The Girlfriends S2/E3: Lost and Found

33m
Producer Anna is joined by Alayne Katz for a pilgrimage to New York City’s biggest public cemetery…could our girl be there?  If you’re affected by any of the themes in this show please reach out to DNA Doe Project, an organisation we’ve partnered with.  The Girlfriends: Our Lost Sister is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.  For more from Novel visit novel.audio

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Runtime: 33m

Transcript

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 Let's be real.

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Speaker 15 This is Andrea Gunning from Betrayal.

Speaker 4 Are there two sides to every story?

Speaker 15 Academy Award nominee Robin Wright stars in The Girlfriend on Prime September 10th, a psychological thriller that will make you question everything. Laura has the perfect life and a son she'd die for.

Speaker 15 But when he brings home his new girlfriend Cherry, played by Olivia Cook, Something feels off.

Speaker 15 Also starring Lori Davidson, The Girlfriend is a twisted game of cat and mouse where nothing is what it seems. Don't miss The Girlfriend, streaming exclusively on Prime September 10th.

Speaker 15 Sometimes the truth is just a matter of perspective.

Speaker 17 This is Danielle Fischel from Pod Meets World. Okay, so Amazon Prime is the easiest and fastest way to get anything delivered, but there's so much more.
Whatever you love, that's what Prime is.

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Speaker 16 Novel.

Speaker 16 Hey, listener. In this episode, we'll be talking a lot about acts of violence and murder, including serial killers.
We'll be talking about grave exhumation too.

Speaker 16 We're also going to meet some of the people who freely give up their time to help bring closure to the families of missing, murdered, and unidentified people.

Speaker 16 This is the kind of work our charity partner, DNA Doe Project, does. I'd encourage you to check them out if you're affected by the themes of this episode.

Speaker 16 They work with law enforcement to identify Jane and John Does using genetic genealogy in the hopes of reuniting the bodies of unidentified people with their families.

Speaker 16 You can find them at dnadoeproject.org. And as usual, you're probably going to hear me swearing.
It's the habit of a lifetime, so there's no stopping it now.

Speaker 16 I want to tell you a story about an island, an unassuming, mile-long island in New York with a complicated, buried history.

Speaker 16 Today, Heart Island is the final resting place for over 1 million people.

Speaker 16 It's the USA's largest public cemetery. The place where locals are buried if they're unclaimed, unidentified, or sometimes because their families just can't afford to bury them closer to home.

Speaker 16 Back in the early 1600s, this land belonged to the Simonoi Nation. They were indigenous to the coastal areas of the Long Island Sound in modern-day New York and Connecticut.

Speaker 16 But then the Europeans arrived and massacred the local native communities.

Speaker 16 Eventually, the Siwanoi were left with no choice. They sold Heart Island and 50,000 acres of other land to a British physician named Thomas Pell.

Speaker 16 Since then, it's played host to a prisoner of war camp, workhouses, a yellow fever quarantine site, and a psychiatric hospital.

Speaker 16 That is, until it became the public cemetery it is today.

Speaker 16 Which brings us to our story, our Jane Doe, our lost sister.

Speaker 16 When you start out an investigation like ours, Trying to find someone who seemingly dropped off the map decades ago, it's hard to know where to begin.

Speaker 16 You find there's a lot more stumbling around in the dark than you expected. But occasionally, those stumbles, well, they turn up something worthwhile.

Speaker 16 Like a few months ago, when my producer Anna came across a charity called the Heart Island Project,

Speaker 16 they make it their mission to tell the stories of the people who are buried there. On their website, there's currently 75,783 profiles, which include everyone's basic burial information.

Speaker 16 Friends and loved ones can add anecdotes and photos to the profiles so that even in death, their loved ones can be brought to life.

Speaker 16 And that?

Speaker 16 Well, that's something that the girlfriends can get behind.

Speaker 16 So Anna called the charity and asked if they knew where our Jane Doe's remains could have gone after the medical examiners confirmed that she was not Gail Katz.

Speaker 19 If they didn't know who the torso belonged to, then it would automatically be buried on Heart Island.

Speaker 19 Because all human remains that are not released to a private funeral director are buried on Heart Island.

Speaker 16 Okay, so without a doubt, at some point that torso was buried on Heart Island.

Speaker 19 Yes.

Speaker 16 Dear listener, I think we just found our first real lead.

