The Girlfriends S1/E3: Bubbly, Bouncy and Very Alive

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Novel.

Hey listener, in this episode there's mention of suicide attempts, depression, violence, and control.

There's also the story of Gail's life full of friendship, curly hair, and the romance of youth.

Probably a few swears too.

So as they say in the South, sorry y'all.

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.

Ah, baby photos.

Is that you two?

That's us two.

two.

And Gail.

No.

And Gail.

That's like comic.

And I was with her when we took this one.

You know, you get from JCPenney, these like little things come here for a free photo.

And she made me go with her, and we took the photo.

And that's her beloved cat.

Here's more carefree Gails before she met and married Bob.

And here's Bob.

And here's Gail and Bob.

Does she look happy?

No.

I'm Elaine Katz.

I'm Gail's sister.

I'm Carol Fisher, and from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio, you're listening to The Girlfriends, episode three: bubbly, bouncy, and very alive.

I've got

you,

I've got you, got you.

Yes, I've got

you, got you, I've got you, got you, I've got you, got you, I've got you.

A few days before Christmas in 2022, my producer Anna visited Elaine in Westchester County, New York.

Elaine had just moved houses the day before to this beautiful wood-paneled home, which looked out over the Hudson River.

They sat around the kitchen table for two days, drinking wine out of plastic cups pulled from cardboard boxes.

I wish I could have been there, though I'll admit I would have been nervous.

I worried a lot about how Elaine would perceive me as a member of a lady's social club that had turned her sister's disappearance into gossip.

I would hate for her to think we made light of the hardest moment of her life, but I'm really ready to learn about Gail and to show all of you who she was because I never got that chance when I first stumbled into this story.

If you look at some of those old photos of their family, it's clear how similar Elaine and Gail look.

They weren't even two years apart.

One of our favorite sayings is Gail and I were the opposite side of the same coin.

We were very different,

but it was because we were responding to the same stimuli in an opposite way.

So we were very close.

Early in our lives, we lived in Brooklyn, and there was a school at the end of our block and the kids would get out

and I find this impossible when I think back on it.

They would go wild and they would like sometimes start fights with us.

Gail was a protector then.

But then she became fragile.

She had psychosomatic asthma, like when she got anxious, she couldn't breathe.

And I remember we would be in school, and you know, they had those public announcements.

You know, Elaine Katz come to the nurse's office.

And there, my sister would be breathing with, you know, a bag over her nose, and I would be called down there to hold her hand and calm her down.

So there was like a role reversal.

Although she was older than me, she had become

highly emotional and fragile.

Elaine, Gail, their younger brother Stephen, and their parents, Sylvia and Manny, moved to Belmore, Long Island in 1964.

It's where the girls lived out their teenage years.

There was a lot of noise in our families.

When we got together, it was always lots of loud discussions.

I think partly the Jewish families.

Lots of debating always went on.

This is Abby Bruce, Gail and Elaine's cousin.

We were having a Passover or Thanksgiving or something all together.

And there was a lot of tension going on between my mother and my uncle.

I forget what was going on, but I remember it being tense.

And Gail went over and sat down at the piano and started playing the piano.

It completely diffused the situation.

She was young.

We were probably, you know, 14 or 15 at the time.

I remember watching her hands on the piano and thinking, she has such beautiful hands.

I would say I was into boys.

Gail was into love.

There's a difference.

I'm not saying that Gail was boy crazy.

I was boy crazy.

Gail

was love crazy.

Gail was engaged like twice before she graduated high school.

Insanity.

Gail had a way about her that she would attract a lot of attention.

We were very popular in school.

We were in the popular crowd.

This is Gail's best friend from high school, Denise Kasenbaum.

If you look through Gail's high school yearbook, you'll find Denise and Gail on the same page.

They look like they could have been plucked right out of Woodstock.

Denise has an air of a young Barba Streisam with long, straight Joni Mitchell hair, while Gail's rocking more of a young Cher look with her curly dark hair, flat iron long and cut to one length.

Pure flower power.

They met when Gail was bumped up a year after excelling at her studies.

While they weren't at school, they were having lots of fun doing all the things us girls did back in the 70s.

I remember being at her house and we'd go up to her room

and we'd listen to Neil Young,

Crosby Stilson Nish and Neil Young.

That was our favorite.

And she was the first person

who I went to New York City with.

We were only 14 and our parents let us go into Manhattan on the train and we went down to Greenwich Village and we, you know, walked around.

We met boys.

We thought we were so cool.

