Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

  Z helped her up onto the bank. “We lay there and laughed for a while, freezing our butts off. Then she got hysterical.”

  He joked about the hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. She joked about changing her will. She told her sister, Joyce Shafer: “He saved my life. I know he loves me.”

  Privately, however, she quizzed her daughter Tia: “Do you think your father could have done it for the insurance? The hundred thousand dollars?” Louise and her husband gave up fishing.

  That month Z selected Sergeant Mathis as the prison’s custodial employee of the month. “Keep up the good work,” he wrote.

  On January 21, the day after the Super Bowl, Louise called in sick to her job at a Coral Gables architectural firm. She planned to apply for another job that day.

  Z said he last saw his wife about 11:00 A.M., then drove to the prison to meet co-worker Franklin Tousley for a trip to a three-day seminar in St Petersburg.

  Louise’s oldest daughter, Tia, twenty-four, telephoned her mother about 12:45 P.M. She knew her mother had told the office she was “sick.”

  “Are you sick?” she asked.

  “I am now.”

  Tia says her mother told her that Jane Mathis had telephoned that morning to ask if Z was home yet, revealing that he had been with her the night before.

  “Mom was very upset. It was like everything was drained out of her,” says Tia. “Like the end of the world.”

  Joy, twenty, the youngest daughter, arrived home for lunch with her fiancé a moment later. Louise was on the telephone with her father. “I knew something was wrong,” Joy said. “Mom told him she was going to have a computer readout done of calls coming in and out of the house. She said, ‘Then, we’ll know.’ She sat on a couch and didn’t say anything, kind of staring off, like she was in her own little world.” Joy and her fiancé, Bobby Twisdale, left at 1:10 P.M. to return to work, she at a Fayva shoe store, he at Zayre.

  Lisa, twenty-three, the middle daughter, saw her father about 1:30 P.M., at a Carvel ice-cream shop where she worked, about a mile from her parents’ home. Lisa saw her dad nervously pat down his pockets. She thought he had lost his keys. “Just my cigarettes,” he said.

  Lisa called her mother at 1:50 P.M. No answer. She tried all afternoon. Lisa went to the house just before 5:00 P.M. She heard the TV inside—loud. The door was not locked. She opened it and saw her mother lying in the foyer.

  “My first thought was, what are you doing on the floor?” She did not see the blood; the floor is brick-red tile. She felt for a pulse. “She was so clammy and cold.” She saw a streak of blood on the wall, recoiled and rushed to the telephone to call her husband, Jason Peterson. As she waited for him to answer, she switched off the blaring TV.

  In the sudden silence, she realized the telephone was dead, the cord ripped out of the wall.

  Lisa fled weeping, her hands bloody. She pounded on a neighbor’s door. Someone called 911. Police arrived. When the paramedics came, a policewoman said, “Never mind,” and waved them away.

  Lisa saw her sister Joy’s car come down the street. “I was crying and calling her name, ‘Joy! Joy!’ When she saw me, she was already crying. She was saying, ‘No, no.’ I saw her mouthing the words.”

  “Tell me everything’s all right,” Joy pleaded.

  Tia arrived about an hour later and collapsed in the arms of her sisters.

  It was the coldest night of the year, 28 degrees. At Miami International, forgiving fans braved a windchill factor of 12 degrees to welcome home the Dolphins.

  Metro-Dade Detective John King had the sisters taken downtown to headquarters, a thirty-minute drive.

  “We were sitting on hard benches, waiting and waiting,” Tia says. “My youngest sister was throwing up. The officers were all joking that it was such a cold night that the bodies out in the ocean were turning into corpsicles. I started screaming, ‘My mother’s been murdered!’”

  A sergeant rebuked her. “Young lady, we’re trying to conduct an investigation here.”

  Lisa’s husband, Jason, twenty-seven, suggested that police test the hands of a possible suspect for gunpowder residue. The technique is fairly common.

  “This isn’t the movies,” he said the detective scoffed.

