Politics & Justice in the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office

                          
The Murder of Lynne Friend

On Sunday August 28, 1994 Lynne Friend spent the day packing up her things for the big move to Tennessee, where she would live as Mrs. Ed O'Dell.

That evening there was a going-away party for Christian, son of Lynne and Clifford, soon to be stepson to Ed O'Dell.

At 8 pm, Lynne was on the phone with Ed.

At 8:01 pm, Clifford Friend was not at his son's going away party on the last day that he would have his son until October. At 8:01, Clifford was purchasing gasoline for his vehicle at a station remote from his son's party but near where he lived and not far from where Lynne lived.

At about 8:15 Lynne's phone call with Ed was interrupted by a call-waiting signal on her phone. Lynne clicked over to take the incoming call.

A few moments later Lynne came back on the phone with Ed and told her that it had been Clifford calling and that he had said to come right over to his house if she wanted a child support check. Ed, with the vitriol of the child custody court hearing in mind, asked Lynne if she thought it was safe. Lynne reassured him. Be careful, Ed cautioned her.

At about 10:00 pm a middle-aged couple was driving home from the movies. It began to rain. It began to rain as it can rain only in South Florida in the summer, that is as hard as it is possible to rain.

The couple lived in a corner-lot house that sided on a quiet, narrow street that bordered an empty field. The quiet street was in the area between where Clifford had his house and where Lynne had hers and close by both.

The street was deserted as the couple drove down it approaching their home. Breaking custom because of the storm the husband drove the car as close to the door to the house as possible to save his wife a drenching. After his wife scampered out the husband put his car in reverse, and turned around to back up and park the car in its customary place. As he turned his head around to look, he was surprised to see a car on the empty field side of his quiet street that had not been there just moments before, and another vehicle, an SUV type, not far from the car. He also saw a man, out on the street in the poring rain, and he saw the man approach the side of the car by the field. He saw the man bend down and do something to the front tire of the car. And then he saw the man leave the car and walk to the SUV and get into the passenger side. And then he saw the SUV drive off.

At 11:30 pm Marine Enforcement Officer Tim Stellhorn and his crew were on board their patrol boat in Government Cut off Miami Beach. The violent storm had passed and the patrol boat lolled about in the waves at the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean. A go-fast boat with its lights out passed them unnoticed. The go-fast was heading due east. Stellhorn throttled up and followed. He got right behind the go-fast and directly in its wake.

There are blind spots and then there is the blind spot that exists for the operator of a motor vessel when another motor vessel is directly in its wake. Stellhorn’s patrol boat was in this blindest of blind spots for the operator of the go-fast. They followed the go-fast until three miles out in the Atlantic in international waters when Stellhorn decided to “light it up.” He switched on his powerful search light and focused it on the go-fast.

There are deer caught in headlights and then there is being caught in a powerful search light at 11:30 at night three miles out in the ocean by a boat directly in your wake. At that moment, Stellhorn saw 6’4” Alan Gold struggling to lift a suitcase onto the side of the go-fast, and then push it over into the water. A second smaller object, that seemed to Stellhorn to be tied to the first in some way, followed the first overboard.

Lights and sirens.

The go-fast abruptly changed course, making a ninety degree turn to the south. As the patrol boat made the same turn to the south right behind, Tim Stellhorn looked to his left into the ocean where the objects had been dumped and saw the suitcase bob from side to side for a second or two and then disappear beneath the waves. The go-fast stopped one-eighth of a mile later. At the helm was Clifford Friend.

“What did you throw overboard,” Gold and Friend were asked separately. “Nothing, it must have been towels blowing off that you saw,” said Gold, who was found armed with a small pistol. “You don’t want to know,” said Friend to Stellhorn, who did indeed want to know.

Politics & Justice in the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office

The Murder of Lynne Friend

In the summer of 1994 President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, former president Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and One Hundred Days of genocide was taking place in Rwanda. Major League Baseball players went on strike in the summer of 1994, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus was the best-selling non-fiction book and O.J. Simpson didn't kill his wife and Ronald Goodman. All for Love and The Power of Love were the top two pop songs.

