‘Somebody beat her to a pulp’: Cold case investigation leads to murder charges in 1994 homicide of 85-year-old
08/08/2026 12:58 pm PDT
HILLSBORO, Ore. (TCN) -- A 66-year-old man has been arrested and charged with murder in connection with the long-unsolved 1994 homicide of an 85-year-old woman.
The Washington County District Attorney’s Office announced that Randall Joseph Gall was charged with second-degree murder on Aug. 4. Veta Hardebeck lived on a neighboring property when she was killed on Feb. 16, 1994.
KPTV reports Hardebeck lived alone and it was initially believed she had died in an accident or due to a medical condition.
An autopsy revealed that her death was a homicide. The case went unsolved for many years until the DA’s Cold Case Unit received additional funding, which allowed them to submit existing evidence to a private DNA lab for testing.
After the case was reopened in 2025, KGW spoke to Hardebeck’s daughter, Caroline Ledbury, who said, “I found my mom laying on the concrete. Somebody had severely beat her to a pulp,” Ledbury said.
“There’s a kitchen window; they had knocked her through the kitchen window. They knocked her so hard in the kitchen window that it broke the glass, and the glass had penetrated her skull and [was] sticking up out of her skull.”
Ledbury told the outlet the scene appeared staged. KGW reports that she said, “Whoever murdered her laid her down, put her head on a hunk of wood — like she’d fallen back and hit her head on the wood is what it looked like. Folded her arms like this and piled them full, these hunks of wood. … My mom was 85 years old, had a woodstove. She’d carry one stick of wood in at a time to stock that stove. That’s all she could handle.”
According to the DA, Gall is behind bars without bail.
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