  At the crime scene, technicians removed a large section of wall with part of a bloody palm print. There was a bullet hole in the wall behind a sofa in the paneled den. Another projectile went through a wall, then a window and lodged in a neighbor’s screen.

  Louise was shot five or six times at close range. Gunpowder had singed her hair.

  Z was notified after midnight. A detective telephoned the Dolphin Beach Resort Hotel in St. Petersburg. Tousley, his co-worker, answered.

  “Z was asleep. I gave the phone to him. He sat up. He swung his feet out of bed. I heard him say, ‘Oh, my God! What do you mean?’ He said, ‘My wife is dead. Somebody killed my wife.’ He was aghast. He seemed to be in a hell of a state of shock.”

  Z said later, “Someone kept telling me my wife was deceased. I thought it was a drunk. I was going to hang up.” Months later, Z said he was still angry. “You’ve got a man—a major, not a peon—in charge of complete security at that institution. And they didn’t even send a state trooper or a policeman” to break the bad news.

  Metro police soon called again. Z quotes a detective as saying, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but one of our suspects is your girlfriend, Jane Mathis.”

  Z said he told the man, “I don’t have a girlfriend. I have a wife, and I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  Detective King spoke to Jane Mathis that night. It would be the only opportunity he ever had. She hired an attorney who instructed her to talk to no one. “She’ll stand by her innocence and let the facts speak for themselves,” he said.

  The day after the murder, Tia and Joy drove to Jane Mathis’s house. They say they took a brick and an unloaded gun. They tore the screen and pounded hysterically on the front door. They did not find Jane Mathis.

  Z flew back to Miami. His boss, Dr. Ana Gispert, met him at the airport. She drove him straight to police headquarters. “I was hauled in, more or less as a suspect,” he told me later, “but they screwed up. They didn’t give me my rights.”

  The mortician asked the daughters to bring white gloves for their mother. “One of the fingers on her right hand was mangled,” Lisa says. “They said it would take the whole day to fix her so we could have an open-casket viewing.” The family conducted a memorial service at the church where the couple had renewed their wedding vows five months earlier.

  The funeral was in Alabama. “It was miserably cold,” said only son, Fred, twenty-six. “My dad flew in with my mom’s body.”

  The son did not meet his father at the airport. “I was afraid I would jump on him,” he said. “I used to encourage Mom to divorce him. But she was really in love with Dad. That was the whole thing.”

  Eleanor Brown, Louise’s sister, said Z “stayed off to himself at the funeral.” The family all knew about Jane Mathis. “No one accused him,” she said. “He said the girl didn’t do it. She wasn’t that kind of girl. I tried to comfort him.”

  Z placed a small bouquet on his wife’s coffin. The card said, I love you.

  At the funeral, the son said, his father explained that he saw Jane Mathis on the eve of the murder to tell her he “was going to have to quit seeing her.”

  The day after the murder, Metro detectives arrived at the prison. They wanted to know about Major Z and Jane Mathis. They wanted to examine all the handguns at the prison. The killer had used a .38-caliber weapon. Were any weapons missing? Could anyone have removed a gun, used it and replaced it undetected?

  Most prison weapons are stored in a double-locked arsenal. A small number, usually four to six, are kept in the prison control room, in a wooden gun case. None was missing.

  Detectives took more than thirty weapons to the crime lab for ballistics tests. Police event
ually returned all but one, the murder weapon, a Model 15 Smith and Wesson .38-caliber revolver with a four-inch barrel, serial number 8K4S391.

  It had cost the taxpayers $93.02 seven years earlier.

  Police and the state attorney’s office refused to discuss the gun or even publicly acknowledge that they had found the murder weapon. Prison officials talked about it uncomfortably.

  “It’s embarrassing to the institution,” said a former assistant superintendent. “It’s a very traumatic thing. We were trying to keep it low-key.”

  The assistant superintendent said he thought the gun came from the control room at the rear of the main lobby. Sergeant Jane Mathis worked there every day, four P.M. to midnight. Major Z had access to the control room. So did about ten other employees. The guns are inventoried when the shift changes. No one reported any discrepancies. Sergeant Mathis worked until midnight Saturday, January 19.