Gail graduated at 17 and followed her high school boyfriend David out to Albany in upstate New York.

She was convinced he was the love of her life, but they broke up within a year or so.

A few more unsuccessful relationships later and Gail was single again.

But this time she was stuck in Albany for no good reason.

She made a plan to enroll in a school in Colorado in the fall, but decided to stick around for one more summer.

During that summer, she met John, fell in love

head over heels.

They had this adorable apartment facing this public square.

Decorated completely like, you know, hippie style she was completely vegetarian she had you know a zillion cats in the apartment he was a struggling artist and every now and then because they really couldn't pay the rent they would go they would tell some local club that the name of their band was rent

they would play a few gigs They would cover whatever crap somebody wanted them to cover.

They would raise enough money for the rent.

And they would stop.

When his band called Odd, spelt OD, weren't trying to pay the rent, they were writing and performing an avant-garde rock opera.

If you don't believe me, here it is.

John's on the keys.

found earth in heaven,

a new millennium.

I saw the heart of men burning the old order.

People touching hands as they walked on the water.

All the treasure was shared with enough for everyone.

Ah, the seventies.

I found a

new hair.

Unfortunately, she was the daughter of professional, educated Jewish people.

And our tribe doesn't really believe in rock music as a career.

And she was getting a lot of flack from her parents.

Her mother was very overbearing as a mother.

Here's Gail's cousin Abby again.

And she had very high expectations of the kids.

So Elaine did what Sylvia thought she should do, and that was go be a lawyer because you're really smart.

Gail didn't want to do any of that kind of thing.

She was a bit of a free spirit, and that was really hard for her mother.

I think she started to feel like they had to succeed.

Gail moved down to New York City, where she enrolled in a dance therapy program and started fronting the band music producers.

And she even got a job as a cocktail waitress at Trax, T-R-A-X,

which was one of the hottest rock clubs in the city.

I think Gail and I would have been fast friends.

I swooned over my fair share of rock stars too, starting with the Monkees as a young girl, and later Eric Clapton and Mick Fleetwood.

Rock and roll musicians represented everything opposite from an overbearing Jewish mother, and crushing on them felt like a certain kind of freedom.

So I totally understand why Gail wanted it to work with John.

I wanted a guy like him too.

At Trax, Gail met big-name producers and record label AR guys.

She even got friendly with Cindy Lauper.

But no one was really biting at her rock opera offering.

It was pretty lonely.

Sitting in her Manhattan apartment, Gail would write John poems describing how much she missed him.

Here's Elaine reading one of them.

It is a poem of loneliness about which I write.

Words, thoughts, and images seem to come best to me in the dead of the night.

Alone, I am in my own quiet room, hoping that this feeling will go away soon.

I close my eyes and wish you're here to help and love me and calm my fears.

But you and I have things we must do.

to grow and to learn, to make our dreams come true.

I cannot touch you and hear you say all of the comforting words you always know to help me up when I fall too low.

And so I'll sing my song of loneliness until you come to me with the internal kiss.

In 1979, John moved to Manhattan to be with Gail.

But their free-flowing upstate love didn't thrive for long in the big city.

They split after a year or so.

Around the same time, Gail suffered from an elbow injury that pulled her out of her dance therapy program.

Within just a few months, she felt lost and aimless.

Gail

kicked around the city, you know, working at tracks,

dating guys that she shouldn't have been dating in the music industry.

And

she unfortunately had a suicide attempt and ended up in the hospital, St.

Vincent's.

I don't think it was a real suicide attempt.

She picked the night to try a suicide attempt when I was meeting her at Trax.

So she knew that I would get to Trax, she wouldn't be there.

Ultimately, she was in and out of the hospital and I somehow convinced her to move into my apartment in Eastern Long Island.

And she lived with me briefly out there.

But not surprisingly, she didn't want to live out there.

And I

wangled out of my graduate school and internship in the city.

And the two of us moved into the city.

And we lived together in the city.

So yes, my sister had a chronic depression.

I have chronic anxiety.

And quite frankly, anxiety and depression are on a continuum spectrum.

As I said, opposite sides of the same corn.

Let's be real.

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Malcolm Glabwell here.

I recently recorded the first episode of Smart Talks with IBM, where I learned how AI agents are joining AI assistants as a major productivity tool.

Let's start with AI agents.

AI agents can reason, plan, and collaborate with other AI tools to autonomously perform tasks for a user.

Brian Bissell, an expert from IBM, gave me an example of how a college freshman might use an AI agent.

