Decades in the Dark

Burt Rosen searched for his missing son, Matthew, for over twenty years. Matthew had been struggling with mental illness when he vanished in 2001. Burt spent day-after-day making phone calls, scouring the internet, searching for any sign of his son. And then, 23 years later, a tip came in that changed everything. 

Hold On To Hope: 

https://hold2hope.org/ 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
And I just sat there as half sobbing, half wondering
what happened to our baby? How could this have happened
to him?

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm Hannah Smith. I'm patia Eton.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
This week we speak with a man named Bert Rosen.
Bert and his wife Carolyn lived through every parent's nightmare
when their son Matthew vanished one day in two thousand
and one. For nearly twenty five years, they had no
idea what had happened to him, and then an unexpected
phone call changed everything. After twenty five long years, Bert
and his family finally got some answers. We talked with

(00:55):
Bert about the years leading up to Matthew's disappearance and
what happens when someone deal with a mental health crisis
is criminalized.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
Let's get into the interview.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Okay, my name is Burt Rosen. I am happily married
to Carolyn, my wife of fifty three years. We've got
four children, two boys, two girls, Matthew, Jeremy, Anna, and Rebecca.
Carolyn and I were actually fixed up on a blind
date by a mutual friend when we were sixteen years old.
By the third date, I was ready to tell her

(01:29):
that I was in love with her, and eventually January
one of nineteen seventy three, we got married. Two years later,
Matthew was born.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Tell me about Matthew as a baby and as a child.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
What was he like.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
So, Matthew was just super happy, go lucky, He was inquisitive.
He was just a great little kid. And from the
time we brought him home from the hospital, he slept
from seven pm until seven am, and he was rambunctious,
just like all little kids are. And then growing up
you really began to see how intelligent he was. That

(02:05):
was showing up in his grades in elementary school, that
continued on through junior high school. And so when it
was time for high school, Matthew went to Oakton High School,
which was in Fairfax County, Virginia, played on the high
school football team. And so just as a kid growing up,
all the way through all the way through to his
high school years, everything is what I would consider to

(02:27):
be the normal growing up experience. He graduated from Oakton
High School. I want to say in eighty.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Eight there's no indication for you, as his parents that
anything is a mess. When does that change.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yes. So when Matthew graduated, most of his friends either
went to a UVA University of Virginia or to Virginia Tech,
and so he ended up enrolling in Virginia Tech. And
everything was seemingly going quite normal during those years. So
Blacksburg was about six and a half seven hour drive

(03:04):
from where we were living in Pittsburgh, and we would
go down and visit him on weekends, or he would
come home to Pittsburgh and you bring home his laundry.
I hope everything would be washed, ride and folded by
the time he went to school back to school after
the weekend. But it was in his third year that
we began to notice things were changing a little bit.

(03:24):
There was just a slight change in his behavior. But
the real aha moment came when Matthew had sent a
letter home to us telling us that he wanted to
withdraw from Virginia Tech because he didn't think he was
getting the education that he was paying for. He wrote
a letter to the dean asked me to proof the letter,
and immediately that switch flipped.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
This letter looked as if it had been written by
someone who maybe didn't have great command of the English language,
parts of it didn't make any sense, and Bert was alarmed.
This was so out of character from Matthew that Burton
his Carolyn urged their son to go see the school doctor,
and to their relief, he did. But Matthew was already
a legal adult. So all of the information that they

(04:10):
have from that doctor's visit is from Matthew. And what
Matthew told them was that the doctor deemed that he
had bipolar disorder and suggested medication.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
The doctor had suggested that Matthew go on lithium, which
he was resistant to do but has often prescribed for
people with a bipolar disorder. Look, by the very nature
of lithium, it has to begin to build up in
your system. It's not something you take like an aspirin.
In a few minutes later your headache has gone, so
it has to build up a little bit. Well, he
only took it for about two weeks, and during that

(04:43):
two weeks he didn't like the way it made him feel.
He would say he felt a little lethargic on it all,
but it really wasn't doing anything more than that, and
so he decided to take himself off of it. And
Matthew said and I come home, and so we drove
down to Virginia Tech and brought him home. And the
only way that I could describe this is the son

(05:05):
that came home was not the sun that went away
to school.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
At that point, did you know that he had stopped
taking his medication or that it was that something you
learned later?

Speaker 2 (05:15):
He had told us I've stopped taking it.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Bert knew his son. He'd watched him grow up, helped
him with homework, and attended his football games. But Matthew
had changed. There had been red flags while he was
at college, like the time his professor called Bert and
said that Matthew was making other students uncomfortable. Then, of
course there was the bizarrely written letter to the dean.
But now Matthew was home and they were witnessing this

(05:39):
new version of him with their own eyes. Bert said
that Matthew would often just sit and stare blinkly. Their
family would eat dinner together, but Matthew would sit there,
completely unresponsive. If the doorbell rang, it was like he
didn't hear it. He was physically present, but seemed as
if his mind was somewhere else, Somewhere Burt and Carolyn
couldn't reach. Matthew was a legal adult, Burton Carolyn had

(06:03):
no authority to make medical decisions for him. All they
could do is plead with him to see a doctor.
They had no access to his medical records. They wanted
to help him, but didn't know how he.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Would be staring at the television. I mean, he was
not violent at all, but he would stare at you
in a steely sort of a way, just enough to
make you uncomfortable being in front of him. We never
felt the threat of danger, just discomfort, and so Caroly
and I thought the counsel of someone who had some

(06:36):
expertise in the types of things that we were experiencing,
and what he said is, Burton Carolyn, you've given up
control of your home to your son, and unless he's
willing to get some help, you may face the difficult
decision of having to ask him to leave for the
sake of the rest of the family. Well, we never
could have imagined that that's a decision we would have made,

(06:59):
but that's exactly what ended up happening. We told Matthew
that the way in which he was behaving was not acceptable.
This could not continue, and unless he was willing to
get some help. He could not continue to stay at home.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
And when this is going on, this conversation taking place,
what is Matthew's level of understanding or acceptance that he's
suffering from mental illness or possibly bipolar disorder.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah, he would not have acknowledged that there was any
sort of a mental health disorder. Matthew refused to get
any help, and then we said, then you're not going
to be able to continue to live here, And so
we watched him pack his rollerboard suitcase walk down the street,
not knowing where he was going to be going other

(07:46):
than he could not continue to stay at home.

