What Lies Beneath

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Speaker 3 There was no way you could look at this and say this is a person who ran away. The mystery had this sort of sinister side to it.

Speaker 4 Oh my God. Oh my God.

Speaker 3 This is really happening. It's happening right now.

Speaker 5 In the dark waters off Miami, miles out to sea, a federal agent hunting for drug smugglers spots a suspicious boat.

Speaker 7 I noticed the passenger roll a large duffel bag off the side of the boat.

Speaker 5 Drugs? The agents never found any. And back on shore, no one could find a missing young mother either.
Was there a connection?

Speaker 9 I was afraid for her.

Speaker 5 Lynn was just months away from her wedding when she vanished, leaving behind a young son and a mystery.

Speaker 10 Any sign that someone had broken in and abducted her? No.

Speaker 5 The search continued on land and at sea.

Speaker 11 No bag, no body, no case.

Speaker 13 I didn't have anything that would show she was actually actually dead.

Speaker 5 Decades go by, and the mystery is almost forgotten, but not by everyone.

Speaker 3 They knew he was the bad guy.

Speaker 9 They just couldn't put him in jail.

Speaker 5 All they needed was a miracle or a witness.

Speaker 15 Wasn't Edward Fools there was a body?

Speaker 5 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with what lies beneath.

Speaker 6 You don't need a moon over Miami for it to be beautiful by night.

Speaker 17 The skyline reflected in Biscayne Bay will do just fine.

Speaker 19 But it's not for everyone.

Speaker 20 I am so, so worried about you.

Speaker 23 Some people are scared by the dark water, afraid of the creatures that lurk down below.

Speaker 16 Afraid of the creatures above who scuttle through the night on secret errands.

Speaker 20 I have no idea where you are.

Speaker 23 You just may share those fears after you hear the story of a woman named Lynn Friend.

Speaker 27 None of this makes sense to anyone who knows Lynn Friend. Well, tonight though.

Speaker 28 Local newscasts told the story of this good neighbor.

Speaker 9 She really was that all-American girl, you know, blue eyes, a beautiful smile from here to California.

Speaker 30 The good mom.

Speaker 3 She adored her son. They were inseparable.

Speaker 21 Little did anyone suspect that for the next 20 years, the story of Lynn Friend would haunt a young boy's life.

Speaker 26 And a secret would remain locked away for decades that would explain everything.

Speaker 12 And the investigation into what may have happened to Lynn Friend continued today.

Speaker 11 She hasn't been seen in days.

Speaker 18 What happened to Lynn Friend that put her in the crosshairs of Miami TV News was that she was missing.

Speaker 25 Just flat out gone.

Speaker 34 No one could imagine Lynn Friend, a responsible hospital administrative aide, just snapping and walking out on her life, least of all on her five-year-old son, Christian.

Speaker 3 One thing is certain, Lynn Friend is not.

Speaker 41 Jennifer Snell, then a Miami reporter, covered the disappearance.

Speaker 3 For her to disappear without leaving word for her son was just something that everyone knew would never happen.

Speaker 16 Esther Sanchez met Lynn when she came to work at Parkway Hospital in Fort Lauderdale.

Speaker 42 At the time, Lynn was still living with her fiancée, a business owner named Clifford Friend.

Speaker 30 When the two married in 1989, Esther was made of honor.

Speaker 9 She wanted what every girl dreams of getting married and having a beautiful wedding and looking forward to having children, the goal of the white picket fence.

Speaker 34 When baby Christian came along, Lynn, the proud mom, made her boy one of the most photographed children in South Florida.

Speaker 30 Over the moon with being a mom, less so at being Mrs.

Speaker 40 Clifford Friend.

Speaker 9 I thought they were a poor match.

Speaker 32 Within a year of Christian's birth, the marriage was floundering.

Speaker 34 Lynn and her husband parted ways and later divorced.

Speaker 9 She was upset that her dreams had fallen apart, but she was very happy with the fact that she was a mom.

Speaker 10 So disappointment abounded, but baby Christian was not part of it.

Speaker 9 He was her number one priority in life. I mean she

Speaker 44 lived for him.

Speaker 35 Consumed with being a mom meant men were out of the picture for the foreseeable future.

Speaker 46 But then along came Ed O'Dell.

Speaker 30 He was a consultant from Nashville working on a construction project at her hospital.

Speaker 9 He set eyes on her right away.

Speaker 9 He was a southern gentleman and he would walk in and he would say hi and then he'd leave and that went on for I think a year. And then

Speaker 9 one day she said, I think I'm going to go out on a date with Ed.

Speaker 46 And that one date turned into a whirlwind romance. Within months, Lynn and Ed got engaged and mapped out a future together in Nashville.

Speaker 46 He was very fond of the boy and looked forward to them all being a family together.

Speaker 33 Lynn had been awarded custody of the child, although she ensured that Christian's father, Clifford, had generous visitation rights.

Speaker 9 She had agreed to everything that Clifford wanted to try to play nice. She said, if this is what you want, we'll do that.

Speaker 48 In August 1994, the clock was counting down to moving day.

