Once upon a time, Lisa Weaver and Matthew Solomon are the most blissful newlyweds on Long Island.
“It really was a fun wedding.”
“It was just absolutely radiant.”
But then a happy holiday turns terrifying.
“It’s Christmas Eve night. A young newlywed goes out for a walk and disappears.”
“I lost it. I really lost it.”
“Every day it was another drama for this couple. The honeymoon is over.”
Lisa Weaver is young and in love. The 22-year-old is the ultimate blushing bride. Fresh-faced and excited about a bright future. Her soulmate, Matthew Solomon, is 23, confident and strong. The young lovers have been together about four years since just after high school. And though they’ve had their ups and downs, Lisa knows Matthew’s the guy for her.
“It’s finally happening.”
“It really was a fun wedding. It really was. Everybody laughed. Everybody had a wonderful time.”
“Lisa had this beautiful gown and beautiful veil and she was just absolutely radiant. She was very tiny and petite and the gown just made her look like a little doll, porcelain doll.”
“Please repeat after me. I, Matthew Solomon.”
“I, Matthew Solomon.”
“take Lisa Weaver.”
“take Lisa Weaver.”
“to be my married wife.”
“to be my married wife until death do us part.”
“You may kiss the bride.”
The handsome young groom is delighted to have Lisa as his wife at last. It’s all he’s ever wanted.
“I never took my eyes off her that day and I just watched her and she was just so happy. It’s the best feeling you can have when you see your child so happy. It’s the best thing you can do. All mothers dream that their daughter, their princess will grow up and meet their prince and it’ll be a beautiful wedding.”
But in the early morning hours of Christmas Day, the fairy tale romance is suddenly shattered. Lisa has vanished. A desperate Matthew cruises the neighborhood.
“Excuse me, officer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was wondering, have you seen my wife? She went for a walk and hasn’t returned.”
The officer had seen a woman walking.
“I did see someone walking, but it wasn’t Lisa.”
“Thank you.”
At 6:00 a.m., Matthew calls 911. Then Lisa’s mother.
“Wait, wait, wait. Matthew, what?”
“Matthew said, ‘Mom, I can’t find Lisa. Lisa went out. She went for a walk. She hasn’t come home. Have you seen her? Is she at your house?'”
“I was bewildered and I couldn’t put it together. What do you mean she’s missing? Uh, why is what are you talking about, Matthew? What What’s going on?”
To hear that your child has gone missing. It’s probably the worst news any parent can ever receive, especially not knowing, is she suffering somewhere? Because the instinct of every parent is to run to their aid and help them. But which direction do you run? Where do you look?
Taking off into the night isn’t like Lisa. Even as a little girl, she was cautious and didn’t like to be alone.
“She was a very quiet little girl. A little bit shy, a little bit clingy, kind of tagged along with her sister, hung around with the right people, did the right things, loved life.”
She also endured heartache. When she was a teenager, her father was diagnosed with cancer.
“My husband was sick a lot. He was really sick a long time, many, many years.”
It’s so sad because sometimes it can feel like abandonment, even if a dad’s job takes him away. In this case, it was illness taking him away. Her uncle Howard becomes a surrogate father.
“She and I bonded almost immediately and I consider her my daughter.”
“We grew up as a tight family. We would get together on the weekends and you know have dinner.”
Lisa and her mom share a special bond.
“Lisa and I were very very close. So, we just did everything together.”
One hot summer afternoon, 18-year-old Lisa strolls into town. Before long, she catches the eye of Matthew Solomon, an attendant at the local gas station.
“Nice to meet you.”
“You, too.”
She was a little bit impressed with him because Matthew had a lot of charisma. The 19-year-old grew up in the same town but went to a different high school. He’s a popular guy, a ladies man who knows what he wants. And now he wants Lisa.
“Fair enough.”
From the beginning, the two are smitten.
“They never do this.”
When Lisa gets home, she gushes to her mom.
“She said, ‘I met this man, very handsome, very good-looking, and we really had a lot of fun.’ She said, ‘He was really funny. is making me laugh.'”
Matthew’s just working at the gas station for the summer. He has bigger plans for his future.
“His father got him in the sheet metal union and he had an excellent job.”
Soon after, Lisa brings Matthew to meet her family.
“Matt.”
