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| Via Newspapers.com |
I put this missing-persons story into the “mini mysteries” file, due to the unsettling lack of information surrounding the case. The “Miami Herald,” October 6, 1985:
You could set your clock by Irene Matheson.
Since Perrine Elementary School opened six years ago, Matheson was always the first person to arrive. She unlocked the cafeteria door at 5:45 a.m., let in the cook at 5:50 a.m. and began baking the rolls, breads, cakes and pies that feed students and faculty at five South Dade schools.
"She was never late--not once," cafeteria manager Michelle Perkins said Friday. "That's why we know something is terribly, terribly wrong."
After hearing the concern of co-workers, Metro-Dade Sgt. Carl Baaske agreed and began an immediate search when Matheson, 69, did not show up for work Tuesday morning.
Police usually will not take missing persons reports until the person missing has been gone for 48 hours. This seemed different, Baaske said.
"It's as though she dropped off the earth," Baaske said Thursday night. "With two million people in Dade County, someone should have seen her or her car by now."
Police initiated a statewide hospital search for Matheson and her 1977 tan Honda station wagon. Officers in police helicopters looked in the many South Dade canals. They were joined by Matheson's son-in-law Tony Klopp.
Klopp, an Eastern Air Lines pilot, rented two light planes for two days so he and a friend could check out the coastline, junk yards, dumps and fields. Her daughter, Cindy Klopp, spends her days driving around looking for her mother's car or sitting by the telephone, waiting for a call.
"I pray she's had a stroke or just driving around," Klopp said. Her mother is in good health with no history of mental illness.
Matheson was last seen at 11 p.m. Monday. Klopp thinks whatever happened to her mother occurred after she left for work Tuesday. The condominium near The Falls where Matheson lives was in perfect order.
"Her coffee cup and a spoon were in the sink," Klopp said, sorting through snapshots of her mother taken at family parties. "Throw pillows were put up so the puppy wouldn't get them and the door was double-locked," she said.
Police have pieced together the hours before Matheson was reported missing from information gathered from family, friends and neighbors. Grandson Scott Klopp was the last family member to see Matheson. She drove the 12-year-old from his Redland home to the Perrine Khoury League baseball field at Franjo and Old Cutler roads.
A follow-up story appeared in the “Miami News” on December 5:
The discovery--almost by coincidence--last night of the car owned by a Kendall woman who has been missing more than two months is the first significant clue police have had in weeks, but may not be helpful if the woman does not want to be found, Metro police said.
"She's an older woman, and it could be a case that she might have gone senile for some reason and doesn't want to come home," said Metro Sgt. Ernest Pruitt, of the department's missing persons unit. "I've seen cases like that before."
Irene Matheson's 1977 tan Honda was found backed into a parking space in an apartment complex at 7941 S.W. 104th St. Police learned the car belonged to Matheson, a 69-year-old baker for the Dade County school system, while running a license plate check on the car and another nearby, Pruitt said.
The two parked cars were struck by a driver who then quickly fled the scene, he said. A resident of the complex reported the hit-and-run accident--in which no one was injured--and it was only while police were investigating the accident that they learned the slightly damaged Honda belonged to the missing woman, Pruitt said.
Pruitt said residents told police that the car had been parked in the space for about a week and had been seen parked in other spaces for about a month.
Police dusted the car for fingerprints and searched it before towing it to the station where it will be vacuumed and examined by laboratory technicians, Pruitt said. A sticker in a panel of the car's door indicated the vehicle was serviced at a station on Oct. 1, the day she was reported missing. The sticker also indicated how many miles the car had been driven since the time of servicing. Since then, the car had been driven about 99 miles, Pruitt said.
Apparently the last driver of the car backed the vehicle into the parking space and against a fence in order to make it more difficult to read the license tag, Pruitt said.
Matheson was last seen on the night of Sept. 30. Her relatives believe she dressed for work at Perrine Elementary School the next morning, and left in her Honda from her home at Heatherwalk Condominium complex--a few miles from where her car was found.
The discovery last night was the first break in the case. "We worked this case continuously for the first two weeks," Pruitt said. "We searched the area around the canal, had the Water and Sewer Authority people search the canals around the house in case she may have accidentally driven into one, conducted surveillances of the area around her house, conducted aerial searches of the area using heat-sensitive equipment in case we could find a body. And we came up with nothing.”
The discovery of Matheson’s car seems to have done exactly nothing to indicate the whereabouts of Irene herself. To date, the mystery of her disappearance remains unsolved.