The Girlfriends S1/E4: Phone Calls from Manhattan

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Speaker 37 And finally, what if your Wi-Fi was like the smartest wi-fi yeah it's wi-fi that is so smart it makes everything work better together xfinity imagine that not all group chats are the same just like not all atoms are the same adam brody for example uses whatsapp to plan his grandma's birthday using video calls polls to choose a gift and hd photos to document a family moment to remember all in one group chat Makes grandma's birthday her best one yet.

Speaker 37 But Adam Scott group messages with an app that isn't WhatsApp. And so the photo invite came through so blurry, he never even knew about the party.

Speaker 42 And grandma still won't talk to me.

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Speaker 36 Novel.

Speaker 38 Hey, listener. In this episode, there's mention of murder, domestic violence, drug abuse, and a dead body.
But I do not go into graphic detail.

Speaker 38 You also hear from a tenacious cast of women and friends whose fight for justice is truly, truly inspiring.

Speaker 38 If you do listen and are impacted by any of our themes, you can reach out to No More, a domestic violence charity we've partnered with.

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That's n-o-m-o-r-e dot org.

Speaker 40 Mindy, a little louder. Hello.

Speaker 39 Hello. Perfect.

Speaker 36 So we're all on record? Yeah.

Speaker 40 And there goes your

Speaker 43 recording.

Speaker 43 Let's put the dogs upstairs.

Speaker 40 I'm going to put them in the car. Give me a second.

Speaker 45 They like the car.

Speaker 38 She's putting her dogs in the car.

Speaker 22 Who does that?

Speaker 38 Mindy.

Speaker 44 Yes, Carol.

Speaker 36 We're starting right now.

Speaker 38 Are you sitting?

Speaker 46 Thankfully, yes.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 10 It does sound like you.

Speaker 46 Smart and petite and attractive.

Speaker 38 You know what else she had in common with us, with you and I and our women friends?

Speaker 43 Dark-haired Jewish women.

Speaker 39 Yeah.

Speaker 38 Besides dark-haired Jewish women with great personalities, she not only thought, she believed that she could fix him. And you and I have been there with men.

Speaker 46 I can relate to that, but

Speaker 10 I

Speaker 46 don't think I can can fix them.

Speaker 46 I think I can fix me

Speaker 10 to adapt to them.

Speaker 46 And I wonder who was fixing whom here.

Speaker 39 Yeah, that's a great point.

Speaker 38 You know, the other thing I'm not proud of is that

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But as I've come to know Gail,

Speaker 38 as I've come to get acquainted with Elaine, we all have a very common bond and all could have been great friends.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 47 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 38 I went kicking and screaming.

Speaker 46 So there is a lot of baggage that we carry.

Speaker 47 Yeah.

Speaker 38 You know, part of me doing this, Mindy, is about like

Speaker 38 it's just time to own my story for Christ's sake. The domestic abuse or the controlling behaviors of men.
It doesn't have to define most women. May that just be part of our journey?

Speaker 38 May not that be a complete story?

Speaker 46 You know, your definition of self changes daily.

Speaker 46 It's like Hamilton, who tells your story.

Speaker 46 Because after you can't tell your own story, who tells your story?

Speaker 38 I look back on that time and even now, I mean, you supported me then and you support me now.

Speaker 51 I will always support you because you're my crazy friend.

Speaker 40 I know.

Speaker 38 I miss you. I love you.
I love you too. And get the dogs out of the freaking car, would you?

Speaker 38 From the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio, I'm Carol Fisher and you're listening to the girlfriends, episode four,

Speaker 36 phone calls from Manhattan.

Speaker 38 This is what I found out about the days, months, and years in New York after Gail went missing.

Speaker 38 In the late afternoon on Monday, July 8th, 1985, Gail's sister Elaine called her parents from a pay phone from the corner of Broadway and 75th Street.

Speaker 38 She was letting them know that she was headed back to law school in DC.

Speaker 42 And my mother said to me, have you spoken to Gail? Do you know where Gail is? And I said, no, I'm...

Speaker 42 Driving in a car, you know, to Manhattan. Then I'm my way to D.C.
What's wrong? And she said, Bob said that she went out and never came back.

Speaker 42 And they had a birthday party in Jersey for his sister's child and she never came home.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 42 by marriage in New Jersey was very strange.

Speaker 38 Elaine put the phone down and got back into the car to start the five-hour drive back to D.C.

Speaker 38 And then, over the course of 24 hours, everyone else's phones in New York started ringing.

Speaker 38 Everyone was saying the same thing.

Speaker 38 Where is Gail?

Speaker 51 Elaine called me and asked me if I had talked to Gail.

Speaker 52 And I was like, what do you mean if I talked to Gail?

Speaker 41 No, why?