“Hi. Nice to meet you.”
“How are you?”
Everybody liked him. He was very happy go lucky, very funny, very secure. The two start dating. They’re just adorable together.
“Matthew made her very happy. They had a lot of good times. They really did.”
But now they’re separated. Why would she run off? Early Christmas morning, Matthew heads downstairs to talk to the couple’s landlords who live below them.
“Like six o’clock in the morning, we did have a knock at the door and Matthew was asking if we had seen Lisa and if we had heard anything from Lisa, but they haven’t.”
Has someone snatched her. Lisa hasn’t been seen since the night before when she told Matthew she was going for a walk. According to Matthew, when Lisa left the house around 11:30 on Christmas Eve, she was wearing sweatpants, sweatshirt, and old running sneakers. She was not wearing any other out of gear.
“Because of the bitter cold, police don’t wait the normal 24-hour period. So, the missing person bureau then started inquiries with family and family members and co-workers.”
Everyone agrees it’s trouble.
“When we arrived at the Lisa’s apartment in Huntington Station, uh the room was packed, the living room was packed with people. Everybody had this look of concern. We said best plan here is just to split up two people car in very quick order.”
The family made up missing person pictures which they started posting.
“Media picked up on this right away and and Lisa Solomon’s picture was both on television and in the local newspapers.”
“This was a big story. It’s Christmas Eve night. A young newlywed goes out for a walk and disappears. All of Long Island was gripped by this.”
“There was yellow tape around my yard and I was just That’s when it was like, ‘What the heck is going on here? This is not real.’ It was unsettling.”
And just like that, the story of the pretty newlywed has turned from fairy tale to nightmare. Two months after a picture perfect wedding in Huntington, New York, Lisa Solomon disappears on Christmas Eve, her husband, Matthew, spearheads a media campaign to help find her.
“Please don’t hurt her. Please don’t do anything rash to whoever did it. No harm’s going to come to them. Just bring her home.”
For the newlyweds, Christmas Eve is a very special day.
“That day she called me up and she was very, very excited that this was going to be her first Christmas Eve with her new husband.”
According to Matthew, they celebrate their two-month anniversary with a romantic dinner. Fresh lobsters, their favorite champagne. After dinner, they relax in the living room.
“Matthew Solomon said he fell asleep. She watched her favorite soap opera, which she taped every day.”
He recalls her waking him up just after 11, upset about her father’s failing health. He said she wanted to take a walk. She wanted to be by herself, and she wanted to think about things. She was very depressed.
“Matthew admonished Lisa not to go too far and just stay within the block and she said that she would and she’d be home in about 10 minutes.”
“I’ll be good. I will.”
We learned that Lisa was an asthmatic and there was no indication that when she left the house that she was carrying anything. She did not have her car keys. She didn’t have identification purse and therefore she didn’t have her medical supplies.
“It just doesn’t make sense. She could have been abducted, could have fallen into some body of water or some crevice somewhere, could have uh just fell ill and might be lying somewhere undiscovered.”
“Where could the pretty young newlywed possibly be?”
“And who could have taken her?”
Matthew was on the news uh reaching out to the community to try to help find his wife. He was very distraught.
“I hope that I can put a you know just put a plea out for people. I need I need all the people I can get. I need everybody out there.”
There was tremendous sympathy in the community. Everybody in Long Island wanted to know the plight of this young woman.
“Lisa, our hearts have to go out to the community because there were literally hundreds and hundreds of people searching for Lisa.”
“You’ll tend to see this in small communities where people adopt an idea that uh she’s one of our own. She’s everybody’s daughter and we have to band together.”
Matthew himself leads the search teams that scour the seediest parts of town. Matthew decided that maybe we should search in some of the lower sections of Huntington Station where there was drug activities and dangerous areas. Matthew storms through the high crime sections armed with a shotgun. He’s determined to find his beloved wife no matter what.
“Throughout their relationship, Lisa could always rely on Matthew to watch over her.”
From the start, the couple share a storybook romance. He had a nice car. He had nice clothes. He took to nice places. They went to really fancy restaurants. And Lisa liked that. She liked that. She really did. Women are always attracted to resources in men and that’s why men display resources like a great car or jewelry and Lisa was no different than any other woman out there. This is a man who could provide potentially financial security for her.
