Decades in the Dark

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And I just sat there as half sobbing, half wondering, what happened to our baby?

How could this have happened to him?

Welcome to The Knife.

I'm Hannah Smith.

I'm Patia Eaton.

This week, we speak with a man named Bert Rosen.

Bert and his wife, Carolyn, lived through every parent's nightmare when their son, Matthew, vanished one day in 2001.

For nearly 25 years, they had no idea what had happened to him.

And then an unexpected phone call changed everything.

After 25 long years, Bert and his family finally got some answers.

We talk with Bert about the years leading up to Matthew's disappearance and what happens when someone dealing with a mental health crisis is criminalized.

Let's get into the interview.

Okay, my name is Bert Rosen.

I am happily married to Carolyn, my wife of 53 years.

We've got four children, two boys, two girls, Matthew, Jeremy, Anna, and Rebecca.

Carolyn and I were actually fixed up on a blind date by a mutual friend when we were 16 years old.

By the third date, I was ready to tell her that I was in love with her.

And eventually, January 1 of 1973, we got married.

Two years later, Matthew was born.

Tell me about Matthew as a baby and as a child.

What was he like?

So Matthew was just super happy-go-lucky.

He was inquisitive.

He was just a great little kid.

And from the time we brought him home from the hospital, he slept from 7 p.m.

until 7 a.m.

And he was rambunctious, just like all little kids are.

And then growing up, you really began to see how intelligent he was.

That was showing up in his grades in elementary school that continued on through junior high school.

And so.

when it was time for high school, Matthew went to Oakton High School, which was in Fairfax County, Virginia, played on the high school football team.

And so just as a kid growing up all the way through, all the way through to his high school years, everything is what I would consider to be the normal growing up experience.

He graduated from Oakton High School, I want to say in 88.

There's no indication for you as his parents that anything is amiss.

When does that change?

Yeah, so when Matthew graduated, most of his friends either went to UVA, University of Virginia, or to Virginia Tech.

And so he ended up enrolling in Virginia Tech.

And everything was seemingly going quite normal during those years.

So Blacksburg was about, oh, six and a half, seven hour drive from where we were living in Pittsburgh.

And we would go down and visit him on weekends, or he would come home to Pittsburgh and, you know, bring home his laundry, hoping everything would be washed, dried, and folded by the time he went to school, back to school after the weekend.

But it was in his third year that we began to notice things were changing a little bit.

There was just a slight change in his behavior, but the real aha moment came when Matthew had sent a letter home to us telling us that he wanted to withdraw from Virginia Tech because he didn't think he was getting the education that he was paying for.

He wrote a letter to the dean, asked me to proof the letter, and immediately that switch flipped.

This letter looked as if it had been written by someone who maybe didn't have great command of the English language.

Parts of it didn't make any sense, and Bert was alarmed.

This was so out of character for Matthew that Bert and his wife Carolyn urged their son to go see the school doctor.

And to their relief, he did.

But Matthew was already a legal adult, so all of the information that they have from that doctor's visit is from Matthew.

And what Matthew told them was that the doctor deemed that he had bipolar disorder and suggested medication.

The doctor had suggested that Matthew go on lithium, which he was resistant to do, but is often prescribed for people with a bipolar disorder.

But by the very nature of lithium, it has to begin to build up in your system.

It's not something you take like an aspirin and a few minutes later, your headache is gone.

So it has to build up a little bit.

Well, he only took it for about two weeks.

And during that two weeks, he didn't like the way it made him feel.

He would say he felt a little lethargic on it all, but it really wasn't doing anything more than that.

And so he decided to take himself off of it.

And Matthew said, can I come home?

And so we drove down to Virginia Tech and brought him home.

And the only way that I could describe this is the son that came home was not the son that went away to school.

At that point, did you know that he had stopped taking his medication or was that something you learned later?

He had told us I stopped taking it.

Bert knew his son.

He'd watched him grow up, helped him with homework, and attended his football games.

But Matthew had changed.

There had been red flags while he was at college, like the time his professor called Bert and said that Matthew was making other students uncomfortable.

Then, of course, there was the bizarrely written letter to the dean.

But now Matthew was home, and they were witnessing this new version of him with their own eyes.

Bert said that Matthew would often just sit and stare blankly.

Their family would eat dinner together, but Matthew would sit there completely unresponsive.

If the doorbell rang, it was like he didn't hear it.

He was physically present, but seemed as if his mind was somewhere else, somewhere Burt and Carolyn couldn't reach.

Matthew was a legal adult.

Burt and Carolyn had no authority to make medical decisions for him.

All they could do is plead with him to see a doctor.

They had no access to his medical records.

They wanted to help him, but didn't know how.

He would be staring at the television.

I mean, he was not violent at all, but he would stare at you in a steely sort of a way, way, just enough to make you uncomfortable being in front of him.

We never felt the threat of danger, just discomfort.

And so Carolyn and I sought the counsel of someone who had some expertise in the types of things that we were experiencing.

And what he said is, Burton, Carolyn, you've given up control of your home to your son.

And unless he's willing to get some help, you may face the difficult decision of having to ask him to leave for the sake of the rest of the family.

Well, we never could have imagined that that's a decision we would have made, but that's exactly what ended up happening.

We told Matthew that the way in which he was behaving was not acceptable.

This could not continue.

