4: Phone Calls from Manhattan 38:50

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You also hear from a tenacious cast of women and friends whose fight for justice is truly, truly inspiring. 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. Mindy. A little louder. Hello. Hello. Perfect. So we're all on record? Yeah. And there goes your fucking dog. Stop recording. Let's put the dog downstairs.

I'm going to put them in the car. Give me a second. They love the car. She's putting her dogs in the car. Who does that? Mindy. Yes, Carol. We're starting right now. Are you sitting? Thankfully, yes. I've learned so much about Gail recently. Gail was this really educated young woman. She was pretty. She was tiny.

And she actually reminds me a little bit of me. It does sound like you. Smart and petite and attractive. You know what else she had in common with us, with you and I and our women friends? Dark-haired Jewish woman. Besides dark-haired Jewish women with great personalities, she not only thought, she believed that she could fix him.

And you and I've been there with men. I can relate to that, but I don't think I can fix them. I think I can fix me to adapt to them. And I wonder who was fixing whom here. Yeah, that's a great point. You know, the other thing I'm not proud of is that I'm not happy with some of the laughter we had over this situation.

Like, I look back and I go, what the hell was I thinking? It's not that we were doing anything wrong. We didn't know. But as I've come to know Gail, as I've come to get acquainted with Elaine, we all have a very common bond and all could have been great friends. You know, in our weird Harriet the Spy way, we're hoisting a red flag.

There's something dangerous. We're concerned about this. I mean, really, Carol, look at how much angst we had about doing this. Yeah, yeah. I went kicking and screaming. So there is a lot of baggage that we carry. Yeah. You know, part of me doing this, Mindy, is about, like, it's just time to own my story, for Christ's sake. The domestic abuse or the controlling behaviors of men, right?

It doesn't have to define most women. May that just be part of our journey. May not that be a complete story. You know, your definition of self changes daily. It's like Hamilton, who tells your story? Because after you can't tell your own story, who tells your story?

I look back on that time and even now. I mean, you supported me then and you support me now. I will always support you because you're my crazy friend. I know. I miss you. I love you. I love you too. And get the dogs out of the freaking car, would you? From the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio, I'm Carol Fisher, and you're listening to The Girlfriends, Episode 4, Phone Calls from Manhattan. I love you.

This is what I found out about the days, months, and years in New York after Gail went missing.

In the late afternoon on Monday, July 8th, 1985, Gail's sister Elaine called her parents from a payphone from the corner of Broadway and 75th Street. She was letting them know that she was headed back to law school in D.C. And my mother said to me, have you spoken to Gail? Do you know where Gail is? And I said, no, I'm...

Driving in a car, you know, to Manhattan. Then I'm on my way to D.C. What's wrong? And she said, Bob said that she went out and never came back. And they had a birthday party in Jersey for his sister's child. And she never came home.

And that did seem really odd. Gail was about appearances. The idea that Gail, no matter how annoyed she was with Bob, didn't come home to attend a birthday party for her nephew by marriage in New Jersey was very strange. Elaine put the phone down and got back into the car to start the five-hour drive back to D.C.,

And then, over the course of 24 hours, everyone else's phones in New York started ringing. Everyone was saying the same thing. Where is Gail? Elaine called me and asked me if I'd talked to Gail. And I was like, what do you mean if I talked to Gail? No, why? Abby Bruce, Gail's cousin. Slow down, slow down. What are you talking about? She went out for a jog. She hasn't come home.

So I went out and started walking around and thinking, you know, where could she have possibly gone? Walked over to the park, came back, called my mother.

who also was like, what are you talking about? What do you mean she's missing? So my mother hung up from me and called my aunt. But when Abby's mom called Sylvia, she was already in hysterics. I need to find my child. We need to find her. I remember her screaming at the top of her lungs. So everybody was kind of making phone calls through the rest of the day. Anyone heard from her? Anyone heard? No one had heard from her. No one had heard from her.

Next to get a call was Denise, Gail's best friend. But it's not Elaine or Abby or Sylvia. He called me. It's Bob. Is Gail with you? What? No. Well, she never came home. That's when I said, oh, my God. I knew right away. I said to my husband at that time, he killed her.

