6: Women Who Like to Gab 28:39

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But you also get to hear our club really come to life, and you know that you've really been waiting for that. And of course, just a warning, a little more of my swearing.

If you do listen and are impacted by any of our themes, you can reach out to Know More, a domestic violence charity we've partnered with. They have lots of great resources to help you or your loved ones. You can find them at nomore.org. That's N-O-M-O-R-E dot org.

Remember Stephanie Youngblood, the fiance who met Bob at the New Year's Eve party back in 1989? She's the only regular member of our club that you haven't heard from directly. The sad reason is that Stephanie died from cancer in 2022, just before this podcast went into production.

Stephanie was a core member of our club, and she dated Bob the longest of all of us, around three years. But I never really knew what led to their breakup until Stephanie first joined us at the Mayflower. And I think it's time you found out, too.

I thought that he was weird. This is Stephanie's best friend, Gina. She saw it all go down. Bob had to one-up you, no matter what it was. No matter what you said, if you ordered a certain bottle of wine, there was another one that was better. He was smarter. He was better educated. No matter what it was...

At first, Stephanie gave Gina the same report everyone gives of Bob. Magical dates, flying above the desert, great food, skiing, so smart, yada, yada, yada. I mean, who wouldn't want that on your repertoire? But the way he acted didn't fit any of that to me.

There was one particular trip with Bob that raised alarm bells for Gina. They had gone skiing in Argentina with a group of doctors, and Gina started to feel sick. So I called her room. I said, Stephanie, I'm not feeling really good. My stomach hurts. She said, come by the room. So I knocked on her door, and he was there and had like a little mini hissy fit, like, who is this intruder?

I felt that I was intruding and I was in a very bad moment that I should not have been there. And he picked up his clothes or something and kind of stalked and stormed out of the room. And I remember I said, Stephanie, I wouldn't have come now. I mean, you know, you should have told me. She goes, no, that's fine. That's just Bob being Bob.

This left a bad taste in Gina's mouth. She had previously been married to a guy just like that, and she knows firsthand what those temper tantrums can develop into. So she told Stephanie that Bob reminded her of her ex, who'd fly off the handle at anything, who got so irate during a dinner that he chucked a pepper grinder into the swimming pool, who once locked her in the bathroom, and who eventually tried to throw her off a boat.

But Stephanie did not want to hear Gina's warnings. Instead, she kept dating Bob, just like how I kept dating him, like Gail did, and like Gina did with her husband. As time went on, Stephanie saw Bob's outbursts get worse, like the time Stephanie, Bob, and a friend were having dinner on a boat. Stephanie had requested a bottle of red wine, but when the waiter brought it over, they accidentally sprayed the wine all over the table. It infuriated Bob.

He turned to Stephanie with these intense laser eyes and started raging on her like it was all her fault. She was terrified. Everybody was like, there's something not quite right with this dude. Following his outburst, Stephanie couldn't look at Bob in the same way. He'd always been a little controlling, but the way he exploded, the way he looked at her, it unlocked a new fear.

Ultimately, though, she wanted to fix him, so she demanded that they go to see a couples therapist. But after just one session, the therapist spoke with Stephanie privately and told her that there were significant problems with their relationship and warned her that her life might be in danger. Remind you of anything? Stephanie said, there's just something wrong.

wrong with him. He had to control everything that they did, what they ate, where they went. And she said, I got to get away from it. I got to figure out how to get away from it. From that point on, Stephanie started to build a plan to leave Bob. One day when she was leaving town for a seminar, she told Bob it was over. And I think it really came down to, I'm going to be gone. I want you out by the time I get back.

That was how she told me. I said, good. And that's how Stephanie earned her seat at the Harriet the Spy Club, a club that was half ridiculous girl talk and half camaraderie, a sisterhood, a place for women to get together, drink wine, and tear their ex-boyfriend to shreds.

She was always excited about it. You know, it was fun. They would go have a glass of wine or meet for coffee. They would shoot the discs. I mean, they would talk about all the things they did and compare notes. I think it was good, too, because for her, she wasn't the only one. We miss you, Stephanie. And I still can't believe that all of our gossiping became part of a multi-state investigation. Wait a minute. You all don't know about that yet. I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm Carol Fisher, and from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio, you're listening to The Girlfriends. Episode 6, Women Who Like to Gab. I've got you. Yes, I've got you. I've got you. I've got you. I've got you. I've got you.