Speaker 3 (07:49):
You know, when you talked about telling him you need
to seek help or you won't be able to keep
living here, what kind of help were you hoping he
would get? Was it pharmaceutical? Was it seeing a therapist?

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Well, he needed to see someone, and the help that
we were referring to was going to see a counselor
whether that would have been a therapist or something else.
We wanted to see someone who might be able to
professionally help him work through whatever it was he needed
to work through. And I'm not sure that we knew
exactly what that was back then.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
Matthew managed to obtain student loans enroll it to Kane University.
He rented an apartment near the campus. Burton Carolyn would visit,
but when they did, they could tell that Matthew was struggling.
The apartment was in a bad state, dishes piled up
in the sink. Matthew's appearance became increasingly unkempt. But what
could they say. He'd managed to stay in school, and

(08:43):
now graduation was right around the corner. Bert said he
and Carolyn were receiving all kinds of order forms in
the mail for caps, gowns, and graduation rings. Matthew's and
pending graduation was a bright spot, a sign that maybe
things were looking up.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
And so we went to a wintertime command at the
Plumbo Center and we sat in the nosebleed section, and
as they got closer to calling the ours, I made
my way down closer to the stage so we could
snap a few pictures, and we did, and then afterwards
we all went out to dinner, thinking that things had
settled down in his life. But the next day I

(09:21):
got a call from the chaplain at the Allegheny County
Jail and he said, Bert, we've got your son here
in jail, assaultant vetter and a police officer resisting arrest
with violence, and they named off a litany of other
things that they had charged them with that I don't
recall anymore, And so we ended up going to a
midnight bond hearing. On Christmas Eve.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
Matthew had been arrested at the school's registrar's office when
he'd gone to pick up his diploma, and it turned
out he was a few credits short of actually graduating.
But since Matthew's behavior on campus was known to sometimes
be erratic, the school had preemptively arranged for a law
enforcement to be present when he arrived. And it's true
when Matthew found out that he wasn't actually graduating, it

(10:06):
was upsetting to him.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
The way that.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Bert described it, the officer put her hand on Matthew's
arm in an attempt to calm him down, and when
he shrugged her off, she fell to the ground. Bird's
understanding is that Matthew did not intentionally push or shove
the officer, but regardless, she fell and Matthew was arrested
for a sultan battery and resisting arrest.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
They walked Matthew in and now for the first time
we're seeing our oldest are firstborn, and he's in shackles.
So Matthew stood in front of the bench and the
judge said, Matthew, let me ask you a couple of questions. One,
how do you support yourself? And Matthew said with my feet.

(10:50):
Now nobody who's thinking logically would tell the judge that
I support myself with my feet. You'd know. They're talking
about what's your livelihood, your income, so on and so forth.
You can almost beget to see that the judge was
getting annoyed. He didn't want to be dealing with this
Christmas Eve. What we were hoping, though, was that he
was going to see something in Matthew that might suggest

(11:11):
that Matthew needed a psychological evaluation. Well he didn't. I'd
love to know what actually happened at the Registrar's office
that day, And when all was said and done, the
state was now the one pressing charges and they gave
Matthew a court date to return. Matthew took off, never
went back, and that resulted in a bench warrant being

(11:32):
issued for him, which to this day, as best we know,
is maybe still there unless there are some statute of
limitations on a bench warrant.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
It was nineteen ninety two, on that Christmas Eve that
Burton Carolyn watched Matthew stand in front of a judge
when they'd had a moment of hope that perhaps the
judge might order a psychiatric evaluation, one that could help
them help Matthew to better understand his mental state, maybe
help them chart a path four. But that didn't happen. Instead,

(12:02):
the judge brought charges and increased Matthew's bail, and Matthew
eventually bonded out and skipped his next court hearing. Matthew
never returned to his college apartment. He went home with
his parents, but in less than a year he was
gone again, and this cycle continued for years until sometime
in the late nineties, when Matthew left and made his
way to New York. For a time, Matthew stayed in touch,

(12:24):
sometimes by email emails that Burton Carolyn were able to
trace to a Burger king in Midtown Manhattan, but Matthew's
communication became less and less frequent, until after a few
months it stopped altogether. Burt and Carolyn felt helpless, but
in two thousand and one something serendipitous happened. Bert was
in New York on business when he got an unexpected

(12:46):
call from Carolyn. She had Matthew on the other line,
and he'd agreed to meet up with Bert.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
And so, now if you could picture the back and
forth conversation, because we're not conference calling at this point,
she's describing to me where he is, an I am
within one hundred yards of him, and so now we
are moving towards each other thanks to Carolyn guiding in
the back and forth conversation. And I was so angry
with him for all that he had put our family

(13:15):
through that I wasn't sure when I saw him whether
I was going to hug him or if I wanted
to deck him. I really wanted to do the latter.
I was just so mad. Well. When I finally did
get up to him, and now our eyes are locking
as we're getting closer together, I realized immediately how bad
he looked, how he smelled terrible. I gave him this

(13:37):
hug and took him back to my hotel room, which
was the Marriotte right off of LaGuardia Airport, and when
we got in there, he just fell on the bed
and he went to sleep for the night, and I
just sat there and half sobbing, half wondering what happened
to our baby? How could this have happened to him?
So the next morning we went down to breakfast and

(13:59):
I asked him, do you want to come home? And
he said, I am home. And after some exchange back
and forth, he said, the streets of New York is
where I live now. No apartment, no nothing. And so
I said, well, at least let me give you the
toiletries that are in my suitcase if you won't come home,
and the address of the shelter in New York. And

(14:20):
so I would later find out that he did go there.
And I went back home, watching Matthew walk off into
the distance, just like Carolyn. I watched him walk down
the street in Pittsburgh. So now in all of that,
I've come back home. He has stayed in New York.