On Monday evening, roughly 30 hours after Gail is said to have gone missing, Bob went to the 19th precinct on East 95th Street and filed a police report. He told the officer that he'd been arguing with his wife Gail all morning and that around 11 a.m. she stormed out of their home to cool off in Central Park.

He told them that she had a history of depression and suicide attempts, which prompted the officer to write EDP in the remarks section of the report. Now, EDP is shorthand for emotionally disturbed person.

Gail is officially designated as New York's missing person squad number 7816, and her case is assigned to Detective Tom O'Malley. Tom's first task is to start interviewing people. Gail's family, her college friends, Denise, Elaine, and they're all talking about Bob. Bob is acting like some TV station character.

wants to put it on the six o'clock news, like two, four, or seven. And he's like refusing to do it and asking my mother if she'll drive in from Long Island to do it, which is so strange. I mean, he lives in Manhattan where the TV studios are. This is his wife.

In the end, he does the interview. And this is the only moment that you'll hear Bob's voice on this podcast because he and his attorney never got back to our request for an interview. But here he is talking about Gail in 1985. She's a graduate student. Psychology takes that very seriously and has patient responsibilities, has patients who are dependent on her.

And I think no matter what, she wouldn't abandon her patients. What do you think happened to your wife? I don't know. I don't know, but I'm worried. Detective O'Malley started to build up a pretty damning picture of Bob. Multiple people tell him about Bob's controlling behavior, the strangulation, and the cat incident.

O'Malley wanted to interview him, but he knew he had to tread carefully. He didn't want Bob to think he was a primary suspect and lawyer up too soon. So during a casual phone call, O'Malley invited Bob down to the station for a chat. This is a note from Detective O'Malley's police report from that day that my producer Anna found. It's dated July 13th, just six days after Gail went missing. ♪

I then asked him if he ever attempted to strangle his wife, and he said very abruptly he did not want to talk about it. When asked of any incident with the cat, I received the same abrupt type answer, no. As we concluded, Dr. Berenbaum said, this doesn't look right, and people are going to start to wonder. When I asked him what he meant, he said, it's obvious, isn't it? After that interview, Tom reached out to Elaine. And he said Bob was not forthcoming.

It's so weird. Bob doesn't want my help. Bob does not want me to find your sister. If my sister was leaving him, going to live with some guy, going to live with some girlfriend, going to Bora Bora, or wherever the heck else she was doing, the first one she would have called would have been me. She might not have called me to admit that she was going to stay married to the psychopath, but she certainly would have called me to tell me she was leaving him.

And I would have been there to do all the things she needed me to do. I mean, please. She was dead. She was dead or he hurt her terribly and he had her hidden somewhere. The next day, exactly a week after Gail went missing, Bob and Gail's friends and family headed to Central Park to distribute some missing posters. I'm looking at one right now.

The portrait of Gail is in black and white from the photocopier. In it, her hair is layered and shoulder length. She's smiling, but in that way where your eyes are being blinded by the sun or you don't quite want your photo taken. And on the poster, they've written her height, 5'3", her weight, 107 pounds, brown hair, and hazel eyes.

a graduate student at Long Island University, last seen at 11 a.m. July 7th, 1985, and they offered a reward for any information. I'm telling you, this gives me chills. It just, it must have been terrifying. Part of me knew she was dead, but part of me wanted to find her. Part of me wanted to find her alive and know that she was still out there somewhere.

They papered the park with missing posters. Except my mother told me it felt weird. It felt like there were two camps. There was his friends and there was my mother and father and Gail's friends. And it didn't feel that they had the same mission.

At one point, Bob was handing out posters to passing joggers with Gail's college friend, Mary Ann. When she asked him where he thought Gail might be, he said, I think she's on a shopping spree at Bloomingdale's. You know what a Jap she is. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the term Jap, it means Jewish American princess. And just in case it's not clear, it's a condescending term.