“Matthew likes to be by her side always.”
“I used to try and tell Lisa, you know, Lisa like he’s not giving you any kind of space. And she was she sort of took that I think as a compliment, you know. Oh, he loves me. He wants to be with me all the time.”
Women love attention. Women love male attention. It makes them feel like they must be really worth his love.
In four years of dating, they break up a few times, as young lovers often do. Still, they know they’re right for each other. On Christmas Day 1986, exactly a year before she goes missing,
“Were you married?”
“Yes.”
Matthew proposes at a waterfront restaurant. The ring was gorgeous. It was a beautiful, beautiful ring, gold, and it was a square diamond, kind of large. It had little tiny stones on the side, and it belonged to a set. There was a wedding ring with diamonds, too. She was very happy. She was going to plan this big wedding.
But now, as this Christmas day draws to a close, Lisa is still missing. How could she just vanish? Each new tip brings a burst of renewed hope.
“In any search and rescue operation, you have to keep hope alive. Lisa’s family had to keep Hope alive in order to keep searching.”
“There were psychics that called in who stated that they knew where she was and there were searches made in those areas. Uh there were also um people who thought that they cited her and called it in and police officers investigated that.”
But every sighting turns out the same. No, Lisa. Another lead services at the bank where Lisa works. During the course of investigation, we learned of a person they called Rob that uh he was someone that was interested in Lisa.
“Mr. Norton.”
“Hi.”
“Rob had applied for a car loan through Lisa, but he wanted to be more than a customer. You know, when a business customer goes outside of the business relationship and you’re a married woman, that’s when red flags should go off.”
“All right. Well, I got to get to a lunch meeting. So, you have a good day.”
“You mind if I go with you?”
“Um, I’m good. Thank you. I’ve got things I need to take care of.”
“Maybe next time.”
Detectives hunt down the mystery man as more and more volunteers join the search for Lisa.
“You just have hope in the beginning, but with each day that passes, you realize that that hope starts to drift away.”
Then 6 days after the newlywed vanished, just before a search team is about to call it quits late one night, they make a terrible discovery that pushes the investigation in a whole new direction.
“Oh my god.”
Newlywed Lisa Solomon has been missing for six days. Her distressed husband, Matthew, pleads for help in finding her.
“Okay, she’s been taking medication.”
“Lisa,”
“but she’s just gone.”
Detectives continue looking for Rob, the man who seemed overly interested in Lisa. As family, friends, and volunteers widen their search for the newlywed.
“Lisa’s family was on a roller coaster. An awful emotional roller coaster. One minute thinking there’d be a chance they found her, some tip would come in, and then their hopes would be dashed again.”
Just a few months earlier, Lisa’s on the lookout for the perfect dress. It seems a lifetime ago now.
“Lisa and I went wedding dress shopping. I think we hit almost every store on Long Island. She just kept saying, you know, I’ll know it when I see it. We walked into this little little teeny weeny boutique and they had a lot of dresses there and there was that dress hanging. It was just hanging there. And Lisa looked at the dress and she said, ‘Oh my god, this is the dress. This is the dress.'”
“Mom,”
“Lisa just loves it.”
“That’s gorgeous.”
“That is beautiful.”
“This is the one. This is the one.”
Then the sales girl came over and she talked to us and she said her wedding was called off and this dress was brought back.
Lisa doesn’t see the dress coming from a failed wedding as a bad omen.
“That’s great.”
But Diane does.
“Well, what’s wrong?”
“It was just that somebody had that dress and was planning her future on that dress and then all of a sudden something happened.”
Not one to succumb to superstition, Lisa keeps planning her dream wedding. Her future was so bright and now her family frantically searches for her.
“The weather was so cold that we had to be in thermal clothing. It was that cold.”
The frigid weather doesn’t stop searchers from going late into the night.
“Report back every hour and a half.”
“Anybody got any questions what we’re doing? Sure. Everybody good?”
On the sixth day, Lisa’s cousin Steven joins an off-duty officer who knows the area well.
“We pass these two farm fields, very, very big, you know, like hundreds of acres of farm field. And as soon as we passed them, we decided that this would be an area maybe for us to look.”
When they head into the first field, Steven radios his dad an update.