And unless he was willing to get some help, he could not continue to stay at home.

And when this is going on, this conversation is taking place, what is Matthew's level of understanding or acceptance that he's suffering from mental illness or possibly bipolar disorder.

Yeah, he would not have acknowledged that there was any sort of a mental health disorder.

Matthew refused to get any help.

And then we said, then you're not going to be able to continue to live here.

And so we watched him pack his rollaboard suitcase, walk down the street, not knowing where he was going to be going other than he could not continue to stay at home.

You know, when you talked about telling him you need to seek help or you won't be able to keep living here, what kind of help were you hoping he would get?

Was it pharmaceutical?

Was it seeing a therapist?

Well, he needed to see someone.

And the help that we were referring to was going to see a counselor, whether that would have been a therapist or something else.

We wanted to see someone who might be able to professionally help him.

work through whatever it was he needed to work through.

And I'm not sure that we knew exactly what that was back then.

Matthew managed to obtain student loans and enroll at Decanes University.

He rented an apartment near the campus.

Bert and Carolyn would visit, but when they did, they could tell that Matthew was struggling.

The apartment was in a bad state, dishes piled up in the sink.

Matthew's appearance became increasingly unkempt.

But what could they say?

He'd managed to stay in school and now graduation was right around the corner.

Bert said he and Carolyn were receiving all kinds of order forms in the mail for caps, gowns, and graduation rings.

Matthew's impending graduation was a bright spot, a sign that maybe things were looking up.

And so we went to a wintertime commencement at the Palumbo Center, and we sat in the nosebleed section.

And as they got closer to calling the R's, I made my way down closer to the stage so we could snap a few pictures, and we did.

And then afterwards, we all went out to dinner.

thinking that things had settled down in his life.

But the next day, I got a call from the chaplain at the Allegheny County Jail, and he said, Bert, we've got your son here in jail, assault and battering a police officer, resisting arrest with violence.

And they named off a litany of other things that they had charged him with that I don't recall anymore.

And so we ended up going to a midnight bond hearing on Christmas Eve.

Matthew had been arrested at the school's registrar's office when he'd gone to pick up his diploma.

And it turned out he was a few credits short of actually graduating.

But since Matthew's behavior on campus was known to sometimes be erratic, the school had preemptively arranged for a law enforcement officer to be present when he arrived.

And it's true, when Matthew found out that he wasn't actually graduating, it was upsetting to him.

The way that Bert described it, the officer put her hand on Matthew's arm in an attempt to calm him down, and when he shrugged her off, she fell to the ground.

Bert's understanding is that Matthew did not intentionally push or shove the officer.

But regardless, she fell, and Matthew was arrested for assault and battery and resisting arrest.

They walked Matthew in and now for the first time, we're seeing our oldest, our firstborn, and he's in shackles.

So Matthew stood in front of the bench, and the judge said, Matthew, let me ask you a couple of questions.

One,

how do you support yourself?

And Matthew said, with my feet.

Now, nobody who's thinking logically would tell the judge that I support myself with my feet.

You'd know they're talking about what's your livelihood, your income, so on and so forth.

You can almost begin to see that the judge was getting annoyed.

He didn't want to be dealing with this Christmas Eve.

What we were hoping, though, was that he was going to see something in Matthew that might suggest that Matthew needed a psychological evaluation.

Well, he didn't.

I'd love to know what actually happened at the registrar's office that day.

And when all was said and done, the state was now the one pressing charges and they gave Matthew a court date to return.

Matthew took off, never went back, and that resulted in a bench warrant being issued for him, which to this day, as best we know, is maybe still there unless there are some statute of limitations on a bench warrant.

It was 1992 on that Christmas Eve that Burton Carolyn watched Matthew stand in front of a judge when they'd had a moment of hope that perhaps the judge might order a psychiatric evaluation, one that could help them help Matthew to better understand his mental state, maybe help them chart a path forward.

But that didn't happen.

Instead, the judge brought charges and increased Matthew's bail, and Matthew eventually bonded out and skipped his next court hearing.

Matthew never returned to his college apartment.

He went home with his parents, but in less than a year, he was gone again.

And this cycle continued for years, until sometime in the late 90s when Matthew left and made his way to New York.

For a time, Matthew stayed in touch, sometimes by email, emails that Burt and Carolyn were able to trace to a Burger King in Midtown Manhattan.

But Matthew's communication became less and less frequent until after a few months, it stopped altogether.

Burt and Carolyn felt helpless.

But in 2001, something serendipitous happened.

Burt was in New York on business when he got an unexpected call from Carolyn.

She had Matthew on the other line, and he'd agreed to meet up with Bert.

And so now if you could picture the back and forth conversation, because we're not conference calling at this point, she's describing to me where he is and I am within 100 yards of him.

And so now we are moving towards each other, thanks to Carolyn guiding in the back and forth conversation.

And I was so angry with him for all that he had put our family through.

that I wasn't sure when I saw him whether I wanted I was going to hug him or if I wanted to deck him.

I really wanted to do the latter.

I was just so mad.

Well, when I finally did get up to him, now our eyes are locking as we're getting closer together.

I realized immediately how bad he looked, how he smelled terrible.

I gave him this hug and took him back to my hotel room, which was the Marriott right off of LaGuardia airport.