Speaker 1 (14:37):
There was little Bert could do but watch as Matthew
once again disappeared into the busy streets of New York,
not knowing if he would be safe, if he would
be fed, or when they'd hear from him again. So
Bert returned home without his son, and just a few
months Later, in two thousand and one, something terrible happened.
Matthew's mother, Carolyn, was involved in a near fatal car accident.

(15:00):
Carolyn suffers from something called hypoglycymc neuropathy, which can cause
her blood sugar to drop suddenly and without warning. Carolyn
had been driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when she'd fainted.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
And when she did, somehow she managed to drive thirteen
miles on the turnpike. She doesn't remember paying a toll,
but just driving through the toll booth, and when she
got to this particular exit, it's one of those that
almost looks like a candy cane. It goes straight ahead
and then it loops its way back and you've got
this large grassy knoll there. Well. What witnesses told us

(15:36):
later was that her car hit that hill at about
eighty miles an hour without breaking, which then means it
launched her. It turned into a launch ramp. She came
down on the other side of the interstate. They had
a life flight or to the hospital, and that would
end up being an extended hospital stay followed time and recovery.

(15:56):
We would later get a call from Matthew asking if
I would come to Philadelphia and pick him up. He said,
he walked from New York City to Philadelphia and he
wanted to come home for Thanksgiving. And I told him
that I'm not going to come pick you up, but
we'll wire a bus ticket to you and you can
catch the bus and we'll pick you up at the
bus station here in Knoxville. And so that's what we did. Carolyn,

(16:20):
against the doctor's recommendation, left the hospital early so that
she could be at home.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
There was relief in having eyes on Matthew, but being
in his physical presence came with a lot of unease.
Carolyn's injuries from the accident were extensive. She was in
a clamshawll like body brace. She'd crushed three vertebrae and
both ankles in the accident. Bert had taken time off
to care for her, but eventually had to return to work.
He and Carolyn were hopeful that Matthew might step into

(16:55):
help now that he was back home, but that hope
quickly faded.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
And so now we're back to again. Matthew, would you
mind fixing me something for breakfast? And Matthew just wouldn't respond,
He wouldn't do anything. Later, we would all be out,
and Carolyn would tell me that Matthew was pushing her
wheelchair and she was actually scared that he was going
to push her down the escalator or something else. And

(17:20):
so finally she said, Matthew, I cannot heal while you're
here in the house, and when your dad gets home,
I'm going to ask him to ask you to leave.
This just can't continue. And so I got home. I
did end up asking Matthew to leave. It was a
rather heated exchange between he and I, and we would

(17:43):
end up asking him to leave. He went over to
one of his siblings apartment and they remember hearing him
on the phone talking about trying to get out to la.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
In the past, when Matthew left, he would periodically update
them on his location, but this time there was nothing.
A week went by, then another, Burt and Carolyn were
beginning to panic. They consulted with the pastor of their church,
who tried to comfort them by saying that Matthew would
check in eventually, But he was wrong. Matthew did not
check in. It was as if he had vanished. Now,

(18:18):
instead of focusing on Matthew seeing a doctor, the entire
picture had changed. They just wanted to know where he was,
to know that he was alive.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
We ended up putting him on the missing Persons list.
The acronym for that is NamUs, which you could look
it up. That's a national database of missing persons, and
the Salvation Army also has a Missing Persons Bureau, so
we registered him under both of those, and then I
started googling him. I had him googled in every which

(18:48):
way to Sunday, but nothing ever turned up, And so
every morning that's how my days started searching through the
Google alert, and if there was something that seemed even
remote that it might be him, that would result in
some phone calls tracing it down to see if it
was him. They were all dead ends. So you have

(19:09):
these years of wondering is he dead or alive, and
then you just tell yourself it would just be good
to have some closure. Nobody wants their child to be dead,
but you don't want to keep looking forever if that
turns out to be the case. So just some closure.
Let us know that he's dead, or perhaps we'll find

(19:30):
him somewhere. But now one year's gone by. Two years
have gone by, and Carolyn started opening the front door
and looking out on our little porch where we have
a swing to see maybe Matthew has shown him. Maybe
today's the day we're going to find him sleeping on
the front porch because he came home in the middle
of the night all those years, even though with the

(19:53):
advent of cell phones and most people using the cells
as their primary means of phone, we kept our landline
all of those years, so that if Matthew decided to
do four one one and decided to try and find us,
he could And.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
What were his siblings? You know, as parents, you're waking
up every day starting your morning with checking your Google
alerts and following up on any little thing you can find.
What do his brothers and sisters make of this particular
time around, how long he's been gone, how long he's
not been in contact.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
At some point in time. But I don't remember exactly
when the practice started. Matthew's birthday's October fifteenth. They would
begin to get together right at Matthew's birthday time and
just say, you know, let's just kind of remember Matthew.
Sometimes it was more somber than others, but it was
always commemorating Matthew's birthday to let him know that he