As a new student, you may not know how do I deal with my health and wellness issue?

How many credits am I going to get for this given class?

You could talk to someone and find out some of that, but maybe it's a little bit sensitive and you don't want to do that.

Bissell told me, you could build an AI agent, a resource for new new students that helps them navigate a new campus, register for classes, access the services they need, and even schedule appointments on their behalf, which in turn buys them more time to focus on their actual schoolwork.

We can see patterns of how agents and assistants can help employees and customers and end users be more productive, automate workflows so they're not doing certain types of repetitive work over and over again, and streamlining their lives and making data more accessible to them 24 hours a day.

To learn more about IBM's AI agents and how they can help your business, visit ibm.com/slash agents.

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I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's never easy hearing about someone reaching a point so low that they try to end their lives.

I can't imagine what Gail must have felt to find herself there.

What I have learned from listening to Elaine is that depression was a lifelong affliction for Gail.

But by the summer of 1980, after Gail's hospitalization, she was doing a lot better.

Well enough that she wanted to start dating again.

So her friend Diane invited her over for a summer barbecue with the promise of vegetarian options and a young man to meet.

Diane was living in New Jersey with her then doctor husband.

and invited Gail over with the intention of a sort of blind date fix-up with Dr.

Bob.

And they really headed off.

She was enamored, doctor, surgeon, pilot.

One night took her, and I think it was Valentine's Day, flying all over the bridges of Manhattan at night.

She said it was very romantic.

I mean, why wouldn't it be?

He whined and dined and took her up to his Eastside, high-in-the-sky apartment with beautiful views of the East River.

And he took her out to his idyllic family's home in West Orange, New Jersey, where his doctor-sister, doctor, brother-in-law were visiting with their son.

The mother, I think, was a psychologist, something that Gail always had an interest in.

It seemed perfect to her.

But in terms of the difference between those two guys, completely opposite ends of the spectrum.

John was a musician.

He could sit around for hours and play his guitar and it was calm and Bob was different.

There was a lot of excitement, a lot of, we did this, we did that.

He was bigger than life.

I think she was just overwhelmed with, wow, this is amazing.

And you couldn't blame her.

We all thought it was too.

Everyone was hearing about the wonderful new man in Gail's life, even her hairdresser.

My name is Widod.

I am the curl expert.

Started the curly hair in the country back in 1984, the first salon for curls.

Gail Katz was a client, a regular client, regular basis.

She was ecstatic when she first saw what her hair can do for her.

It was bouncy and she was having a good time with it.

And it literally reflected her personality.

Bubbly, bouncy, very alive.

That's the Gail that I knew.

We were all talking about boyfriends, and she had met this doctor, and she was very excited about it.

And I remember it was around Thanksgiving in that she was dreading going Thanksgiving, but she might be introducing Bob to her family at the time.

I imagine Gail would have been excited about introducing her new beau to the family.

He was exactly what her mother wanted for her.

Boy, do I know that feeling.

Sylvia was beside herself.

He's a doctor.

He's a doctor.

That's all she talked about.

And I don't think she meant it in a bad way.

I really don't.

A typical Jewish mother from Long Island dream for their child.

I think she wanted Gail to be taken care of.

And this was the answer to what she thought was the best thing that could happen.

And Bob took care of literally everything.

Gail would tell me she would go to turn on a light

and he would with one hand hold her hand and with the other hand turn the light on.

Now it might have looked like he was helping her, but who needs help turning on a light?

He was controlling everything.

One evening early on, Elaine and her boyfriend Larry went out for sushi with Gail and Bob.

And Bob was with his chopsticks picking up food and putting it in Gail's mouth.

He was feeding her.

And then he started feeding me.

He was telling Larry, I own both of them.

It was

so

strange.

From that moment on, Elaine started noticing things about Bob that made her uncomfortable.

First, it was just the way he stood out in his frumpy clothes when they went dancing at Studio 54.

Then the fact he'd make up bizarre lies, like saying he went to a trendy pizza place all the time and then not knowing which neighborhood it was in.

It was such an innocuous and dumb lie.

Like, nope, Peppy's pizza isn't there.

And, you know, he's so bright

that you had to be really smart to catch him in all his lies.

But that wasn't so hard for Larry.

Larry was Yale undergrad, Harvard grad.

Larry was smarter than Bob.

And Bob would say something.

Larry would turn his head and look at me and roll his eyes.

And I knew that was, you know, code for not true.

Worst of all was how Bob was trying to change Gail.