And when we got in there, He just fell on the bed and he went to sleep for the night.

And I just sat there and half sobbing, half wondering, what happened to our baby?

How could this have happened to him?

So the next morning, we went down to breakfast and I asked him, do you want to come home?

And he said, I am home.

And after some exchange back and forth, he said, the streets of New York is where I live now.

No apartment, no nothing.

And so I said, well, at least let me give you the toiletries that are in my suitcase if you won't come home.

and the address of the shelter in New York.

And so I would later find out that that he did go there.

And I went back home watching Matthew walk off into the distance, just like Carolyn and I watched him walk down the street in Pittsburgh.

So now in all of that, I've come back home.

He has stayed in New York.

There was little Bert could do but watch as Matthew once again disappeared into the busy streets of New York, not knowing if he would be safe, if he would be fed, or when they'd hear from him again.

So Bert returned home without his son.

And just a a few months later in 2001, something terrible happened.

Matthew's mother Carolyn was involved in a near-fatal car accident.

Carolyn suffers from something called hypoglycemic neuropathy, which can cause her blood sugar to drop suddenly and without warning.

Carolyn had been driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when she'd fainted.

And when she did, Somehow she managed to drive 13 miles on the turnpike.

She doesn't remember paying a toll, but just driving through the toll booth.

And when she got to this particular exit, it's one of those that almost looks like a candy cane.

It goes straight ahead and then it loops its way back.

And you've got this large grassy knoll there.

Well, what witnesses told us later was that her car hit that hill at about 80 miles an hour.

without braking, which then means it launched her.

It turned into a launch ramp.

She came down on the other side of the interstate.

They had to life flight her to the hospital.

And that would end up being an extended hospital stay followed time in recovery.

We would later get a call from Matthew asking if I would come to Philadelphia and pick him up.

He said he walked from New York City to Philadelphia and he wanted to come home for Thanksgiving.

And I told him that I'm not going to come pick you up, but we'll wire a bus ticket to you and you can catch the bus and we'll pick you up at the bus station here in Knoxville.

And so that's what we did.

Carolyn, against the doctor's recommendation, left the hospital early so that she could be at home.

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There was relief in having eyes on Matthew, but being in his physical presence came with a lot of unease.

Carolyn's injuries from the accident were extensive.

She was in a clamshell-like body brace.

She'd crushed three vertebrae and both ankles in the accident.

Bert had taken time off to care for her, but eventually had to return to work.

He He and Carolyn were hopeful that Matthew might step in to help now that he was back home, but that hope quickly faded.

And so now we're back to again.

Matthew, would you mind fixing me something for breakfast?

And Matthew just wouldn't respond.

He wouldn't do anything.

Later, we would all be out and Carolyn would tell me that Matthew was pushing her wheelchair.

And she was actually scared that he was going to push her down the escalator or something else.

And so finally, she said, Matthew, Matthew, I cannot heal while you're here in the house.

And when your dad gets home, I'm going to ask him to ask you to leave.

This just can't continue.

And so I got home.

I did end up asking Matthew to leave.

It was a rather heated exchange between he and I.

And

we would end up asking him to leave.

He went over to one of his siblings' apartment and they remember hearing him on the phone talking about trying to get out to L.A.

In the past, when Matthew left, he would periodically update them on his location, but this time there was nothing.

A week went by, then another.

Burt and Carolyn were beginning to panic.

They consulted with the pastor of their church, who tried to comfort them by saying that Matthew would check in eventually.

But he was wrong.

Matthew did not check in.

It was as if he had vanished.

Now, instead of focusing on Matthew seeing a doctor, the entire picture had changed.

They just wanted to know where he was, to know that he was alive.

We ended up putting him on the missing persons list.

The acronym for that is Namus, which you could look it up.

That's a national database of missing persons.

And the Salvation Army also has a missing persons bureau.

So we registered him under both of those.

And then I started Googling him.

I had him googled in every which way to Sunday, but nothing ever turned up.

And so every morning, that's how my day started, searching through the Google alerts.

And if there was something that seemed even remote, that it might be him, that would result in some phone calls, tracing it down to see if it was him.

They were all dead ends.

So you have these years of wondering, is he dead or alive?

And then you just tell yourself, it would just be good to have some closure.

Nobody wants their child to be dead, but you don't want to keep looking forever if that turns out to be the case.

So just some closure.

Let us know that he's dead, or perhaps we'll find him somewhere.

But now one year's gone by, two years have gone by, and Carolyn started opening the front door and looking out on our little porch where we have a swing to see maybe Matthew has shown up.

Maybe today's the day.

We're going to find him sleeping on the front porch because he came home in the middle of the night.

All those years, even though with the advent of cell phones and most people using the cells as their primary means of phone, we kept our landline all of those years so that if Matthew decided to do 411 and decided to try and find us, he could.

And what were his siblings?

You know, as parents, you're waking up every day, starting your morning with checking your Google alerts and following up on any little thing you can find.

What do his brothers and sisters make of this particular time around?

How long he's been gone?

How long he's not been in contact?

At some point in time, but I don't remember exactly when the practice started.

Matthew's birthday is October 15.

They would begin to get together right at Matthew's birthday time

and just say, you know, let's just kind of remember Matthew.

Sometimes it was more somber.

than others, but it was always commemorating Matthew's birthday to let him know that he was never forgotten.