Bob then suggests that Gail may have been overly affected when writing her recent paper on depression, but Marianne disagreed with him. Gail didn't seem depressed when she last saw her. Marianne's stance seemed to annoy Bob, at which point he pointed over at the gate and he said, how do you know she just didn't climb that gate? How do you know Gail isn't lying at the bottom of that reservoir? At one point, the New York Post reported

did a story on it. And there's everybody holding the missing posters in front of their chest. Bob is holding it in front of his face as if he doesn't want people to see him. Just like he didn't want to go on camera. After distributing posters, Denise and a group of Gail's friends went back to Gail and Bob's apartment. It was then that they all started quizzing Bob. Where is Gail? When did you last see her?

What were you arguing about? He acted like, oh, so upset. Gail's missing. The group of women started looking around for clues. And that's when we said, where's the rug that used to be here?

Because it was a beautiful Asian rug. And Bob said, Oh, it had to be cleaned. The cat got sick. We all looked at each other like, what? But he was so stone cold. It's not as if he displayed any emotion at all. So there was like nothing to react to. At one point, the phone rang, but Bob decided not to pick it up.

When the answering machine kicked in, Gail's voice played out into the entire room, telling the caller to leave a message. It must have been heartbreaking. Along the way, Bob continued to share his theories. He'd talk about Gail's drug use and how perhaps that's how she had gotten into trouble. Listen, I'm not going to say my sister didn't do any drugs. My sister, like, had patients, and she was a graduate student, and then she had this prestigious internship. My sister...

was not someone who had a drug problem. I'm not saying my sister never did any drugs, but that's not who she was. Everything the Katz family knew started to stack up. Bob's past behavior, the fact that Gail was going to leave him that very night, the way she apparently left with hardly any belongings, and yet nobody had seen or heard from her. They had become convinced that Bob killed Gail.

With only a week or two left before sitting for her bar exam, Elaine had to make a hard call. I'll never forget, I was taking the Pieper Law Review class. I called John Pieper, and I told him what I was going through. He said, don't take the bar exam. You can't do that, which was sad for me.

For Elaine, this was no longer a missing persons case, but a homicide investigation. And if she wasn't going to sit for the bar, then she'd settle for putting Bob behind bars.

Of course, I was heartbroken that I did not know where my sister was. But it wasn't because I couldn't bear the truth that my sister just left for another life and ignored her sister. It's because the facts surrounding the situation made it impossible.

She left her pocketbook, you know, there with cigarettes. And she lives in a building with doormen. There's a fire department on the same block where they all whistled at my sexy sister. She's allegedly wearing a tank top and short shorts. Nobody saw her. We would fall asleep without hanging up the phone. She did not go somewhere without talking to me. And I began the one to two year process proving killed my sister.

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Oh, the missing poster's in here. When Elaine first arrived back in New York after dropping out of law school, she immediately started collaborating with the detectives from the missing persons unit. It took the form of a deep relationship with Tom O'Malley and literally walking the beat with him. I mean, sitting there in missing persons with him, brainstorming with him. They would talk about the calls Tom would get from people responding to the missing persons reports.

a man who claimed to see Gail sitting in a yoga position in front of a brownstone near Washington Square. A doorman from an apartment on 52nd Street thought he saw her, but later he changed his mind, and a man said he saw her and her friend at H&H Bagels on East 81st Street. She was spotted uptown on the subway, downtown through Soho, and wandering around Tudor City.

None of these sightings could be verified by the detectives, but they also could not be dismissed. Ultimately, though, the detectives already had a pretty good hunch who the last person to see Gail was. I'll never forget, I was having a drink with Tom O'Malley on one of those investigator cop bars, and Les Wolf came in and walked over and greeted us. Les was a private investigator that Bob had hired to search for Gail.

And as he walked away, Tommy said, yeah, he's been hired to, you know, hide evidence. Bob knew he did it. Bob wasn't hiring someone to help find Gail. He knew exactly where Gail was. We couldn't confirm this, but whatever way you slice it, for Elaine, the official route didn't seem to be leading to anything. So she tried a different tack. She offered to pick up some of Gail's stuff from Bob's place. I was hoping that I could engage him in some way. And I thought that it sounds so idiotic.

