Randy Guzek, Terrebonne couple’s killer in 1987, will get fifth trial, if judge’s latest ruling stands

SALEM, Ore. (KTVZ) – One of the most notorious killers in Central Oregon history may be getting yet another new trial – his fifth – if a judge’s ruling Friday stands, after recent years brought a change in state law, a state Supreme Court ruling and former Gov. Kate Brown’s commutation of 17 Death Row inmates’ death sentences.

Randy Lee Guzek was 18 in 1987 when he and two other men, Mark Wilson and David Cathey, fatally stabbed and shot Rod and Lois Houser at the couple’s Terrebonne home. The other two men got life sentences after testifying against Guzek.

A bill passed by lawmakers in 2019 narrowed what crimes qualified as aggravated murder, the only charge that carried capital punishment in Oregon. The new law was not retroactive, but the Oregon Supreme Court ruled two years later that it was – and in 2022, Brown commuted the death sentences, making them life without parole.

And now, in a ruling from the bench in Salem on Friday, Judge Daniel Murphy said Guzek, who turns 54 on May 29, should get yet another trial, once again on procedural grounds.

The state attorney general’s office quickly filed a motion to reconsider that will be heard next week, according to Josh Marquis, the former Deschutes County prosecutor who prosecuted Guzek in his last three retrials.

Marquis noted that rather than seek parole in late 2019, as he could have, Guzek’s attorneys filed a nearly 7,000-page “post-conviction relief” petition. That petition went to a non-jury trial before the judge this month, in which Marquis was subpoenaed earlier this year.

Marquis, the retired former Clatsop County DA, told us in 2021 in expected such a possible outcome and expressed dismay last year over the governor's "blanket" commutations.

“I cannot imagine the heartache this is causing the Houser family, with whom I remain in contact,” Marquis said Friday. He told NewsChannel 21 that he’s told the family and District Attorney Steve Gunnels, “I will try the case a fourth time, if they want me to, without pay, as I did in 1997 and 2010.”