Never Let Them See You Cry (30 page)

The attacker was resolute. He propped a chair on the balcony so he could reach the bedroom window. The chair gave way, and he plummeted fourteen floors to his death. The incident appeared suspicious at first. The man barricaded in the bedroom did not see his attacker fall. Still frightened, he had hurled a lamp out a window to attract attention and help. The dead man's family later questioned when the lamp was thrown. Some suspected it might have been thrown during a struggle, that the victim was pushed. But witnesses on the ground insisted that the body had landed first, that a short time later, moments before we arrived, a window shattered and the lamp came down, amid a shower of glass.

Emory survived the messy scandal, becoming even more quiet and low-key. You never knew what he was thinking. He approached me one day at the Justice Building, with an announcement of sorts. “I'm sure you'll be relieved,” he said, “to hear that I've moved, bought a house. It's just one story.” That said, he walked away.

Miami's most colorful judge, Ellen Morphonios, achieved success on her own. She did it the hard way: no silver spoons or silver platter. She worked her way through law school at night, carrying her baby son in a basket to classes with her. Crack rifle shot, ex-beauty queen and tireless worker, she rose through the ranks of the state attorney's office—strictly a man's world at the time—to become chief prosecutor of major crimes.

When I first covered the court, almost two decades ago, she wore stiletto heels and tight skirts. She still does. Her hair is still long and blond and wavy. They call her the Hanging Judge, the Time Machine, Maximum Morphonios and Lady Ellen. She is especially tough on criminals who harm animals or children. She sentenced one brutal robber to 1,698 years, saying, “He deserves to do each and every day of it.” She keeps a small replica of the electric chair in her office and will not hesitate to sentence those who deserve it to the real thing.

She has done so nine times.

Common sense, down-home justice is her trademark, along with a gutsy sense of humor. One of the most persistent stories about her is that after sentencing a rapist to a long stretch, she hiked up her black robe, exposed her terrific legs, and said, Take a good look at these, pal. They're the last ones you'll be seeing for a long, long time.”

She likes men, always had a flock of them around her, including three husbands, two sons and her dad, until he was ninety. Domestic difficulties never interfered with her work— even when she was assigned armed guards for several days after reported threats from her estranged first husband, a junior college professor. When the professor invaded the Justice Building and her chambers one day, she rejected his pleas for reconciliation. He retaliated, by banging his head on her desk until he drew blood.

Led away, down a back staircase into a parking lot, nose bleeding, he cried, “Take your hands off me! I'm no criminal.”

That day was especially hectic for Judge Ellen Morphonios. The press, present in force because of an important trial, jumped on the story with gusto. Ellen had brought her baby chimpanzee, Toto, to work with her. Anne Cates, her secretary, babysat Toto while the judge was on the bench. Perhaps due to all the excitement, Toto's disposable diaper was soon in dire need of change. Anne attempted to do so, laying him down like a baby and removing the dirty diaper, but Toto resisted and threw a tantrum. He pinched Anne, hard, then chased her around the office, bouncing off furniture and swinging from the purple drapes.

Ellen loves purple, so everything in her office was purple—including the ink she used to sign official decrees.

Toto chased Anne right out of the purple office. She headed for the courtroom, to inform Ellen of the new emergency, but Toto tried to follow. She scuffled with the creature, who had one hairy arm and leg outside the door, as she tried to force him back inside and close it quietly, without attracting the attention of salacious news crews stampeding through the building seeking footage of the judge's bloodied husband.

Ellen took a recess and changed Toto, who cooed like a baby, letting her diaper him and powder his hairy bottom.

Is it any wonder I loved that beat?

An awkward situation arose the day the back zipper on my dress split apart. Judge Morphonios was on the bench, and I ducked into her purple chambers. Anne recalled there was a sewing kit up in the clerk's office. “Take it off,” she said, “I'll take it up there and fix it.” She said she'd lock the door and that I should wait until she got back. Only she and Ellen had keys, she reassured me, and the judge was in trial and not expected back in chambers soon.

Anne left with my dress. I felt a bit uncomfortable, lounging around the judge's purple office at midday in my underwear. Hearing voices and a key in the lock, I ducked into the judge's large walk-in closet. She had called a recess for a private conference with several lawyers. There seemed to be five or six of them. If I announced my presence, someone would no doubt throw open the closet door. Too embarrassing, I thought. If I kept silent, they would probably return to the courtroom soon, none the wiser—and, in the interim, with my ear to the closet door, I might happen to overhear inside information on important cases.

