howard Randolph died of cancer, having never been charged with the suspected murder-for-hire plot that snatched Lillian Hedman from the world. Her killing is, therefore, still officially classed as unsolved.