He might break down. And I'll never forget, I got up. All of my sister's stuff was in big trash bags. He didn't want her underwear. He didn't want her perfume. He wanted her bike, her skis. He wanted some expensive crystal platter that my aunt had bought them as a wedding gift. I argued with him, you can't have that.

And I called my Aunt Bea on the phone. And I said, Bea, tell him he has to give me the bowl. Handed him the phone, and he let me take. And I realized I had made the biggest mistake. Had I left the stuff, it may have haunted him. Instead, I was taking out the trash. By this point, Bob had been interviewed a few times by Detective O'Malley and his partner, Detective Dalsis.

At first, it had been on a friendly, voluntary basis, but it was becoming apparent that they were no longer treating Gail's disappearance as a missing persons case. After five or so interviews, he lawyered up and became increasingly hard to reach. Whenever the cops or Gail's friends and family tried to call him, they got his answering machine. Time passed and still nothing. The Katz family endured their first family gatherings without Gail.

Their first Yom Kippur, their first Passover, and with each passing day, the family's grief cemented, and the wider public forgot about Gail. So Elaine started writing letters to the editors and journalists of New York papers from the perspective of her grieving mother. My name is Sylvia Katz. My daughter, Gail Katz-Biermann, disappeared from her apartment. Nobody has heard from her.

My son-in-law has been asked to take a lie detector test along with other friends of Gail's. But unlike her friends who said yes, my son-in-law has refused twice. He was the last person to see Gail. Therefore, everything that is known comes from him. He is uncooperative, as is his family. We are very frustrated and so are the police. Please help us.

Part of what I was trying to do is really, in good faith, get evidence. Part of what I was trying to do, if I couldn't get evidence, is make sure that every single place that Bob was, people knew the truth. So by the spring, I sent letters to every doctor that worked with Bob. And at that point, he was in a three-hospital rotation.

and I sent them to all three hospitals. I used a reverse phone book at the New York Public Library. This is way before happy web stuff. Sending a letter to every single person in the high-rise apartment building. Elaine started coming up with her own leads, talking to people the police hadn't even interviewed. The woman downstairs told me that it was terrible living under them. They fought constantly, especially on the weekends when he was home.

And it was awful. And what was interesting about that day was how quiet it was, except she heard furniture moving. But it wasn't enough. There came a time, the missing persons and the Homicide Bureau, and they all put their hands up and said, we just don't have the evidence, lady. I remember thinking, double jeopardy. They're hoping for a better case.

And if they do it now and they fail and they ever get really good evidence, he will be walking around with impunity, being able to say, I beat it. And I think that really would have killed us. But my cousin, Hillard Weiss, worked for the Legal Aid Society, and he got the DA's office to investigate.

In August 1986, a year and a month since Gail went missing, the case was passed on to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. But after just one year, the investigation came to a halt and the case was dropped yet again. So at the point at which they said, we're not prosecuting, I had nothing left to lose. And I began a different campaign. I would call him and I would say...

I know you killed my sister. Everyone knows she killed my sister. And you're not going to get away with it. And I'm going to keep on leaving these messages. And every time you have a new girlfriend, she's going to hear these messages. I was dying for him to sue me for slander. We might not have had beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminal courtroom. But if he sued me,

I would get him under oath in a deposition in a civil suit. He would have to prove that I was lying so I could act with absolute impunity. But Bob was never going to sue Elaine. He knew better than that. Instead, her messages went unanswered. And slowly, people started getting on with their lives. Even Bob continued to work at Maimonides Hospital, where he now worked as a heart surgeon.

I went back to work. I went through my daily routine. Denise, Gail's friend. I used to ride the bus, and I'd look out the window on the bus, and sometimes I'd see somebody that looked like her. And I'd get this rush inside me, like, is that Gail? And of course I realized it wasn't, but I never stopped looking for her.

So for a lot of years, it was still that feeling inside me that maybe she is alive. Maybe she is out there. Elaine decided that after three years of grief and anger, she needed to choose herself. It was during the summer of 1988. My father had been hospitalized with heart disease. They discovered a massive brain tumor.