When you pick up a cold case, the first thing you do is you redo everything that's been done in the past. No matter how old it is, no matter what's been done, you do it over again. This is Dan Bibb, one of the DA prosecutors assigned to Gail's cold case. Even if someone who's been spoken to says they don't remember or they don't know, a lot of people lie. There were many cases I picked up where people were

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about. And 10, 15 years later, they've straightened their acts out and now willing to tell you what happened. It's a rule. You redo everything that's been done in the past. And that's what we did. We took every report, what's called a DD-5, it's Detective Division Report. And if there was a witness interviewed, we redid that interview.

And when Dan says they re-interviewed everyone, he means it. We've seen the files. There's Elaine, Denise, Gail's brother Steve, the doorman at Gail's apartment, Gail's colleagues, and her fellow students. And they also spoke to the two guys Gail was dating on the side, Anthony Segalis and Kenneth Feiner. If the husband didn't do it, maybe one of the boyfriends did.

Segalis and Feiner couldn't have been more different people. Segalis a little bit brash, you know, businessman. Feiner, this soft-spoken psychologist. Yeah, Feiner and Segalis, they weren't killers. Next, Dan and his partner Steve had to figure out what Bob had been up to over the past 10 years.

which is when these two poker-loving, steak-eating, luxury hotel-staying prosecutors first touched down in Sin City. One of the first people they spoke to when they arrived in 1998 was Scott Baranoff, Bob's childhood friend from New Jersey, who had convinced Bob to join him in Las Vegas. He's like a mahogany tan, like golden girl, nice-looking guy. He's got pictures on the wall of him and all these casino owners.

You know, and all the casino owners are in their 70s and 80s. The guy says they're 80 years old. They got 25-year-old girlfriends. At these casino openings, you'll see me on one side and the cardiologist on the other. I'm like, what? He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. The cardiologists keep them alive and the urologists keep them pissing and fucking. And I nearly fell out of my chair laughing so hard.

Once the medical bro talk was over, Scott started spouting loads of stuff about his old buddy Bob and the things they used to do back in New York. Like the time Bob dropped in at Scott's mom's house after his nephew's party. The day that Gail went missing. Dr. Bierenbaum told Dr. Baranoff that Gail's missing. What should I do? And that's when Bierenbaum reported her missing the next day.

They spoke to Ernie Sussman, too, a local urologist who Bob befriended after he gave him flying lessons. I had no idea he was married. Wow. It's amazing that that never came up. Yeah. And I wouldn't ask, you know. If guys volunteer stuff, great. I mean, unless I'm asked, I'm not going to start talking somebody's ear off about my past and my relationships. So I think it's a guy thing. I mean, most guys don't start gabbing.

Now, if they gab too much about their past, you know, I'm a little suspect. I'm not sure I want to be around them anyway. The guys just didn't really know much about Bob or Gail. They didn't ask. It was like the guys. It's like, yeah, I remember he told me his wife disappeared one day. He never saw her again. So you're a guy, you're not going to drill down and say, Jesus, Bob, what the hell happened? You know, you just say, all right, well, you probably walk away thinking, did he kill her?

It was becoming clear that if the prosecutors were going to get anywhere with the Vegas interviews, they needed to come to the people who knew Bob best in this town. The women who did like to gab. The girlfriends. Bless Dan and Steve, they really had no idea how much we had been preparing for this.

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The first member of the club to get the call was Stephanie Youngblood. She invited Dan and Steve straight to her office. She was the chiropractor who said that his engagement ring was the gift that keeps on giving. I think he was engaged to like three or four different women in Las Vegas. He dated the entire Jewish professional community. What they really wanted to know was what Bob had said about Gail.

She was aware that he was previously married, that his wife had disappeared. And I know that he had given to her an account as to what he thought had happened to Gail. In fact, when Stephanie first met Bob, he told her that he had never been married before. But then Stephanie started noticing that some mail was addressed to Bob and Gail Bierenbaum. She also found a trunk with luggage tags that had Gail's name on it. The same trunk I saw.

Stephanie shared all of this with her friend Gina. She said he didn't have any good explanations for it other than his wife had gone missing and she was wondering why he still had papers and bills and things like that there in a Las Vegas house when he came from New York years before. When Stephanie repeatedly asked Bob who Gail was, he welled up and said it was hard to explain. Then he told her his story.

that she went to Central Park and never came back. He said it was upsetting because during the investigation, he found out she had a drug problem and that she was having extramarital affairs. These were the details Dan and Steve were looking for. It was the common theme, the argument that

walking out, going to the party. Again, there were a number of lies and embellishments, but it was also the fact that he had this horrendous temper. He could fly off the handle at the drop of a hat and almost nothing.