Speaker 16 I'm Carol Fisher, and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the girlfriend's our lost sister, episode 3, Lost and Found.

Speaker 16 After Melinda Hunt, the founder of the Heart Island Project, told us that our Jane Doe is more than likely on Heart Island, we asked her for some help.

Speaker 19 What I could do is go back and do a manual search for that time period in the ledgers to see if there's a torso listed.

Speaker 16 By ledgers, Melinda means Heart Island's burial records.

Speaker 19 What is the timeframe for the search?

Speaker 16 Literally, all we know is that it was in September 98 that she was identified as not Gail.

Speaker 16 It was during the lead-up to Bob Bierenbaum's trial for the murder of Gail Katz that the torso was confirmed not to be Gail. And so the official status was returned to Jane Doe.

Speaker 19 I would search starting September 98 through August 2000 and a B female torso.

Speaker 19 White or black?

Speaker 16 White.

Speaker 19 And what's the age?

Speaker 16 Around 30.

Speaker 19 Okay.

Speaker 16 Obviously unknown.

Speaker 16 Melinda agreed to look into it for us. To be honest, we weren't that hopeful, but she assured Anna that if our girl was there, she'd find her.

Speaker 19 It's not that common to see a torso listed.

Speaker 16 Is it not?

Speaker 19 No. It's not common at all.

Speaker 16 With that, Melinda starts diving diving into the Heart Island paperwork to see what she can uncover.

Speaker 16 It's going to take a lot of painstaking work, individually examining page after page of handwritten ledgers. It could take weeks, maybe more.

Speaker 16 So once again, we're left waiting for an email to come through that could change everything.

Speaker 16 In the meantime, Anna spends night after night in the glow of her laptop screen trawling the missing person's databases for anything that could lead us to our girl.

Speaker 16 Torso,

Speaker 16 New York City, 1989. Unidentified bodies database.
ME case number

Speaker 16 R89563. Okay, so nothing comes up on that medical examiner number.
Okay.

Speaker 16 Fucking Fucking hell. They all look like such serial killers.
Sminging. Seven.
Horrible.

Speaker 16 I'm gonna. Wikipedia.
The state of New York, 1989. Female missing persons report.
Oh, this is interesting. Oh, wow.
One of them was found on Staten Island. Unidentified.
But I wanted a torso.

Speaker 16 This just isn't working. Um.

Speaker 16 And then

Speaker 16 an email from Melinda. Anna gets the gang together on an emergency call.

Speaker 16 Oh, oh my gosh. What?

Speaker 16 She's clearly excited, but frankly, I don't know what the fuck's going on. Tell me what it fucking says.
Oh my god, wait. Page two, row 12.
Is everyone there? Oh, wait. I'm on the wrong page.

Speaker 16 Oh, my God.

Speaker 16 Attached to the email are some hazy photocopies of the handwritten Heart Island ledgers. It's pages and pages of names, dates, locations of death, and burial permit numbers.

Speaker 16 And there's one entry in particular that's standing out, even to me. Oh, oh my god, wait, oh my god, wait, wait, what?

Speaker 16 Here's what it says: Unknown female, age 20, date of permit, August 24th, 2000, date of death, May 21st, 1989, on Front Street. That's exactly when and where the torso of our Jane Doe first appeared.

Speaker 16 Down Down to the specific street.

Speaker 16 And the date of permit, basically when the torso was buried on Hart Island, was August 24th, 2000, which is the same year that a certain fuckhead named Bob Bierenbaum was convicted for the murder of Gail Katz.

Speaker 16 Holy shit.

Speaker 16 But before we get too ahead of ourselves, Anna phones Melinda to see what she thinks.

Speaker 19 A match is a match. The date of death is correct.
and the location is correct, and you know this person was unidentified. That's a match.

Speaker 16 Dare we say it? That it's really our girl?

Speaker 16 After over a year's worth of investigation, it looks like we finally caught up with her. And now that we found her, we don't want to waste any more time.

Speaker 16 So, we're going to pay her a visit. It's time to go to Heart Island.

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Speaker 16 Hey, it's Anna Sinfield here, host of The Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer, which is out right now.

Speaker 16 You can listen to this brand new season plus all episodes of the Girlfriend Season 1, Season 2, and The Girlfriend Spotlight ad-free and one week before everyone else by signing up to an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription.

