January 31, 2021 — It’s been 11 years since Grosse Pointe Woods resident JoAnn Matouk Romain disappeared and was eventually found dead floating in the Detroit River. At first glance, it appears that nobody, outside the Matouk Romain family, really cares about what transpired and/or how it actually happened. At second and third glance, same thing.
The lack of empathy, urgency and professional due diligence in determining the true facts surrounding one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in Metro Detroit history, is astounding. Apathetic isn’t strong enough a word to describe the negligent, very possibly downright criminal behavior from the powers that be in law enforcement and multiple municipalities in this matter.
If one percent of the effort and resources put forth by the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Office in Southeastern Michigan the past 45 years to crack the Jimmy Hoffa case was expended to find out the truth in the Matouk Romain case, I’m quite certain we would already have the answers the Matouk Romain family has been looking for feverishly the last decade-plus. And in a puzzling and sad irony, some of the same people that may be on the outskirts of involvement in the Matouk Romain case were most likely tangentially connected to the world-famous Hoffa kidnapping and assassination 35 years prior.
Matouk Romain, 55, went missing after an early-evening church service at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Lakeshore Drive in Grosse Pointe Farms on January 12, 2010.
Here’s what we know for sure:
Even though there wouldn’t be a body discovered for another two and a half months, the Grosse Pointe Farms Police immediately ruled the situation a suicide by drowning, claiming Matouk-Romain, a mother of three with no history of mental illness or suicidal tendencies, walked from the church service to the banks of Lake St. Clair and jumped into the half-frozen body of water in below-freezing temperature with the intention of killing herself. A private autopsy conducted at the University of Michigan, discovered that JoAnn’s death was a “dry drowning,” meaning there was no water in her lungs and that she was probably dead before she ever hit the water.
We know that Matouk-Romain was in a failing marriage and part of a long-running intra-family feud over a wine store and real estate fortune with her older brother, sister and cousins. We know she openly expressed to almost a dozen different people in the weeks leading up to her disappearance that she feared for her personal safety because of a tiff with first cousin, Tim Matouk, a highly-decorated detective and Wayne County Investigator, over the treatment of her troubled baby brother, John Matouk, a former millionaire businessman who had fallen on hard financial times and owed an alleged bookmaker with reputed ties to local mob figures tens of thousands of dollars in sports gambling losses.
Matouk Romian’s children believe firmly Tim Matouk murdered their mom and the Grosse Pointe Farms and Grosse Pointe Woods Police Departments helped him cover it up. The investigative timeline provided from the police and U.S. Coast Guard when compared to time-stamped computer logs and testimony under oath at depositions, makes very little to virtually no sense at all and to an objective observer would make it seem as if the timeline had been doctored with to at least some degree. Although U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker ultimately dismissed the Matouk Romain estate’s $100,000,000 wrongful death lawsuit against Tim Matouk and 16 Grosse Pointe Farms and Woods police officers and their departments in 2018, she noted the facts presented to her were “disturbing” and “suspicious,” however lacked the responsibility- threshold merit to warrant a verdict in its favor.
Disturbing and suspicious is quite the understatement. Whether Tim Matouk had anything to do with his cousin’s death?, I honestly don’t know. Did the cops conspire in a cover-up? I can’t say they did, but I can say with conviction, at the very least, it was shoddy, sloppy and lazy police work and way more needed to be done to try and provide closure to this woman’s family.
Suicide? Come, on, don’t kid yourself. The fact that we are going off the premise that she killed herself in the first place is ridiculous. No mentally-fit middle-aged female – especially one with both lucrative divorce and civil litigation proceeding paydays on the horizon – decides to off themselves by an impromptu dive into an icy lake. Oh, and that minor detail about no water being in her lungs, that seems like a red flag on the suicide angle, don’t you think?
Three years have passed since Judge Parker tossed the civil suit and made her parting comments on the case and nothing has changed. No grand juries, no arrests, no active investigations.
Three months have passed since Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries ran an episode on the Matouk Romain case and I personally penned a three-part investigative series on the case for The Grosse Pointe News via as part of a Google News local journalism initiative and again, nothing. No grand juries, no arrests, no active investigations.
I reported of a meeting between JoAnn Matouk Romain and the FBI in the days preceding her going missing and a run-in at her family’s liquor store days earlier that send her running to a priest and eventually to the feds. Still, nothing.
No movement. Nobody cares. And frankly it all reeks of corruption.
Brick wall after brick wall. And I’ve got to tell you it doesn’t fell like all those brick walls are popping up by accident. Eleven years have gone by and the way things are trending, they’ll be another 11 gone before you know it and nobody will have lifted a finger. The complacency is maddening.
It’s up to the woke masses to bring this into a proper perspective for politicians and police to understand. That means making people accountable. Shining a light on injustice and forcing action. This will not stand. This issue needs to be addressed. American citizens can’t just vanish into the water and when they’re found with suspicious body damage or lack thereof, their deaths can’t just be discarded as suicides because we’re too lazy or compromised to get to the bottom of what really happened. That’s not America. That’s third-world country crap.
Eleven years and a whole lot of nothing. Law enforcement and legislators alike should be ashamed of this apathy and dereliction of duty.
Where’s the outrage?
OP-ED written by:
Scott M. Burnstein
Founder & Editor & Chief of The Gangster Report
True-crime author, investigative journalist, historian
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