Savage Murder & Strange Milkshakes

Arab, Alabama, sits in the north of the state, about an hour and a quarter from Birmingham and roughly three hours from Atlanta, straddling the line between Marshall and Cullman counties. details of the account remain covered until revealed

Kathy Cavinaw was born in Memphis on 19 August 1954 and grew up in Huntsville. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it By 1990 they had two children, Micah and Heather, 32 acres paid off and a house nearly paid for. Randall had no criminal record, and neighbours described the couple as hard-working and law abiding.

In 1986 Randall began an affair with Judy Bagwell, a neighbour and fellow worker at the switch plant who was then married to Tommy Smith. The affair lasted for years. Judy became obsessive. She built replicas of Randall's children's bedrooms in her own house, down to the furniture, lamps and wallpaper, and she kept a sealed plastic bag containing his cigarette butts and fingernail clippings. On a Wednesday night in late 1987 she hid in the back seat of Kathy's car outside Kathy's church wearing a black wig, sunglasses and a trench coat, and told Kathy she was in love with Randall and that he loved her. Kathy told her she could not have him, and a church deacon separated them. Randall was furious and stopped seeing Judy for two weeks, then resumed.

Kathy learned of the affair, and the marriage broke down in cycles of separation and reconciliation. There was no violence. By the summer of 1990 they were separated but not divorced: Kathy and the children stayed in the family home on Bridge Road in the Grassy community outside Arab, and Randall lived in a trailer beside the chicken houses.

On the evening of Thursday 16 August 1990 Kathy attended a revival service while the children stayed with Randall at the trailer. The following morning she did not appear for work, and calls to the house went unanswered. Randall left the children with his aunt and drove to Destin, Florida, with Judy for a weekend of scuba diving, telling the aunt he was going to work. That evening a cousin took the children back to the house to change for another revival service and found Kathy in her bedroom. She had been stabbed 46 times, mostly in defensive wounds. She was laid across the bed with her left leg down and her right leg propped on a bedside table, an alarm clock on the table undisturbed. Her underwear had been cut off neatly with scissors. There was no forced entry and nothing had been taken, and she was still wearing her jewellery. Semen was present, but the pathologist concluded she was dead before it entered her body.

Randall and Judy returned from Florida the next day and were interviewed separately. Randall said he had last had sex with his wife three or four months earlier, gave blood voluntarily and let detectives film him walking through the house. He suggested they look at Judy, describing her possessiveness and the bag of clippings. Both took polygraph tests on 29 August. Randall passed; Judy showed deception about who killed Kathy. A lorry driver reported a white Ford station wagon with a missing hubcap speeding away from the area at about two in the morning.

this part of the story is covered for now Three days later a Maryland laboratory reported that DNA from his blood matched the semen at a frequency of one in 940,000 people. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now

details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He went to Holman Correctional Facility, 350 miles from home, where he spent three and a half years of a five-year custody.

this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed By then Randall's family had sold the farm, the house and the chicken houses, and his mother, aged 78, mortgaged her own home to hire Birmingham defence attorney Richard Jaffe.

At the 1997 retrial the defence argued that Judy Bagwell had killed Kathy, using semen she had collected from Randall over the years, and that the state's own pathologist's evidence proved the sex act happened after death. A hairdresser known as the milk shake lady testified that Judy had told her she saved her lover's semen, used it as face cream and mixed it into protein shakes. Judy herself took the stand, denied the killing and then said that if the DNA was Randall's it had to have come from her. Randall's children testified that they had spent the night of the murder with their father at the trailer.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now

details of the account remain covered until revealed He married Brenda Massingill, the former co-worker who had campaigned for him, and returned to poultry farming, raising 86,000 chickens. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now