Speaker 16 Available exclusively on Apple podcasts. And that's not all.
Because The Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer has been selected as one of Apple's summer listens, we're offering you a 30-day free trial.

Speaker 16 It's a limited time offer though, so you gotta act quick. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

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Speaker 16 They only allow visitors to Heart Island once a fortnight. So after finding an entry for our lost sister in the ledgers, we booked the next available slot to visit.

Speaker 16 But while we found her grave site, our job isn't done yet. She's listed as an unknown, and what we really want to know is who she is.

Speaker 16 So, we call some experts to ask how we can go about identifying her.

Speaker 19 It's a simple process to do an exhumation of a doe.

Speaker 16 And then we just somebody just takes a sample and

Speaker 16 we go.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 16 This is Bob and Tracy from from our friends at DNA DOE, the volunteer-run organization that uses genetic genealogy to identify unknown people.

Speaker 16 In other words, they test DNA against other people that they have in their systems to build potential family trees and connect unidentified people with their loved ones.

Speaker 16 Now, we should be able to get this kind of DNA information from the medical examiners. But as we heard in our last episode, they're not being very forthcoming.

Speaker 16 Luckily, DNA dough are the next best thing.

Speaker 19 Basically, if you were looking to go the genealogy route, you would need to have the sample sent to a lab. They would create a profile.

Speaker 19 That profile would then be uploaded to GenMatch and or Family Tree DNA and then try to make the identification of who that torso belonged to.

Speaker 16 Finding our Jane Doe's family would be a dream come true. But as always, there's a catch.
And it's not really expensive.

Speaker 19 It varies with the DNA Joe project. We tend to offer some funding options.
We're all volunteers, so we volunteer our services. There's also grants sometimes, so there's money available.

Speaker 19 There are options where it's less expensive, but typically

Speaker 19 usually around $5,000.

Speaker 16 Okay, we'll go find some DNA. It's easy, right?

Speaker 16 Just go get it.

Speaker 19 It's not that hard, right?

Speaker 16 Just go get it.

Speaker 16 Shortly after the call with DNA Doe, Anna finds herself on the edge of the Bronx, standing in the freezing rain, waiting to board a ferry. Hi, again.
Hi, how are you feeling?

Speaker 16 Next to her, bundled up in a hat and gloves, is Gail Katz's sister, Elaine.

Speaker 16 Elaine spent nine years grieving beside Gail's grave when she believed the torso inside the coffin belonged to her sister. Elaine has never had the closure she deserves.

Speaker 16 Gail's body was never found and it might never be.

Speaker 16 Even all these years after our Jane Doe's torso was removed from Gail's grave, Elaine still feels a connection to this woman. It's why she's come today so she can pay her respects.

Speaker 16 Good morning to everybody.

Speaker 16 First and foremost, even if this is your first, second, third trip, we would like to welcome everyone to Hart Island.

Speaker 16 We would like to express our deepest condolence to you and your family and we hope this trip brings you some sort of comfort or closure.

Speaker 16 Together along with the clusters of families holding flowers, soft toys and photos, Elaine and Anna board the ferry.

Speaker 16 On a nice summer's day the outside deck is probably filled with people. But today, with the rough waves and biting wind, everyone is squeezed inside like sardines.

Speaker 16 The island is only a short distance away, but it's obscured from view by a thick, eerie fog. It feels sort of fitting.

Speaker 16 After a 15-minute ride, the boat suddenly jolts as it makes contact with the dock on the other side.

Speaker 16 The weather isn't much better off the boat. It's gray and could probably be described as miserable.
But luckily, Elaine doesn't mind.

Speaker 16 I want this to have

Speaker 16 the gloom, be sitting, the cemetery.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we can probably get a little cold.

Speaker 16 You're not allowed to just walk around Heart Island. Even if you were, it's so big and the graves are so many that you'd probably never find what you were looking for.

Speaker 16 So everyone is funneled onto a bus and dropped off at their pre-booked destination.

Speaker 16 The bus itself is small and crowded. Mourners sit next to each other, sharing stories of their loved ones.

Speaker 16 Anna and Elaine get off the bus. Waiting for them is Melinda Hunt from the Heart Island Project.
She's agreed to show them around.

Speaker 16 They put a little yellow stake in the shot.

Speaker 16 What's amazing can be.

Speaker 16 And there, just a few meters away from the bus is a small wooden marker in the ground.