In the summer of 1994 Lynne Friend, a pretty, sparkily, 35 year old prepared to marry a well-to-do Tennessee businessman and move there with her five-year old son.

Lynne was from Texas originally and by 1994 was twice-divorced. Her first husband had been a military man but he broke her heart and she divorced him. Lynne moved to South Florida to start over and there, incomprehensibly, selected as her second soul mate a tacky, pawn shop owner (redundancy upon redundancy) named Clifford Friend. Lynne worked as marketing director for a hospital, a job which was a considerable distance across the job respectability line from pawn shop owner.

Clifford and Lynne had a baby in 1990, a boy they named Christian. They were devoted parents but not long after Christian's birth Clifford came home to find the house empty and his wife and son gone. “It wasn’t what I had thought,” was Lynne’s breathtakingly empty description to Clifford of their marriage and her reason for ending it.


Clifford was shocked by the sudden end and emotionally overwrought. Shock and grief gave way to anger and Clifford became angry with Lynne, as did Clifford's friends. Clifford had friends: Alan Gold and Robert Missey, Karen Bookbinder, Alan Gold's live-in girlfriend, Dawn Alvarado and Melinda Edelsberg, men and women. Alan Gold was Clifford's best friend.


All of Cliff's friends felt for him, and they loathed Lynne for what she did. It was, they felt, a cold thing to let Cliff come home to an empty house, to so abruptly end a marriage. It showed no care for the feelings of a person who they cared for. "It wasn't what I had thought," was so meaningless as to be meaningful: it conveyed powerfully how cavalier Lynne's feelings for Clifford--and for Clifford's relationship with Christian--had been. There wasn't much power to a love that could be broken so easily.


So Clifford was hostile toward Lynne about the divorce. But at least he still had his son, or at least he still had his son half the time. Clifford, Lynne, and Christian had lived in a house close to the dividing line between Dade County (Miami) and Broward County (Ft. Lauderdale). After their divorce Lynne and Christian lived on one side of the the county line and Clifford on the other, only about a mile away.


Lynne’s move created both problems and leads in the investigation of her murder. Problems, because jurisdiction was divided not only between municipalities but counties, leads because Broward and Dade had different telephone area codes and a call from one to the other still counted as “long distance” for phone records purposes.


Lynne's third candidate for death-do-us-partdom, was not a pawnbroker, not even a BIG pawnbroker. He was not on the pawnbroker side of the job respectability line at all. Like Lynne he was on the hospital side of the line: he built them. Ed O'Dell was an executive in a hospital construction and design corporation. "Wealthy corporate executive" is a redundancy that can make a woman woozy and Lynne fell woozy in love with Ed and he with pretty, sparkily her.

Clifford immediately saw the new danger that was posed by Lynne's quick-developing romance with wealthy, Nashville-resident Ed O'Dell, and as the relationship deepened so did Clifford's foreboding and so did his anger.


Ed and Lynne got engaged and in 1993 Lynne started legal proceedings to take Christian with her to Tennessee. There's a saying among lawyers, "There's nothing civil about civil," meaning that civil law practice is much more contentious than criminal. Within the civil law genus child custody cases are the least civil.


The custody battle over Christian was unusually heated even by the prevailing standard.


No expense was spared to provide Lynne with the best possible legal representation. The law favored her too. In what many consider to be antiquated, unfair precedent, the law establishes a presumption in favor of custody with the mother. The father's ability to prevail against this presumption requires a showing of a markedly stronger paternal bond, and Clifford and Lynne were equally good parents, or markedly better material life prospects for the child with the father than with the mother.


Clifford Friend had no chance and Judge Gerald Hubbard gave Lynne custody of Christian.


Ed and Lynne set their wedding date for October 7, 1994. The weekend of August 27-28 was to be Lynne's last in South Florida before the move and she had agreed to let Clifford have Christian all that weekend.


to be continued.


Image Untitled painting, (black on gray) (1969-1970), Mark Rothko.

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