Speaker 19 Lynn was home packing when Ed called from Nashville about 8 o'clock on a Sunday night.

Speaker 24 She told him she'd be running out for a few minutes, but would call him back as soon as she returned home.

Speaker 30 Two hours went by, and no Lynn phone phone call. The fiancée left a message on her answering machine.

Speaker 50 Hello, it's me. It's about 9.15th and I'm a little worried about you and hope everything's okay.

Speaker 18 Close friend Esther lived in the same condo complex as Lynn.

Speaker 30 When Esther noticed her friend's car was gone late at night, she became concerned.

Speaker 11 Esther started calling too.

Speaker 39 I'm very, really, very worried.

Speaker 20 You didn't tell me you were going anywhere.

Speaker 32 Unanswered messages piled up through the night.

Speaker 12 Hello, hello.

Speaker 50 It's 10.30, and I had hoped I would hear from you by now.

Speaker 20 I am so, so worried about you. I have no idea where you are.

Speaker 50 Call me.

Speaker 50 Bye.

Speaker 35 The next day, a neighbor spotted Lynn's car abandoned about a half mile from her home.

Speaker 40 A front tire was flat.

Speaker 28 Soon the cops arrived, and Esther let them in Lynn's condo.

Speaker 9 What I noticed that was very odd, she's very meticulous and very neat, and she's very frugal.

Speaker 9 The television was on, the lights were on, the air conditioning was on.

Speaker 26 Lynn appeared to have closed the door of her townhouse north of Miami on a Sunday night and vanished into the thick night air.

Speaker 10 So this has become very ominous for you.

Speaker 9 So now it's very, very scary.

Speaker 6 What in the world had happened to nice Lynn Friend?

Speaker 21 Law enforcement officers from all over South Florida were looking for any trace of her.

Speaker 19 Coming up empty.

Speaker 4 A wedding, a move, a new job.

Speaker 5 Lynn was facing enormous changes and stress in the days ahead. Is it possible she just took off? And if she was a runaway bride, had she run into trouble?

Speaker 10 Did you think maybe she got cold feet and was just taking a timeout somewhere?

Speaker 9 Without her son, never.

Speaker 32 Days passed and clues were few in the disappearance of Lynn Friend. The missing mother of a five-year-old boy seemed to have gotten in her car on a rainy Sunday night and never come home.

Speaker 32 Lynn's friends and fiancée Ed Odell pleaded for help.

Speaker 52 All I want is Lynn back. I just want to marry her and take her away and live happily ever after.

Speaker 28 They handed out flyers and searched the residential area where her car was found abandoned.

Speaker 9 Honestly, I was very afraid.

Speaker 21 A townhouse she left with the TV still on.

Speaker 34 Ed Royal, an investigator assigned by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, was frankly perplexed by what he didn't find at her condo.

Speaker 55 There was no sign of any struggle at Lynn's house. Lynn's house was exactly as you would expect it.
She was two days away from moving. She had boxes ceiling to floor.

Speaker 10 Any sign that someone had broken in and abducted her? No.

Speaker 25 Cops also came up empty when they searched her abandoned car with a flat tire.

Speaker 17 Inside, they found a waste pouch with her driver's license.

Speaker 55 There was no evidence, no fingerprints, no DNA, foreign DNA in it.

Speaker 10 Forensically, you're not coming up with this aha kind of clue. No, where it says this explains everything.
No.

Speaker 34 So what did happen to the 35-year-old single mother? With all too few forensic clues to examine, the investigators became biographers, learning just who this missing woman was.

Speaker 34 When they peeled back the layers of Lynn's life, what they saw right away were big, stressful changes on her horizon.

Speaker 26 A new marriage in a new city, a new life altogether. Had it all become too much?

Speaker 43 Her best friend, Esther Sanchez.

Speaker 10 Did you think maybe she got cold feet on moving to Tennessee and was just taking a timeout somewhere?

Speaker 9 Without her son?

Speaker 4 never.

Speaker 56 Lynn would have to be dead

Speaker 9 to not have Christian.

Speaker 19 And what about her son, Christian?

Speaker 36 Could he help fill in any pieces of the puzzle?

Speaker 10 Sensitive thing, the child here is five years old. But maybe he has a story to tell.

Speaker 55 Now, I don't know how much a five-year-old child could provide at that time.

Speaker 45 In truth, precious little.

Speaker 37 The night Lynn disappeared, Christian had been with his father for the weekend.

Speaker 32 Like Lynn, her ex-Clifford friend had also met someone since his divorce two years before.

Speaker 32 He was engaged to a woman named Janet Miriam. She lived in Texas and learned of Lynn's disappearance long distance.

Speaker 44 Cliff had called me and said that he had,

Speaker 44 I believe, had received a phone call stating that Lynn had disappeared. They found Lynn's car and they didn't know where she was.

Speaker 10 It's just a very traumatic thing that's gone on. He's lost his mother.
I don't know how much, whether you shielded him from it.

Speaker 57 Okay, the news, news,

Speaker 44 we shielded Christian as much as possible.

Speaker 27 Who's going to take this area?