Speaker 16 No tombstones, no names, no flowers.

Speaker 16 I'm not sure what we were expecting. After all this time, she really does feel like a sister to us.
So finding her grave is such a significant moment.

Speaker 16 But here, she's just another body stacked three deep in a plot of 150.

Speaker 16 It's not the ending we imagined or hoped for. It's honestly just sad.

Speaker 16 Standing at the graveside, all three women fall into silence.

Speaker 16 I am ashamed to admit that I closed the door on this woman in 2000.

Speaker 16 I didn't want to take on

Speaker 16 a new challenge,

Speaker 16 but having no closure, it kills you.

Speaker 16 It is an unbearable burden.

Speaker 16 When the girlfriends

Speaker 16 said to me, let's identify the torso. Let's identify who is she.
Let's bring closure to another family. Let's open this door.

Speaker 16 I thought that was just something that I wanted to be a part of.

Speaker 16 After a short while, the bus reappears and a guard gestures for the ladies to get back on board. And then after all this lead up and barely a few words, it's time to go.

Speaker 16 Everyone else here knows who they're visiting, but we still have no idea whose grave that was. We don't even know her name.

Speaker 16 Anna's thoughts return to disinterring the torso for DNA testing. There's something about having stood in front of her grave that makes the thought of exhumation no longer abstract, but very real.

Speaker 16 And this reality, it's not a comfortable one because our lost sister has already been through so much, dug up and reburied over and over.

Speaker 16 And while our intentions are genuine and good, maybe she's finally at peace here on this island.

Speaker 16 But can we really walk away never knowing her story, never knowing her name?

Speaker 16 Just as we think we're left with no option but to disturb her once again, we get another email.

Speaker 16 It's from the New York City Department of Social Services, which manages Heart Island. They found some updated ledgers.
There's been a development.

Speaker 16 They don't understand what it means. If you look at cause of death, they've put a new little entry in there which says disinterred for OCME on August 16th of 2013.

Speaker 16 It says our Jane Doe's torso was disinterred once again, but this time from Heart Island in 2013, 11 years ago. She wasn't even there when Anna and Elaine visited her grave.

Speaker 16 There's nothing on the ledger to suggest that she was ever reburied on Heart Island.

Speaker 16 So where the fuck did she go?

Speaker 2 Let's be real.

Speaker 3 Life happens.

Speaker 4 Kids spill.

Speaker 5 Pets shed.

Speaker 6 And accidents are inevitable.

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Speaker 6 Neat flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space, whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment.

Speaker 13 Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200,000 happy customers.

Speaker 10 It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa.

Speaker 4 Visit washablefas.com today and save.

Speaker 3 That's washable sofas.com.

Speaker 14 Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 16 Hey, it's Anna Sinfield here, host of The Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer, which is out right now.

Speaker 16 You can listen to this brand new season plus all episodes of the Girlfriend Season 1, Season 2, and The Girlfriend Spotlight ad-free and one week before everyone else by signing up to an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 16 And that's not all. Because the Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer has been selected as one of Apple's summer listens, we're offering you a 30-day free trial.

Speaker 16 It's a limited time offer, though, so you gotta act quick. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

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Speaker 16 After learning the bombshell news that our lost sister was disinterred from Heart Island in 2013, we're back to square one

Speaker 16 again.

Speaker 16 It says on the ledger that the torso was disinterred by our old friends, the office of the chief medical examiner. So we reach out once more and ask them why.

Speaker 16 But we do have a theory.

Speaker 16 When our lost sister was exhumed from Gail Katz's grave in 1998, they kept her DNA profile on record.

Speaker 16 This is a common practice at the medical examiners as it means Jane and John Does can still be identified years after their cases have gone cold.

Speaker 16 So if our girl, an unknown woman, was disinterred on Hart Island, a place where unidentified bodies are buried, you have to ask yourself, why?

Speaker 16 You wouldn't just disinter a body unless you knew who it belonged to, or at the very least had a strong suspicion.

Speaker 16 This suggests to us that not only could she have been identified, but she could be part of a criminal investigation, which also means there could be a suspect in her murder.

Speaker 16 We've always been inclined not to center any perpetrator on this show, and we stand by that decision. But maybe if we figure out who killed our lost sister, it might lead us to her identity.

Speaker 16 Which is why Anna finds herself in Brooklyn. Hi.
Hi!

