The DAY AFTER Wisconsin Right Now asked Tony Evers’ Department of Corrections if it was taking action to revoke Randolph Whiting’s parole, he was taken back into custody.
Randolph “Gargoyle” Whiting is one of the most notorious paroled killers in Wisconsin history; he was convicted of gang raping a Green Bay woman and then cutting her throat so severely he almost beheaded her, before leaving her in a manure pit to die. In fact, when we wrote a 60-plus part series on the brutal killers and rapists who were freed by Gov. Tony Evers’ then appointee to the Wisconsin Parole Commission last fall, Whiting’s case was the first we featured.
We’ve now learned that, on April 24, 2023, a domestic violence-related restraining order was filed against Whiting in Waupaca County Circuit Court. According to court records, a judge granted the restraining order on May 2, 2023, for four years.
Whiting was not taken back into custody until May 4, the day AFTER Wisconsin Right Now asked DOC what was being done about it. Here’s our May 3 email to DOC:
Jail booking records show he was booked the following day into the Waupaca County Jail.
DOC finally responded on May 5, writing merely, “DCC staff are investigating.”
The woman who filed the retraining order, whose name we are withholding because she is an alleged domestic violence victim, wrote the court, “There is no doubt if I had not asked him to leave my home, I would be dead by now.” She accused Whiting of “putting something in my food and beverages,” squeezing her throat, threatening her, and being controlling. Whiting denied the allegations in a letter, raising concerns about the woman’s mental health.
Wisconsin DOC records online still list Whiting as living on “active community supervision” in Waupaca, despite the jail booking sheet.
Whiting has not been charged with a crime in association with the new allegations.
A letter submitted with the injunction says the woman met Whiting when she rented an apartment to his son. She lived on the first floor of a two-family home and rented out the upper unit.
She wrote that she started seeing Whiting St. around Christmas of 2020.
He was living in the basement of his sister’s home at the time. He asked her to marry him shortly after they started dating. They underwent premarital counseling at a church. He told her that God “creative a suitable helper for him. God created woman. God wants marriage. Wives be submissive to your husbands,” the woman alleged.
She alleged that Randy Jr. moved out of the apartment after alleging that his father “pushed him across the room and he was scared of his anger.”
They married in March 2021. She alleged that Whiting “started to try to control me, especially how much money I spent. It started with haircuts, makeup and cigarettes. He would not help me purchase good tires for my car.” She paid half of his car repairs and he did not do it in return, the restraining order claims.
She spoke with a pastor who “said be patient and let him have control since he was in jail for 35 years without choices or control. He even controlled the decorating,” the woman wrote.
The woman alleged that after an argument at a diner, Whiting “grabbed me by the throat and squeezed. It really scared me. I saw the other personality. He cried and apologized several times.”
When they would argue while driving “he would act like he was going to drive the vehicle into oncoming traffic. He did that more and more often. He would hold my elderly dog a few feet off the ground and drop her on her feet knowing she has a bad hip and knee. He would grab me wherever and squeeze,” she wrote.
She claimed that, after another argument, “he chased me into my bedroom because I refused to argue with him. He was very angry and grabbed me by the arm very hard,” the restraining order alleges.
The woman told the court that Whiting told her “if anyone ever hurt him, his friend…. Would kill them…He also told me if I ever hurt him (a relative) would hurt me.”
She said she has lost a “significant amount of weight in the last few months and believe he has been putting something in my food and beverages. Prior to April of this year, Randy almost always picks up my prescription medications. There is no doubt if I had not asked him to leave my home, I would be dead by now.”
Whiting wrote a letter in his own defense that is also in the court file. In it, he accused the woman of telling a pastor he had tampered with her fone and was controlling “because I was making financial decisions without her and wanting to know how she was spending her money. She was not willing to challenge any of her thinking and blamed all our problems on me. Never once did she mention any sort of abuse.”
He alleged that she had “not once mention to any of them a hint of physical abuse,” referencing the woman’s children, other family members, and Whiting’s sister.
“As a group, her entire family is concerned about her mental health,” he wrote. He alleged that she accused another man of poisoning her too and stated that the woman’s daughter went with Whiting to the Waupaca Police Department to speak with an officer who had given the woman a ride to the courthouse to pick up the TRO paperwork. He alleged that the daughter “explained to him that she was seriously concerned about her mother’s current state of mind and overall mental health.”