Every year there was a Christmas ornament for Matthew.

Every year there was a birthday card for Matthew.

Were they believing that he was likely deceased?

For some people, coming to their own conclusion could be a coping thing, or for some people, it's like, well, this is what I think is going on.

He's never stayed up contact this long.

Was there a general feeling that he was out there somewhere?

Yes.

But the question would be, do you think we'll ever see Matthew again?

And all we could say is we hope so.

Matthew's family never stopped hoping, but soon a decade had passed with no word from Matthew.

Reminders of him were all around them, a lot of them good, family photos, the memories from happier times, and others not so good, like unpaid bills for his student loans showing up in the mail.

Bird continually checked the missing persons database, Namus, as well as the Salvation Army's missing persons list, always looking for Matthew.

But in the blink of an eye, a second decade had had passed.

By 2022, Matthew had been missing for 21 years.

The world had gone on turning, but left a hole where Matthew should be.

Bert was planning his retirement and knew that he wanted to do something he was passionate about.

So he and Carolyn co-founded their organization, Hold On to Hope, to help families with missing loved ones.

I was the CEO of a homeless shelter here in Knoxville, and it's like, what am I going to do next?

What are we going to do next?

And so we started Hold hold on to hope in 2022.

Well, one of the families that we would end up working with was someone who thought their son had come to Carm where I was working.

And their email made a circuitous route and eventually ended up with my assistant, Kathy, who said, Bert, you're going to want to read this.

Well, I did, reached back out to that family.

And long story short, I said, we've not been able to locate your son.

He has not been here.

My wife and I know a little something about what you might be going through.

And if you would ever like, we'd be glad to chat with you once a month on a Zoom call, which we've done for over two years.

We got a text message from them while we were visiting family in Florida saying we've learned that Brandon passed away.

That was their son's name.

Turns out that Brandon died of a drug overdose five days after he disappeared, and they had been searching for him for two years in vain.

They held a memorial service for him.

Carolyn and I went to the memorial service, and it was driving home from that memorial service that Carolyn said, you know, what if what happened to Brandon is the same thing that happened to Matthew?

What if he's been dead all these years and our searching has been in vain?

Burt had retired at the tail end of 2023 and dove into his work helping families with loved ones through Hold On to Hope.

But driving home from this memorial service in 2024, it really changed their search for Matthew.

They realized that if Matthew was dead, if all of these years of searching had been in vain, they wanted to know.

Burt had a contact in law enforcement, former Knoxville Police Chief David Roosh, who'd since joined the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

Burt called him up, seeing if there was anything David could do to help.

I reached out to David saying all the years that I was CEO and while we were both in Knoxville, I never asked any favors of you.

I thought it was bad form.

I'm not there anymore now, I'm asking.

Well, David then assigned a special agent in charge who came to our home.

And now things are beginning to move at a little bit more rapid pace.

The first real tip that happened out of nowhere, my cell phone rings one afternoon.

A woman identifying herself as being with the Pittsburgh Police Department telling us that they're taking Matthew off the missing persons list because they just spoke to him 30 minutes ago.

She said, well, I probably shouldn't tell you this, but he's somewhere in Alaska.

That was the first time Alaska had ever shown up, which was so foreign because Matthew hates cold weather.

How on earth would he end up in one of the coldest places imaginable when he hates the cold?

For the first time in nearly two and a half decades, Burt and Carolyn have a real lead, information that could possibly reunite them with Matthew.

And they run with it.

Burt and Carolyn hire a PI and call police departments in Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage, looking for a name, Matthew Rosen.

And eventually, they get a hit.

There is a man by the name of Matthew Rosen confirmed to be living in Alaska, but was it their son?

They couldn't be sure.

We call the Alaska State Police.

The person that we spoke to who is an investigator said, we're not allowed to give you that information.

Now I'm back to our investigator again, who says he lives here in Knoxville.

And he says, just so so happens, a very dear friend of mine retired from the Alaska State Police after 28 years of service.

All these dots are beginning to line up now.

So he introduced us to him.

His name is Trace Lewis, and he ended up being the person who went through all of the loopholes that you have to go through.

And ultimately, there is something in Alaska called the Alaska Permanent Fund.

Every Alaska resident gets a check every year so long as you are a resident.

Well, they publish the names.

They don't publish any other information, but they do publish the names.

Well, he went back and he found that Matthew was on that list and had applied for the fund four years prior, but did not apply for the next two years after that.

We waited it out a little bit longer because you have to apply between January 1 and March 31.

Let's see if he applies in 2024.

He did.

Well, that allowed him to go detect other information, which ultimately led to him coming back to us and saying, we have Matthew located.

We've got an email address for him, a phone number for him, and a street address.

Now we're ready to go to Alaska on the basis of that.

And he said, but there's four feet of snow.

You don't really want to go to Fairbanks in four feet of snow and gave us all the reasons.

I'm being more practical.

Carolyn's chomping at the bit saying, look, we just got to go.

But we ended up waiting because for medical reasons.

But you did not reach out to him at that email address.

You just kind of stayed in the background.

Okay.

Yeah, for fear that if we reached out to him and in fact, he was trying to go under the radar and didn't want us to find him, that that would just cause him to go again and take off somewhere.

In April of 2024, Bert, Carolyn, and their two daughters, Matthew's sisters, booked themselves tickets on the same flight to Alaska.

