Rand Death Details Emerge

Wayne Rand

Last week Whispers did not have official confirmation that the oldest of serial fraudster Tony Rand’s five sons, all convicted felons themselves, was stabbed to death at a motel near Dallas.

Now we do.

The Addison Police Department released one page of an incident report confirming that Wayne Anthony Rand was killed with a “knife/cutting instrument” at a Red Roof Inn & Suites.

The report also says that Landon Bentley Rand, 21, is the suspect in the murder.

The single page does not explain why Wayne Rand was at a motel slightly more than a mile from his home address in Farmers Branch.

Nor does it establish the relationship between Wayne Rand and Landon Rand, but Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA identified Landon as Wayne’s son, information it attributed to police sources.

Curiously, Landon Rand, who is in custody, is not listed among the survivors in an obituary for Wayne Rand published online by Ted Dickey West Funeral Home of Dallas, as he had been in Wayne’s grandmother’s obituary in 2019. Instead Wayne’s listed survivors include two daughters, his parents and his four younger brothers, Jeff, Greg, Mark and Bill, among other relatives.

Tony Rand, now 81, raised his five sons and one daughter in North Little Rock, where he ran a small chain of movie theaters. He spent most of the 1990s in federal prison for defrauding its creditors of some $17 million.

Most of the Rand family subsequently relocated to the Dallas area, and Tony and all five sons pleaded guilty in 2010 and 2011 to defrauding investors in oil and gas schemes totaling $110 million.

Wayne Rand pleaded guilty to felony theft of more than $200,000 — much more. The Texas State Securities Board described his crime as “an extensive oil-and-gas exploration scam in which he used millions of dollars of investors’ money for personal expenses, including the purchase of a house, luxury speedboats, guns and jewelry.”

He was sentenced in 2011 to 20 years in state prison but had been released by 2021.