“Uh, he said that maybe we should call it quits. Everybody’s called it quits, but I told him we were here and that we wanted to finish doing this search in this area.”
It’s a good thing. Eventually, they stumble upon piles of garbage bags.
“We were kicking them and they were just leaf bags. And one of them was hard. And with that, the auxiliary police officer took his knife, started cutting the bag open, and we discovered that there was a body in the bag. We saw an arm frozen to a leg. The body was in a fetal position, frozen to the ground.”
The officer goes for help. Steven’s all alone with the body.
“I continue to open the bags to see if this was Lisa. And then I saw Lisa. It was definitely Lisa. I knew it was Lisa. The feeling is of every emotion you can think of. all wrapped up in one. You’re scared. You’re sad. You’re frightened. You wish you can bring her back to life.”
It’s hard to imagine the trauma that Steven felt upon finding her body. After all the hard work searching, he was one of the few remaining ones throughout the night, still continuing to search because he believed that she could be alive. What an awful thing when he came upon her body.
“Buddy, listen. You don’t want to see this. You don’t need to SEE IT YET.”
“LISA,”
when Matthew got to the scene, he tried to get near Lisa’s body, and I know they were holding him back. They didn’t want to let him get near that.
“He got somewhat hysterical. There was some pushing and some shoving and Matthew ended up being taken to the hospital and being sedated.”
Lisa was left in five layered trash bags, one placed inside the other, like gruesome black plastic nesting dolls. She’s completely frozen, nude. The only thing she has on a gold band on her left ring finger.
“A red fiber was found in the fifth outer bag in the tie, the twist tie.”
But can the tiny piece of evidence lead them to the beloved newlywed’s killer? In the immediate aftermath, nothing is certain.
“Immediately my thoughts went to Diane cuz Diane and Lisa were so close and Lisa um was her life. When I had to tell my sister that it was Lisa, she immediately went into a heavy state of denial.”
“I kept saying, ‘No, it’s not Lisa. It’s not Lisa. It’s okay. Don’t worry. It’s not Lisa.’ I remember that so well saying it it’s not Lisa. And I remember my daughter Donna. She came over to me and she put her hands on my face and she said, ‘Mommy, it’s Lisa.’ Steven found Lisa.”
The night that Lisa was found, I heard Lisa’s mother’s reaction to the news. And um I had never heard anything like that. It was such despair. It it it’ll never leave me. It It’s just something I’ll never forget.
“I mean, we were just livid at that point that somebody could do this to somebody that we loved so much.”
The cause of death, as determined by the medical examiner, was strangulation. Detectives finally locate Rob, the man who had bothered Lisa at work, but he can prove he was with family during the time of the disappearance.
“Rob uh had a solid alibi for that night, and we watched him out as a suspect in the disappearance of Lisa Solomon.”
If Rob didn’t do it, who did? Almost immediately, rumors swirl all over Long Island. But investigators turn their sights closer to home.
“Finding Lisa’s body changed the whole investigation. Now it’s not a disappearance. Now it’s a murder investigation. Now the question is, who killed her?”
Lisa Solomon’s body is found just a couple miles from her home, 6 days after she vanished. And only 2 months after she and Matthew Solomon went, she was naked. She was bruised. She’d been there for almost a week. The body was frozen. Everyone shocked at the cold-blooded killing and police waste no time tracking her killer.
Town gossip starts to turn toward Matthew.
“Right after Lisa’s body was found, now the perception is changing. You know, was the husband this sympathetic figure or did he have something to do with what was a horrible crime?”
Detectives know the husband is often involved in crimes like this.
“But could this doting husband really have harmed his new bride?”
“It was like, ‘Oh, give me a break. Good God. How could it be? It would never be Matthew. Never in a million years.’ I’m really like really upset that everybody’s trying to blame it on Matthew.”
“I felt terrible for Matthew and for the families to have to go through that.”
It’s hard to believe just eight weeks earlier, it’s time for the wedding, but not everyone is excited.
“Sometime before the actual ceremony, Lisa and I were talking and I said, ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this marrying Matthew?’ And she said yes. She was sure.”
Lisa’s uncle Howard has his own concerns, serious ones.