  She was off on Super Bowl Sunday and on Monday, the day of the murder.

  Major Z had reported to work Monday morning—before his St. Petersburg trip. He logged out of the prison at 12:52 P.M. Tousley went to pick up a cooler of sandwiches and soft drinks. The two men arranged to meet in fifteen or twenty minutes, near Homestead First National Bank. The bank is six-tenths of a mile—a two-minute drive—from the home of Jane Mathis.

  Tousley said he found Z waiting at the intersection. He followed Z for 13.7 miles—to the Carvel shop, where he dropped off a car borrowed from his daughter, Lisa.

  Tousley recalled little of their talk during the auto trip across state to St. Petersburg, but he said Z “mentioned something about some keys.”

  The murder took place that afternoon, presumably while Z was on the road with co-worker Tousley, but the precise time of death is uncertain. Joy last saw her mother about 1:10 P.M. Lisa telephoned at about 1:50 P.M.—and got no answer.

  Could Major Z and Sergeant Mathis have seen each other that day—after he left the prison? Major Z denied it.

  On the day of the murder Sergeant Mathis walked into the prison about three P.M. She did not belong there. It was her day off. She was not in uniform. She wore a sweater and blue jeans. She said she was there to write a check for $9.80, a monthly premium, to an HMO medical plan. The matter was not urgent. “I had told her to bring in a check sometime that week,” said Maribel Ortiz in the personnel office. While she was there, prison officials say, Sergeant Mathis stopped in the control room.

  St. Pete hotel records show that Z telephoned Jane Mathis that evening.

  “Right from the damn hotel,” Z says. “I had nothing to hide.” He was worried, he said, about Jane’s health. “She had a chest cold—congestion. We discussed the weather.”

  She cut short the conversation, he said. “She told me she had spilled some paint and had to clean it up.” Z said he also tried to call home that evening, but the line was busy. “I hung up and watched TV a little.”

  Jane Mathis failed to report for work at the prison the next day—or the next. On the third day of her unexplained absence, personnel director Kril Jackson spoke to her mother. “She said her daughter had been questioned by the police and was under a doctor’s care for nervousness and strain.”

  He dispatched an aide to her home with resignation papers. Jane Mathis signed.

  Z never worked a day at the prison again either. His boss took a typed resignation to his home.

  Z signed.

  The first time the family was allowed to return to the house after the murder, Z searched “frantically for his keys,” son-in-law Jason said. “He said he found them under the dishwasher.”

  Z said he never spoke to Jane Mathis after the murder. He would drive by her house but did not stop. To do so, he said, would “bring hellfire, damnation and police down all over her.”

  Life after his wife’s death was not easy, Z said. Intruders broke into his house, and strangers chased his car and shot out a window. He changed the locks and disconnected the telephone. He was denied unemployment compensation.

  The insurance company withheld payment of the hundred thousand dollars. “I’ll have to sue the damn insurance companies,” Z said. Eventually they paid but not to him.

  The money was divided among the dead woman’s children.

  Z always acknowledged that he and his former lover are the prime suspects. Of himself, he says, “It’s not every day you are a murder suspect after an impeccable life: two traffic tickets in fifty-two years. I am innocent. I’ve seen enough of prison that I don’t want to get involved in murder. I’ve walked down Death Row and seen the electric chair. Murder is not my bag. You have two innocent people here. I have no idea who killed my wife. It wasn’t Jane Mathis.”

  Jane Mathis would not discuss the case. “As far as we’re concerned,” her lawyer said, “the matter is over. There is no case, absolutely no evidence whatsoever. She wants to go on with her life.”

  Z said there was no case against anyone: “Just between you and me and the old deep blue sea, I feel that most of what they have is circumstantial evidence.”

  The state attorney’s office agreed.

  No one was charged.

  The people who loved Mrs. Z never stopped hoping for justice. I grew to know Tia and Lisa and their husbands, Terry and Jason. Joy postponed her wedding after the murder. Eventually she married her fiancé, and they moved to Atlanta. They are all good and wholesome young people.