I was still undecided about the proper course to take when Anne returned with the repaired dress. Startled, she spilled the beans. There was only one way out, and she feared I might be sprinting down a crowded corridor.

“Where's Edna Buchanan?” she blurted, waving my dress at the judge and assembled lawyers.

Silence.

The time seemed right to speak up. “Here I am,” I cried. What impressed me most is that no one ever asked for an explanation.

Judge Morphonios takes everything in stride.

Her second husband, a greyhound trainer, was soon out of the running. Her third marriage was made in heaven, or so I thought. Maximum Morphonios eloped to Reno on a Friday the thirteenth with a handsome, young gung-ho police lieutenant assigned to narcotics and vice. They seemed meant for each other.

When Cindy, Judge Sepe's red-haired secretary, married a foot doctor and got pregnant, the baby shower was at Ellen's house. Her lieutenant was on the job that night. The all-female baby shower festivities were at their height when he made an appearance. He and his squad were conducting a narcotics raid in the neighborhood. He charged in, wearing camouflage gear and carrying a shotgun, gave her a little smooch, then charged back out into the night

Nobody lifted an eyebrow—domestic bliss, Ozzie and Harriet, Miami style.

Ellen, I thought, had made the perfect match.

It was, for a while. Then he did the unthinkable, as men so often do. He fell in love—with her son's young wife. Both divorces were painful. The young couple had children. The lieutenant, who had since gone to law school and passed the bar, went from being Ellen's husband to being her grandchildren's stepfather.

Nobody ever said life was simple.

Arthur Rothenberg, the assistant public defender, who once told me, “If a man serves only himself, he can never be satisfied,” left Miami for Yap, a thirty-nine-mile-square island where women wore nothing from the waist up and ancient stone money is still in use. He signed on for two years, to defend the natives of Micronesia, twenty-two hundred tropical islands strung out across the Pacific. His title was public defender for the District of Yap, which encompassed slightly more than seven thousand people on twenty inhabited islands scattered over seven hundred miles of sea. The entire district had reported only twenty-two violent crimes the year before.

Rothenberg had defended more than that on one bad day in Miami.

“I'm going so I'll gain perspective,” he told me. “What happens in Dade County is not the end of the world.”

But he did come back to Miami, where he is now a circuit judge.

One night not long after our last conversation, Marvin Emory's new Cadillac Seville slammed into a fire hydrant, rupturing the gas tank. The car then crashed into a light pole. Hot wires fell and sparked, and the car caught fire. Emory had been drinking. Witnesses say he simply sat there making no effort to escape. The flames were so intense they melted the tires and the door handles, scorched all the paint off the car and the name off his Rolex. He was thirty-nine.

Former assistant public defender Roy Black, now one of Miami's richest and most successful defense attorneys, recently won an acquittal for William Kennedy Smith on rape charges. Steve Mechanic, the matinee-idol lawyer, Ray Windsor and Tom Morgan all have successful private practices. Charismatic public defender Phillip Hubbart is now an appeals court judge.

And Toto resides in a zoo in Sanford, Florida, far from the commotion of the criminal court.

The photographs of two sturdy little blond boys and their baby sister, Amanda, arrive regularly at my desk. At two and a half, Amanda is silky-haired, wearing ruffles on her dress and little white shoes.

She does not remember of course, but we took her first airplane trip together when she was three weeks old. We journeyed from Miami to Chicago in the dead of winter, at the height of a snowstorm. She was the better traveler, by far. I hate to fly, but we were on a mission: Amanda, her parents and me.

We wanted to solve a murder.

This story differed from the others in many ways, some of them personal. “Careful,” my editor warned. “Don't get too involved with the people you write about.”

One lesson I have learned on the police beat is that life is cheap and editors are treacherous, but this one was right. I have no big, extended family, and never yearn for one—solo is my style—but if I could choose a family to belong to, this might be the one.

I was not sure that such family ties existed, except on television. One reason this murder is so unforgivable is because the very woman who instilled the warmth and values in these people was the victim.

To the state of Florida, the murder of Mrs. Z remains an “unsolved” crime. Yet everyone involved believes they know who did it, and why.

Z stands for Zinsmeister, Evelyn Louise Zinsmeister. A doting grandmother, age forty-seven, she painted landscapes, wore a gold
Mrs
. Z necklace and drove a Honda with a MRS. Z vanity plate.

Someone slipped into her suburban four-bedroom home in Perrine, south of Miami, on the afternoon of January 21, 1985, pursued her from room to room, and shot her again and again and again. Bullets blew away parts of her face and right hand. The murderer did not break into the house or steal anything from it—except a life.