Gail couldn't change two things that Bob required of her.

He wanted her to be taller, and he claimed that she had a Brooklyn accent.

She was 5'2, she wasn't tall.

So there was this constant, you're not good enough for me.

Get thinner, get taller, don't wear, you know, sexy clothes.

I'll never forget seeing her and she was dressed so dowdy.

She looked like she was from some religious sect.

We very quickly began to realize, Larry and I, what a sick fuck Bob was.

The fact is, Gail was in love and she wanted it to work out with Bob, just like I had.

No amount of side-eye from Elaine was going to convince her otherwise.

After around a year of dating, Gail and Bob got engaged.

And whether Elaine liked it or not, she was plunged into the role of maid of honor.

They started planning the wedding, picking out food, scouring wedding dress shops, visiting venues, combing through Bloomingdales.

I hated Bloomingdales.

It's way too big.

I have no idea where anything is in Bloomingdales.

But we went to Bloomingdale's looking at dishes and linens and towels and doing the whole gift registry thing.

During a haircut, she told Weedad the news and asked if she'd come up to Long Island to do everyone's hair and makeup before this ceremony.

No expenses spared.

Gail seemed so excited.

You know, I'm in New York, a lot of clients, so for me to have a Jewish girl marrying a doctor is perfect.

That's what they all want.

Another Jewish girl marrying a doctor, how happy, how fabulous.

Then one night, about a month before the wedding, Elaine got a frantic call.

My sister calls me hysterical and she said, you have to come get me in the morning.

And like, I wasn't so happy about this marriage.

This sounds good to me.

I'll come get you in the morning.

I go into the city and I drive up to her apartment and she comes out holding her cat.

No luggage, no nothing.

Just the cat.

And she is is weeping, and I'm like, what's up?

And she said, Bob tried to kill the cat.

And she tells me that she was in the bedroom, she heard the cat making a funny noise.

She goes into the bathroom, and there Bob is with the cat's head in the toilet, drowning the cat.

And she, of course, saves the cat, And

she says he was jealous of the cat.

He thinks I love the cat more than I love him.

So, I'm going to prove to him how much I love him.

I'm going to get rid of the cat.

And I, of course, responded, I have a good idea.

Let's keep the cat and get rid of Bob.

While this alleged drowning was never reported to the police, it raised alarm alarm bells among Gail's family.

I remember thinking, this is so weird.

Why would anybody do something like that?

Here's Gail's cousin Abby again.

And I think I remember having a conversation with my mother about it.

And my mother saying,

you know, maybe it's not exactly the way we hear it went.

You know, it was the typical deny that it could really be as bad as it was.

So I remember thinking, okay, maybe it wasn't.

We were planning a wedding.

So why were we planning a wedding if this was so terrible?

When I think back now, I'm like, oh my God, what planet was I on?

Sorry.

I didn't think it would make me cry.

Gail did get rid of the cat, a stray she rescued from Caldwell Airport after she found it roaming the strip.

It was named Amelia.

A month later, on the morning of August 29th, 1982, Gail and Bob woke up in separate beds.

Gail at her parents' house in Long Island and Bob in their apartment.

They're getting married.

A poem by Gail Katz.

Today I feel like pleasing you more than before.

To be living for you is all I want to do.

To be loving you.

It will all be there.

Everything you want, I swear, it all will come true.

Today, I can't use words.

They don't say enough.

Please, please listen to me.

It's taken so long to come true.

So long for you.

All for you.

There are so many reasons we choose to get married.

It sounds unromantic, but it's not always just about love.

We get married for security, both financial and physical.

We get married because of family pressure.

We get married because our friends are doing it too.

I can't say why Gail decided to marry Bob.

I suspect she recognized in him a life she wanted, financial security, and a husband her parents would be proud of.

But for her sister Elaine, it felt wrong.

She'd been dragged around every wedding dress shop in Manhattan, only to find that Gail had decided to wear Bob's mother's dress.

I can tell you for a fact.

It was not at all

like what I thought she was going to buy.

And I again think this was about pleasing Bob.

It was the most obvious start to a marriage of compromise.

Early in the morning on the wedding day, We Dodd and her husband Peter arrived at Gail's parents' home to start fixing everybody's hair and makeup.

The door was open.

I just rang the bell.

They said, come in.

I walked in.

Peter was with me.

We walked through a hallway into the kitchen.

And there was an argument going on with her mother, her sister, and Gail.

It was screaming.

But you see many things as a hairdresser.