Speaker 16 You saw me looking lost. I was right outside.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I was just trying

Speaker 16 a million things real quick.

Speaker 16 Anna's meeting a man called Raul Montero, who, by the way, can put together a wonderful fruit platter.

Speaker 16 Got a little spread, so whatever. Make yourself at home.

Speaker 21 Whatever you need.

Speaker 16 This is so sweet. Nice to meet you, though.
It's nice to meet you too. Raul is part citizen sleuth, part victims advocate.
He's best known online as Ketch Lisk.

Speaker 16 Lisk stands for the Long Island Serial Killer. That name first appeared in the media in 2011 after the discovery of multiple sets of remains on Gilgo Beach in Long Island.

Speaker 16 Tens of murders in New York York and Long Island have been connected both officially and unofficially to this unknown killer.

Speaker 16 When we asked our listeners to write in with your tips on how we could identify our Jane Doe, the Long Island serial killer came up several times as a suspect worth considering.

Speaker 16 And that's why Anna has come to see Raul, someone who's obsessed with trying to identify Lisk and as his name says, catch them.

Speaker 16 Raul started collecting data of missing and murdered people and entering it onto a map. His investigation soon outgrew the Long Island serial killer, though.

Speaker 16 He has now logged practically every case in New York since 1914. He even has a marker for our lost sister.
It's the only database we've ever seen her listed on.

Speaker 21 I am

Speaker 21 breaking 7,000 locations that represent a person.

Speaker 21 It's just never going to be finished.

Speaker 16 For our lost sister and for the nearly 7,000 other people on this map, Raul has outlined what little is known about them. A

Speaker 21 dark red heart or a dark blue heart represent an adult male or female that their body has been found, remains have been found.

Speaker 21 A dark red or a dark blue icon represent a male or a female adult that's gone missing.

Speaker 16 It's pretty pretty impressive visually.

Speaker 16 If you want to check it out, we put a link in the episode description.

Speaker 21 There's also a light color blue and a light color red on both of those icons that represent minors.

Speaker 16 Raul would be the first to admit that this has become more of an obsession, one that he finds it difficult to step away from.

Speaker 21 It's like more people on the map, more information.

Speaker 21 I can see it, I can match it, and I can feel some sort of closure.

Speaker 16 Well, I mean, maybe this is the perfect segue for me to show you some stuff that we have

Speaker 16 about the.

Speaker 16 Anna pulls out a folder of all the information we have on our Jane Doe. So the torso washed up May 21st, 1989.

Speaker 16 We know from the autopsy report that they believed that the doe had been murdered a few months prior. So that would be the time of death would have been about February 1989.

Speaker 16 Anna starts listing out facts about our lost sister like her predicted age and the condition of her body but they zero in on where she ended up on the shore of Staten Island Front Street Pier number three.

Speaker 16 This gets Raoul thinking about where she came from.

Speaker 21 You know where's that water flow at that time?

Speaker 16 If you follow the tidal path, it suggests that a body that washes up on that side of Staten Island could very likely have been dumped upstream towards Manhattan.

Speaker 21 The East River will actually open up into the Long Island Sound, which

Speaker 21 it's the tides that really predicate where a torso might go.

Speaker 16 There are two rivers in particular running through Manhattan that naturally funnel out into Staten Island, the East River and the Hudson.

Speaker 16 So that's one lead. On to the other one, the Long Island Serial Killer.

Speaker 16 Though his potential killings go back decades, they only garnered attention in late 2010.

Speaker 21 Shannon Gilbert, an escort, was out on Long Island in Oak Beach to see a client. Within a matter of hours of being in that house,

Speaker 21 she ran from there screaming. She was never seen alive again.

Speaker 21 During the ultimate search for Shannon Gilbert, the remains of 10 bodies were found.

Speaker 16 Most of the bodies found along that stretch of land near Gilco Beach in Long Island were female sex workers.

Speaker 21 Jane, those that find themselves tossed aside on some highway on Long Island.

Speaker 21 Like so many other victims, were ignored for so many years because

Speaker 21 you're a minority, because you're a drug addict, because you're a sex worker.

Speaker 21 And in that mix,

Speaker 21 serial killers

Speaker 16 prowl.

Speaker 16 To this day, some of the victims found on the beach have never been identified. And until recently, there was no perpetrator identified either.
For years, the police struggled to nail a key suspect.