That's around the time that I decided I had to live. I left Larry because he reminded me of Gail. Larry was Elaine's long-term boyfriend. I stopped allowing my mother to talk to me about my sister. Went on New York Magazine personal ads and found a husband, literally. And while Elaine was on her honeymoon with her new husband, a human torso washed up on the shores of Staten Island.

a torso that they believe could belong to Gail.

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She was carried in by the water and laid on the beach waiting to be found. Without overwhelming you with details, it was clear that she had been at sea for a while and that it was not her choice. This happened on May 21, 1989, which makes it roughly four years since Gail went missing.

Obviously, it's hard to verify who a torso belongs to at first glance. But for New York's chief medical examiner, Charles Hirsch, the age and size of the torso on the shore, it seemed to match up enough to warrant further testing. And once again, Elaine had to put her own life to one side. The saga began of trying to identify the torso. They tried to

DNA testing, but it was in the water for so long. The DNA testing was not sophisticated enough back in 1989. And I remember it was the fall of '89 when during one of those trillion conversations that I had racking my brain about how am I going to identify this torso, I remembered that my sister had coccyx bone injury and we looked far and wide for those x-rays.

We couldn't find them. Then we remembered that she had that injury when she was at NYU and she didn't have health insurance. So she used my health insurance card to get x-rays. And we got all these x-rays and it was the radiology report of the torso comparing it to the x-rays that we found that sufficiently for the medical examiner allowed them to

to change Jane Doe torso on the death certificate to Gail Katz Bierenbaum. And finally, I felt that I found my sister and I had her and she was safe. A few months later, Gail's family finally had a burial. I remember there was a scene at the burial site because I wanted to open the corfin. I wanted to see my sister. Cried and screamed.

And people who were bigger than me, which wasn't so hard, physically restrained me. They would not let me see her. And we buried her. Gail's gravestone is small, nestled closely to the ground. Its inscription reads, Gail Beth, beloved daughter, granddaughter, and sister. March 8th, 1956 to July 7th, 1985. Forever in our hearts.

I'm sure it meant a lot to give Gail a place to rest. Usually Jewish burials take place within 24 hours, yet the Katzes had to wait four years. But whatever sense of closure that gave them, it didn't last long. Within six months of the burial, Sylvia, Elaine's mother, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. My mother buried her daughter, and she was dead by June.

Then, just six years later, Elaine's father, Manny Katz, also died from cancer, something he battled for years. He was buried next to his daughter and his wife in the Mount Zion Cemetery family plot in Queens. That's when I stopped. I could not leave my brother alone. So, I promised myself that Bob would not kill me too. But when Elaine Katz stops, she doesn't really stop.

She was so angry that he was out there walking around, living his life. As long as her sister was gone, she was going to find a way to make him pay. This is Abby Bruce, Elaine's cousin. There wasn't a thing you could say to her, do. It was an obsession. And what's amazing to me about her is that along with that obsession, she lived her life.

She got married. She had children. She opened a law firm. I mean, she's an amazing person. But there was no question in my mind that she was never going to give up. And so every once in a while, Elaine would pick up a part of the case, or in a moment of sudden fury, she'd call Bob again to leave a message on his machine while he was at work. You killed my sister, and I know you think you got away with it. I will always hound you and haunt you.

And I will keep police. I will keep at the press. I will always find you as long as you are a licensed and registered physician. No matter where you go, I will find you. And thanks to me, he did go. Straight into my unsuspecting arms in Las Vegas, Nevada. But it didn't take long for him to run again.

While we were meeting up to talk shit about him at the Mayflower restaurant, he was packing his bags and heading to one of the coldest places in America, North Dakota. I know, surprised us too. ♪

There was a period where there was a lull, and he was writing snowblower injuries in the Minot newspaper. He was just a smart guy, but women found him creepy. I will never forget him saying, we have a cold case bureau, and I'd like to open up Gail's case. We liked to have the three-hour lunches. We liked to have a cocktail after work, and we liked investigating homicides.

I mentioned, you know, the torso and I'll never forget him saying, what torso? 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.

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