Maine State Police, who investigated a murder-suicide in Hebron last month, have decided not to reopen an investigation into the death of the shooter’s first wife in a fall at Two Lights State Park in Cape Elizabeth over 23 years ago.

State police reviewed the 1993 death of Greta Randall after determining that Daniel Randall killed his daughter, 27-year-old Claire Randall, and himself on Dec. 8.

“His first wife died, and the same person committed a homicide 23 years later. We always look into the background of someone who is a murderer in a murder case,” Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Steve McCausland told the Press Herald last month.

On Wednesday night, McCausland said that the agency looked at the Cape Elizabeth Police Department’s investigative records from July 3, 1993, and concluded that Greta Randall’s death was an accident.

“Everything in the documentation that we saw pointed to an accident,” McCausland said.

Randall, a 32-year-old Saco mother who was six months pregnant, went to the park with her husband and two young daughters for a picnic that day. She died when she fell and hit her head on rocks, the 1993 report said.

After the murder-suicide in December, the Portland Press Herald filed a Freedom of Access Act request for the Cape Elizabeth Police Department’s investigative records in Greta Randall’s death.

Those records, which were redacted in several places to protect individuals’ privacy, were made available Wednesday by the police department’s attorney, John J. Wall III of Portland-based Monaghan Leahy.

The police department’s report said the rocks at Two Lights State Park were “wet and slippery due to on and off rain showers” that day.

The couple were sitting at a picnic table while their two daughters played, but when they lost sight of the girls, Greta Randall stood up to look for them.

“Mr. Randall could only add that a moment after his wife stood up, she fell. He contends that he did not see his wife fall,” the report states. There were no other witnesses.

The police report said she fell just to the left of the rocky plateau on which they were picnicking. A park ranger administered CPR until emergency responders arrived.

“It appears there were no witnesses to the fall,” police said. Mr. Randall “attempted to comfort and talk to his non-responsive wife throughout the time that help was being summonsed,” the report said.

Cape Elizabeth police Capt. Neil Williams, who is now the town’s police chief, said in the report that Greta Randall was six months pregnant.

Her baby was born three months premature and died the next day.

Daniel Randall, a pastor, remarried, but was estranged from his family at the time of the murder-suicide in Hebron. His daughter, Claire, was found dead in the home’s bathroom with multiple gunshot wounds. Daniel Randall died on the porch from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

 

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