(20:49):
was never forgotten. Every year there was a Christmas ornament
for Matthew. Every year there was a Birthday card for Matthew.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Were they believing that he was likely deceased? For some people,
coming to their own conclusion could be a coping thing,
or for some people it's like, well, this is what
I think is going on. He's never stayed up contact
to the song. Was there general feeling that he was
out there.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
Somewhere, Yes, But the question would be do you think
we'll ever see Matthew again? And all we could say
is we hope.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
So Matthew's family never stopped hoping, But soon a decade
had passed with no word from Matthew. Reminders of him
were all around them, a lot of them good family photos,
the memories from happier times, and others not so good,
like unpaid bills for his student loans showing up in
the mail. Berg continually checked the Missing Person's Database NamUs,

(21:44):
as well as the Salvation Armies Missing Person's List, always
looking for Matthew. But in the blink of an eye,
a second decade had passed. By twenty twenty two, Matthew
had been missing for twenty one years, the world had
gone on turning but left a hole where Matthew should be.
Bert was planning his retirement and knew that he wanted
to do something he was passionate about, so he and

(22:06):
Carolyn co founded their organization hold On to Hope, to
help families with missing loved ones.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
I was the CEO of a homeless shelter here in Knoxville,
and it's like, what am I going to do next?
What are we going to do next? And so we
started hold On to Hope in twenty twenty two. Well,
one of the families that we would end up working
with was someone who thought their son had come to
carm where I was working, and their email made a

(22:35):
circuitous route and eventually ended up with my assistant Cathy,
who said, Bert, you're going to want to read this. Well.
I did reach back out to that family, and long
story short, I said, we've not been able to locate
your Sonny has not been here. My wife and I
know a little something about what you might be going through,
and if you would ever like, we'd be glad to

(22:57):
chat with you once a month on a zoom call,
which we've done for over two years. We got a
text message from them while we were visiting family in Florida,
saying we've learned that Brandon passed away. That was their
son's name. Turns out that Brandon died of a drug
overdose five days after he disappeared, and they had been
searching for him for two years. In Vain, they held

(23:18):
a memorial service for him. Carolyn and I went to
the memorial service, and it was driving home from that
memorial service that Carolyn said, you know, what if what
happened to Brandon is the same thing that happened to Matthew.
What if he's been dead all these years and our
searching has been in Vain.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Bert had retired at the tail end of twenty twenty
three and dove into his work helping families with loved
ones through hold On to Hope. But driving home from
this memorial service in twenty twenty four, it really changed
their search for Matthew. They realized that if Matthew was dead,
if all of these years of searching had been in Vain,

(24:00):
they wanted to know. Bert had a contact in law enforcement,
former Knoxville Police Chief David Rouche, who had since joined
the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Bert called him up, seeing
if there was anything David could do to help.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
I reached out to David, saying, all the years that
I was CEO and while we were both in Knoxville,
I never asked any favors of you. I thought it
was bad form. I'm not there anymore. Now I'm asking well.
David then assigned a special agent in charge who came
to our home, and now things are beginning to move
at a little bit more rapid pace. The first real

(24:36):
tip that happened out of nowhere my cell phone rings
one afternoon, a woman identifying herself as being with the
Pittsburgh Police Department telling us that they're taking Matthew off
the missing person's list because they just spoke to him
thirty minutes ago. She said, well, I probably shouldn't tell
you this, but he's somewhere in Alaska. That was the

(24:57):
first time Alaska had ever shown up, which was so
foreign because Matthew hates cold weather. How on earth would
he end up in what of the cold as places
imaginable when he hates the cold.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
For the first time in nearly two and a half decades,
Burt and Carolyn have a real lead information that could
possibly reunite them with Matthew and they run with it.
Burton Carolyn hire a PI and call police departments in Juno, Fairbanks,
and Anchorage looking for a name Matthew Rosen, and eventually
they get a hit. There is a man by the

(25:32):
name of Matthew Rosen confirmed to be living in Alaska,
but was it their son? They couldn't be sure.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
We called the Alaska State Police. The person that we
spoke to, who is an investigator, said we're not allowed
to give you that information. Now I'm back to our
investigator again, who says he lives here in Knoxville. And
he says, just so happens, a very dear friend of
mine retired from the Alaska State Police after twenty eight
years of service. All these dots are beginning to lune

(26:00):
up now, so he introduced us to him. His name
is Trace Lewis, and he ended up being the person
who went through all of the loopholes that you have
to go through, and ultimately there is something in Alaska
called the Alaska Permanent Fund. Every Alaska resident gets a
check every year so long as you are a resident. Well,

(26:23):
they publish the names, they don't publish any other information.
But they do publish the names. Well, he went back
and he found that Matthew was on that list and
it applied for the fund four years prior, but did
not apply for the next two years after that. We
waited it out a little bit longer because you have
to apply between January one and March thirty one. Let's

(26:45):
see if he applies in twenty twenty four. He did well.
That allowed him to go detect other information, which ultimately
led to him coming back to us and saying, we
have Matthew located. We've got an email address for him,
a phone number for him at a street address. Now
we're ready to go to Alaska on the basis of that.

(27:09):
And he said, but there's four feet of snow. You
don't really want to go to Fairbanks and four feet
of snow, and gave us all the reasons. I'm being
more practical. Carolyn's chomping at the bit, saying, look, we
just got to go, but we ended up waiting because
for medical reasons.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
But you did not reach out to him that email address.
You just kind of stayed in the background.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Okay, Yeah, for fear that if we reached out to him,
and in fact, he was trying to go under the
radar and didn't want us to find him, that that
would just cause him to go again and take off somewhere.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
In April of twenty twenty four, Bert, Carolyn, and their
two daughters, Matthew's sisters, booked themselves tickets on the same
flight to Alaska. They settled into their seats. They were hopeful,
they were anxious. They were filled with questions that could
only be answered by going to Alaska and looking for Matthew.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
The selves, the joy of finding him. What if it's
not him, How will he react after not seeing us
for twenty five years? What is this going to be like. Meanwhile, well,
intending people, we're giving us a variety of suggestions. One,
don't go alone, have someone go with you just in case.