  Tia, the oldest girl, vibrant and levelheaded, often speaks for all of “us kids.” Estranged from their father since the murder, they have, in effect, lost both parents.

  No murder victim’s family has done more to seek justice. Eighteen months after her murder, Mrs. Z’s children, grandchildren, sisters, nieces, cousins and other relatives traveled to Miami from Alabama, Georgia, Fort Lauderdale and Leisure City to try to learn why there was no prosecution. Carrying homemade placards and wearing black armbands, they picketed the office of state attorney Janet Reno.

  They also picketed the prison—or tried to.

  WHO WAS ON DUTY IN THE CONTROL ROOM JAN. 21, 1985? One homemade sign asked.

  GUN CONTROL OUT OF CONTROL AT DADE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, said another.

  Prison guards denied them access to a road leading to the prison. They promised that an official would come out to talk to them. None ever did—only prison employees, grimly shooting video-camera pictures of the marchers with their signs.

  The family also marched on the state capitol, pleading for justice.

  They were ignored.

  Detectives told them the night of the murder that the case was all but wrapped up, say the children of Mrs. Z, that the killer was known. But prosecutors refuse to press a circumstantial case.

  The family even filed a civil suit, against the prison and the state, for not carefully screening employees and for allowing a state-owned weapon to fall into the hands of their mother’s murderer. A day in court, they hoped, might bring to light evidence that would help a criminal prosecution, but the state stymied their lawyer.

  Tia and I talked often. She missed her mom—still does. In a small way, I may have been a substitute, someone for her to turn to. The two blond boys in the pictures are Tia’s. They were Mrs. Z’s only grandchildren at the time of her death.

  She has seven now. One is Amanda, Tia’s third child.

  Z rented out the family home. His children drive by from time to time. “It will always be my mom’s house to us,” Tia says.

  Many “unsolved cases” are solved in the minds of police who believe they know the guilty party. They want to make an arrest—but prosecutors, ever aware of their conviction records, refuse the case. They insist on more evidence first. Sometimes there is no more.

  The most dangerous killers do not commit murder in front of witnesses. They do not wait for police, smoking guns in hand, or sign confessions. It seems unfair not to let a jury decide.

  In the dead of winter 1988, nearly three years after the murder, an
Oprah producer called. A show on unsolved murders was planned, and she asked if I knew of any nagging cases.

  First person I called was Tia.

  She was suffering from postpartum depression. Amanda had been born on Christmas Eve, and Tia’s mom had not been there, as she had been when the boys were born. Her sons’ paternal grandfather was near death from cancer. But no blues or bad news could extinguish the spark of hope. The family conferred and concurred. They would do anything to further the case.

  I took with me the details of two other murder cases I believed national television exposure could solve. Lisa and Jason also flew to Chicago, at their own expense, to provide moral support. They boarded an earlier flight. By the time we arrived at the Miami airport, with tickets sent by Oprah, it was snowing in Chicago and flights were being canceled. Ours was one of them. The show would be taped at nine A.M. next morning. We had to fly out that night to make it in time.

  Eastern said nobody was flying into Chicago. Luckily we did not take their word for it and found a Midway flight As much as I fear and loathe flying, especially through ice and snow, I was relieved. This was a mission.

  Tia looked beautiful and was wonderful on the show. Oprah was super. Guests included the parents of a missing girl believed to be a victim of Seattle’s Green River killer, a former New York cop whose eleven-year-old daughter was murdered, and the twin brother of a Chicago lawyer who was ambushed by a sniper—all unsolved cases.

  Tia talked about her mother’s murder, and I spoke about two perplexing mysteries: a small boy found cemented into an apartment-house closet and a dismembered couple found floating. I was eager for network exposure of the three unidentified corpses from Miami. Identifying the victims would be a giant step toward solving their murders. Oprah knew none of us, yet remembered all our names, all the stories, all the people and places, and had read my book, to boot. She never once stumbled or missed a beat.