“I was not happy about Lisa and Matthew. I thought she was making a big mistake. Shortly after I met him, I started seeing through some things that just didn’t seem right. Every time he did something, it was always like, ‘Notice me. Notice me. See what I’ve done for you.’ And uh ordinary people don’t act like that. And as a result, I started to sour very rapidly on Matthew Solomon.”
Howard took her away to Maine a couple of months before the wedding and he spent the whole week trying to talk her out of the marriage. And I mean, she wouldn’t even consider it. She wouldn’t even listen to him. Love is the world’s greatest delusion. It’s a drug. It absolutely is. And it makes you blind to what other people are saying. It’s so much easier for outsiders to see sometimes what’s going on inside a relationship because they don’t have the delusions that the lovers do.
Nothing will stop Lisa from marrying the love of her life. Her dear uncle walks her down the aisle.
“I didn’t want to do it. I did it because I loved Lisa so much.”
But now, as the family prepares for a funeral, they recall a party they had just after the wedding.
“I invited a psychic over to my house and I invited a few of my friends and she was going to give us all a reading. And Lisa went in and when Lisa came out I noticed that she was crying and she was really really upset. She said, ‘Mommy, she told me that uh she sees death all around me.'”
“She’s probably talking about your dad.”
Diane thinks the psychic is picking up on Lisa’s gravely ill father, but the psychic didn’t say the same thing to Diane or Lisa’s sister, Donna. Now the words have a whole new meaning.
“I had to go to Lisa’s wake and I had to see Lisa. That was the hardest thing I have ever done in my whole life. Ever. Ever. that I remember like trying to hug her and kiss her and feel her hair and touch her cheek. I just want to touch her hair, you know? I just want to touch her face.”
At the wake, things get weird.
“Matthew looked at it as more of a party. His friends showed up. He had bought beer. When I did see Matthew uh drinking beer at the wake, uh my initial reaction was just that everybody grieves in their own way.”
Is this a grieving husband or something else?
“Police believe he’s hiding something. From the many interviews we did of Lisa’s co-workers and friends, we learned that uh there were many inconsistencies and discrepancies in what Matthew was telling us.”
Friends tell detectives Matthew does have a very possessive side. And after the engagement, it only gets worse.
“Once Lisa and Matthew were married, I didn’t really see much of her anymore.”
“I don’t think Matthew really wanted anybody in her life except him. You know, he kind of pushed her away from a lot of her friends.”
The more he can isolate her, the more he can control her. So, she doesn’t have her mom and her sister and her friends telling her, “He’s not good for you.” He keeps them separate, and he’s able then to control her mind. Matthew would go to Lisa’s house in the morning before they were married just to see what she was wearing. Kind of approve it.
“What’s wrong?”
“What are you wearing?”
“A dress.”
“You’re not going to church in that.”
“Why not?”
“Cuz it looks slimy.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m not being ridiculous.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m not.”
He was controlling about every piece of her. like she was some doll of his, some extension of himself that he could play with and mold and manipulate. He was sick.
“I’ll be right here when you get out.”
Uh if they went anywhere and she wanted to go to the bathroom, he would actually escort her to the bathroom, wait outside the door, and then escort her back to the table. We were starting to see this picture of this compulsive person that is just I thought so in love with her that he cannot be 10 minutes without her which later on I found out I don’t think it was love. I think it was just obsession, possessiveness and obsession.
“I think Matthew was in love with the concept of Lisa. She was the girl that every guy in town wanted to take out and he had her. And Matthew, I think, thought of Lisa as a trophy.”
“He was jealous in a pathological way because the truth is there’s no amount of control that would be enough for him. This overpossessiveness and and this control by the husband of the wife, it’s a red flag to any investigator.”
The couple’s relationship certainly had its secrets, and the most shocking truth about them will soon emerge.
“The day I walked Lisa down the aisle and she married Matthew Solomon was the last day I ever saw Lisa alive.”
When newlywed Lisa Solomon is discovered murdered, suspicion shifts to her husband, Matthew.
“After the body was found, more information came out about Matthew and Lisa’s relationship. I guess it wasn’t like the nice warm cozy story that a lot of people wanted to believe. Apparently, it was a pretty volatile relationship even before they got married. Uh, a lot of arguing.”
Matthew has a pathological attachment disorder. His attachment to Lisa was not love.
“Let’s make this clear. This was never love. This was a passionate control and vigilant kind of manipulation of her.”