(28:21):
Another person suggested that if nothing else, we at least
have Mace with us, so if he comes to the
door and he's aggressive, we could be prepared to at
least do what we need to do. An investigator told
us that Alaska has some very strict trespassing laws, and
so he said, you know, Matthew may not come to
the door. If you knock, you may see him peek

(28:43):
out a window, or something, or he may come out
and have a conversation with you on the front porch
and ask you to leave, and if he does, you're
obligated to go. And he said, I'm a little concerned
about his mental well being and so just be very
very careful. Meanwhile, well, Carolyn said, I know, my son,
We don't need to be concerned about any of those things.

(29:06):
The plan was take the flight, get into Fairbanks slightly
after lunch, get our rental car, go drop off our
luggage at the hotel, and then go drive to the
address that we have for Matthew. And that plan was unfolding. Well,
the weather was all good, everything was conducive to doing that.
When we checked into the hotel and we're ready to go,

(29:27):
we got in the car and we went. It's really
two straight shots from the hotel that we were staying
at to where Matthew is. Now. We had seen the
aerial view of where Matthew's address was, and what it
looked like was a big field that was somehow off
the main drag. As we're driving, as you would often

(29:49):
see in rural locations, especially where the weather is bad
like it is in Alaska. They've got seven eight and
nine mailboxes side by side, all on the side of
the roads, so the postal car er could just mail mail, mail,
mail mail, and then it's up to everybody else to
walk out to the street and grab their mail.

Speaker 3 (30:09):
What was it like in the car?

Speaker 2 (30:10):
Was it? It was just quiet. It was quiet. Everybody
kind of lost in their own mind, except that Rebecca
had Google Maps and so she was giving the directions
where to go. But it was quiet. No music on,
no nothing, just following the street. From the moment we
picked up the rental car till we drove to the hotel,
it was just quiet. But before we left we had

(30:32):
all prayed together and that was us just saying, okay,
we don't know what the future is going to hold here.
And then we went on our way. So we're driving
down this road. It's a three and a half mile
stretch and all you've got is your direction and then
oncoming traffic the other way and the mailboxes on the
side of the street. As we're approaching where we need

(30:56):
to make the turn. We're about a quarter of the
way into the turn and Rebecca yells out, there's this
figure walking towards the mailboxes. She said, that's Matthew. I
would know him anywhere. Now she hadn't seen him since,
you know, in all these years, i'd know him anywhere.
So we finished the turn, turned around like we're going

(31:18):
to make a U turn to go back out to
the main street, pulled off to the side, and now
we're facing the mailboxes and this person that's standing over there,
Carolyn opens up her window and she says Matthew, and
he looked up. So we get out of the car,
and in this case, Carolyn was front seat passenger. I
was on the driver's side of the two girls. We

(31:38):
all get out of the car. Well, my two daughters
and I began walking up towards where Matthew was so
we could see each other a little bit more clearly.
And I said Matthew and he said yeah. I said,
it's your dad. And we just stood there frozen for
a moment. One of the girls said, could we come

(31:58):
up and give you a hug, and so the three
of us walked up and gave him a hug, but
not Carolyn. Carolyn was frozen next to the passenger door.
She just couldn't move. So, now if you could imagine
the two girls and me hugging Matthew right there by
the mailboxes, and Rebecca's waving saying, mom, come on, come

(32:19):
on up, and Carolyn couldn't move, she couldn't speak. After
we hugged for a little while, Matthew left. He didn't
break away from the hug, but the hug was over.
He walked over to Carolyn, threw his arms around her,
and all you could hear was this profuse, loud wailing
coming from Carolyn. She just hugged him and she wasn't

(32:41):
letting go. I mean, this was a bare hug that
she had on him, and she was just wailing. And
after that finally subsided, Matthew said, so you want to
come to my place and hang out. At that point
we knew that we had a good enact. The girls
would with Matthew the quarter mile back to his mailbox.

(33:03):
We would follow along in the car and we would
end up spending the rest of the day with him.
And what was the first of several days to come.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
And so you have this reunion with Matthew at his
mailbox and then he invites you in. Can you describe
where he was living to us? What did it look
like and feel like?

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yeah, so it looked like a cabin. It looked very rustic,
but from the outside it looked clean. It wasn't until
we walked in the cabin that we realized that this
is a very sparse cabin. One small sofa where you
can sit, one chair that he has against a wall
where he has a makeshift desk. He's got lights, he's

(33:52):
got a stove, he's got a refrigerator, and he has
no running water. We would learn that Alaskans refer to
this as a dry cabin, and it's fairly typical, so
it's not like there was water that he couldn't afford.
Once you get a certain way past the University of Alaska,
there's no infrastructure and no running water for any of
the people that live out there. Just as we were

(34:13):
pulling up and walking into his cabin, a car pulled
into his driveway. This was a Safeway who was delivering
his groceries, and so we took the groceries in and
then we helped put them away in his refrigerator, in
his freezer. But again, all of the dishes stacked up
in the sink. They were dirty, but he wasn't. There

