A Tigard man suspected of killing his wife 40 years ago in Washington County died by suicide after police reopened the investigation and recently forwarded it to prosecutors, the county sheriff’s office said Wednesday.
Detectives working on the cold case interviewed Randal “Randy” McEvers, 70, in January, then referred the case to the Washington County District Attorney’s office.
On Feb. 8, before prosecutors decided whether to charge him, McEvers died by suicide, the sheriff’s office said.
Washington County sheriff’s deputies responded the morning of Jan. 2, 1983, after McEvers, then 30, called 911, saying his 28-year-old wife, Nancy McEvers, had killed herself.
Officers responded to their home on Southwest Rivendell Drive in the Durham neighborhood of then-unincorporated Washington County, where they found the woman dead from a gunshot wound to the head, officials said.
The couple and their 1-year-old son had been home alone when the shooting occurred, officials said.
When Randal McEvers spoke to deputies, he described two versions of what preceded the shooting, the sheriff’s office said. He later refused to cooperate with investigators.
Investigators determined by April 1983 that the shooting was not self-inflicted, after looking at forensic evidence, testing the gun and reviewing the results of Nancy McEvers’s autopsy, officials said.
But investigators suspended the case in August 1983 due to a lack of other leads.
The case was cold until August 2022, when sheriff’s office detectives reopened the investigation, officials said.
The sheriff’s office re-examined evidence and interviewed over 20 people, including detectives, deputies and firefighters who responded to the shooting in 1983.
In January, detectives visited Randal McEvers at his Tigard home to interview him, then referred the case to county prosecutors, the sheriff’s office said.
Less than a month later, he was dead, officials said.
