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Dead Asleep is Hulu's latest true crime documentary, based on Randy Herman Jr.'s brutal stabbing of a 21-year-old girl in West Palm Beach, Florida. What makes it a thrilling mystery is that it was never truly solved. In March 2017, 911 operators received a murder confession on a call. The caller was Randy Herman Jr. and the deceased was Brooke Preston.
However, Randy and Brooke were childhood friends and he had no motive to kill her. The former claimed he had been sleepwalking when he stabbed her. Watch Dead Asleep on Hulu, available to stream starting 16 December 2021.
Dead Asleep is directed by Skye Borgman and produced in association with Sky Crime. The documentary features Randy's family, attorneys on the case, journalists, forensics and other experts offering different perspectives on the case.
5 things you need to know about Randy Herman Jr.'s case before diving into 'Dead Asleep'
Here's a little background information about Randy Herman Jr.'s sleepwalking murder case before you watch Dead Asleep.
1) What is Randy Herman Jr.'s background?
Randy Herman Jr. hails from a rural town called Laceyville. He lived there with his mother and sister. His parents divorced when he was young and his father was mostly absent from his life.
He was the first in his family to go to college where he studied criminal justice while working part-time as a corrections officer. It was in college that he started drinking heavily and using drugs recreationally.
In 2013, he lost his part-time job after a drug charge for possession of marijuana. A few days after that, he was pulled over for driving drunk. He left school and moved back home where he continued to drink. In 2014, he was charged with a second DUI.
During his time in jail, he found out that his father had murdered his live-in girlfriend and then taken his own life in Alabama. Desperately needing a new lease of life, Randy decided to move to Florida along with his childhood friend Brooke Preston, after he was released from jail.
2) How did he murder Brooke Preston?
Randy Herman Jr. lived in Florida with Brooke and her sister Jordan for six months. He got a job that he quit after 4 months and drank his way through the inheritance his father had left for him. Brooke eventually left to live in Buffalo in 2016, with her boyfriend of four years.
A few months later, she returned to their West Palm Beach house to collect the rest of her belongings and bid goodbye to her friends. In 2017, when she got back to Florida, Randy was broke and a depressed alcoholic.
Despite his resolve to quit drinking, Randy downed upwards of 30 beers while celebrating with Brooke. He became increasingly belligerent after all the drinking and Brooke called another friend to pick her up.
The next day, Randy called Brooke over to the house to give her a t-shirt. She took it and hugged him goodbye before leaving, and that's the last thing he remembers of Brooke being alive.
He claimed to have slept after she left but less than 20 minutes later, he was standing over her brutalized body with a hunting knife in his hand. He also had cuts on his hands that showed how Brooke struggled to protect herself.
3) What was the sleepwalking defense?
After Randy made the 911 call, confessing to Brooke's death, he was charged with first-degree murder. The evidence included Brooke's blood on his socks and hands, his skin beneath her fingernails, and the 911 call.
Despite rigorous questioning by the police, no motive was revealed. Kathi, Randy's mother, insisted that he couldn't have killed anyone and suggested sleepwalking as a possible explanation for the murder. She cited incidents from Randy's childhood where she had found him opening cabinets and riding a bike in his sleep.
Randy's defense team brought in a forensic psychologist who confirmed the diagnostic signs of a parasomnia sleep disorder. His defense attorney pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, not because he was clinically insane but because there was a defect that led to the grotesque killing.
But Randy Herman Jr.'s case was not the first time a defendant had put forth sleepwalking as a criminal defense. In 1846, a Boston man was acquitted of the murder of an escort after his attorney claimed he was a chronic sleepwalker. In 1997, a devout Mormon in Arizona stabbed his wife 44 times and dragged her body into their backyard pool in his sleep.
However, the jury did not buy Randy's sleepwalking defense and he was sentenced to life in prison in May 2019.
4) What piece of evidence made the jury convict Randy Herman Jr.?
As part of Randy's defense, forensic psychologist Dr Charles Ewing testified that it usually takes some time to fall into the kind of deep sleep that leads to sleepwalking.
However, he also said that someone can fall into a deep sleep immediately, especially when drinking and sleep deprivation are involved. The latter was Randy's case.
Herman claimed he had spoken to Preston minutes before her death and later only remembers having stabbed her. According to the documentary Dead Asleep, the memory of Randy being awake just minutes before the murder could have been a dream or an imagined memory.
The jurors pointed to this specific memory when asked their reason for convicting him. They felt that Randy couldn't have returned to a deep sleep minutes after talking to Preston. Thus, the timeline of events was a big motivating factor for the jurors in convicting Randy Herman Jr.
5) Where is Randy Herman Jr. now?
Randy Herman Jr. is currently incarcerated at the Hardee Correctional Facility. He is serving life in prison without parole. In November, he filed a motion with the 15th Judicial Circuit, asking the court to vacate his first-degree murder conviction.
He plans to represent himself and argues that his attorneys didn't provide a proper defense in advising him to plead insanity.
In his motion, he wrote that the counsel did not conduct an adequate investigation or they would have discovered that sleepwalking should have been raised under the legal defense of automatism and not insanity.
Automatism refers to bodily movements that are not consciously controlled like breathing or sleepwalking.
While Randy is deeply regretful and distraught following the murder of Brooke Preston, he still believes it was not intentional. The Hulu documentary Dead Asleep also aims to unpack whether Randy in fact murdered Brooke and if so, whether he deserves life imprisonment or not.