(34:37):
was a brightness in his eyes, something that we hadn't
seen in a long long time. Fingernails were clean, his
shirts did not look like there's something that had been
thrown into a corner and thrown on. I mean, he
had no idea we were coming. So as he walked
to the mailbox, shirt was tucked in, had his belt on.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
The cabin was small, rustic, with no wander and an outhouse,
but it seemed like a place that Matthew truly felt
like home. He was taking care of it, and he
was taking care of himself. But Bert did notice something strange,
two large logs in the front of the house that
appeared to have fallen and then been left there. Matthew
told Bert the logs were protection from evil spirits. Back

(35:20):
inside the cabin was a shelf full of notebooks. Bert
asked Matthew about them.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
I asked him a question about a Google post that
I had seen where an author by the name of
Matthew Rosen in Fairbanks had published a self help book
through a publisher in Pittsburgh, and I thinid, no, there's
no way, and he said, yeah, that's me. I've published
two self help books that are available on Amazon, and

(35:49):
he said, here's a copy for you. So it's a
four hundred and fifty page hardback book, and that one's
called Twinkle, and then the other one is called Stellar Repeller,
which is a smaller paperback book. Both are self help books.
Matthew spends his days talking to himself. He said he's

(36:12):
had no human contact in little over four years, except
to say thank you to the person that delivers his groceries,
or if every now and then he treats himself to
a cup of coffee and has to go to a
local restaurant. Whatever interaction you would have to order your
coffee is all he's had. He said, I haven't had
any human contact. I don't talk to anybody. I don't

(36:33):
do anything. I sit here, I write. I try and
get up at six am every morning and be in
bed by one am. They get a lot of sunlight there.
And he said, then I walk and I read and
I write.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Matthew's writing is more like poetry than pros. It's repetitive.
I've read a sample on Amazon that says, me, the me,
the you, the you will choose to in this as such,
me the me, the you want to win.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
But regarding the book, ever since we have found Matthew
Carolyn talks to him at least twice a day, sometimes
for an hour each time they talk, sometimes longer. He
talks to all of his siblings during the week thirty
minutes or so wherever they can catch the time because
they're all working, and I'll talk to him about once

(37:27):
or twice a week as well. What Carolyn said as
she listens more and more to Matthew, she believes that
the way Matthew has been able to cope with his
life and be doing as well as he's presumably doing
is by writing these things down, and that has become
his way of helping himself. That has become his self help.

(37:50):
But she said, the more I talk to Matthew, the
more I understand his book.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
Well, it's interesting because it makes me think about how
you talked about that moment years before when you were
in the courtroom and the judge asked him, how do
you support yourself? And he said with my feet. There's
something about him writing these books and calling them self help,
these books that are sort of full of his musings
and sort of poetic writings, where it's very literal in

(38:17):
the way that he's called them self help. It's sort
of a documentation of how he has helped himself by
writing these books. And in some ways, you know, I'm
sure that there is a lot that goes into this
and it's complicated, and I imagine that this is not
the life that you had imagined for your son when
he was young, right, But in some ways it's impressive

(38:38):
the way that he has built this life for himself.
You know, yes, he's isolated and he's writing these books
in this cabin that might not make sense to other people,
but the fact that he found his way to Alaska
and the fact that he's living in his cabin and
his self sustaining and is able to clothe himself. And
I don't know if he seems happy or not, but
in some ways, I'm like, wow, he really figured it

(39:00):
out a way to make a life for himself.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
He has. And one of the things that the private
investigator in Alaska was telling us, because he has had
a lot of similar cases, is that for some people
when they go on lithium, it helps, but for some
people who go on and then come off of it,
they're worse than had they never gone on it to

(39:24):
begin with, and that actually they learn how to cope
without taking the medication. Well, from everything we know from
Matthew thus far, that's what he's done. And so now
in tracing back to where I started, where we heard
him on the phone to La. So consider he only
gets SSI, no other funds. And so he went from

(39:48):
LA to San Francisco to Colorado, to Virginia, to West
Virginia to New York, to Boston to Philadelphia. And he
said the only flight he ever took was from Boston
to Anchorage. And then he decided, after being an Anchorage
for a little while, that he really didn't like it there,

(40:09):
and so he went to Fairbanks because Fairbanks seemed like
a nice place. I don't know how you do all
that on five hundred dollars a month, but he's very frugal,
counts his pennies, and he would tell us that there
were times when if he went to one of those locations,
if he felt safe sleeping on the streets, then he

(40:31):
just slept on the streets. If he didn't feel safe,
then he'd go into a shelter. And when he went
into a shelter, he could get his meals. It didn't
cost him anything to be there.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
Today, Burt and Carolyn have a relationship with Matthew that
a decade ago they could have only dreamed of. It's
not the life or a relationship they probably pictured, but
Matthew seems to be a piece. He speaks with his
parents on a regular basis and his siblings. There's even
a family holiday on the horizon.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
We're planning on having him come here for Thanksgiving. He'll
probably just stay over until after Christmas and go back
home the first week of January. And then all of
a sudden, I had this aha moment where gosh, if
you don't have real ID or a passport, you can't fly.
So I said, well, let me call him and ask him.
And so once I kind of beat around the bush

(41:21):
a little bit, he said, Dad, I have real ID.
Don't worry. He said. Now nobody knows this, but I'm
the one that actually came up with the idea of
real ID. But I have it. It's current. He has
a cell phone and a computer, which is how we
zoom daily. His cell phone is a fifty dollars a
month unlimited plan that he uses as a hotspot for

(41:41):
his laptop, and he functions completely in that fashion. When
we were in downtown Fairbanks, I was asking for directions.
He said, I'll go up here and turn left. And
I'm saying, how do you know your way around all
of these places? And he said, well, I just kind
of do. So. I don't know what he's done during
those years two hour walk from where he lives to

(42:03):
downtown Fairbanks, but apparently he's walked it several times.