They settled into their seats.

They were hopeful.

They were anxious.

They were filled with questions that could only be answered by going to Alaska and looking for Matthew themselves.

The joy of finding him.

What if it's not him?

How will he react after not seeing us for 25 years?

What is this going to be like?

Meanwhile, well-intending people were giving us a variety of suggestions.

One,

don't go alone.

Have someone go with you just in case.

Another person suggested that if nothing else, we at least have Mace with us.

So if he comes to the door and he's aggressive, we could be prepared to at least do what we need to do.

An investigator told us that Alaska has some very strict trespassing laws.

And so he said, you know, Matthew may not come to the door.

If you knock, you may see him peek out a window or something, or he may come out and have a conversation with you on the front porch and ask you to leave.

And if he does, you're obligated to go.

And he said, I'm a little concerned about his mental well-being.

And so just be very, very careful.

Meanwhile, Carolyn said, I know my son.

We don't need to be concerned about any of those things.

The plan was to take the flight, get into Fairbanks slightly after lunch, get our rental car, go drop off our luggage at the hotel, and then go drive.

to the address that we have for Matthew.

And that plan was unfolding well.

The weather was all good.

Everything was conducive to doing that.

When we checked into the hotel and we were ready to go, we got in the car and we went.

It's really two straight shots from the hotel that we were staying at to where Matthew is.

Now, we had seen the aerial view of where Matthew's address was.

And what it looked like was a big field that was somehow off the main drag.

As we're driving, as you would often see in rural locations, especially where the weather is bad like it is in Alaska, they've got seven, eight, nine mailboxes side by side, all on the side of the road.

So the postal carrier could just mail, mail, mail, mail, mail.

And then it's up to everybody else to walk out to the street and grab their mail.

What was it like in the car?

Was it tight?

It was just quiet.

It was quiet.

Everybody kind of lost in their own mind, except that Rebecca had Google Maps, and so she was giving the directions where to go, but it was quiet.

No music on, no nothing, just following the street.

From the moment we picked up the rental car till we drove to the hotel, it was just quiet.

But before we left, we had all prayed together.

And that was us just saying, okay, we don't know what the future is going to hold here.

And then we went on our way.

So we're driving down this road.

It's a three and a half mile stretch.

And all you've got is your direction and then oncoming traffic the other way.

And the mailboxes on the side of the street.

As we're approaching where we need to make the turn,

we're about a quarter of the way into the turn and Rebecca yells out, there's this figure walking towards the mailboxes.

She said, that's Matthew.

I would know him anywhere.

Now she hadn't seen him since, you know, in all these years.

I'd know him anywhere.

So we finished the turn, turned around like we're going to make a U-turn to go back out to the main street, pulled off to the side, and now we're facing the mailboxes and this person that's standing over there carolyn opens up her window and she says matthew and he looked up so we get out of the car and in this case carolyn was front seat passenger i was on the driver's side the two girls we all get out of the car

Well, my two daughters and I began walking up towards where Matthew was so we could see each other a little bit more clearly.

And I said, Matthew?

And he said, yeah.

I said, it's your dad.

And we just stood there frozen for a moment.

One of the girls said, could we come up and give you a hug?

And so the three of us walked up and gave him a hug, but not Carolyn.

Carolyn was frozen next to the passenger door.

She just couldn't move.

So now if you could imagine the two girls and me hugging Matthew right there by the mailboxes and Rebecca's waving saying, mom, come on, come on up.

And Carolyn couldn't move.

She couldn't speak.

After we hugged for a little while, Matthew left.

He didn't break away from the hug, but the hug was over.

He walked over to Carolyn, threw his arms around her,

and all you could hear was this profuse, loud wailing coming from Carolyn.

She just hugged him and she wasn't letting go.

I mean, this was a bear hug.

hug that she had on him and she was just wailing and um after that finally subsided matthew said so So, you want to come to my place and hang out?

At that point, we knew that we had a good inact.

The girls would walk with Matthew the quarter mile back to his mailbox.

We would follow along in the car, and we would end up spending the rest of the day with him.

And what was the first of several days to come?

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And so you have this reunion with Matthew at his mailbox, and then he invites you in.

Can you describe where he was living to us?

What did it look like and feel like?

Yeah, so it looked like a cabin.

It looked very rustic, but from the outside, it looked clean.

It wasn't until we walked in the cabin that we realized that this is a very sparse cabin, one small sofa where you can sit.

One chair that he has against a wall where he has a makeshift desk.

He's got lights.

He's got a stove.

He's got a refrigerator and he has no running water.

We would learn that Alaskans refer to this as a dry cabin, and it's fairly typical.

So it's not like there was water that he couldn't afford.

Once you get a certain way past the University of Alaska, there's no infrastructure and no running water for any of the people that live out there.

Just as we were pulling up and walking into his cabin, a car pulled into his driveway.

This was Safeway, who was delivering his groceries.

And so we took the groceries in and then we helped put them away in his refrigerator and his freezer.

But again, all of the dishes stacked up in the sink, they were dirty.

But he wasn't.

There was a brightness in his eyes, something that we hadn't seen in a long, long time.

Fingernails were clean.

His shirts did not look like they're something that had been thrown into a corner and thrown on.

I mean, he had no idea we were coming.