Speaker 32 Meanwhile, the massive investigation into Lynn Friend's disappearance had one goal.

Speaker 17 To find her or at least her body if she was in fact dead.

Speaker 2 Are you prepared to deal with the worst?

Speaker 58 No.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 I cannot think that.

Speaker 4 I will not think that.

Speaker 52 Lynn is the woman that I'm going to marry. She is my life.

Speaker 3 I think he really wanted to hold it together and to be dignified.

Speaker 33 Jennifer Snell was a reporter for Miami's NBC station, WTBJ.

Speaker 3 I think that as the words would come out of his mouth, he would realize what he was actually saying was that the love of his life was dead.

Speaker 52 I have to believe for Christian's sake that she's still alive because he's just a five-year-old child and he needs his mother and he loves his mother so much.

Speaker 48 Ed O'Dell was driven.

Speaker 30 He would not give up trying to find the love of his life.

Speaker 17 He called on everyone, even the president, to ask for help.

Speaker 55 Ed O'Dell started a campaign writing to President Clinton, and lo and behold,

Speaker 55 we get a call from the FBI that said they would now like to join the investigation.

Speaker 53 But even with the top law enforcement agency in the country in on the search for Lynn Friend, there was still no break in the case.

Speaker 40 But then out of the blue, the deep, dark blue, a chance encounter produced a lead from a most unlikely place in the case of a missing woman.

Speaker 5 Coming up, a federal agent on the lookout for drug runners runs into something strange.

Speaker 7 I tell one of my crew members, light him up. As soon as he lights up the boat, the chase is on.

Speaker 5 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 25 The waters off Miami Beach are where the vigilant agents of the U.S.

Speaker 33 Customs and Border Protection Service go to work every night.

Speaker 41 And here, the cat-and-mouse game of law enforcement, pursuing cocaine cowboys in their GoFast boats, was the reality back in the 1990s.

Speaker 17 Customs agent Tim Stellhorn remembers it well.

Speaker 7 In 1994, drug smuggling was very prevalent.

Speaker 17 On that long-ago Sunday night Lynn Friend disappeared, Agent Tim Stellhorn and his crew left their dock on the Miami River at dusk. They knew nothing of the missing woman case.

Speaker 37 Their focus was on intercepting drugs and smugglers.

Speaker 32 They headed outside into the dark open ocean waters that lead to the Bahamas, a hotbed of smuggling.

Speaker 35 About three miles out, they idled and doused their running lights.

Speaker 7 It was a beautiful night. The ocean was calm.
We had the engines shut off, and we were listening for any boats that might be in our area.

Speaker 7 So I hear this boat coming out and through night vision goggles, I could see that there was two people on board. The two people on board were in dark clothing, goggles, bandanas around their heads.

Speaker 18 It was around 11 o'clock.

Speaker 40 Stellhorn and his crew, running dark, tailed the boat surreptitiously, but quickly the element of surprise was lost.

Speaker 7 I watched the passenger turn around and he spots us, I think. I tell one of my crew members, light him up with a spotlight.

Speaker 7 As soon as he lights up the boat, I notice the passenger roll a large duffel bag off the side of the boat. The chase is on.

Speaker 7 We think we have a narcotics case, a smuggling case that went bad, and at some point they just stopped their boat and both of them put their hands straight up in the air.

Speaker 25 The two were zipped up during the questioning that followed.

Speaker 24 Agents returned to the spot where the bag was dumped, but it had already sunk.

Speaker 17 And with no drugs found on the boat, agents released the two.

Speaker 37 But their boat was seized for a follow-up investigation.

Speaker 32 Just another night in the office in the war on drugs, or so Agent Stellhorn thought.

Speaker 7 So a week goes by, sitting on a couch reading a newspaper, and on one of the back pages is a story about a missing woman. Her name is Lynn Friend.

Speaker 7 Friend is an unusual last name, and so of course it registered with me that I just stopped a boat a week prior with a guy named Friend on board.

Speaker 34 It was Clifford Friend, Lynn's ex-husband. With him was a Miami beach man named Alan Gold, who turned out to be the co-owner of the boat.

Speaker 7 At the bottom of the article was a detective's name and a phone number, so I called the number. At first, he didn't believe me.
He thought it was a prank call.

Speaker 35 Hardly.

Speaker 19 Light bulbs clicked.

Speaker 21 Missing pieces fell into place.

Speaker 42 A missing ex-wife, a former husband busted dumping something offshore on the very night.

Speaker 41 Leslie Diambrosia is an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Speaker 10 That's a fortuitous matchup in this case.

Speaker 57 The customs officers in this case did such an amazing job.

Speaker 61 Mr.

Speaker 56 Finn, is there anything that you want to say?

Speaker 21 Now, 10 days after Lynn's disappearance, investigators and the media laser focused on Clifford Friend.

Speaker 30 Janet Miriam, still his fiancé at the time, was caught in the whirlwind that followed.

Speaker 44 There was cameras wherever Cliff went.

Speaker 3 Do you expect to be charged in the murder of your ex-wife?

Speaker 44 Trying to tell Cliff in front of his child that he was guilty of the disappearance of his ex-wife.

