- November 18, 2024
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At first, no one realized the 88-year-old woman’s death wasn’t natural.
Paramedics who removed Mary Ann Shaw Mathews’ body from a recliner in her Ellsworth Drive living room Feb. 21 after her son Richard said he found her dead saw no signs of trauma. Neither did deputies who arrived with them.
Mathews’ doctor signed a death warrant, and Lohman Funeral Home took her body to prepare it for burial.
And then, according to a Flagler County Sheriff’s Office report, Mathews’ 62-year-old son Richard Guyton Mathews showed up drunk at the funeral home and told employees he’d strangled his mother and fed her sleeping pills, because she had told him she wanted to die.
Medical examiner's findings
The funeral home employees called the Sheriff’s Office, and a medical examiner performed an autopsy on Mary Mathews’ body, ruling her death a homicide by strangulation.
Detectives arrested Richard Mathews and charged him with manslaughter April 23, and a deputy wrote in the felony warrant that on or about Feb. 21, Richard Mathews “did then and there unlawfully and by his own act, procurement or culpable negligence, kill Mary Mathews by manual strangulation and overmedication.”
Four medications were found in heightened quantities in Mary Mathews’ bloodstream, including several medications commonly used to treat depression, as well as Zolpidem, the drug used in the insomnia medication Ambien.
The concentration of Zolpidem in Mathews’ bloodstream was three to 13 times what it should have been, according to data from a toxicology report cited in the deputy’s report.
The story Richard Mathews told detectives in interviews was, essentially, the same one Lohmans’ employees Denise Rhoades and Julia French said he told them when he showed up “highly intoxicated” but “not fall down drunk” Feb. 24 and demonstrated by placing his hands around his own neck how he said his mother had told him to kill her.
He told the women “that he tried to take his mother's life by strangling her and that he was unable to go through with her request after which he gave her a quantity of sleeping pills,” according to a news release from Sheriff’s Office spokesman Commander Bob Weber.
Then, the women said he told them, “he kept watching her as she was in the chair and checking on her and making sure she was breathing and then she wasn’t breathing.”
'I would have been forgiven'
After the Feb. 27 autopsy, a detective spoke with Richard Mathews at the home on Ellsworth Drive.
During the interview, the detective wrote in an arrest report, Mathews “advised that on February 21, 2014, Ms. Mathews was acting normal,” but that “approximately three days prior to Ms. Mathews’ death, she asked Richard to kill her.
Mathews “stated that Ms. Mathews was ready to die for a couple of weeks because she was going downhill and was tired,” according to the report.
Part of the detective’s recounting of the interview is redacted in the report; self-incriminating statements made by someone accused of a crime often are, as is some personal information.
But the detective wrote that Mathews said: “You know it’s one thing to be loaded and be able to do something, but when you wake up from it and realize what you’ve done, it can be hard to live with. You know not that I’ve killed anybody before but I have a friend who has.”
The detective asked Mathews if he would consider killing someone.
Mathews replied, according to the report, “Religiously I know that I would have been forgiven, cause there is only one sin that is unforgivable and that’s the sin of unbelief; you can read that in the book of Hebrews.”
Then, he continued, “I had no problem with that part of it but I just did not want to do it,” and, “I was hoping that God would just go ahead and take her, and that’s essentially what happened.”
But he told detectives he hadn’t overmedicated his mother, saying “I was probably loaded when I said that,” and he initially denied strangling her, explaining her bruises by saying she’d told him she was trying to strangle herself.
Later, though, he demonstrated how he choked her, according to the report.
Dr. Pedrag Bulic, who examined Mary Mathews’ body, “stated the manner shown would be consistent with the injuries discovered,” according to the report, and that “due to Ms. Mathews’ frail condition she would have most likely lost consciousness in less than 30 seconds and expired in less than one minute with the manner shown.”
Mathews was taken to the Flagler County jail, and is being held on $250,000 bond.