Sometimes the fights get out of hand.
“This is ridiculous.”
“He’s just a friend. For where? Where?”
“High school.”
Like the one after a friend’s wedding reception.
“Stop. Stop. What are you doing?”
Lisa was going to leave and Matthew ran out and tackled her on the lawn. They fell down. Uh, he bruised her arm during the struggle.
Lisa hides it from her family. After Lisa was murdered, we started talking to a lot of her friends. And that’s how we found out that Matthew was on the violent side with Lisa.
“And Lisa would never really tell me. I would say, ‘Lisa, what happened? You know, what happened?’ She’d say, ‘Nothing.'”
It’s very very common for a victim of domestic violence like Lisa to make uh excuses for a perpetrator because she loves him because she actually feels that it’s her fault.
The most damning news comes from the landlords downstairs who heard something around midnight on that fateful holiday night.
“On Christmas Eve, I remember my husband and I getting ready for bed. We heard an argument and it was coming from upstairs.”
“What was that?”
“I had no idea. It that was mostly from Matthew. His voice was what we heard and there was whimpering or crying that was coming from Lisa.”
“We also heard like a shuffle from one side of the apartment to the other. After that, we heard a thud or a thump on the wall. After that, there was silence.”
In the moment, Joanne and her husband chalk it up to newlyweds fighting. They’re newlyweds themselves. Matthew gives detectives permission to search his apartment and car. They need physical evidence linking him to the crime. And in the trunk of his car, they find what they’re looking for. Red fibers that lab techs match to the fiber found in the bags holding Lisa’s body.
“We have probable cause to arrest Matthew for the murder of his wife, Lisa.”
12 days after Lisa’s body is found, police arrest Matthew Solomon for her murder.
“And I said, Matthew, the charade has to end.”
“Yeah, I got you.”
“You can’t keep lying to people. I said, and the truth is that you murdered your wife, Lisa.”
After weeks of lies, he finally confesses sort of.
“And I put my arms around her. I didn’t realize that that my right arm was on her neck.”
Matthew claims that night they got into an argument.
“All right, I’m heading out.”
“Where are you going?”
“Church with my mom.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
He says he just hugged her tightly, trying to calm her down. Lisa’s last breath was squeezed from her by the man who took vows to love and protect her just 8 weeks earlier.
“If he calls strangling her, hugging her too tight, this illustrates his pathology. He couldn’t love her enough. He couldn’t control her enough. He couldn’t hold her tight enough. She was always going to get away in some manner until finally he held her so tight he squeezed the life out of her.”
After Matthew murdered Lisa, he picked her up and put her in the bathtub and he stripped her naked.
Then in a bizarre move, he took off his dead wife’s valuable diamond engagement and wedding rings and replaced them with a cheap gold band. Matthew wrote a letter to Lisa saying, you know, Lisa, when you get back, stay here, you know, call me. I love you. Love, Matthew. Matthew wrote this after he strangled his wife.
And then he goes to a local convenience store, buys garbage bags. He literally treated her like a piece of garbage, threw her in garbage bags, threw in the trunk of their car. sees a field, tosses her on the side of the road.
“Yes, it was Matthew. Everybody was right. We were wrong. We loved him and we trusted him. And what a betrayal. What a betrayal. He is a man without a soul. He really is. He has no soul. He’s an animal. Yeah.”
Matthew Solomon is found guilty of second degree murder and depraved indifference murder. Defined as a killing committed by someone who has an utter disregard for the value of human life with a wicked, evil, or inhuman state of mind. He’s sentenced to 18 years to life. Thanks to the family’s ongoing efforts in petitioning the parole board, he has so far been denied parole four times.
But this is all little comfort to Lisa’s family. She is never coming home again.
“Four years of his life he spent making her happy and then I hand her over to him and then eight weeks later he murders her. I’ll never understand that as long as I live. Never understand that. I walked Lisa down the aisle. I lifted her veil. I kissed her. And unknowingly, I turned over to her murderer. I’ll never forget it.”
When you lose a child, that pain never goes away. That pain is always there with you.
“When I visit Lisa’s grave site, I feel so at peace. I just say, ‘Lisa, I’m here. I am here. I’m here with you. And someday I’m going to be up there with you. And nobody nobody will ever ever separate us again.'”