Speaker 21 And then there was this investigative nugget.

Speaker 43 Ed O'Dell reported to the cops that the night Lynn disappeared, she told him that she was going to Clifford's house to pick up a child support payment.

Speaker 43 When detectives heard that, they got a search warrant for Clifford's place. They seized some items in his car, but found no evidence of foul play anywhere.

Speaker 44 I never

Speaker 44 gave thought that he had anything to do with Lynn's disappearance.

Speaker 28 But investigators weren't so sure, so they turned their attentions to the area where customs stopped Clifford's boat.

Speaker 18 With waters a thousand feet deep, Agent Ed Royal asked the U.S.

Speaker 35 Navy for help, but there was a little problem.

Speaker 55 The U.S. Navy is precluded from providing assistance to law enforcement without reimbursement, so they were willing to provide us three days of searching for $48,000.

Speaker 10 And you were going to get a bill at the end of it.

Speaker 55 We had to pay up front, actually.

Speaker 35 Two months later, the fee covered, the U.S.

Speaker 21 Navy was ready to join in the search.

Speaker 17 Its ship was fitted out with side-scan sonar that could image the ocean floor.

Speaker 10 But no gym bag.

Speaker 58 No.

Speaker 55 No bag, no body. The experts told us that it was beyond a needle in a haystack.

Speaker 16 The Navy said it had to pull the plug when the money ran out.

Speaker 40 But Lynn's fiancé, Ed O'Dell, stepped in.

Speaker 55 And Ed O'Dell wrote a check to the Navy for another $13,000 to extend the search one more day.

Speaker 36 The extra day bought one promising sighting.

Speaker 55 We saw what we thought was a black bag on the ocean floor.

Speaker 48 Grappling hooks were sent down.

Speaker 34 Searchers on deck held their breath, but it wasn't what they were looking for.

Speaker 55 A plastic garbage bag.

Speaker 10 And what was in the garbage bag?

Speaker 55 It turned out to be beer cans.

Speaker 55 Garbage.

Speaker 21 The Navy search had fizzled out.

Speaker 45 Detectives were back at square one, and they'd already ruled out one of the people closest to Lynn.

Speaker 29 What about Ed O'Dell?

Speaker 10 Do you have to suspect the fiancé?

Speaker 58 Not at all.

Speaker 55 He was in Tennessee at the time all of this occurred. We have the phone records.

Speaker 33 So after months, detectives were no closer to solving the case.

Speaker 34 They had no DNA, no forensics, no blood spatter, nothing to help them.

Speaker 23 And despite their suspicions about Clifford Friend, law enforcement couldn't say definitively what happened to his ex-wife Lynn.

Speaker 57 We didn't have the body and we didn't have any eyewitnesses.

Speaker 34 Back in 1994, Catherine Fernandez-Rundell had been the Miami-Dade state attorney for two years when this case came into her office.

Speaker 26 She was determined Lynn Friend's name would not end up in some cold case file.

Speaker 57 This was not the easiest case, as you might imagine. Couldn't even say definitively if she was dead.

Speaker 11 She might have metaphorically taken the midnight train to Georgia. Nobody knew.

Speaker 57 That's correct. We didn't really know that she was missing.
We believed it. You had a little boy.
We weren't sure what he was going to say. We didn't have access to him.

Speaker 57 So really what you had was very little. And so you had to really build it.
You had to stay tenacious.

Speaker 26 Tenacious indeed.

Speaker 18 Because Clifford Frank actually had an alibi.

Speaker 18 One he wasn't proud of, perhaps, but it explained what he was doing that night and why there were two men in a boat.

Speaker 5 Coming up, an undercover sting that didn't quite go as planned.

Speaker 61 He said, oh, I took the recording device and I dropped it in her diaper.

Speaker 17 Months passed, and with no success in finding Lynn's body, police appealed to the public for help.

Speaker 28 They put together a Crime Stoppers reenactment video that aired on local TV, showing two men dumping a bag in the ocean, then trying to evade customs agents.

Speaker 31 A reward was offered, but the tip line stayed mostly silent.

Speaker 17 Neither Clifford Friend nor Alan Gold would tell police directly what they were doing on the boat that night.

Speaker 42 But customs agent Tim Stellhorn thought he knew when he ran a background check and found Clifford's priors.

Speaker 7 Through the investigative findings, we learned that Clifford Friend did have a criminal history, and part of that criminal history was in drug smuggling.

Speaker 34 And while the other man with him, Alan Gold, had no history of drug arrests, was Clifford Friend, a known smuggler, dumping drugs into the ocean that night.

Speaker 11 His attorney said Clifford Friend was committing a crime that night, but it wasn't murder.

Speaker 63 They were running drug deals together.

Speaker 32 Attorney Peter Heller says that's what was in the bag Clifford dumped.

Speaker 58 Drugs.

Speaker 7 You're saying he was dirty.

Speaker 63 He had a dirty history? He did, he did, and they knew that.