After Stephanie's interview, she called me and said she'd given my number out to Dan and Steve and they want to interview me too. She said they're opening this case back up, they really want Bob, and they believe that we all independently have enough information to help put him away. Let me be honest here. I was kind of on the fence about meeting them. It was fun gossiping with the girls at the Mayflower restaurant, but this all sounded a bit too serious.

Thinking back, I just wanted this to go away and not have to accept the fact that I might have dated someone capable of murdering his wife. So I said I would only meet with them if it could be at Stephanie's office.

When we met, I told them all about my relationship with Bob, the glass-breaking story, and that wild syphilis accusation. But the one they really loved was the moment when I said, what did you do, murder your wife? He doesn't respond. What are you talking about, Caroline? He just drops his head.

And that comes in as an admission by silence, where it's something that a reasonable person would be expected to respond to and deny or whatever. A reasonable person just wouldn't sit there once confronted with an accusation that you had committed a murder. What stuck out to me was that the women all remembered the conversations and details. What he said, what he did, what she said, what she did.

And I think it was a function of there but for the grace of God go I. At first, these details were just fodder for club gossip. But now they were becoming a murder case. It didn't feel good, especially after the things I'd learned about Bob from the detectives. They told me about his life in North Dakota and how he was starting over. He had a new medical practice and was part of a community.

They said his new wife, Janet, was pregnant and the baby was due in a few months. Could that guy really have murdered somebody? And if he hadn't, were we about to ruin his life?

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Back in New York over the summer of 1998, Dan and Steve kept going, re-approaching potential witnesses who had refused to be interviewed back in the 80s. There was one woman in particular that they were desperate to talk to, Roberta Karnofsky, a medical student who Bob supervised at Maimonides Medical Center. We were kind of aware that Roberta was a love interest and we were aware that she lived with him.

But she was uncooperative at the time. Back in 1985-86, she refused to be interviewed. But when Dan and Steve approached her all these years later, Roberta agreed to talk. Steve flew out to meet her in her new home of Charleston, North Carolina. I met with her and her lawyer. Her lawyer felt comfortable with me. And it just was a great interview.

Roberta tells Steve that Bob first asked her out in August of 1985, just a month after Gail went missing. About three weeks later, and after just a couple of dates, he asked her to move into his apartment, which technically is still Gail's apartment. In fact, Roberta was already living there when Elaine came to collect Gail's belongings, the ones Bob put out in trash bags.

Roberta also told Steve about this one night at the apartment that really stood out to her. Roberta tells us that in the middle of the night, there's a telephone call saying that there's a woman in the Port Authority, I believe it was, which is a bus terminal in midtown Manhattan. And would he come down and take a look at her and see if it's her? And Bob is resistant to that.

Bob says, I doubt it's Gail, and asks if he has to come right away, as it's the middle of the night. Roberta Karnofsky, hearing this, is ready to move out of the apartment. She says, should I get out of here now? And he tells her, no, don't worry, it's not her. Bob did eventually go, but he dragged his feet. That was a little piece of evidence that hurt him quite a bit, you know, because he knew, of course, it wasn't her, because he knew where she was.

From that point on, Roberta was suspicious of Bob and she, just like us, started adding up the details. She thought about the answering machine messages Gail's mom would leave Bob accusing him of murdering her daughter. And she remembered how much he loved to fly. She started to formulate a theory that Bob had killed Gail, rented a plane, and thrown her into the ocean.

And it was after an argument that Roberta and Bob had at dinner where she actually accused him of killing Gail. And he remained silent. Roberta told her friend Sharon Alangi about what was going on and her plane theory. Sharon had an idea to check Bob's movements on the day of Gail's disappearance.

When Bob was at work, they said, let's look at his flight log for that day. And they went and they saw that it was altered. And it was altered to show that on that date, he had not flown, but he had flown on another date. A savvy 12-year-old could see that it had been altered from the 7th to the 8th.

It's a huge breakthrough for the case, but it's not the first time that the DA had learned that Bob most likely flew that day. Back in the original DA investigation in the 80s, one of the investigators called in at Caldwell Airport, the same place Gail rescued her cat Amelia, to ask some questions. And they walked in and they talked to the owners of McDaniel Aviation and they said, actually, you know, Dr. Birnbaum used to fly out of here all the time.

