The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor 10)

Friends and family say that part of what made Payne such an outstanding civil servant, one that personified the department’s motto of Honor, Integrity, Sacrifice, was that he didn’t have to do it.

He chose to do so.

A Family That Served—and Sacrificed

When, almost a decade ago, Payne graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, he could have followed practically any professional path other than law enforcement.

He’d enjoyed a privileged background, brought up in upscale Wallingford, in all the comfort that a Main Line life afforded. After attending prep school at Episcopal Academy, then completing his studies at U of P, he was expected to pursue a law degree and, perhaps, join his adoptive father’s law practice, the prestigious firm of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester.

Instead, Matt Payne chose something else: He decided that he should defend his country.

He signed recruitment papers with the United States Marine Corps, only to discover that a minor condition with his vision barred him from joining the Corps.

Determined to serve in some other capacity, Payne joined the Philadelphia Police Department.

Again, he didn’t have to. If anything, Matt Payne had a pass. But, again, he chose to.

A pass, because his biological fathe

r, Sergeant John F. X. Moffitt, known as Jack, was killed in the line of duty, too—shot dead while responding to a silent burglar alarm at a gasoline station. And Jack Moffitt’s brother, Captain Richard C. “Dutch” Moffitt, commanding officer of the department’s elite Highway Patrol, had been killed as well while trying to stop a robbery at the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Avenue.

Payne’s decision to join the police department came only months after his Uncle Dutch was killed. Many believed he joined in order to avenge the deaths of his father and uncle, and to prove that the condition that kept him out of the Corps would not keep him from being a good cop.

“Frankly, all that scared the hell out of us,” said Dennis V. “Denny” Coughlin, who recently retired as first deputy commissioner of police, but who was a chief inspector at the time Payne joined the department.

Coughlin had been best friends with Jack Moffitt at his death, and took upon himself the sad duty of delivering the tragic news to Matt’s mother—then pregnant with Matt—that she’d been widowed.

“I can confess now that when Matty came to the department,” a visibly upset Coughlin added, “I tried to protect him. I sure as hell didn’t want to have to knock on his mother’s door with the news that now Jack’s son had been killed on the job, too. Unfortunately, that duty fell last week to First Deputy Commissioner of Police Peter Wohl.”

New Cop, Hero Cop

After graduating from the Police Academy, there was no question that Matt Payne was becoming both a good cop and a respected one.

“But no matter how hard we tried throughout his career,” said Peter Wohl, to whom Payne was first assigned as an administrative assistant when Wohl ran Special Operations, “Matt wound up in the thick of things, bullets flying. That said, all his shootings were found to be righteous ones.”

Before Payne had even put in six months on the job, he had already drawn his pistol. It had happened when he was off duty and had come across a van that fit the description of the one used by the criminal the newspapers had labeled the Northwest Serial Rapist. When the driver tried to run him down, Payne shot him in the head. A young woman, trussed up and naked in the back of the vehicle, was saved from becoming the rapist’s next victim. And headlines hailed Matt Payne as a hero.

The next incident happened during an operation that this writer covered.

Matt Payne had been assigned to provide protection for me in an alleyway that was supposed to be a safe distance from where tactical teams were staging to arrest a gang who had committed murder while robbing Goldblatt’s Department Store.

“We thought that in having Matt sit on Mick,” Wohl explained, “we could keep Mick out of our way and at the same time keep Matt far from any gunplay.”

They were wrong.

As this writer reported then, one of the men the cops were trying to arrest came into the alleyway and began shooting. Matt Payne, his forehead grazed by a bullet, returned fire and killed the shooter.

The following day, on the front page of the Bulletin, the photograph I took of a bloodied Matt Payne holding his pistol and standing over the dead shooter appeared with this writer’s firsthand account of Payne’s heroic actions.

The photograph’s headline read: “Officer M. M. Payne, 23, The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”

A Shining—but Brief—Career

Promotion followed, but so, too, did more gunfire.

Payne became romantically involved with a young woman named Susan Reynolds and then discovered that a sorority sister of hers had become caught up with a terrorist named Bryan Chenowith, who was the target of a nationwide manhunt by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In an attempt to trap Chenowith, Payne asked Reynolds to lure her friend to a diner in hopes that the fugitive would follow and the FBI’s special agent in charge in Philadelphia could nab him. However, the fugitive brought with him a .30-caliber carbine rifle and shot up the parking lot.