Speaker 1 (42:07):
Does he have any social connections in the area that
you're aware of?

Speaker 3 (42:11):
And his no, none, okay.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
No, none anywhere. Actually, he said, I've never had a girlfriend,
never had any significant relationships. I don't make friends where
I go. But one of the other things with this
is that there were several poignant moments while we were
all there, enough to a point where it brought tears
trickling down his cheeks, which he said, those aren't tears

(42:34):
because I don't have emotions. I don't cry over anything.
And yet there he was crying. And on the last
day that we would be with him, we had predetermined
the night before that we were going to take his
bicycle to get fixed when the weather's decent enough. There
there are some bike trails that take you all the
way down to the university, and he said, yeah, I

(42:57):
just haven't had time to fix it. Well, dad interpretation,
I haven't had time to fix it means you can't
afford to fix it. And so we said, why don't
you let Mom and I take you tomorrow get your
bike fixed, and then we'll go spend the day together
and we'll pick your bike up at the end of
the day. When we got there the next morning, his
bike was outside right by the front door. He was

(43:18):
dressed and ready to go, as was the case on
all the other previous days. So as we put the
bike in the back, he sat in the rear seat
directly behind Carolyn on the passenger side of the car.
He said, before we go, there's something I need to say,
And now tears are streaming down his eyes, and he said,

(43:39):
I need to apologize for all the pain, all the hurt,
all the suffering that I've caused you all these years.
Will you please forgive me? And it was just a
meltdown moment. Matthew told us that several years ago, he said,
someone came out to the house he thinks it was
Alaska State Police and told them that I had been

(44:01):
reported missing and that they were out there to verify
whether or not he was actually the Matthew Rosen that
we had been looking for, and he said, your parents
and your family are looking for you. Do we have
permission to tell them where you are? And he said, no,
you can't tell him. You can tell him I'm okay,

(44:23):
but don't tell them where I am. We would later say, Matthew,
why did you do that? He said, well, I didn't
know if, after all these years, that if you knew
where I was, if that would be helpful or hurtful.
And I concluded that it would hurt you more to
know where I was than to just keep searching, And

(44:47):
so I decided to tell them, no, I don't want
them to know where I am. And he said, really,
I never thought i'd see you again. In fact, I
pretty much had figured Mom and Dad that you guys
had passed away by now, and that would just be
the way it would be. The hotel that we rented
was a two bedroom apartment with a living room and

(45:09):
a kitchen. And then the idea struck, since we've got
the kitchen, instead of going out to a restaurant, maybe
he gets a home cooked meal. And so we went
out to the store and then we came back and
Carolyn made dinner, and so as we're all sitting around,
Matthews said, I haven't had a home cooked meal since
I left home, and I never thought i'd have one again,

(45:33):
especially not one of yours. He said, gosh, I sure
miss that.

Speaker 3 (45:38):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
And so the idea of him coming for Thanksgiving was
something we raised, not him, but he didn't bat an eyelish.
He said, it would be great to experience a Roseen
family Thanksgiving, and it wouldn't be too bad to get
a little bit more of your home cooking mom.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
That's like such a sweet moment for you guys. And
he does it end up coming back for Thanksgiving, And
now you guys are in touch and it's like, you
guys knew what he needed in that moment, even after
not having seen him twenty four years. What is your
motivation for sharing your family's story.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
I think it's twofold one. It's similar to what I
had said to my daughter when she was a little
upset that I was kind of letting the cat out
of the bag beyond our immediate family. And she has
some challenges of her own health wise, And I said, Rebecca,
if you suddenly found that you were healed of all

(46:34):
the infirmities that you experienced. Wouldn't you want to let
everybody know that you've been cured, you've been healed. And
I said, that's what it's like here. I can't help
but talk about it. But the other side of that,
and the other motivation is that if this is just
another story of son disappears, parents find son, family reunion,

(47:00):
we would miss the larger part of this. And it's
one of my motivations and that hope is such a powerful,
powerful tool, And that was one of the reasons that
Carolyn and I started Hold On to Hope because we
knew what it was like for people trying to hold on,
and so part of telling the story was really so
that we could further advance the work that we do

(47:21):
with hold On to Hope. Especially when you consider on
that name as database. It's about six hundred thousand names
that are on that list and the number of people
who are going through just what we're going through. So
don't give up hold on to Hope.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
I think that's such a strong and really heartful message.
And I really appreciate you sharing your story, and I
appreciate Matthew's openness to you sharing it as well. So
we've never done a story like this, and we want
to make it super clear that certainly deciding to live

(47:58):
a more solitary lifestyle or suffering from mental illness is
absolutely not a crime. But for Bert and everyone who
loved Matthew, and also for law enforcement, this was also
a missing person's case. Absolutely, and the story actually speaks
so closely to the whole point of going, you know,

(48:18):
quote beyond the headlines. There are many moments in this
episode that require that. Yeah, I mean when Bert talked
about I think it was two or three times they
asked Matthew to either get help or leave, they drew
this hard line. You know that still came from a
place of love and wanting him to get better, and

(48:42):
also just a lack of understanding how to best support
him at that time.

Speaker 3 (48:47):
Yeah, you know, that's so complicated. I'm glad you brought
that up because I could see how it would be
really easy to pass a quick judgment on someone in
that scenario. But you know the reality is is that
you're right. It was a long time ago they didn't
have as much information, but even today, there are mental
health experts who would give family members this advice if

(49:07):
the person in their family is an adult who has
full control over their decisions about their medical and psychological treatment.
Sometimes that is the advice that's given is distance yourself.
I mean, it's so difficult and brutal, but it's obviously
a really complex situation.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah, and there can be an issue of a lack
of other options and resources, even if you don't want
to have to give them an ultimatum. And it's like
they were going through so much themselves in their household
with Carolyn recovering from this terrible car accident. There are
just these sort of realities to people's lives, and these
things happen in many layers, and so yeah, like you said,

(49:52):
easy to pass judgment until you know the whole story
and start to think about it a little more closely
to what they were going through at the time.