So as he walked to the mailbox, his shirt was tucked in, had his belt on.

The cabin was small, rustic, with no running water and an outhouse, but it seemed like a place that Matthew truly felt like home.

He was taking care of it, and he was taking care of himself.

But Bert did notice something strange.

Two large logs in the front of the house that appeared to have fallen and then been left there.

Matthew told Bert the logs were protection from evil spirits.

Back inside the cabin was a shelf full of notebooks.

Bert asked Matthew about them.

I asked him a question about a Google post that I had seen where an author by the name of Matthew Rosen in Fairbanks had published a self-help book through a publisher in Pittsburgh.

And I said, no, there's no way.

And he said, yeah, that's me.

I've published two self-help books.

They're available on Amazon.

And he said, here's a copy for you.

So it's a 450-page hardback book.

And then that one's called Twinkle.

And then the other one is called Stellar Propeller, which is a smaller paperback book.

Both are self-help books.

Matthew spends his days talking to himself.

He said he's had no human contact in a little over four years, except to say thank you to the person that delivers his groceries.

Or if every now and then he treats himself to a cup of coffee and has to go to to a local restaurant, whatever interaction you would have to order your coffee is all he's had.

He said, I haven't had any human contact.

I don't talk to anybody.

I don't do anything.

I sit here.

I write.

I try and get up at 6 a.m.

every morning and be in bed by 1 a.m.

They get a lot of sunlight there.

And he said, then I walk and I read and I write.

Matthew's writing is more like poetry than prose.

It's repetitive.

I read a sample on Amazon that says, me, the me, the you, the you, will choose to win this.

As such, me, the me, the you, the you want to win.

But regarding the book, ever since we have found Matthew, Carolyn talks to him at least twice a day, sometimes for an hour each time they talk, sometimes longer.

He talks to all of his siblings during the week, 30 minutes or so, wherever they can catch the time because they're all working.

And I'll talk to him about once or twice a week as well.

What Carolyn said, as she listens more and more to Matthew, she believes that the way Matthew has been able to cope with his life and be doing as well as he's presumably doing is by writing these things down.

And that has become his way of helping himself.

That has become his self-help.

But she said, the more I talk to Matthew, the more I understand his book.

Well, it's interesting because it makes me think about how you talked about that moment years before when you were in the courtroom and the judge asked him, how do you support yourself?

And he said, with my feet.

There's something about him writing these books and calling them self-help, these books that are sort of full of his musings and sort of poetic-like writings, where it's very literal in the way that he's called them self-help.

It's sort of a documentation of how he has helped himself by writing these books.

Yes.

And in some ways, you know, I'm sure that there is a lot that goes into this and it's complicated.

And I imagine that this is not the life that you had imagined for your son when he was young, right?

Right.

But in some ways, it's impressive the way that he has built this life for himself.

You know, yes, he's isolated and he's writing these books in this cabin that might not make sense to other people.

But the fact that he found his way to Alaska and the fact that he's living in this cabin and is self-sustaining and is able to clothe himself.

And I don't know if he seems happy or not, but in some ways, I'm like, wow, he really figured out a way to make a life for himself.

He has.

And one of the things that the private investigator in Alaska was telling us, because he has had a lot of similar cases, is that for some people, when they go on lithium, it helps.

But for some people who go on it and then come off of it, they're worse than had they never gone on it to begin with, and that actually they learn how to cope without taking the medication.

Well, from everything we know from Matthew thus far, that's what he's done.

And so now, in tracing back to where I started, where we heard him on the phone to LA,

so consider he only gets SSI, no other funds.

And so he went from LA to San Francisco, to Colorado, to Virginia, to West Virginia, to New York, to Boston, to Philadelphia.

And he said the only flight he ever took was from Boston to Anchorage.

And then he decided after being in Anchorage for a little while that he really didn't like it there.

And so he went to Fairbanks because Fairbanks seemed like a nice place.

I don't know how you do all that on $500 a month.

but he's very frugal, counts his pennies.

And he would tell us that there were times when if he went to one of those locations, if he felt safe sleeping on the streets, then he just slept on the streets.

If he didn't feel safe, then he'd go into a shelter.

And when he went into a shelter, he could get his meals.

It didn't cost him anything to be there.

Today, Bert and Carolyn have a relationship with Matthew that a decade ago, they could have only dreamed of.

It's not the life or relationship they probably pictured, but Matthew seems to be at peace.

He speaks speaks with his parents on a regular basis and his siblings.

There's even a family holiday on the horizon.

We're planning on having him come here for Thanksgiving.

He'll probably just stay over until after Christmas and go back home the first week of January.

And then all of a sudden I had this aha moment where, gosh, if you don't have real ID or a passport, you can't fly.

So I said, well, let me call him and ask him.

And so once I kind of beat around the bush a little bit, he said, Dad, I have real ID.

Don't worry.

He said, no, nobody knows this, but I'm the one that actually came up with the idea of real ID.

But I have it.

It's current.

He has a cell phone and a computer, which is how we Zoom daily.

His cell phone is a $50 a month unlimited plan that he uses as a hotspot for his laptop.

And he functions completely in that fashion.

When we were in downtown Fairbanks, I was asking for directions.

He said, oh, go up here and turn left.

And I'm saying, how do you know your way around all of these places?

And he said, well, I just kind of do.

