Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

  One defendant decided those probation terms were too tough. He preferred to do the time. The other met the challenge, lived up to the terms, won a degree in hotel and restaurant management and operates a successful Miami Beach restaurant.

  Sepe sentenced a University of Miami art student, charged with cocaine possession, to volunteer work at a school for retarded children. His sentence became a career. The principal hired the defendant full time as his school’s art director.

  Long before the environment became the major concern it is today, Judge Sepe organized the Miami River cleanup project. Establishing work crews of probationers, he assigned one as foreman and sent them to clean up the river, the beach and the county parks.

  With logic, common sense and eloquence, he reached defendants; most were receptive. Sepe sentenced some men to death and others to life—appearing before him may well be the best thing that ever happened to them.

  Take the defendant who could neither speak nor hear. The judge agonized over how a young man who could not communicate could comprehend the proceedings.

  “I’m not going to bring this boy to trial until he can understand what we’re saying,” Judge Sepe told lawyers. Classes were arranged at a university center for the handicapped. Nearly a year later, the defendant, now adept at sign language, appeared in court, his mother at his side.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever heard my son call me Momma,” she said, weeping, along with almost everybody else present.

  Unfortunately, something happened. As of this writing Sepe himself faces indictment: corruption, taking bribes. Federal agents swooped down with search warrants on his office and home and came away with wads of hundred dollar bills. A tragedy for everyone concerned—especially the taxpayers who trusted him.

  Marvin Emory was a busy young defense attorney whose career I covered during my year on the criminal-court beat. Fair-haired and fine-featured, he was well spoken, well prepared and concise. Low-key, with a quiet wit, unlike his more flamboyant colleagues, he was no desk pounder. He hardly ever raised his voice and never became ruffled. He was instrumental in changing Florida’s abortion law. Despite his success he was quiet, a loner. I was at the Miami Homicide Bureau one weekend, talking to Sergeant Arthur Beck, when we got a call: Somebody had taken a fatal dive fourteen floors from Marvin Emory’s penthouse apartment.

  There had been quite a mêlée. The place was a shambles, lamps and furniture smashed, pictures knocked off the walls. Emory was alive, his pale face flushed. He wore a cabana set, shorts and an open shirt. The young man who had plunged from his balcony was a former client with a history of mental problems. He had arrived unexpectedly and attacked another young man he found visiting. To escape, the original visitor managed to barricade himself in a bedroom.

  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 repaire
d 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.

  AFTERMATH

  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.

  17

  Mrs. Z

  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 t
he 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.”