More than 40 years have passed since Janet Lenny White was attacked and murdered in her Florida office, and her husband is still in pain.
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Randy White was protecting his beautiful young wife.
When the couple met for lunch at their home in Florida on June 14, 1982, he insisted on returning to work in the car despite the inconvenience. He watched her unlock the door and waving goodbye. He drove at his horns.
12 minutes later, Janet Rennie White was dead and was repeatedly stabbed in a nearby forest.
“At 12:55pm, I kissed her goodbye. They estimated her death time was 1:07pm,” Randy White told USA Today in an interview. “You’re not prepared for a life that just stops it all of a sudden.”
Currently, Rennie’s killer – Kale Barrington Bates – is scheduled to be executed in Florida on August 19th with a fatal injection.
Randy is scheduled to be there as he hopes that justice will eventually be done for Rennie 43 years after the murder.
As Bates’ appeal disappears and his execution approaches, USA Today looks back at Randy and Renee White’s love story, a horrifying crime, and how he survived the worst day of his life.
“Who the hell is that young woman?”
Randy White was 19 years old and was strolling around Marianna’s pizza parlour in the Florida Panhandle.
“She’s walking through the door. I mean the second thing she went in. I can remember what I said. “She was absolutely gorgeous.”
The Raven haired girl ordered pizza and was looking for a seat when Randy told her to take her to her wrist and sit beside him.
“She said, ‘I don’t know you,’ and I said, ‘That doesn’t matter, sit down,'” he recalled. “And from that night onwards, I saw her every night, until I got married ten weeks later. And then I was with her.”
Later, Randy learns that when she gets home the night Rennie meets, she tells her mother, “I met the man of my dreams.”
“We were totally hooked on each other,” Randy said. “Like an upside down madness.”
“She always wanted to be someone.”
Eight years after the wedding, the white man still lived on his honeymoon. Rennie loves to travel and came up with a last minute plan that keeps Randy spinning her head.
“We probably haven’t been together for three weeks and we were having fun over the night… It’s 1:30am and she comes to me and says, ‘Let’s go to Jacksonville.’ “I said, ‘It’s 1:30am and Jacksonville is three hours away from here.’ Now, you can guess where we’ve come. ”
Once, my best friend who lives in Chicago called the couple and told me he’d bought them a ticket to LED Zeppelin if they could travel.
“She can you go with me, I can go without you,” Randy said. “I was like, ‘I’m going.’ I told my boss and he asked how much time I needed, I said “maybe five days.” 12 days later, we are still in Chicago. ”
Randy didn’t care about the unpredictability.
“She’s always been doing that,” he said. “I didn’t know where I got involved with her.”
At the time, Randy worked as a salesman on the business supply side of Maxwell House Coffee, while Rennie was the office manager at State Farm Insurance in Lynn Haven, Florida. She took evening classes in the hopes of opening her own insurance office one day.
“She always wanted to be someone,” Randy said.
The couple had been talking about their children for years, but Randy was so young that they weren’t in a hurry. In 1982, when he was 27 and 24, they decided it was time, he said. “She wanted the kids to be really, really bad.”
Shocking attack: “Lenny fought back.”
On Monday, June 14th, 1982, everything changed for the whites. The couple had just had a romantic weekend in Cape San Bras and Shell Island along the Florida Panhandle coastline and are back to work.
At lunchtime they met at their home in Linhaven. She watched her favorite show “Days of Our Lives” and he made a sandwich for her. When it was time to return to work, Randy wanted to make sure Lenny was back safely as her boss was looking for a new business, but she was the only one in the office.
What the couple didn’t know when Rennie said goodbye to Randy was that the man broke behind the office waiting for her.
When Rennie came in, the phone rang. She responded, saying “Hello” when Kyle Barrington Bates popped out, according to court records. Rennie let out a “bone-shattering cry” and Bates cut off the phone cord, court records say.
A woman immediately called the local police. It was too late.
“Bates attacked her, but Rennie fought back,” court records said. “In spite of her best efforts, Bates overwhelmed Rennie and pushed her into the woods behind her office.”
Bates “brutally beat Lenny”, strangled her, stabbed her twice in the chest, and “trying to rape her”, Randy opposes the terminology regarding sexual assault, but “trying to rape her.” Bates admitted that “both he and Lenny’s underwear contained evidence of semen” and “engaged in unilateral sexual acts,” court records state.
Within about 15 minutes of waving goodbye to Lenny, Randy received a call in her office that an emergency had occurred. Anxious and sick, he rushed to the scene, where the sheriff’s pastor broke the news.
“He looked at me and recalled, ‘Mr. White, I don’t know how to say this. I don’t know how to tell this, but your wife was murdered,” Randy recalled. “I lost it completely.”
Police arrived within minutes of the attack. Bates tried to make a vacation, but turned around and ended up walking through the sunny weather in front of an armed officer.
He is covered in blood, with Rennie’s wedding ring in his pocket, and admits to taking her into the woods, but Bates always denising to kill her. He was convicted of murder and other charges and sentenced to death.
His attorney did not respond to USA Today’s request for comment.
“Your wife was murdered.”
After the murder, grieving, Randy became lonely, obsessed with cocaine, and helped him to “stoop the demons chasing me.” The next year was full of pain and darkness, and he abandoned his dream of having a child.
“That part of me left after she was killed,” he said. “It destroyed me. I thought, ‘I’m done, I’m not going to take my kids into the world.’ ”
Then, seven years after the murder, he met someone. Randy was walking into the salon and got a haircut when she met her new receptionist. The second time in his life he recalled, “I’ve gone.”
Randy and Jennifer White have been married for 29 years now.
“It was a blessing,” he said. “I was in a darker place than the dark, so there’s no doubt that she was sent to me… She pulled me away from the depths of hell.”
Randy said he quit cocaine cold turkey in 1995 and flushed out supply to the toilets. He hasn’t touched on it since.
“I’m better than ever,” said Randy, who now has 70 people. I don’t see it as depression.
Now, Randy is preparing to witness Bates’ execution. He said it was too long to come, years after Rennie’s murder.
“This has been hanging out for just 43 years, so at least for this part, I can put it behind me and not think again. “But I will never pass it. I will fight it until the last breath.”
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter at USA Today. Contact her at amanda.myers@usatoday.com and follow her at X at @AmandaleUSAT
