In the early hours of February 10, 1992, fire broke out in a two-story duplex apartment at 10489 Seneca in Boise, Idaho. When crews could get inside they found Randy Row, thirty-four, and his stepchildren Joshua Cornellier, ten, and Tabitha Cornellier, eight, dead in their upstairs bedrooms of carbon monoxide poisoning. They had never woken. Fire investigators found that the fire had been set with a liquid accelerant where the apartment met the garage, and that a second fire had been started in a pile of clothes in the living room. The power to the upstairs had been cut at the circuit breaker, disabling the smoke detector, and the furnace fan had been set to run continuously, feeding the flames and driving smoke through the house.
The children's mother, Robin Lee Row, thirty-four, was not there. She had moved out because of trouble in her marriage and was staying with a close friend, Joan McHugh. Within days investigators had found that she held six life insurance policies on her husband and children, with herself as beneficiary, worth $276,500 in all. She had bought the most recent on January 24, 1992, seventeen days before the fire. In a storage unit she rented in Meridian they found evidence that she had been stealing from the bingo game she managed for the YWCA, where she worked. She was arrested on February 13 for stealing the bingo money. The lead investigator was Gary Raney, later Ada County sheriff.
Row was born on September 12, 1957. Police learned in 1992 that the Seneca Street fire was not the first death in her family. A daughter, Christina, had died of what was recorded as sudden infant death syndrome in 1977, and a son, Keith, had died in a fire in a cabin in California in 1980, when a portable heater set his blankets alight; she collected twenty-eight thousand dollars on his life insurance. Raney said years later that the forensic evidence suggested the boy's bedroom door had been locked and the heater pushed up against his bed, that he had probably tried to crawl to the window and died on the way, and that he believed the death could have been charged as murder had the Boise case not gone forward. She was never charged in either death.
The night of the fire unraveled her account. A driver out early that morning saw a car he later identified as matching hers near the Seneca Street home. At McHugh's house, McHugh heard someone showering and running the washing machine in the early morning hours, and Row admitted to her that she had showered and washed her clothes. Row first said she could not remember where she had been, and later said she had been sitting in a car outside talking with her psychiatrist. When McHugh pointed out that the psychiatrist could give her an alibi, Row did not seem interested and would not give the psychiatrist's name. The abuse she had described in her marriage also fell apart: there were no reports of arrests or charges against Randy Row, and the welfare workers she said had come to the house to sedate him had never been there. Investigators also learned that she had begun a sexual relationship with McHugh's adult son.
The calls that did the most damage were made from jail. Row was being held in the Ada County Jail on the theft charge, on $100,000 bail. Detective Raney asked McHugh to put a tape recorder on her telephone in case Row called. At 11:30 on the morning of Friday, March 20, a magistrate issued a warrant charging Row with three counts of first degree murder, and at one o'clock police and prosecutors announced the charges at a press conference. At about the same time Row, who had learned what was coming, telephoned McHugh. As Raney had suggested, McHugh told her that she had woken during the night of the fire, gone downstairs and found Row gone. Row said that she had been outside the house, talking to her psychiatrist. She called back at 2:05 and repeated that she had been talking to the psychiatrist at 4:30 in the morning. She was formally arrested for the murders in the jail the following Monday, and the charge of aggravated arson was added later. Her lawyers tried to keep the calls out of the trial, and failed.
On March 5, 1993, an Ada County jury convicted her of aggravated arson and three counts of first degree murder. She was sentenced to death on December 16, 1993 by Judge Alan Schwartzman.
At sentencing the trial judge found four aggravating circumstances that could support death: that she had committed more than one murder, that the murders were committed in the course of an arson, that she had killed in expectation of the insurance money, and that the killings showed utter disregard for human life. The court weighed the mitigation against the first of these alone and found it did not make death unjust. Her lawyers had presented letters from friends and family, testimony from her friends, California welfare records and Veterans Administration records about her husband's old injuries and the marriage, and had portrayed her throughout as a good mother who loved her children; the judge accepted that she had been described and seen that way. On appeal she complained that the judge had kept calling her a mother and the dead her children. The Idaho Supreme Court said the judge had only been answering the case her own lawyers made. It affirmed everything on March 18, 1998, denied rehearing on May 20, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case that November.