Speaker 49 Clifford also owned a pawn shop in the miami area according to his lawyer clifford's drug-running career ended when lynn disappeared he wanted to turn his life around he had a little boy to take care of

Speaker 35 and he would take care of christian with his new bride a year and a half after lynn disappeared clifford and janet married Alan Gold with a waist-length braid was there too.

Speaker 10 The investigators never really go away. You're putting together your new life with this man and yet you've got to deal with all that stuff.

Speaker 44 After the first couple of years, the first two years,

Speaker 44 it really disappeared.

Speaker 35 As the case receded from the public eye, Clifford and Janet friend focused on raising young Christian.

Speaker 10 Does he remember his mother?

Speaker 44 I never wanted him to forget who his mother was. So I always made sure that he had pictures of his mother in his room.
And he was allowed to ask any question that he ever wanted.

Speaker 10 You've become the only mom he really remembers in his life.

Speaker 1 You are mom.

Speaker 44 I am mom, and he calls me mom. He understands I am not his biological mother.

Speaker 10 What kind of dad was Cliff to Christian?

Speaker 44 He was a great dad. They went and played ball together.
They went fishing together. They went on travels together.
Cliff is a phenomenal father.

Speaker 53 Meanwhile, up in Tennessee, Lynn's one-time fiancé, Ed O'Dell, had moved on with his life too, married now with children.

Speaker 34 The dwindling friends of Lynn thought they'd never see a resolution to the case of the missing woman.

Speaker 23 But there was one person in particular who didn't like to see the dusty jacket of unsolved cases in his files.

Speaker 29 Has to be ferret.

Speaker 34 In 2010, one of Miami's most experienced prosecutors, Michael von Zampt, took over the case along with assistant state attorney Marie Mato.

Speaker 10 What did you think the biggest problem problem with the case was?

Speaker 13 I had no body, I had no witnesses, and I didn't have anything that would show she was actually dead.

Speaker 3 Well, I think that especially now in 2014, juries with

Speaker 3 have high expectations.

Speaker 10 The CSI speech that so many prosecutors give in jury selection.

Speaker 3 Well, they expect physical evidence.

Speaker 3 They want to see a body.

Speaker 18 The two re-examined the 16-year-old file and took a fresh look at a lead from back then that had never panned out.

Speaker 43 An acquaintance of Clifford, someone named Robert Missy, told police about a disturbing conversation he had with the ex-husband not long before Lynn went missing.

Speaker 41 He said it happened over breakfast at this IHO.

Speaker 51 Clifford told him, well, she's never leaving the state with my child. She's going for a boat ride and she's never coming back.

Speaker 59 This is dynamite for an investigator.

Speaker 51 It was great. We managed to convince Missy that he should become our ally.

Speaker 25 In other words, a snitch.

Speaker 49 Missy, a convicted felon on probation at the time, agreed to wear a wire and met Clifford again a few weeks later.

Speaker 30 There was something that was worrying the pawnbroker about their earlier breakfast meeting. My biggest concern is the conversation that we had at IHOP.

Speaker 30 I just want to make sure you didn't talk to me again. Oh, no, because I don't know what to do.
And I had no conversation whatsoever.

Speaker 51 And that to us gave us confirmation that there had been

Speaker 51 an actual conversation at the IHOP, and there was probably a discussion about the disposing of Lynn Friend.

Speaker 22 Missy turned out to be a hapless, technologically challenged informant.

Speaker 32 At another meeting, Missy wanted to make sure Clifford didn't discover his concealed wire, so he used his own baby as cover.

Speaker 61 When we asked him what was wrong with the baby, we couldn't hear the baby was screaming. He said, oh, I took the recording device and I dropped it in her diaper.

Speaker 29 Oh, you're kidding.

Speaker 61 And the reason she was screaming was because those things get kind of hot. And we were just all appalled that he had done that.

Speaker 17 Investigators did believe the initial IHOP story, but after Missy was caught out in a lie on something else, he was quietly retired from the investigation.

Speaker 17 Now, 18 years after Lynn Friend went missing, Prosecutor von Zamft decided to tell Missy's IHOP story to a grand jury, absent Missy himself.

Speaker 13 We use that as the part of the basis for the indictment.

Speaker 37 Marginal evidence maybe, but nonetheless a good prosecutorial strategy.

Speaker 19 The grand jury indicted.

Speaker 35 Are you Clifford Friend?

Speaker 56 Yes, ma'am. Okay.

Speaker 42 In 2012, prosecutors charged Clifford Friend with first-degree murder.

Speaker 23 His attorney was flabbergasted that prosecutors would dare to build a circumstantial case with no body, mind you, on the expected star witness testimony of a very shaky informant.

Speaker 63 Our investigators... had done tremendous amount of work on Robert Missy.
We had boxes of files of dirt on Robert Missy.

Speaker 40 But what the defense didn't know was that prosecutors were putting up a straw man.

Speaker 17 Missy wouldn't be their star witness at all.

Speaker 13 We were never going to use him in trial. Our whole intent was to use him and have the defense running around looking for him and everything they could find on him.

Speaker 36 And while the defense did just that, spinning its wheels, prosecutors were quietly working on reeling in another prize, another better witness.

