THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 25, 1994 TAG: 9408250560
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A01 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN JOLLY DAVIS AND LYNN WALTZ, STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: CHINCOTEAGUE LENGTH: Long : 162 lines
Everyone agrees that Stanley Mathews met a horrible fate on the evening of Dec. 6, 1992, in his Chincoteague home.
Mathews burst into flame and lay burning on his kitchen floor. Then the 63-year-old plumber dragged himself to the shower and put out the fire. He died two days later from burns over 80 percent of his body.
What no one can agree on is how it happened.
Accomack County's fire investigator ruled Stanley Mathews' death accidental. A private investigator hired by Mathews' widow, Pauline, declared it a likely suicide.
But Pauline Mathews says their theories don't fit the facts.
``I truly believe somebody murdered him,'' the 59-year-old Chincoteague woman said. ``I'm hellbent on proving it.''
Today she'll get that chance when Baltimore authorities dig up and examine her husband's body. It took Pauline Mathews 20 months of begging and badgering, but she finally persuade authorities to reopen the case. That cleared the way for the exhumation.
At 7 a.m. this morning at a Baltimore cemetery, Stanley Mathews' grave will be opened, the vault lid cracked and his coffin lifted from the dirt.
His body will be transported to a Baltimore medical examiner, who will look for signs of foul play - blunt-force trauma to the head, knife wounds, gasoline - anything that may have survived the nearly 20 months of deterioration.
If the medical examiner finds evidence of foul play, it will mean Pauline Mathews was right and virtually everyone else in Accomack County was wrong.
``POLLY'' MATHEWS IDOLIZED her rough-neck husband when they were young. He was fun. She liked his inner strength.
That was before the drinking, and the fights - before their son died in a fire at age 28.
Dec. 6, 1992, is the date Pauline Mathews can never forget. It's her dead son's birthday. And it's the day her husband was mortally burned in their home.
``They say fire is black when you're in it,'' she said, her pale blue eyes unwavering.
Fire has eaten a black hole in Polly's life.
It started in July 1989, when their son Mark left home, angry that his father wouldn't let him build a welding shop near the house.
Mark moved to New Jersey, got a job on a clam boat and rented a room for $50 a week. By August he was dead. Fire consumed the tiny room after he fell asleep with a lit cigarette. An autopsy showed he died of smoke inhalation.
Stanley and Pauline built a shrine in their son's room, a picture of him surrounded by candles.
Stanley's drinking worsened. So did the fighting.
``I threw it in his face that if he hadn't been so hard on Mark, he wouldn't have been in New Jersey,'' Polly said.
On Dec. 6, 1992, Polly marked her son's birthday with a visit to the Baltimore cemetery where he was buried. It was a day so bitterly cold the wind ripped the flowers out of her hand as she tried to lay them on her son's grave. She left quickly, driving to a relative's home.
Then the call came. Stanley had been burned. Her husband of 32 years was being flown to a burn center in Baltimore.
``I tell you, I went hysterical,'' said Polly. ``I screamed and screamed so hard. All I could think was: Oh God, not again.''
Stanley was conscious when she first saw him. The respirator prevented him from speaking.
``I'll never forget the eyes . . . there was fear in them,'' said Polly. ``He was trying to tell me something.''
Polly still wonders what he was trying to say.
All she has left is the memory of her husband slowly dying, his body swelling.
``By the time he died he looked like a thousand-pound man,'' Polly said. ``If I hadn't known it was my husband, I would have been petrified to be in the same room with him. His skin was split like sliced meat.''
When his heart failed, Polly hesitated.
``Finally I just said: `Leave him alone,' I knew he was gone before the machine stopped. You can tell. There was something - he was gone.''
WHEN POLLY GOT HOME, she discovered that friends had cleaned the house. They had thrown a rug over the man-shaped hole Stanley melted into the linoleum. They painted over the skin he left on the walls as he crawled to the bathroom.
Two weeks later, still in shock, she began to go through his belongings. She discovered that her husband's shotgun and rifle were missing.
``We couldn't find the guns,'' she said. ``We looked everywhere. They were gone. I had to face the fact that something really evil happened in this house.''
Officials don't agree.
Fire investigator Johnny Godwin ruled the death accidental. His theory is that Mathews may have been attempting suicide, but changed his mind too late. Mathews caught fire on the back porch, Godwin believes. Frantically, he broke the window in the door, trying to reach the deadbolt. In desperation, he clambered up a piece of plywood and through a small back window.
Mathews landed on the floor, Godwin concluded, then crawled to the bathroom and doused himself in the shower.
Next, Mathews called his best friend to tell him he was in trouble. The friend arrived and called 911.
When rescuers arrived, Mathews told them he didn't know what had happened. But for one clue, the fire investigator would have ruled the fire a suicide, he said. Mathews clearly tried to save himself, inconsistent with a man intent on destroying himself.
No autopsy was performed because officials ruled the death accidental. Analysis of debris from the kitchen floor showed residue of ``a gasoline petroleum product,'' according to a forensic report.
Godwin and others say Pauline Mathews has made a nuisance of herself since her husband's death. ``She owes the county an apology, me, the state police and her own investigator an apology,'' he said.
Pauline Mathews says hogwash to Godwin's theory. If her husband had been on the back porch, all he had to do was douse himself in a shallow pond out back.
Angry that officials wouldn't take her husband's clothing to a forensic lab, she took them herself. Angry that they wouldn't investigate further, she hired a private detective, Richard Chance of Midlothian, Va.
Chance believes Stanley Mathews killed himself. He thinks Mathews doused himself with ether, then used a lighter to ignite himself in the kitchen. He broke the windows, Chance said, to make it look like a break-in, so that Polly could collect on his small life insurance policy, which she eventually did.
Polly says only murder explains it all.
She believes someone broke into the house, knocked her husband unconscious from behind, doused him with gasoline and lit a match. Mathews lay on the floor burning, then roused and put the fire out.
Chance says he empathizes with Pauline Mathews.
``I think she can't accept things,'' Chance said. ``I think, deep down, she knows, but she can't accept the truth.
``There's only one guy who can answer this question,'' Chance said. ``And he's not here to tell us.''
POLLY MATHEWS has been desperate for answers.
She complained to the fire investigator. She went to the county administrator. She wrote to the FBI. She consulted two attorneys. She spent more than $1,000 on a psychic.
Finally, she got the attention of state Sen. Thomas Norment. He wrote a letter to the county administrator, asking that the case be reopened.
``After reviewing all of the documentation I am convinced that Mrs. Mathews will be eternally tormented unless the body can be exhumed and an autopsy performed,'' Norment wrote in a March letter to county administrator Arthur Fisher.
Fisher relented. Mathews agreed to pay the exhumation costs, expected to run about $1,300.
A Baltimore medical examiner agreed to do the autopsy.
``From my review, I am impressed with the bizarre and unusual nature of Mr. Mathews' death,'' Dr. John E. Smialek wrote in a June 29 letter. An autopsy would be able to identify internal injuries or abnormalities which were not identified in the hospital while he was dying, Smialek said.
Today, Polly Mathews prays, her torment will finally be eased. If there are no answers in her husband's grave, she will continue to rely on her faith in God.
``The Lord carried me, and he's still carrying me. I console myself with the idea that Jesus will return and I'll see my son and husband. Jesus is coming back and I can't wait.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff color photo by IAN MARTIN
Stanley Mathews, above, and his widow, Pauline Mathews.
Color photo [Stanley Mathews]
KEYWORDS: FATALITY
by CNB