Randall Joseph Gall, 66, was arrested Tuesday at his home in Gaston after a Washington County grand jury secretly indicted him on a charge of second-degree murder in the 1994 death of 85-year-old Veta Hardebeck. Gall was arraigned Wednesday and remains held without bail at the Washington County Jail, according to authorities. Investigators believe Gall lived on a property neighboring Hardebeck's rural Gaston home at the time she was killed.
The Washington County Sheriff's Office Tactical Negotiations Team carried out the arrest a day after the indictment was issued, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive. As detailed by Beaverton Valley Times, the secret indictment, returned Monday, allowed deputies to take Gall into custody at his residence without warning, ending a case that had gone unsolved for more than three decades.
A Staged Accident Scene
Hardebeck was found dead outside her Gaston home on February 16, 1994, police said. Her daughter later recalled finding the 85-year-old on the concrete outside, knocked through a broken kitchen window with glass in her skull, and firewood stacked on top of her body, according to KGW. Investigators have said the scene appeared arranged to resemble an accidental fall as she gathered wood for the stove she used to heat the rural property.
Decades of Uncertainty Before an Autopsy Revealed the Truth
Investigators initially treated Hardebeck's death as the result of natural causes or an accident, per The Independent. A subsequent autopsy determined she had actually been killed by blunt-force trauma and strangulation. Oregonian archives, cited by The Oregonian/OregonLive, indicate she was strangled on the back porch of her home — but the early assumptions about how she died obscured that evidence for years.
A Grant-Funded DNA Breakthrough
The case sat dormant until July 2025, when the Washington County District Attorney's Office received a $14,000 grant from the Oregon Cold Case Investigators Association and Brothers Car Collection, Beaverton Valley Times reported. The funding allowed the Cold Case Unit to submit crime-scene evidence to a private laboratory for advanced DNA testing that wasn't available to investigators in 1994. That testing ultimately connected Gall to Hardebeck's death, leading to Tuesday's indictment.
Cold Case Unit's History of Reopening Old Wounds
The Cold Case Unit was established in 2020 through a U.S. Department of Justice grant called