Speaker 19 One Clifford friend could only hope he'd never see again.

Speaker 5 Coming up, the other person on the boat that night breaks a promise and 20 years of silence.

Speaker 15 He said we have to dump the bag.

Speaker 5 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 9 They don't know what insurance is.

Speaker 59 20 years after Lynn Friend's disappearance, Clifford Friend, looking more jowly banker than killer, was on trial for his ex-wife's murder.

Speaker 11 The motive, prosecutors say, was sitting directly behind him.

Speaker 14 The son Christian, now 25.

Speaker 21 Clifford, the prosecutors theorized, killed Lynn to stop her from taking the boy out of state to Nashville, where she was to remarry.

Speaker 21 Christian had always been in that place right behind his father, never questioning his innocence.

Speaker 11 In court, it showed the jury his continuing support of his father, even as he was about to hear, until now, untold family stories.

Speaker 12 Among the first witnesses was Ed Odell, Lynn's one-time fiancé.

Speaker 37 Odell described his last call with Lynn.

Speaker 28 Her call waiting beeped and she put him on hold.

Speaker 16 She said it was her ex-husband Clifford on the other line asking her to come over over to his house and pick up some money he owed.

Speaker 61 So, when you hung up with her, that was the last time you ever spoke to her.

Speaker 51 That is correct.

Speaker 61 What did you do when you didn't hear from her?

Speaker 52 I tried to call her

Speaker 52 and

Speaker 12 did not get through.

Speaker 39 Did you call her?

Speaker 4 Excuse me a minute.

Speaker 35 Mr. Adrian, did you want to stay away?

Speaker 4 No, I would like to get finished.

Speaker 22 To prove Clifford killed Lynn to stop her from taking their son away, prosecutors called her divorce attorney.

Speaker 49 He testified that one week before her disappearance, Clifford went ballistic in a family law court when a judge approved the boy's move to Nashville.

Speaker 67 He was angrily yelling at his lawyer that nobody, nobody will take Christian away from me.

Speaker 48 But these outbursts were at best purely circumstantial evidence.

Speaker 30 The prosecution would need a lot more than that.

Speaker 34 Remember, Lynn's body had never been found.

Speaker 12 However, the night his ex disappeared, Clifford and his pal Alan Gold were spotted in a speedboat dumping a bag overboard.

Speaker 32 The state believed Lynn's remains were in that bag.

Speaker 34 But Alan Gold had kept his mouth shut all these years.

Speaker 13 The key was finding a way to force Alan Gold to cooperate.

Speaker 34 Prosecutor Michael von Zamt made the other man in the boat an offer he couldn't refuse.

Speaker 43 He was subpoenaed to testify and given a grant of immunity with it.

Speaker 30 If he didn't testify, the hammer would come down hard.

Speaker 13 And then I'll have the judge order you to testify, and then I'll let you sit in jail till the trial's over.

Speaker 17 At age 68, Gold didn't like the prospect of years in jail.

Speaker 23 He chose the door marked cooperation.

Speaker 14 Stetson in hand, Alan Gold limped into court with a certain bravado.

Speaker 40 He passed by his former friend Clifford moments away from telling his version of that fateful night 20 years before.

Speaker 42 He testified that when he went to Clifford's house, the son Christian, who was supposed to be spending the weekend with his father, wasn't there.

Speaker 24 It turned out Clifford had dropped the boy off at a babysitter's.

Speaker 32 And then Gold said he right away noticed a large canvas bag on the floor.

Speaker 68 And when he pointed to the bag or told you about the bag, who did he tell you was in the bag?

Speaker 35 Lynn.

Speaker 53 Gold says Clifford told him he and Lynn had argued, and then things got out of control.

Speaker 15 The next thing he knew,

Speaker 15 it was over. He had lost it.
He knocked her down and choked her out.

Speaker 68 What did you take that to mean?

Speaker 15 It means that she was in the bag, she wasn't coming back, and that was the end of Lynn.

Speaker 42 Clifford said he'd need the 30-foot GoFast boat they owned together.

Speaker 30 It was docked behind Gold's condo on Miami Beach.

Speaker 15 He wanted to use the boat, take her out,

Speaker 29 pretty deep water, and dump her.

Speaker 68 And when he told you that, did you immediately turn and run out the door?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 53 Gold said, go figure.

Speaker 40 He decided to help his buddy out of a jam because of his son, Christian.

Speaker 15 I basically didn't want to see the kid fatherless, and I figured it was the lesser of the evil.

Speaker 15 I figured it was just a tragic accident that happened, and why make it worse?

Speaker 25 First, Gold said they got rid of Lynn's car.

Speaker 38 Back at the house, the two picked up the bag with Lynn's body.

Speaker 68 Did you, as you tried to lift this bag, say anything to Clifford about why did it weigh so much?

Speaker 15 I did.

Speaker 68 And what did he tell you?

Speaker 15 It's weighted.

Speaker 30 Once on the boat, Gold says Clifford weighted it down even more.

Speaker 15 He disengaged the anchor from the anchor line and stuffed that in as well.

