Randall Brent Woodfield was born in Salem, Oregon, on December 26, 1950, the son of a telephone company executive, and grew up in comfortable circumstances in Otter Rock. He was a fine athlete, played wide receiver for Portland State University, and was drafted in the seventeenth round by the Green Bay Packers in 1974. He was cut in training camp, and the reason given was a series of arrests for indecent exposure.
He went back to Oregon, worked as a barman in Portland, and served four years of a ten-year sentence for robbery. He was paroled in 1979. The Oregon press called him the I-5 Killer and the I-5 Bandit, after the interstate he worked along.
From late 1980 he committed a long run of armed robberies of small shops and filling stations along the Interstate 5 corridor between Washington and California, and in many of them he forced the women present to perform sex acts. In January 1981 he shot two teenage girls in Salem, killing Shari Hull and leaving Beth Wilmot alive; she identified him. At least four people are known to have died, and Oregon investigators have connected him by pattern and ballistics to somewhere around eighteen killings and dozens of sexual assaults.
He was arrested in March 1981 and convicted in June of Shari Hull's murder, and sentenced to life plus ninety years, with further convictions following in California. In 2006 DNA linked him to the 1980 murder of Cherie Ayers, an old classmate, in Portland. He is at the Oregon State Penitentiary.