Town note
People came to the area after the American Revolution to get away from loyalists and colonists who disliked each other.
about 0:05:52The story
Randy Sundstrom was born in 1963 and grew up in Roscoe, New York, one of three children of the farmers Charles and Florence Sundstrom. He joined the army in 1981 after finishing high school, served two years, and came home to run a small engine repair shop. In 1989 his girlfriend became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Mindy. Mindy saw almost nothing of him afterwards: a few birthday cards, a necklace one Christmas and a gift card when she graduated from high school.
She was a couple of years younger than Randy and worked for years at the Delaware County Social Welfare Agency. Randy commuted to a warehouse job at Drogen's Home Furnishings in Oneonta and later worked at Scott Machine Corp, an engraving business in Walton. In the late 1990s the couple became consumed by growing giant pumpkins. Randy was founder and president of the New York State Giant Pumpkin Growers Association, and their mentor and close friend was Bill Bobeer, who ran a chimney cleaning business. In 1999 they set themselves the goal of breaking the state pumpkin record. They appeared in the 2007 PBS documentary Lords of the Gourd, and in 2008 they grew a pumpkin weighing 1,459 pounds, the tenth largest in the United States that year.
On 19 February 2010 Randy disappeared. She stopped growing pumpkins and took a job as a cashier at the Big M supermarket, where the owner, Jim Groff, remembered her as a hard worker and a favourite with customers. In the spring of 2012 she began dating Dominic 'Nick' Bosco, a tree service worker of about 50 from Long Island. His family had bought land on John Lockwood Road, off East River Road a few miles from Walton, built a house there and accumulated 200 acres. Nick's father John had bought the property, and his brother Patrick had ended up with the house; Nick spent as much time there as he could.
On 19 February 2013, the third anniversary of Randy's disappearance, police went to John Lockwood Road at about two in the afternoon to serve the warrant. She shut the door; within a minute the officers heard two shots and the house was ablaze. She had shot her Australian shepherd, Shadow, and then herself with a 30-30 rifle. The fire left only the wraparound deck, the chimney and some cordwood. When the ruins were searched, Nick Bosco's body was found at the bottom of the basement steps. He had been dead for up to three days, and the burns were too extensive for investigators to establish a cause of death.
Three days after the fire, with Randy still unaccounted for, police brought a cadaver dog to the farmhouse at South River Road. The dog alerted to a 55-gallon barrel about 25 paces from the back door. Randy's body was inside; he had been there for three years, and the barrel stood about 100 feet from the entrance to the Walton Pistol Club, past which the neighbour Al Budine, who ran the club, said he had mowed a hundred times.
Randy had never been reported missing; a lieutenant said family members had had no contact with him for many years. His daughter Mindy, then 23, was told by telephone that her father was dead and that, as next of kin, she had to deal with the body. She arranged a military burial at Sullivan County Veterans Cemetery, where several pumpkin growers including Bill Bobeer attended and told her stories about him. Nick's brother said the family had no real closure over what the woman did. The burned house has since been replaced by a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house of 2,036 square feet with a zestimate of $395,800, and the pumpkin house at South River Road, 1,463 square feet, is valued at $152,000.