Police have no witnesses.

The night before she died, Evelyn Louise Zinsmeister saw the Dolphins lose Super Bowl XIX on television. Her husband, Charles Frederick Zinsmeister, did not watch with her. His beeper chirped shortly after the kickoff. He said it was Dade Correctional Institution, the prison where he worked. He was a major. “Can't you get anybody else?” his family heard him say.

He hung up the telephone and said Broward County police had captured an escaped convict. Z, as he is known, said he had to go bring back the prisoner.

But there was no escaped prisoner.

Instead, Z would later admit, he went to see Jane Mathis. She too worked at the prison. She was twenty-six; he was fifty-one. They had been lovers.

This story of murder, a doomed marriage and illicit love that flowered in a state prison began twenty-eight years earlier in the Alabama town of Cullman.

Louise and Charles Zinsmeister grew up there. Their mothers knew each other. They married on March 4, 1957, he twenty-three, a sailor on leave, she nineteen, a girl with a bell-clear soprano voice. They had four children.

Louise, the dutiful military wife, was once awarded a plaque for sewing curtains for an admiral's barge. Z loved his life aboard Navy tankers. “I was an E-9,” he told me, “as high as you can go in enlisted status.”

Life changed after he retired in 1977. Z began using Grecian Formula and had an affair with a nineteen-year-old.

“It was the only vindictive thing I ever did to my wife in my life,” Z acknowledged. Z, who often refers to himself in the third person, later told me, “If there was ever a time that Charles F. Zinsmeister was going to do anything criminal against his wife, that would have been the time, in 1977.”

Z went to work at the prison, an institution surrounded by farmland and barbed wire, on August 22, 1978.

Jane Susan Mathis went to work there on June 26, 1981. She had worked at a McDonald's, a W. T. Grant and at Cook's Gas Co., in Homestead. She left Cook's after a shortage of nearly ten thousand dollars was discovered. “Her husband came down and paid back the money in a lump sum,” says company president Tim Kent. The prison, he said, never called for a reference.

Z and Jane Mathis became lovers. They exchanged messages. “We may have to move with more caution,” Z once wrote, “and at times just plain use of restraint—but if it means getting you after this is all over … then the waiting is worth it I can't even think of my world without you.”

She wrote: “I enjoyed every aspect of playing house with you … My entire body melts at your gentle touch.” She signed it, “Your Hairy Kitten.”

In September 1982, Jane Mathis divorced her husband of five years. She got the house. He got the 1923 Roadster.

In February 1983, Z filed for divorce. Louise was served with the papers on St. Valentine's Day.

Z and Jane Mathis lived together for a while. Z describes her as “very soft-hearted, the type who cries if somebody shoots a dog,” though he did suffer minor injuries twice during the romance. “I hit my own damn elbow, all in playing,” he said. “We were scuffling around on the bed, and I smacked my elbow. Can you imagine Jane Mathis, a hundred and ten pounds, slamming my elbow into something?”

Then came a “damn freak accident … I stuck a stick in my eye at the institution. A day or so later I was lying on the bed, and I asked her to toss my glasses to me. They hit my hand, glanced off and hit my sore eye. She didn't violently slam the glasses into my eye.”

Z went back to his wife in July 1984, the same month he insured both himself and Louise for $100,000. She welcomed him home. They even renewed their marriage vows at the church wedding of their daughter Lisa on August 18.

Louise sewed for weeks making the bride's gown, the bridesmaids' dresses, and her own elegant blue-voile formal.

The reunited couple paid Z's ex-lover about two thousand dollars. “It was a personal debt,” Z said later. “I was doing the right thing.”

That autumn, Z decided to teach his wife to fish. On the cold night of November 10 they drove to a dark and remote Homestead rock pit.

Something happened.

“The grass was slippery, and the rear end slipped off and drug the front end right into the rock quarry,” Z said. His 1978 Alfa Romeo sports car sank in twenty-five to thirty feet of water.

“Blub, blub, blub,” he recalled. “It was strange. I yelled at her to get the window down and get out, but I came to the surface and didn't see her. I was wearing heavy boots that were full of water, heavy jeans and a heavy jacket. I said, ‘Oh, hell,' and dove back down.” The water was black as ink. A “higher power” must have been his guide, Z said. “I went in through my window. She was still sitting there with the damn tackle box on her lap.” Z shoved her out the passenger window. “I pushed her butt through there like a marshmallow. When I came up she was about ten feet from the bank, yelling, ‘Help! Help!' She had lost her glasses.”

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.”