RANDAL PADGETT
Sentenced to Death by DNA Evidence that Led Police Away From the Truth

“I’d never been in prison before. I didn’t know what prison was, except what I’d seen in the movies. I’d never even been in jail, until they arrested me for my wife Cathy’s murder.

“They sentenced me to death on my birthday, May 22, and carried me to Holman Prison that same day. It was late by the time we got there, around 10:30 at night. They did a strip search and took everything away from me. I kept thinking, when is the guard gonna come over and kick me in the face. Just the feel of the place, people screaming, all kinds of commotion, and those metal doors sliding and slamming, sliding and slamming. Another one opens up and then it slams behind you. It seemed like a hundred metal doors.”—Randal Padgett, set free by a unanimous verdict of “not guilty” after five and a half years incarceration, three and a half of those years on death row.1

The Crime
Friday, August 17, 1990, Arab, Alabama
Following Thursday night’s revival service at New Brashier’s Chapel Methodist Church, Cathy Padgett lingered to chat with some of the other churchwomen. Driving at night and going home to an empty house made her uneasy, but Cathy Padgett put her trust in God. ‘If anyone was in my house, I would just bind them up in the name of the Lord,’ she declared in a testimony to her faith. Cathy had attended the revival at the New Brashier’s Chapel Methodist Church every night that week, at each service going forward to the altar and asking God to help her through this difficult time.2

That past May, Cathy and Randal Padgett had separated after sixteen years of marriage. Randal had admitted to having an affair. Although as yet unwilling to take the radical step of filing for a divorce, the couple had discussed it and arrived at an amicable property settlement, as well as agreeing to share custody of six-year-old Heather and eleven-year-old Micah in the event they divorced. Randal continued to see his children on nearly a daily basis.3

Randal and his girlfriend Judy Bagwell had a trip to Florida planned for that weekend. Feeling guilty about being away from his children for so long, Randal had asked Cathy if Heather and Micah could spend Thursday afternoon and evening with him, and Cathy had agreed. He took them to a movie and afterwards to play miniature golf. Randal was staying in a mobile home on his chicken farm, a seven-mile drive from the couple’s other farm on Bridge Road where Cathy lived. Randal tried phoning Cathy several times that evening to make sure she knew he intended to keep the children overnight. He reached Cathy a few minutes before ten. She had just returned from the revival. It was the last time Randal Padgett would speak to his wife.4

About two a.m. Friday morning, Jimmy Gullion, a truck driver for Goldkist, was on his way back from making a feed delivery. Gullion saw dust rising above a cornfield that bordered Bridge Road and slowed his rig. Surfaced in gravel, Bridge Road intersected with the highway Gullion traveled. The speeding vehicle causing the dust cloud was a white Ford Fairmont station wagon with a missing a rear hubcap, Gullion noted when it came into full view. His lights shone briefly into the car’s interior, and he could make out the silhouettes of two people. The driver had slender arms, bushy black hair, and wore a blouse-like top. The event logged itself in Gullion’s mind for being unusual—in eleven years of traveling that stretch of highway on regular basis, he had only once before seen a car on Bridge Road at that time of night.5

Randal and the children rose early. After driving into town to Hardee’s to buy sausage and biscuits for their breakfast, Randal took the children to the home of his aunt, Lillian Snow. Lillian frequently cared for Heather and Micah. She lived just across the creek from the 32-acre farm where Cathy’s house was situated.6
Randal and the children unpacked their Hardee’s breakfast and ate at Aunt Lillian’s table, then Randal left to tend to chores in the chicken houses. He came back at noon and had lunch with his family. His cousin Reba Davis and her daughter, who lived in a mobile home on Aunt Lillian’s property, were also there. Ashamed about his affair and not wanting his family to know he and his girlfriend had plans to leave for Florida that same afternoon, Randal told his aunt and cousin he was going back to finish up chores at the chicken farm.7

Randal’s hired hand finished up the chicken house chores. By early afternoon, Randal Padgett and his girlfriend Judy Bagwell were on the way to Destin, Florida.8

