A Rose for Her Grave: The Randy Roth Story (Best on Best, Alleghenny Image Factory, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The February 18 Lifetime “premiere” movie was of the surprisingly romantically titled A Rose for Her Grave: The Randy Roth Story, based on a true-crime book by Ann Rule (1931-2015), who got into the business in an unusual way. She briefly dated a man named Ted Bundy who later turned out to be a serial killer, and when she learned that about him she wrote a memoir about their relationship called The Stranger Beside Me which became a huge best-seller and launched her on a career as a true-crime writer. A Rose for Her Grave is set in the Seattle area and concerns a hot-looking middle-aged widower named Randy Roth (Colin Egglesfield) who’s shown in the opening scene viciously attackign and killing a woman,we’re not told who. Then there’s a typical Lifetime cyhyron reading “Five Years Later,” and five years later Randy is a Little League coach and garage mechanic in Washington state when he meets Cynthia “Cindy” Baumgarther (Laura Ramsey). Cindy is a widow whose son Tyson (not listed on imdb.com, though he’s a cute and personable kid who’s probably going to be really hot when he grows up)is plaiomg om the ga,e amd jots a triple,then scores on the next pitch. Randy’s son Greg (Jonathan Bergman) sidles up to Cindy and asks her, “How’d you like to date my dad?” She would – it helps that aside from having great pecs and a basket literally to die for, he’s also qu9ite charming and seems like a really nice guy – and within a few months they’re married, at least in part because Cindy has been anxious that Tyson has been without a male role model in the family since his actual dad died.

Once Randy and Cindy are actually married, his whole attitude does a 180° turn: he becomes an almost insane disciplinarian to both Greg and Tyson, including spilling trash on the kitchen floor and then demanding that the two bous clean it up until the floor is spotless. Before Randy moved in, Cindy had been hosting a long-term house guest named Lori Baker (Chrishell Stause), whose relationship to Cindy is unclear – at first I assumed she was either Cindy’s adult daughter (and therefore Tyson’s sister) or Cindy’s younger sister, but eventually it turns out she’s no biological relation at all,just a very close friend whom Cindy wanted to help out, to the point of turning down Lori’s offers to pay rent. At one point Loru hears cries from the bedroom Randy and Cindy share and assumes – correctly – that Randy is beating her. (My thought was they could have just been having consensual rough sex, and I remembered one time decades ago when I met a man in a bar and he took me back to his place, where we got into it so ecstatically that his partner, who was there, knocked on the door and said he’d kill me if I were hurting him.) Cindy keeps a journal in a little orange book and won’t let anyone else, even Lori, read it. Randy has also so totally browbeaten his own son Greg that the poor kid regularly wets the bed – something Tyson tells his mom about.

Midway through the movie Randy suggests that the blended family – himself, Cindy, Tyson and Greg – go on a river-rafting trip, only Cindy drowns on the way and dies. Remembering that Randy’s previous wife died in a similar “accident” while on a camping trip – this one a hike on Mount Rainier – Lori becomes determined to get to the bottom of this and becomes convinced that Randy killed both his wives. She meets at least two of Randy’s exes, Donna Clift (Meredith Jackson) – who bought a cat after she and Randy broke up and whose cat later disappears (we presume Randy killed the cat as revenge for Donna’s having talked to Lori about Randy, though we’re not told that for certain) – and Mary Jo Phillips (Katy Wilson), who tells Lori that Randy dumped her once he found out she’d survived ovarian cancer and therefore no life insurance company would sell a policy on her. That, at last, explains Randy’s motive. Randy has also started an affair with Dana Carlson (Rachel Stubington), teenage daughter of his old friends John and Megan Carlson (Jim E. Chandler and Amy Parrish), and Lori starts to fear for Dana’s safety, especially when she goes to a party at the Carlsons’ and sees Randy chatting up yet another woman, once again using his son as lure: “Hey, would you like to date my dad?”

Eventually Lori wins the help of Seattle police detective Susan Peters (Cathy Salvodoon), a Black woman who goes by the name “Soupie” as a mash-up of “Sue P.” Though a search of Randy’s home yields no evidence, Soupie is determined to make the case against him and ultimately does so through having Randy arrested and subjected to a police interrogation. Ultimately Lori wins custody of Tyson after she traces the will Cindy had written before her marriage to Randy and never rescinded, in which all her money (which is a considerable fortune since her late husband was well-to-do) was left to a trust fund for Tyson and with Lori named as the executor and also the person she wanted to have custody of Tyson if anything happened to her while Tyson was still a minor. While it was somewhat surprising that Cindy was offed halfway through the story – I suspect if writers Conor Allyn and Benjamin Anderson had had their way and not been constrained by the facts of the case, they would have had Cindy herself come to the realization that her husband was a psychopathic killer and would have led the charge against him – for the most part A Rose for Her Grave is a quite good Lifetime movie.

Part of its quality stems from the perfect casting of Colin Egglesfield as Randy Roth. I had assumed from that mouthful of a last name that he was British; he isn’t, he’s anAmerican actor best known for parts on TV, including a run on the soap opera All My Children. He also had a small part in the 2010 Lifetime movie The Client List, but my moviemagg blog post on that filmdoesn’t mention him. Egglesfield is not only drop-dead gorgeous, he’s totally in command of his performance both as the charming man he appears to be and the cold-hearted maniacal killer he turns out to be. Part of his skill is being able to make us believe that he’s been wounded by post-traumatic stress disorder )his excuse for that assault on Cindy in their bedroom early in their relationship) suffered in combat with the Marines. His insistence on treating his kids kile a drill sergeant reminded me of Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, though without the charm that ultimately softened Von Trapp and led him to fall in love with the convent girl he hired to be governess to his children.Only it turns lut, unsurprisingly, that though he was actually in the Marines he was a file clerk at a base in North Carolina and never got anywhere near a combat zone. In the end Randy is convicted of the murders of both his wives and sentenced to life without parole.

The other especially good aspect of A Rose for Her Grave is its director, Maritte Lee Go. She’s mostly a producer and second-unit director, and most of her directorial credits in imdb.com are for shorts or an episode in a compilation film called Phobias, though she’s had at least one feature-length credit, Black as Night. Judging from her work here, anything she does would be worth watching; she creates a convincingly Gothic atmosphere and gets incredible performances not only from Egglesfield but from Ramsey and the two boys playing the kids. You can add Maritte Lee Go to Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise as potentially major female directors who’ve got a hand up from their work on Lifetime!