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 third 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.