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. Fire investigators found that a liquid accelerant had been used and that the smoke alarm had been switched off. 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. 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 had been arrested on February 13 for grand theft of the YWCA's bingo money and was held in the Ada County Jail 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 denied her habeas petition in 2011, and her appeal from a later federal ruling, filed in April 2023, was still before the Ninth Circuit in September 2025.
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 limits the time for such a claim 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. In 2011 federal district judge B. Lynn Winmill dismissed one of her appeals.
Row, who turned sixty-eight in September 2025, is the only woman on Idaho's death row and the only condemned prisoner at the Pocatello Women's Correctional Center; the men on death row are held at the maximum security prison near Boise, where she would be moved if a death warrant were ever issued. Idaho has never executed a woman. In March 2025 the state made the firing squad its primary method of execution, with the change set to take effect in July 2026, and executions were paused while the prison system prepared for it.