He alleged the marriage disintegrated because of poor communication and financial issues. He said she told him she loved him and blew kisses over the phone and then when he called again the same day, she told him she wanted a divorce and filled garbage bags with his clothes.
Since 2019, Gov. Tony Evers’ Parole Commission has released hundreds of convicted criminals, freeing them early on parole mostly into Wisconsin communities, including more than 300 murderers and attempted murderers, and more than 47 child rapists.
Randolph Whiting was one of them. His release was discretionary. He was paroled from a 1980s era murder victim. The victim was named Margaret Anderson.
Many called the death of Margaret Anderson the most “brutal murder in Green Bay history,” according to WBAY-TV.
A book written about her death says she was practically “beheaded” and left to die in a manure pit. A group of biker gang members, including Randolph “Gargoyle” Whiting, gang-raped her in a bar, beat her with a cue stick, and then, prosecutors said, Whiting slashed her throat from ear-to-ear and dumped her in the pit.
“They actually tortured her and beat the ‘h’ out of her,” a retired police officer told WBAY.
The Green Bay Press-Gazette reported that the neck wound was 6 to 8 inches long, appearing to “go halfway through her neck.” Anderson was discovered lying on the road in a pool of blood “with her arms thrashing above her head,” before she gasped and died.
According to WBAY, she was found by a cattle truck driver who initially thought she was a hurt animal crawling on the road.
Evers’ Parole Commission Released Randolph Whiting Early
Whiting, 63, was paroled on Jan. 21, 2020. He had received a life sentence in the 1984 case, which occurred before truth-in-sentencing laws went into effect.
According to the Green Bay Press-Gazette newspaper, Whiting claimed to have found religion and wrote articles for a blog called “Between the Bars.” In one of them, written in April 2013, he claimed “I am … no longer the person who committed murder. People can choose to continue to hate me for the person I was 30 years ago, but that person is already dead.”
As author Mike Duplaise writes, “Margaret Anderson was a divorced mother with a teenage son, scraping out a very modest existence in early 1980s Green Bay, Wisconsin, when a night out during the holiday season turned into a nightmare. Before the next day would dawn, Margaret would become the victim of one of the most horrific murders in Green Bay’s history.
She would endure two hours of torture at the hands of four motorcycle club members inside the Back Forty tavern after closing time, before being driven to a manure clean-out area outside a meat packing plant on the edge of town. There, one of the bikers cut her throat and left her for dead in the snow of a brutally cold winter night.”
Tamra Copple Sonsteng of Helena, Montana, was Anderson’s niece. She told the Green Bay Press-Gazette in 2020, of Whiting and the other men there that day: “There has never been any remorse. These guys didn’t care. They never once contacted family members to say, ‘I apologize, I was drunk, I was really drugged up.’”
The article says that Sonsteng believes Whiting was released in part because her parents and most siblings are gone. She recommended against his release. She received a letter from Evers’ Parole Commission Chairman John Tate saying that Whiting was being released. Evers, who first appointed Tate in 2019, reappointed him in 2021, after Whiting’s release. Tate had sole authority over the release, but Evers noted that he was “pleased” to reappoint Tate after Tate gave Whiting freedom.
According to a 1984 article in the Green Bay Press-Gazette, the victim, Margaret Anderson, died a horrific death. Her throat was slashed, and she was badly beaten.
The killer was Randolph “Gargoyle” Whiting, prosecutors said. He was 24 at the time.
A newspaper article from the time described how a passerby found Anderson with a neck wound that had “blood coming out like a fountain of water. Her mouth was open, and she was calling for help.”
The Press Gazette reported that the neck wound was 6 to 8 inches long, appearing to “go halfway through her neck.” Anderson was discovered lying on the road in a pool of blood “with her arms thrashing above her head,” before she gasped and died.
The article says that Whiting was the person who slashed her throat, and there was later some dispute over that. But he was the only person ever convicted of murder in her case. Three other men also drove her from a bar to a manure pit, where she was dumped.
A 2020 article in the Press Gazette said all four of these men are today walking free. Whiting’s ex-wife was quoted as saying “they should die there,” referring to prison.
The newspaper reported that the men were part of a biker gang, and they gang-raped the victim at a bar, while one beat her with a cue stick. But it was Whiting who slashed her throat “ear-to-ear” and tossed her in the manure pit, prosecutors argued. She staggered around it before dying.
According to WBAY, the retired police officer said, “What they did to her in the bar was enough to kill her.”
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