A second state petition, filed in 1999, argued that McHugh was not to be believed, that the state had misrepresented to the judge what her CT scans showed about atrophy of her brain, and that investigators had failed to secure the fire scene and misrepresented their evidence; the Idaho Supreme Court upheld its dismissal in 2001. A federal judge, B. Lynn Winmill, denied her habeas petition in 2011. In March 2023 he denied her again, in a sixty-three-page order that sharply criticized both her past lawyers and the way Idaho prosecuted capital cases, but held that a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, barred him from hearing new evidence about her brain because the failure to raise it lay with her post-conviction lawyers. Her lawyer, Deborah Czuba, said she would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, pointing out that Row had been sentenced to death by a single judge rather than the jury the Constitution now requires, that she had health problems that made it hard for her to walk and sometimes left her confused, and that she had been a model prisoner, well liked by the staff. That appeal was still pending in September 2025.
In state court, too, her later appeals turned on her brain. Her lawyers, from Federal Defender Services of Idaho, argued that scans taken before the killings showed atrophy and cognitive impairment, and that her trial lawyers had lacked the time and money to develop that evidence or put it before the court at sentencing, where it might have meant life instead of death. On September 4, 2025, the Idaho Supreme Court unanimously rejected her request to send the case back for possible resentencing, holding that Idaho law requires any such claim to be filed within forty-two days of a death judgment and that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions had closed other routes. "Nearly three decades later, Row now asks this court to revisit her same arguments but reach a different result," Justice Gregory Moeller wrote. "Row's argument is unavailing." By then she had filed five petitions for post-conviction relief and two federal habeas claims, all unsuccessful.
Row, prisoner number 40171, turned sixty-eight in September 2025. She is the only woman on Idaho's death row, one of eight people under sentence of death in the state by the Department of Correction's count in March 2026, and the only condemned prisoner at the Pocatello Women's Correctional Center; the men are held at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise, where she would be moved if a death warrant were ever issued. Idaho has carried out three executions since it enacted its current death penalty law in 1977, and has never executed a woman. In March 2025 the legislature made the firing squad the state's primary method of execution, effective July 1, 2026. The prison system paused executions in April 2025 while it rebuilt the execution chamber, and said in the spring of 2026 that it expected to lift the pause once the work was finished and the new method took effect.
September 12, 1957: born.
1977: her daughter Christina dies of what is recorded as sudden infant death syndrome.
1980: her son Keith dies in a cabin fire in California, and she collects on his life insurance; she is never charged in either death.
January 24, 1992: she buys the most recent of six life insurance policies on her husband and children.
February 10, 1992: Randy Row and his stepchildren Joshua and Tabitha Cornellier die in a deliberately set fire at their Boise duplex.
February 13, 1992: arrested for stealing the bingo money from the YWCA.
March 20, 1992: a magistrate issues a warrant charging her with three counts of first degree murder.
March 5, 1993: an Ada County jury convicts her of aggravated arson and three counts of first degree murder.
December 16, 1993: Judge Alan Schwartzman sentences her to death.
March 18, 1998: the Idaho Supreme Court affirms.
November 1998: the United States Supreme Court declines to hear the case.
2001: the Idaho Supreme Court upholds the dismissal of her second state petition, filed in 1999.
2011: federal judge B. Lynn Winmill denies her habeas petition.
March 2023: Winmill denies her again in a sixty-three-page order.
September 4, 2025: the Idaho Supreme Court unanimously rejects her request to send the case back for possible resentencing.
March 2026: she is the only woman on Idaho's death row, one of eight people under sentence of death in the state.