Speaker 42 Customs agents who stopped them confirmed the boat anchor was missing.

Speaker 30 They also found cement blocks and rope.

Speaker 18 Gold recalled the moment out at sea when he gave Clifford a heads up that customs was following.

Speaker 15 He said, We have to dump the bag. He jumped in the back, grabbed the hole, the side of the bag.
I grabbed the other and it went over the side.

Speaker 49 After a short chase with armed federal agents, Gold said they had no choice but to surrender.

Speaker 15 I'll peed my pants, but other than that, he basically wanted to know

Speaker 15 what went overboard. I told him that a towel blew over.

Speaker 8 So basically, you lied. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 15 I don't really want to tell anybody I just got done dumping a body in the Atlantic.

Speaker 53 Gold was asked, why now, 20 years later, did he finally stop covering for his pal Clifford?

Speaker 15 You had basically told me if I refused to answer, that you would put me in jail.

Speaker 11 And certainly you're not here out of the goodness of your heart.

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 68 Were there any other considerations that kept you from coming forward?

Speaker 15 I made a commitment to the guy 20 years ago. I didn't see any reason to break it.

Speaker 29 You broke it?

Speaker 15 Only because you put me in a box and I don't have any choice.

Speaker 34 A compelling witness, for sure.

Speaker 49 But was he credible?

Speaker 13 He's a character. He is despicable, but he's believable.

Speaker 32 Prosecutors had one more witness to go, a jailhouse snitch named Andres Garcia Flores.

Speaker 30 The judge ordered us not to show his face.

Speaker 32 Flores testified that one night he and Clifford were watching a Spanish TV soap opera when they were in the same jail.

Speaker 18 Ironically, the plot was about a drug dealer who killed his wife by throwing her off a boat.

Speaker 39 Do you remember in English what he said to you?

Speaker 6 Wow, remind me of what I did.

Speaker 10 It's like Tellaboo.

Speaker 34 More damning testimony.

Speaker 8 Or was it?

Speaker 51 You were absolutely certain you and Mr.

Speaker 69 Friend were watching that show.

Speaker 41 The defense had done its homework and was ready to pounce.

Speaker 5 Coming up, the judge explodes at the prosecution.

Speaker 39 You put on a jailhouse snitch and you didn't check in any further to his credibility. I don't want to be talking to that.

Speaker 5 And a son defends the man accused of killing his mother.

Speaker 69 I know that he loves me too much to hurt me by taking my mother from me.

Speaker 54 The defense was behind on points after Alan Gold, the state star witness, spun a hypnotic story about helping his buddy Clifford Friend dump his ex-wife's body in the ocean.

Speaker 32 But one person wasn't convinced. Christian Friend, the boy who lost his mother at the age of five, listened to two weeks of damning evidence that his father killed her.

Speaker 44 Every night he came home feeling more and more confident that his father was innocent.

Speaker 10 Was innocent, not going the other way, not getting shaky about.

Speaker 44 Oh, he wasn't shaky at all.

Speaker 10 Did you have any moments where you wavered, Janet?

Speaker 58 Never.

Speaker 10 Said, maybe I've been married to a stranger here. Maybe there's things I don't know about this?

Speaker 44 Absolutely not.

Speaker 10 And the reason you stayed with him so far square behind him is what?

Speaker 44 We had a great relationship.

Speaker 34 While his son and wife still believed in him, how would the defense get the jury to buy its case?

Speaker 35 An excellent place to start was the jailhouse snitch.

Speaker 37 He told that damaging story about him and Clifford watching a soap opera together about an ocean-going wife-murdering drug dealer.

Speaker 22 Clifford allegedly blurted out something like, that's what I did.

Speaker 63 The prosecutor, when she told me about this, she says, you can't, Peter, you can't make this up. I said, yes, you can.
And in fact, it turned out he did.

Speaker 34 During cross-examination, attorney Peter Heller caught the snitch in a lie that sent the whole trial reeling.

Speaker 32 Private investigators working for the defense uncovered evidence the state didn't know about.

Speaker 22 It turned out Clifford never did watch that Spanish-language TV program with the snitch.

Speaker 44 The problem with this story was

Speaker 44 I immediately went and pulled our phone records and Cliff and I were on the telephone when this episode was aired.

Speaker 40 The snitch's story unraveled to the prosecution's great humiliation and unhappiness.

Speaker 35 After that, whoops, Judge Teresa Pooler ripped into the state.

Speaker 39 Seriously, you put on a jailhouse snitch and you didn't check him any further to his credibility. I don't want to respond to that.

Speaker 13 You want an answer? I made a mistake. I made a mistake.
I shouldn't have gone with it.

Speaker 11 At one point, I turned to Marie and said, you know, sometimes when it's too good to be true,

Speaker 13 it probably is.

Speaker 23 The judge called in puzzled jurors and told them to disregard the snitch's testimony.

Speaker 62 He is now under investigation to perjury.

Speaker 17 And here was the big point of the defense's newly energized argument.

Speaker 22 Jurors, if the state would put on a big fat liar like the jailhouse snitch, what did that say about Alan Gold, the star witness?

