A FAMILY THAT SERVED—AND SACRIFICED
When, almost a decade ago, Payne graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, he could have followed practically any professional path other than law enforcement.
He’d enjoyed a privileged background, brought up in all the comfort that a Main Line lifestyle afforded. After attending prep school at Episcopal Academy, then completing his studies at U of P, he was expected to pursue a law degree and perhaps join his adoptive father’s law practice, the prestigious firm of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester.
Instead, Matt Payne chose something else: He decided that he should defend his country.
He signed recruitment papers with the United States Marine Corps, only to have a minor condition with his vision bar him from joining the Corps.
Determined to serve in some capacity, Payne joined the Philadelphia Police Department.
Again, he didn’t have to. If anything, Matt Payne had a pass. But, again, he chose to.
A pass because his biological father, Sergeant John F. X. Moffitt, known as “Jack,” had been killed in the line of duty—shot dead while responding to a silent burglar alarm at a gasoline station. And Jack Moffitt’s brother, Captain Richard C. “Dutch” Moffitt, who was commanding officer of the department’s elite Highway Patrol, had been killed trying to stop a robbery of the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Avenue.
Payne’s decision to join the police department came only months after his Uncle Dutch had been killed. Many believed he’d done so in order to avenge the deaths of his father and uncle and to prove that the eye condition that kept him out of the Corps would not keep him from being a good cop.
“Frankly, all that scared hell out of us,” said Dennis V. “Denny” Coughlin, who recently retired as first deputy commissioner of police but at the time of Payne’s joining the department was a chief inspector.
Coughlin long had been best friends with Jack Moffitt and took upon himself the sad duty of delivering the tragic news to Matt’s mother—then pregnant with Matt—that she’d been widowed.
“I can confess now that when Matty came to the department,” a visibly upset Coughlin said, “I tried to protect him. I sure as hell didn’t want to have to knock on his mother’s door with the news that now Jack’s son—who was also my godson—had been killed on the job, too. Unfortunately, that duty fell last week to First Deputy Commissioner of Police Peter Wohl.”
NEW COP, HERO COP
After graduating from the police academy, there was no question that Matt Payne was becoming both a good cop and a respected one.
“But no matter how hard we tried throughout his career,” said Peter Wohl, to whom Payne was first assigned as an administrative assistant when Wohl ran Special Operations, “Matt wound up in the thick of things, bullets flying. That said, all his shootings were found to be righteous ones.”
Before Payne had even put in six months on the job, he had already drawn his pistol. It had happened when he was off duty and had come across a van that fit the description of the one used by the criminal the newspaper headlines called the “Northwest Serial Rapist.” When the van’s driver tried to run him do
wn, he shot him in the head. A young woman—trussed-up and naked in the back of the vehicle—was saved from becoming the rapist’s next victim. And headlines hailed Matt Payne as a hero.
The next incident happened during an operation that was being covered by this writer.
Matt Payne had been assigned to provide protection for this writer in an alleyway that was supposed to be a safe distance from where tactical teams were staging to arrest gang members who had committed murder while robbing Goldbatt’s Department Store.
“We thought that in having Matt sit on Mick,” Wohl explained, “we could keep Mick out of our way and at the same time keep Matt far from any gunplay.”
They were wrong.
As this writer reported then, one gang member who ran from the tactical teams came into the alleyway and began shooting. Payne, his forehead grazed by a bullet, returned fire and killed the felon.
The following day, a photograph taken by this writer of a bloodied Matt Payne holding his pistol while standing over the dead shooter appeared on the newspaper’s front page with this writer’s firsthand account of Payne’s heroic actions.
The photograph’s headline read “Officer M. M. Payne, 23, The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”
A SHINING—BUT BRIEF—CAREER
Promotion followed. But so, too, did more gunfire.
Payne became romantically involved with a young woman named Susan Reynolds and discovered that a sorority sister of hers was caught up with a terrorist named Bryan Chenowith, the target of a nationwide manhunt by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In an attempt to trap Chenowith, Payne asked Reynolds to lure her friend to a diner in hopes that the fugitive would follow. The plan was for an FBI special agent to grab him, but the fugitive brought with him a .30 caliber carbine rifle—and shot up the diner parking lot.
Susan Reynolds took a bullet to the head and died in Payne’s arms.
Later, Payne quietly admitted that the experience haunted him beyond anything he’d ever known.