So I don't know what he's done during those years.

Two-hour walk from where he lives to downtown Fairbanks, but apparently he's walked it several times.

Does he have any social connections in the area that you're aware of?

And his?

No.

No, none.

Okay.

No.

None anywhere, actually.

He said, I've never had a girlfriend, never had any significant relationships.

I don't make friends where I go.

But one of the other things with this is that there were several poignant moments while we were all there, enough to a point where it brought tears trickling down his cheeks, which he said, those aren't tears because I don't have emotions.

I don't cry over anything.

And yet there he was crying.

And on the last day that we would be with him, we had predetermined the night before.

that we were going to take his bicycle to get fixed.

When the weather's decent enough there, there are some bike trails that take you all the way down to the university.

And he said, yeah, I just haven't had time to fix it.

Well, dad interpretation, haven't had time to fix it means you can't afford to fix it.

And so we said, why don't you let mom and I take you tomorrow, get your bike fixed, and then we'll go spend the day together and we'll pick your bike up at the end of the day.

When we got there the next morning, his bike was outside right by the front door.

He was dressed and ready to go, as was the case on all the other previous days.

So as we put the bike in the back, he sat in the rear seat directly behind Carolyn on the passenger side of the car.

He said, before we go, there's something I need to say.

And now tears are streaming down his eyes.

And he said, I need to apologize for all the pain, all the hurt, all the suffering that I've caused you all these years.

Will you please forgive me?

And it was just a meltdown moment.

Matthew told us that several years ago, he said someone came out to the house.

He thinks it was Alaska State Police, and told them that I had been reported missing and that they were out there to verify whether or not he was actually the Matthew Rosen that we had been looking for.

And he said, your parents and your family are looking for you.

Do we have permission to tell them?

where you are?

And he said, no.

You can't tell them.

You can tell them I'm okay, but don't don't tell them where I am.

We would later say, Matthew,

why did you do that?

He said, well, I didn't know if after all these years, that if you knew where I was, if that would be helpful or hurtful.

And I concluded that it would hurt you more to know where I was than to just keep searching.

And so I decided to tell them, no.

I don't want them to know where I am.

And he said, really, I never thought I'd see you again.

In fact, I pretty much had figured, mom and dad, that you guys had passed away by now, and that that would just be the way it would be.

The hotel that we rented was a two-bedroom apartment with a living room and a kitchen.

And then the idea struck, since we've got the kitchen, instead of going out to a restaurant, maybe he gets a home-cooked meal.

And so we went out to the store and then we came back and Carolyn made dinner.

And so as we're all sitting around,

Matthew said, I haven't had a home cooked meal since I left home.

And I never thought I'd have one again, especially not one of yours.

He said, gosh, I sure miss that.

Wow.

And so the idea of him coming for Thanksgiving was something we raised, not him.

But he didn't bat an eyelash.

He said, it would be great to experience a Rosen family Thanksgiving, and it wouldn't be too bad to get a little bit more of your home cooking, mom.

That's like such a sweet moment for you guys.

And he does end up coming back for Thanksgiving.

And now you guys are in touch.

And it's like you guys knew what he needed in that moment, even after not having seen him 24 years.

What is your motivation for sharing your family's story?

I think it's twofold.

One,

It's similar to what I had said to my daughter when she was a little upset that I was kind of letting the cat out of the bag beyond our immediate family.

And she has some challenges of her own health-wise.

And I said, Rebecca, if you suddenly found that you were healed of all the infirmities that you experience, wouldn't you want to let everybody know that you've been cured, you've been healed?

And I said, that's what it's like here.

I can't help but talk about it.

But the other side of that and the other motivation is that if this is just another story of son disappears, parents find son, family reunion, we would miss the larger part of this.

And it's one of my motivations in that hope is such a powerful, powerful tool.

And that was one of the reasons that Carolyn and I started Hold On to Hope,

because we knew what it was like for people trying to hold on.

And so part of telling the story was really so that we could further advance the work that we do with Hold On to Hope, especially when you consider on that nameless database, it's about 600,000 names that are on that list and the number of people who are going through just what we're going through.

So, don't give up.

Hold on to hope.

I think that's such a strong and really heartfelt message.

And I really appreciate you sharing your story, and I appreciate Matthew's openness to you sharing it as well.

So, we've never done a story like this, and we want to make it super clear that certainly deciding to live a more solitary lifestyle or suffering from mental illness is absolutely not a crime.

But for Bert and everyone who loved Matthew and also for law enforcement, this was also a missing persons case.

Absolutely.

And the story actually speaks so closely to the whole point of going, you know, quote, beyond the headlines.

There are many moments in this episode that require that.

Yeah, I mean, when Bert talked about, I think it was two or three times they asked Matthew to either get help or leave, they drew this hard line.

You know, that still came from a place of love and wanting him to get better and also just a lack of understanding how to best support him at that time.

Yeah, you know, that's so complicated.

I'm glad you brought that up because I could see how it'd be really easy to pass a quick judgment judgment on someone in that scenario.

But, you know, the reality is, is that you're right, it was a long time ago.

They didn't have as much information.

But even today, there are mental health experts who would give family members this advice.

If the person in their family is an adult who has full control over their decisions about their medical and psychological treatment, sometimes that is the advice that's given is distance yourself.