Speaker 41 Prosecutors were concerned.

Speaker 13 That was their whole key, was to try and say if they put on one liar, they put on the other.

Speaker 35 The defense would do everything it could to prove that, like the snitch, Gold was a liar also.

Speaker 32 And that the reason he decided to tell prosecutors what they wanted to hear was that he was afraid of being charged with murder, too.

Speaker 62 There's no statute limitations on first-degree murders, is there?

Speaker 15 I didn't whack the broad, so I didn't care.

Speaker 62 Is that what this is whacked the broad?

Speaker 15 Is that what she is?

Speaker 15 I watch the Sopranos a lot.

Speaker 37 It didn't take much prodding of the witness to show the court just how little respect Gold had for the entire proceeding.

Speaker 62 Find this whole thing to be comical?

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 62 Why is that so?

Speaker 15 Took 20 years to get here.

Speaker 63 Oh, so that's why it's funny.

Speaker 15 Your sense of humor is different than mine.

Speaker 30 The judge limited the defense from offering its drug-smuggling alibi and the suggestion that it was drugs, not Lynn's body, in the bag Clifford dumped.

Speaker 35 Still, the defense was able to shoehorn in the thought that Gold and Clifford were on a drug run that night.

Speaker 62 Okay, this isn't true, sir, but you needed to meet him that night to go run some drugs.

Speaker 50 Isn't that true?

Speaker 33 With no body ever found, no DNA and no physical evidence in Clifford Friends' house to prove Lynn was murdered there, Gold admitted he couldn't with absolute absolute certainty say that Lynn's body was in that bag.

Speaker 62 Could you tell from your own senses that there was a body in there, yes or no?

Speaker 15 It wasn't April Fool's. There was a body.

Speaker 62 Okay. But you didn't look in there to confirm that there was a body.

Speaker 53 With the state and the defense now resting their cases, closing arguments boiled down to one thing.

Speaker 32 Would jurors believe Alan Gold?

Speaker 12 You know, Alan Gold was about as

Speaker 52 unrepentant a sinner as you're ever going to see.

Speaker 12 The state put him on because he knew things that only he would know.

Speaker 62 You cannot believe what Alan Gold said. He has an agenda.
He fabricated because of his agenda to save his own life.

Speaker 34 The 20-year-old murder case was now in the hands of the jury.

Speaker 36 Jurors deliberated late into the evening.

Speaker 34 Around 9.30, they announced a verdict.

Speaker 44 Christian and I were together.

Speaker 44 holding hands.

Speaker 4 I had told him no matter what happened,

Speaker 4 we would hold our heads high.

Speaker 9 We, the jury, find the defendant, Clifford Brett Friend, guilty of second-degree murder.

Speaker 43 Second-degree murder.

Speaker 33 The jury apparently believed Gold's story, but not that the crime was premeditated.

Speaker 53 At sentencing a few weeks later, Lynn's long-ago fiancé, Ed O'Dell, spoke directly to Christian, reminding him of what he missed in life.

Speaker 52 You will not be able to understand Lynn's love for you until you have your own child, when you will know a love that you never knew possible before.

Speaker 38 Christian, who had sat silently throughout the trial, finally spoke, and he was still four square behind his father.

Speaker 69 I'm not going to go into

Speaker 69 the frustration I feel in hearing that I missed out on growing up with my mother.

Speaker 69 I'm not going to go into how frustrating it is to hear how I've become a good person in spite of my father, because he is the best person I know.

Speaker 69 I've been asked why I never questioned my dad about any of this many times by many people,

Speaker 69 and I never felt the need to.

Speaker 69 He raised me and taught me right from wrong. You've heard it said many times that my dad loved me too much to let me go.

Speaker 69 But I know that he loves me too much to hurt me by taking my mother from me.

Speaker 21 In court, Judge Teresa Poohler had the final words.

Speaker 56 You treated Lynn Friend with unspeakable sir, look at me.

Speaker 56 With unspeakable cruelty. Your actions left your five-year-old child to grow up without knowing his mother.
The manner in which you disposed of her body, sir, was despicable.

Speaker 56 By so cavalierly dumping her in the ocean. Clifford Brett Friend, for these reasons, I am sentencing you to life in prison.

Speaker 6 State Attorney Catherine Fernandez-Rundell vowed that Lynn Friend's story would not end up in some cold case file.

Speaker 45 Now she says there is justice both for the young mother and for her son, even though he disagrees with the outcome of the case.

Speaker 10 Ultimately, it's all about a boy, isn't it?

Speaker 57 It's all about a boy.

Speaker 59 It's a tug of love between the two parents.

Speaker 57 That's right. Except I would beg to say that I don't think a father who would deprive a boy of the love of a mother really loves the boy.
He loved himself more, it seems to me.

Speaker 35 Markers.

Speaker 17 Out west, there's the great open sky.

Speaker 41 In South Florida, the ocean, always the ocean, the vast churning tropical waters.

Speaker 28 For the aging friends still remembering, it is Lynn's marker too.

Speaker 21 After a violent death, the place where they prayed, she might finally rest in peace.

Speaker 5 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.

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