Speaker 16 But that changed in 2022.

Speaker 16 Going back over the evidence, the police zeroed in on a witness statement that described seeing one of the victims getting into a Chevrolet avalanche on the night of her murder.

Speaker 16 This ultimately led the authorities to one local man, Rex Hurman.

Speaker 16 Hurman's phone records were examined and he was found to have used burner phones to arrange meetings with some of the women whose bodies were found near Gilco Beach.

Speaker 16 Finally, police found an old pizza box thrown away by Hurman and tested the DNA left on the crust. It matched a hair found near one of the bodies.

Speaker 16 Herman is currently awaiting trial for four of the murders, although some suspect that he could be responsible for many more dating all the way back to the 1980s.

Speaker 16 Do you think that there's a chance that

Speaker 16 J-Doe could be a LISPS victim?

Speaker 21 I think there's always a chance. You look at early LIS victims who were dismembered and scattered.
We look at Rex's building permits from the 90s and 2000s, and he's on Staten Island.

Speaker 16 So the Long Island serial killer sounds like a significant lead, but he's not the only one.

Speaker 16 There's another infamous serial killer that Anna wants to run by Raul as a possible suspect, one that she came across in one of her nighttime sleuthing sessions.

Speaker 16 Joel Rifkin,

Speaker 16 American serial killer who was sentenced to 203 years.

Speaker 16 My God,

Speaker 16 imprisoned for the murders of nine women.

Speaker 16 Oh my God.

Speaker 16 When it comes to New York serial killers, Rifkin rings a few alarm bells for us. He admitted to killing and dismembering his first victim victim in March of 1989, and that's not the only coincidence.

Speaker 16 The head and the legs were found around the time of the murder, but nobody knew what happened to the torso.

Speaker 16 As Anna lays out the similarities between our Jane Doe's case and Rifkin's first victim, she can see Raul's cogs turning.

Speaker 21 Do you mind if I send the text? Yeah. I might get something right away.

Speaker 16 What?

Speaker 16 Who do you know?

Speaker 16 Raul won't give Anna a name, but he knows a detective who was involved in Joel Rifkin's case. He fires off a text and not long after, a reply comes through.

Speaker 21 She did answer.

Speaker 16 The detective asked for more information, so they sent her everything we have on Our Jane Doe, including the Heart Island ledger.

Speaker 16 When Anna leaves, Raul promises to update her as soon as anything comes through, which thankfully doesn't take very long.

Speaker 16 Later that evening, there's a text from Raul. He forwarded Anna a message from the detective, responding to all the evidence we gave them and our suspicions about Joel Rifkin.

Speaker 16 They simply say,

Speaker 16 there is your answer.

Speaker 16 Coming up next on the girlfriend's, our lost sister.

Speaker 21 He said that he could only remember her name as Susie.

Speaker 16 To his horror, Susie suddenly popped up on the couch in a last-stitch effort to salvage her life. Dear Anne, I've been searching for you for over a year.

Speaker 21 Is this going to be the person that we're looking for? Is this the answer?

Speaker 16 The Girlfriend's Our Lost Sister is produced by Novel for iHeart podcasts. For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

Speaker 16 The show is hosted by me, Carol Fisher, and our chief investigator is Mindy Shapiro. To find me on social media, search Carol A.
Fisher. That's Carol with an E.

Speaker 16 The season is written and produced by Anna Sinfield and Lee Meyer. Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr.
The editor is Joe Wheeler. Max O'Brien is our executive producer.

Speaker 16 Our fact checker is Dania Suleiman. Production management from Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolf.
Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Nicholas Alexander. Additional engineering by Daniel Kempson.

Speaker 16 Music supervision by Anna Sinfield and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed and performed by Louisa Gerstein and produced by Louisa Gerstein and Nicholas Alexander.

Speaker 16 The series artwork was designed by Christina Leenpool. Story development by Anna Sinfield.
Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development.

Speaker 16 Our executive producers at iHeart Podcast are Katrina Norvell and Nikki Etor.

Speaker 16 Special thanks to Allie Cantor, Carrie Lieberman, and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcast, as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME.

Speaker 16 And a special shout out to Vince Hayward, who's my life partner in True Crime, for taking on the role of girlfriend's confidant and lead tech support.

Speaker 16 I've got you

Speaker 16 Novel.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.