Speaker 3 (49:59):
Yeah. So one of the things that I want to
talk about is lithium because that's the medication that Matthew
was prescribed after seeing a doctor at his school. You know,
this is all according to what Matthew told Bert, right,
because we obviously don't know his medical records, but that
he started taking it, didn't like it, and then quickly
went off of it, so I started to look into

(50:20):
lithium a little bit more. And you know, it's interesting.
When it first started to be used in the nineteen
forties to treat people suffering from manic depressive disorders, it
was kind of this revolutionary treatment. It was the first
treatment that had been found that had somewhat long lasting effects.
There hadn't really been one before, and the result of
that was that so many people endured horrible treatment, being

(50:44):
locked away in asylums. And also, you know, there were
treatments that today would not be done, such as giving
people lobotomies, which is not effective and incredibly damaging to
people's brains. And so for many people, when lithium came
on the scene, it was a huge advancement and felt
like this sort of miraculous treatment that did allow many

(51:04):
people with manic depressive disorders such as bipolar to live
a functional life in society. And it's used today still.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
Yeah, and it's an incredibly powerful drug, but with that
come intense side effects. Not only does it take weeks
of use to start working, but you can experience fainting,
wait gain, trouble breathing, confusion, memory loss. I mean, the
list is long, and for that reason, lithium has a
really high non adherence rate, which just means that people

(51:35):
stop taking it. Actually, a twenty twenty one Dutch study
of older patients who were newly prescribed lithium reported that
thirty six point three percent of them discontinued within a
median of eighteen months.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
That's a pretty significant percentage.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
Yeah, And I feel like that's so important for us
to point out because Bert notes that Matthew decides to
stop taking lithium, and I think I think that it's like, well,
if you have this drug available to help you, why
wouldn't you take it? But it's just never that simple,
and you know, he's having to make a decision to
either put himself in a place where he thinks he

(52:13):
is maybe better off without it. And I can't say
whether that's true or not, but I can say, looking
at the data, a lot of people decide to stop
taking it.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Yeah, And obviously everyone's different, but it's interesting in this
case how Matthew has really been able to figure out
how to make a life for himself without medication.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
And you know, when we were in our first preliminary
conversations with Bert ahead of the interview, we did ask like,
how would Matthew feel about you sharing this story because
he is at the center of it. Yeah, and Bert
said that he had Matthew's okay to do that and
that was really important to us going into it.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (52:50):
Absolutely. Talking about mental illness, I want to shout out
the National Alliance on Mental Illness. You can go to
the website at NAMI dot org. They estimate that two
million people with mental illness are booked into US jails
every year. There's a lot of collision with mental health
crisis and the criminal justice system, and this episode is

(53:13):
just one of so many examples of how that is
harmful and not helpful and can really spiral someone's life
even further out of control because then oftentimes families are
left on their own to try to figure out how
to help their loved one not only navigate their mental illness,
but then also navigate the criminal justice system on top

(53:34):
of that, which even if you're not struggling with a
mental illness, is difficult to navigate and figure out, takes
time and resources. So you know, there's information about all
of this on the National Alliance on Mental Illness. One
of the things that they do is that they're trying
to create programs that they could train police forces, and
they're calling it help, not handcuffs, you know, better ways

(53:57):
to respond to mental health. And I don't have a
lot of information about the effectiveness of those programs, although
I know that they were trying to institute one in
New Orleans in twenty twenty one. But it's good things
to be thinking about and talking about, and I think
that we should be talking about it way more in
our society because so many people are not being helped. Yeah. Absolutely.
Oh one other thing I wanted to mention when I

(54:19):
was looking into lithium, ended up listening to this interview
by this doctor, Walter Brown, And he wrote this book
a few years back called Lithium, A Doctor, a Drug,
and a Breakthrough, And it's sort of about the history
of lithium and treatment. And he's been a psychiatrist psychologist
for a long time and treated different patients with manic
depressive disorders, and so he has personal experience talking about

(54:42):
using the drug and the effectiveness and the issues with
it as well. But he talked about some of the
research into bipolar disorder and one of the things that
is not proven but he mentioned which I thought was interesting,
is that there is this correlation to people who are
manic to oppressive and who are also very creative, and

(55:03):
they don't understand what that is. But there's some research
into there being a genetic connection, like some sort of
genetic thing that's both causing the manic depressive disorder is
also causing people to be incredibly creative. There's a higher
percentage of poets amongst people with manic depressive disorders. Wow,

(55:28):
that's so interesting.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
I had no idea.

Speaker 3 (55:30):
Yeah, and I mean it's not proven, I don't as
far as I'm aware, but there have been some things
written about this correlation, so it's kind of interesting.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
So Bert and Carolyn Rosen, Matthew's parents, are the co
founders of an organization called hold On to Hope that
provides compassionate support, encouragement and hope to those with the
missing loved one. You can check them out at hold two.
That's the number two Hope dot org.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
That's our episode today. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (55:59):
If you have a story for us, we would love
to hear it. Our email is the Knife at exactlyrightmedia
dot com, or you can follow us on Instagram at
the Knife Podcast or a Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

Speaker 3 (56:09):
This has been an exactly right production. Hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me Paysia Eaton.

Speaker 1 (56:15):
Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Samarosi.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
This episode was mixed by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer
is Christina Chamberlain. Our theme music is by Birds in
the Airport Artwork five NSA Lilac executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff,
Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.