Usually Cathy came by Lillian’s to pick up the children between 4:30 and 5:00, after she got off work. When Cathy was late, Reba phoned the house several times, but no one answered. Reba, Cathy, and the children intended to have supper at the church that evening, the final night of the revival. Thinking perhaps Cathy had gone straight to the church from work, Reba phoned there, as well, but no one had seen Cathy.9

Looking forward to the evening outing, Heather and Micah suggested Reba drive them home to change clothes so they could go on to the revival as planned. They knew where a “secret” key was hidden and could let themselves in.10

‘Mom must be home,’ the children chorused when they saw their mother’s car in the garage. The door leading into the house from the utility room off the garage was unlocked. Cathy’s purse was on the floor just inside the doorway, the contents strewn about. Six-year-old Heather headed straight for her mother’s room.11
‘Something’s wrong with Momma!’ she wailed and burst into tears.12

Micah, Reba, and Reba’s daughter Laurie rushed to the back of the house. Horrified, Reba ushered the hysterical children into the kitchen and phoned for an ambulance.13
Cathy Padgett lay crossways on the bed on her back, her legs spread with her right foot propped up on the nightstand and her left foot resting on the floor. She was naked from the waist down. The bed linens were soaked with blood. Bloodstains splattered the headboard, nightstand, wall, and windowsill. Cathy Padgett had been stabbed more than forty times. Her left thumb and right pinky finger were nearly cut off, evidently from her desperate effort to wrest the knife away from her attacker. There were cuts on seven of her ten fingers. Her pink sleep T-shirt with the logo “Alarm Clock Shock” was pushed up to just below her breasts. Her blood soaked tampon had been removed and placed on the pillow. Her panties had been cut on both sides, from the waist to the leg openings, and remained under her buttocks in back, with the front flap dangling over the edge of the bed.14

The Marshall County Sheriff’s Department and Arab Police Department worked through the night canvassing the crime scene, taking photographs and dusting for fingerprints. Exhausted, the officers and investigators went for breakfast at a local diner early Friday morning. The waitress who served them eavesdropped on the conversation. ‘It looked like she was raped after she was already dead,’ one officer remarked. Said another, ‘The whole thing looked staged to me.’15

“If I’d been home with my wife like I should have been, Cathy might be alive today.”

Randal Padgett has sandy blond hair salted with telltale signs of age. Over six feet tall, with a stocky physique, he looks like a man who might have played football in his younger years. “Nah,” Randal says in his shy, soft-spoken drawl, “I played basketball in junior high, but I didn’t go out for any sports in high school—you had to stay after school for practice, not enough time for hunting and fishing. I loved to hunt and fish.”16

Randal was born in 1950, in Arab, Alabama, a small community in Marshall County, a predominantly rural region located in the northeast sector of the state. Marshall County has a total population of 84,000. By comparison, the nearest city of any size, Huntsville, in neighboring Madison County, has a population of 158,000. Except for his college years and his time on death row, Randal Padgett has lived in Marshall County his entire life. “My pop was a farmer. He row cropped, until he got into the chicken business, and eventually, raising chickens was all he did. After high school, I went to Jacksonville State University and got a bachelors degree in business with a minor in economics. That first year after college, about all I did was fish, me and this buddy of mine, every day for nearly a year. My pop started to get on me, ‘Don’t you think it’s about time you do something besides fish, son?’ I was in Huntsville at Kmart in the sporting goods section and the manager was talking about needing help, so I hired on as an assistant manager.

“That’s where I met Cathy.”
A petite, blue-eyed blonde, Cathy Cavanaugh worked as a cashier in the automotive section. Randal had scarcely dated at all in high school. His only prior steady girlfriend was a woman he dated in college, a relationship that lasted less than a year. Cathy Cavanaugh was friendly and easy to talk to, and finally Randal got up the nerve to ask her for a date.

She accepted and suggested Randal follow her home after work, so he would know where her house was. “Huntsville was a big city to me,” Randal says sheepishly. It was raining and the roads were slick. When a traffic light just ahead changed from green to yellow, Randal panicked—I’m gonna lose her. He sped up, Cathy stopped, and Randal plowed into the back of her car, severely damaging her bumper. They phoned for the police to file an accident report. When the officer arrived, they were sitting in the car holding hands. The officer thought they were strangers who had become intimately acquainted in the short span between the accident and when he had arrived at the scene. In a sense, it was true…