Lynne Friend was killed by her ex-husband, Clifford Friend, on the night of August 28, 1994. He strangled her during an argument over her plans to move their five-year-old son to Tennessee, then dumped her body in the Atlantic Ocean with the help of a friend. Her body has never been recovered. Clifford was not charged until March 2012 and was convicted of second-degree murder in 2014, nearly 20 years after the killing.
Lynne Friend and the Custody Fight
Lynne Friend was a 35-year-old hospital administrator and the divorced mother of a young son, Christian. After a bitter custody battle, she had won custody and was preparing to leave southeastern Florida for Tennessee, where she planned to marry her fiancé, Ed O’Dell. Clifford Friend, a pawnshop owner living in Lighthouse Point, was furious about the move and about losing regular access to his son.
On the evening of August 28, 1994, Lynne told O’Dell she was heading to Clifford’s house to pick up a child support check. She never came back.
What Happened That Night
According to testimony that surfaced years later, Clifford and Lynne argued about Christian being taken out of state. Clifford knocked her down and choked her to death.
He then called a longtime friend, Alan Gold, and asked him to come to the house. Gold arrived to find a large canvas equipment bag on the dining room floor. Clifford told him what had happened. Gold never looked inside the bag but understood Lynne’s body was in it. The two men loaded the bag onto Clifford’s 31-foot Chaparral boat, ran east from Government Cut into the open Atlantic, weighted the bag with an anchor, and threw it overboard.
The Customs Agents Who Saw It Happen
Federal customs agents were patrolling the water that night. Agent Tim Stellhorn and his partner spotted the boat heading due east toward the Bahamas and assumed the men were smuggling drugs. The agents watched them throw objects over the side roughly seven miles east of Miami Beach.
When agents stopped the boat and searched it, they found cinder blocks, gloves, black clothing, and a small mushroom anchor too small to actually anchor the vessel. Clifford and Gold insisted they had only thrown towels overboard. With no drugs on board, the agents released them. What the officers had witnessed would not make sense for years.
Why the Case Sat for Nearly Two Decades
Clifford was the obvious suspect from the start. He had the motive, the opportunity, and federal agents had placed him on a boat dumping weighted objects into the ocean the same night Lynne disappeared. Lynne’s blue 1989 Mercury Grand Marquis was later found abandoned in northeast Miami-Dade County with a slashed front tire, and a witness described a man matching Clifford’s vehicle leaving the scene.
But without a body, without a confession, and without a cooperating witness, prosecutors did not believe they could prove murder beyond a reasonable doubt. Massive search efforts, including underwater operations, turned up nothing. The case went cold. Investigators never formally closed it, and Clifford went on with his life in South Florida.
Alan Gold Breaks the Case
The case moved when Alan Gold agreed to cooperate. Gold signed an immunity agreement in May 2013, protecting him from prosecution as an accessory. The statute of limitations on that charge had already run, but the formal immunity sealed the arrangement.
Gold gave prosecutors what they had lacked for 18 years: a firsthand account of Lynne’s death and the disposal of her body. He testified that Clifford admitted choking Lynne during their argument, and he described helping load the body onto the boat, running miles offshore, and dropping the weighted bag into the dark water.
A Miami-Dade grand jury had already indicted Clifford on a charge of first-degree murder in March 2012, before Gold’s formal immunity deal, relying on the accumulated circumstantial evidence. Gold’s cooperation strengthened the case going into trial.
The Trial and Conviction
Clifford Friend’s trial began in late June 2014. He was 58. Prosecutors built their case on Gold’s testimony and circumstantial evidence, arguing that Clifford killed Lynne in a rage over losing custody and then methodically disposed of her body.
Former customs agent Tim Stellhorn took the stand and described what he saw on the water in 1994, including the cinder blocks and the undersized anchor with no legitimate boating purpose. His account corroborated Gold’s, even though the agents had not understood at the time what they were watching.
The jury convicted Clifford of second-degree murder rather than first-degree. First-degree murder in Florida requires proof of premeditation, and jurors apparently concluded that while Clifford killed Lynne, the prosecution had not proven he planned it in advance. Second-degree murder reflected a finding of ill will and spite without premeditation.
The Sentence
In September 2014, Circuit Judge Teresa Pooler sentenced Clifford Friend to life in prison. Florida’s sentencing guidelines for second-degree murder suggested approximately 22 years, but Judge Pooler went well beyond that recommendation. She addressed Clifford directly from the bench: “The evidence showed you committed a monstrous act. Her life was precious and you took that from her. You dumped her in the ocean like a sack of trash. This was unspeakable cruelty. This was a despicable act.”
Lynne Friend’s body has never been recovered. Her son, Christian, was five years old when she was killed. Twenty years passed before anyone was held accountable for her death.