I mean, it's so difficult and brutal, but it's obviously a really complex situation.

Yeah.

And there can be an issue of a lack of other options and resources, even if you don't want to have to give them an ultimatum.

And it's like they were going through so much themselves in their household with Carolyn recovering from this terrible car accident.

There are just these sort of realities to people's lives.

And these things happen in many layers.

And so, yeah, like you said, easy to pass judgment until you know the whole story and start to think about it a little more closely to what they were going through at the time.

Yeah.

So one of the things that I want to talk about is lithium, because that's the medication that Matthew was prescribed after seeing a doctor at his school.

You know, this is all according to what Matthew told Bert, right?

Because we obviously don't know his medical records, but that he started taking it, didn't like it, and then quickly went off of it.

So I started to look into lithium a little bit more.

And, you know, it's interesting, when it first started to be used in the the 1940s to treat people suffering from manic depressive disorders, it was kind of this revolutionary treatment.

It was the first treatment that had been found that had somewhat long-lasting effects.

There hadn't really been one before.

And the result of that was that so many people endured horrible treatment.

being locked away in asylums.

And also, you know, there were treatments that today would not be done, such as giving people lobotomies, which is not effective and incredibly damaging to people's brains.

And so for many people, when lithium came on the scene, it was a huge advancement.

And it felt like this sort of miraculous treatment that did allow many people with manic depressive disorder, such as bipolar, to live a functional life in society.

And it's used today still.

Yeah, and it's an incredibly powerful drug, but with that come intense side effects.

Not only does it take weeks of use to start working, but you can can experience fainting, weight gain, troubled breathing, confusion, memory loss.

I mean, the list is long.

And for that reason, lithium has a really high non-adherence rate, which just means that people stop taking it.

Actually, a 2021 Dutch study of older patients who were newly prescribed lithium reported that 36.3% of them discontinued within a median of 18 months.

That's a pretty significant percentage.

Yeah.

And I feel like that's so important for us to point out because Bert notes that Matthew decides to stop taking lithium.

And I think that it's like, well, if you have this drug available to help you, why wouldn't you take it?

But it's just never that simple.

And, you know, he's having to make a decision to either put himself in a place where he thinks he is maybe better off without it.

And I can't say whether that's true or not, but I can say looking at the data, a lot of people decide to stop taking it.

Yeah.

And obviously everyone's different, but it's interesting in this case how Matthew has really been able to figure out how to make a life for himself without medication.

Yeah.

And, you know, when we were in our first preliminary conversations with Bert ahead of the interview, we did ask, like, how would Matthew feel about you sharing this story?

Because he is at the center of it.

Yeah.

And Bert said that he had Matthew's okay to do that.

And that was really important to us going into it.

Oh, absolutely.

Talking about mental illness, I want to shout out the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

You can go to their website at nami.org.

They estimate that 2 million people with mental illness are booked into U.S.

jails every year.

There's a lot of collision with mental health crisis and the criminal justice system.

And this episode is just one of so many examples of how that is harmful and not helpful and can really spiral someone's life even further out of control.

Because then oftentimes families are left on their own to try to figure out how to help their loved one.

Not only navigate their mental illness, but then also navigate the criminal justice system on top of that, which even if you're not struggling with a mental illness is difficult to navigate and figure out.

Takes time and resources.

So, you know, there's information about all of this on the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

One of the things that they do is that they're trying to create programs that they could train police forces and they're calling it help not handcuffs,

you know, better ways to respond to mental health.

And I don't have a lot of information about the effectiveness of those programs, although I know that they were trying to institute one in New Orleans in 2021.

But it's good things to be thinking about and talking about.

And I think that we should be talking about it way more in our society because so many people are not being helped.

Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, one other thing I wanted to mention, when I was looking into lithium, I ended up listening to this interview by this doctor, Dr.

Walter Brown.

And he wrote this book a few years back called Lithium, a Doctor, a Drug, and a Breakthrough.

And it's sort of about the history of lithium and treatment.

And he's been a psychiatrist, psychologist for a long time and treated different patients with manic depressive disorders.

And so he has personal experience talking about using the drug and the effectiveness and the issues with it as well.

But he talked about some of the research into bipolar disorder.

And one of the things that is not proven, but he mentioned, which I thought was interesting, is that there is this correlation to people who are manic depressive and who are also very creative.

And they don't understand what that is, but there's some research into there being a genetic connection, like some sort of genetic thing that's both causing the manic depressive disorder is also causing people to be incredibly creative.

There's a higher percentage of poets amongst people with manic depressive disorders.

Wow, that's so interesting.

I had no idea.

Yeah.

And I mean, it's not proven, I don't, as far as I'm aware, but there have been some things written about this correlation.

So it's kind of interesting.

Yeah.

So Bert and Carolyn Rosen, Matthew's parents, are the co-founders of an organization called Hold On to Hope that provides compassionate support, encouragement, and hope to those with a missing loved one.

You can check them out at hold to, that's the number two, hope.org.

That's our episode today.

Thanks for listening.

If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it.

Our email is thenife at exactlyrightmedia.com, or you can follow us on Instagram at theKnife Podcast or Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

This has been an Exactly Right Production, hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith, and me, Patia Eaton.

Our producers are Tom Breifogel and Alexa Samarosi.

This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.

Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.

Artwork by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgareth, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

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