So it's not shocking, but it's like, all right, how do we manage this?

How do we get rid of these two to try to do the bride?

Calm her down, get her ready, and get out.

And the mother and the sister, I asked them if they'd mind leaving.

And they said, in a minute, we need to finish this and you can come right back.

And so I said, okay.

I turned around and I said to Peter, we're starving.

We'll have a cup of coffee and a bagel or something.

And then we'll wait for them.

And then I'll go in and I'll do it.

So we go outside.

We're looking at each other.

And he said, this is odd.

I'm like, I know.

It's really strange.

I went back in.

The argument, I guess, resolved.

And I went and did Gail's hair.

I was in her room.

We were doing her hair.

And she was just upset.

Very, very upset.

She wanted it to be the way she wanted it and she doesn't care what her mother says.

She doesn't care what they say.

She had, I believe, I don't know whose veil, but she didn't care how it was put on.

She was just, just get me done and get me out of here.

I don't care what the hell I look like.

It was just a strange experience.

Nobody can fully remember what the argument was about.

We Dodd says she thinks she heard Bob's name being thrown about.

Elaine remembers it being tense because the flower crown Gail ordered turned out to look more Christmas wreath than Stevie Nick's.

The only thing I'm sure of, it's not the wedding morning Gail would have dreamt of.

She put on a brave face and headed into Manhattan, wearing a modified flower crown and her modified mother-in-law's dress.

She looked so beautiful.

I don't know if you've seen pictures of their wedding.

She was beautiful.

Bob wore a white linen suit, which is a little odd.

And he sort of matched Gail.

After a traditional service at a temple in Manhattan, everyone moved on to the party at a stylish penthouse restaurant called Terrace in the Sky, overlooking the grounds of the Columbia University campus.

From up there, you could see panoramic views across northern Manhattan.

There were two rooms at the terrace, and she had her friends and

me in one room and she had everyone else in the other room.

The venue boasted a wine list of over 300 bottles and the chef prepared dishes like smoked salmon and caviar, lobster veloute, and duck confi.

She arranged for she and I to be served a better champagne than anyone else.

We had special champagne, Gail and I.

It was really fun.

We danced.

And it was a happy day.

It seemed like it was a happy day.

I didn't end the day day thinking this is the beginning of the end

in any way.

After the wedding, Bob and Gail went on a honeymoon to Crete and judging from their photos, it looked like a beautiful trip.

But something changed when Gail got home.

After the marriage, Her energy was not there.

She was a little bit more subdued, not talking about clubs, not talking about museums, not talking about anything.

Just very, very quiet.

Just wanted her hair done.

No conversation as to a desire of what she would like this time.

It was just whatever you think.

Very passive.

At this point, Bob was working 120-hour weeks on a three-hospital rotation, and Gail was studying psychology at grad school.

He was exhausted, and she felt neglected.

She was the most lonely wife imaginable.

She was completely ignored.

He came home like some 14-year-old before they were real video games and played on his computer.

He was either doing his internship and working or home

and playing on his computer.

Unless he had some infantile need.

that he needed satisfied.

He ignored her.

The incident which really turned my head around about him was my 30th birthday pie.

This is Gail's friend Denise.

I mean, who makes their wife have to sit on his lap to eat dinner and feed her?

It was just so strange.

That was the first time that I really started to think this is not kosher.

Elaine says that by 1984, Gail started having an affair with a finance guy named Anthony Segalis.

They'd hang out at each other's apartments while Bob was at work.

They would party.

They would sleep together.

Then there was also Kenneth Feiner, a professor who Gail met on the subway after he spotted her reading a psychology article.

He always insisted it was a meeting of the minds rather than a sexual thing.

It's hard to know if Gail was just distracting herself or trying to line up her next relationship before breaking things off with Bob.

But the fact is she was unfaithful.

She needed that kind of validation from a man.

So did her mother.

Her mother promoted that having a man in your life made you complete.

And without that, you weren't.

On November 9th, 1983, the day before Gail's graduate record exams, she was studying at home.

She was feeling nervous

and

Bob had gone to work.

She figured he was doing, you know, his usual residency long shift.

She thought he wouldn't catch her smoking.

And he came home

and he saw her smoking.

And between the front door and the balcony of their apartment, there was a couch.

And as she tells me, he came running in, leaped over the couch.

I mean, it's not a six-foot hurdle, it's just a couch.

Pushed her down

with his hands around her throat

and strangled her.

And of course, he did what all men do after they've...