They said, well, do you have any records of him flying here? I said, yes. Do you have any records of him flying here in July of 1985? And they said, yes. And sure enough, he flew on July 7th, 1985, the day his wife disappeared. Dr. Birnbaum, in talking to both missing person detectives and detectives from the precinct, her family or his friends, he never mentioned that person.

He had rented that plane that afternoon and we had records that he did. There was no way that he could deny it. He lied to police and to everyone else when he related his activities after he says his wife walked out of the apartment sometime around noon that Sunday. It was a lie of commission because he would say he was either waiting for his wife to return

Or he was on his way to his sister's place in Montclair, New Jersey, which is two or three towns over from where Cold War Airport is for his nephew's birthday party. Or he was already at the party when he was actually in an airplane for almost two hours. And he could have flown over 150 miles easily. So, I mean, the importance of the flight is not only because he lied about it, because it gave him the opportunity to dispose of a body where no one was ever going to find it.

Based on all of the interviews and this breakthrough proof of the flight, the DA land Roberta Steery. They believe Bob killed Gail at some point between 10.30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on July 7th.

that Bob put her body into a duffel bag and smuggled her out of the back door of his building to the car, evading cameras and the doormen. At 4.30 p.m., he drove right onto the tarmac at Caldwell Airport, hired a plane, and flew for a two-hour round trip, allowing him to travel 170 miles out over the Atlantic.

He dropped her body out of the plane, flew back, and headed to his nephew's party just a few miles away. There's even a photo of him smiling with his nephew and the birthday cake. The only problem is the prosecutors needed hard evidence. All these stories were not enough. They had to prove that beyond any reasonable doubt, Bob must have done it.

And for Dan and Steve, there was one reasonable doubt that they still had to address. The torso. When the body washed up on the Staten Island shore back in 1989, the chief medical examiner didn't have the DNA testing capabilities that they do now. Instead, the body was identified as Gail's by comparing a radiology report of the torso and some x-rays of Gail's former coccyx injury.

To Dan and Steve, it felt like a risk. Could you really identify a body solely by comparing their spines? It's a sort of detail that the defense could cling on to to discredit their argument. DNA testing had improved in the intervening years, and they wanted to be sure, but it comes at a risk.

If the body is definitely Gail's, then they're protecting themselves from the juror's doubt. But if it's not hers, then they're back to square one. A case with no body and only circumstantial evidence, that's a hard case to win. And on top of all that, the torso was already buried. So Dan called Gail's sister Elaine. They then asked me if they could exhume the body.

I said, "We are and we will put everything that we have into this. No holds barred. Bring out all the guns blazing. I can't guarantee an outcome." I thought about it for a while. We had no idea whether this was ever going to be prosecuted, whether it was going to be a successful prosecution. Eventually, Elaine consented to the exhumation and the tent was erected over Gail's grave site in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens.

A few months later, Elaine was asked to come into the city for a meeting at the medical examiner's office. When she arrived, she was directed into a huge conference room where Dan, Steve, two lawyers, and the chief medical examiner, Charles Hirsch, were all waiting for her. And they said to me, the torso is not Gail. And after a string of curses, I said to them, you have ripped Gail.

the shred of closure that I have away from me. You better indict him and you better convict him. Next time on The Girlfriends. My sister called and she said, turn on the news. Sometimes you want to keep things out of the press, but this case was front page for a while. I got a phone call from a woman and she actually says to me, I slept with this guy right after his wife disappeared.

What if he's not guilty? Will he come after us for slander? And if he is guilty, will he come after us after us? The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more from Novel, visit novel.audio. The series is hosted by me, Carol Fisher, and produced by Anna Sinfield. Our assistant producer is Julian Manugarapattin. And our researcher is Madeline Parr.

The editor is Veronica Simmons. Max O'Brien is our executive producer. Our fact checker is Valeria Rocha. Production management from Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolfe. Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander.

Music supervision by Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein. Story development by Isaac Fisher. Willard Foxton is creative director of development. Special thanks to Sean Glynn, David Waters, Mithily Rao, Katrina Norvell, David Wasserman, and Bethann Macaluso.

We did reach out to Bob and his legal team to ask if he'd like to comment on the podcast, but we never heard back. Novel.

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