Gotten their anger out.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

And I told her there has to be a report of this.

You know, go to the police station and make a report.

And she did,

which, by the way, is amazing.

I mean, that was attempted murder.

In the report made to the police a few days after, Gail describes to the desk clerk how Bob strangled her to the point of losing consciousness.

But the police never followed it up with Gail.

So instead, she tried to fix her crumbling marriage herself.

She told me how sorry he was and he was going to get therapy and everything was going to be okay, just like after he strangled the cat.

She went and stayed at my grandfather's in Brooklyn.

I remember my mother being very upset, furious at him.

I think my grandfather,

I think my grandfather told her that she needed to work it out.

I don't think she told my grandfather about the strangling part.

And then she went back home.

That was the beginning of the end for Elaine.

She didn't want her around him anymore.

She did everything she could to

get her out of there, begged her to come stay with her, begged her to stay at my grandfather's, begged her to do something legal.

And Gail just wouldn't.

When Gail made up her mind about something,

You couldn't talk her out of it.

For the next six months or so, Gail and Bob went to therapy both separately and together.

It was a confusing time for Elaine because on one hand, Gail seemed to be dedicated to staying with Bob.

And then on the other, she started to talk about leaving him.

My boyfriend Larry was subletting his apartment.

She called me to ask me if I could come up for the last weekend in July because she wanted to have a really big 30th birthday party for Bob.

And then she also asked me if she could sublet Larry's apartment because she wanted to leave Bob.

And I said, you know, which is it?

And she says, I'm not sure.

A couple of visits in, she goes, it's really tough.

I thought it would be different.

It's not different.

I think I made a mistake.

I need to change my life.

And it just so happened that my client next to me happened to be a realtor and they started a conversation.

I don't know where it went from there, but I think they did connect about trying to get an apartment.

I remember in the late fall, early winter of 1984, her telling me, I'm going to get a divorce and I'm going to get him.

She told me

that she had a letter, a letter from his psychiatrist.

warning her that he was twisted and dangerous and he was going to kill her.

She was going to use that letter to threaten him, to give her divorce, number one, because there was no no-fault divorce in the state of New York, and number two, to give her

what she wanted.

And what she wanted

was just to finish graduate school.

She just wanted him to support her so she could finish her degree and go on her merry way and support herself.

And

I, of course, said, it's very dangerous to be threatening Bob that you're going to ruin him.

And as always,

as when he strangled the cat,

as when he strangled her,

she said, Don't worry, Elaine, I have it under control.

The last day I saw her, I picked her up at her hairdressers

and we went to the museum.

It was a sunny day,

warm.

She was wearing a halter top or something like that, and shorts.

We were laying on a blanket

and

we were chatting about art, music, places we'd seen and been

and how much we loved each other.

She had the New York Times with her, and we were circling apartments, possibilities.

It wasn't until, you know, towards the end of the day that

she told me that she was going to make him dinner.

And then during dinner, she was going to talk to Bob about leaving.

I got nervous right then and there because

by that time I knew he wasn't the kind of guy who was just going to take that sitting down.

And so I had this feeling in my gut like, oh my God,

you know,

how's that going to go?

How is he going to react?

And she was saying to me, you know, I got to get home because I got to cook Bob dinner.

Walked back together to her apartment building,

kissed each other goodbye, and she went upstairs.

I went downtown.

I shouldn't have let her go home.

Denise, that's not on you.

I know.

I know.

Yeah.

I knew something wasn't going to be right.

Sorry.

Sorry to apologize.

I still, I still get emotional about it.

Gonna pause?

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Next time, the search for Gail.

Bob was not forthcoming.

Bob does not want me to find your sister.

He was so stone cold.

It's not as if he displayed any emotion at all.

She left her pocketbook there with cigarettes, and she lives in a building with doormen.

And there's a fire department on the same block where they all whistled at my sexy sister.

Nobody saw her.

Sometimes I'd see somebody that looked like her.

I'd get this rush inside me, like, is it girl?

I began the

process

of

proving

that Bob killed my sister.

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 Manugera-Patten, and our researcher is Madeline Parr.

The editor is Veronica Simmons.

Max O'Brien is our executive producer.

Our fact-checker is Valeria Roca.

Production management from Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolf.

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, Might Villie Rau, Katrina Noravelle, David Wasserman, and Bethann McAluso.

And an extra big thank you to Kevin Bartlett and the rest of the band Odd for letting us use their track, The Electrifying Flying Man.

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.

This is an iHeart podcast.