Speaker 38 Abby Bruce, Gail's cousin.

Speaker 52 Slow down, slow down, what are you talking about? She went out for a jog. She hasn't come home.
It's been since yesterday. What do you mean she went for a jog and she never came home?

Speaker 52 What did she have on? She had on her running shorts and her t-shirt.

Speaker 51 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,

Speaker 39 called my mother, mother,

Speaker 36 who also was like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 52 What do you mean she's missing?

Speaker 51 So my mother hung up from me and called my aunt.

Speaker 38 But when Abby's mom called Sylvia, she was already in hysterics.

Speaker 52 I need to find my child.

Speaker 52 We need to find her.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 No one had heard from her.

Speaker 38 Next, I get a call with Denise, Gail's best friend, but it's not Elaine or Abby or Sylvia.

Speaker 53 He called me.

Speaker 38 It's Bob.

Speaker 48 Is Gail with you? What?

Speaker 48 No.

Speaker 54 Bush, she never came home.

Speaker 54 That's when I said, oh my God.

Speaker 54 I knew right away. I said to my husband at that time, he killed her.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 He told the officer that he had 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Now, EDP is shorthand for emotionally disturbed person.

Speaker 38 Gail is officially designated as New York's missing person squad number 7816, and her case is assigned to Detective Tom O'Malley.

Speaker 38 Tom's first task is to start interviewing people: Gail's family, her college friends, Denise, Elaine, and they are all talking about Bob.

Speaker 42 Bob is acting weird.

Speaker 42 Like some TV station

Speaker 42 wants to put it on the six o'clock news, like 2-4 or 7. 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.

Speaker 42 I mean, he lives in Manhattan where the TV studios are. This is his wife.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But here he is talking about Gail in 1985.

Speaker 55 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.

Speaker 55 What do you think happened to your wife? I don't know. I don't know, but I'm worried.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 It's dated July 13th, just six days after Gail went missing.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 When asked of any incident with the cat, I received the same abrupt type answer, no.

Speaker 38 As we concluded, Dr. Bierenbaum 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?

Speaker 38 After that interview, Tom reached out to Elaine.

Speaker 42 And he said, Bob was not forthcoming. It's so weird.
Bob doesn't want my help.

Speaker 42 Bob does not want me to find your sister.

Speaker 42 If my sister was leaving him and going to live with some guy, going to live with some girlfriend, going to Bora Bora or wherever the heck else she was doing,

Speaker 42 the first one she would have called would have been me.

Speaker 42 She might not have called me to admit that she was going to stay married to the psychopath,

Speaker 42 but she certainly would have called me. to tell me she was leaving him.

Speaker 42 And I would have been there to do all the things she needed me to do. I mean, please.

Speaker 8 She was dead.

Speaker 42 She was dead or he hurt her terribly and he had her hidden somewhere.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 The portrait of Gail is in black and white from the photocopier. In it, her hair is layered and shoulder length.

Speaker 38 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,

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 I'm telling you, this gives me chills. It just, it must have been terrifying.

Speaker 54 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.

Speaker 42 They papered the park with missing posters.

Speaker 42 Except

Speaker 42 my mother told me it felt weird.

Speaker 42 It felt like there were two camps. There was Bob and his friends, and there was my mother and father and Gail's friends.
And it didn't feel that they had the same mission.

Speaker 38 At one point, Bob was handing out posters to passing joggers with Gail's college friend Mary Ann.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Mary Ann'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?

Speaker 38 How do you know Gail isn't lying at the bottom of that reservoir?

Speaker 42 At one point, the New York Post 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.

Speaker 42 as if he doesn't want people to see him.

Speaker 42 Just like he didn't want to go on camera.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Where is Gail?

Speaker 38 When did you last see her? What were you arguing about?

Speaker 27 He acted like, oh, so upset.

Speaker 54 Gail's missing.

Speaker 47 Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 38 The group of women started looking around for clues.

Speaker 54 And that's when we said, where's the rug that used to be here?

Speaker 36 Because it was a beautiful Asian rug.

Speaker 54 And Bob said, oh, it had to be cleaned.

Speaker 38 The cat got sick.

Speaker 56 We all looked at each other like, what?

Speaker 36 But he was so stone cold.

Speaker 54 It's not as if he displayed any emotion at all. So there was like nothing to react to.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 It must have been heartbreaking.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 42 Listen, I'm not going to say my sister didn't do any drugs. My sister like had patience and she was a graduate student and then she had this prestigious internship.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 38 Everything the Katz family knew started to stack up.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 With only a week or two left before sitting for her bar exam, Elaine had to make a hard call.

Speaker 42 I'll never forget I was taking the Pieper

Speaker 42 Law Review class, and I called John Pieper and I told him what I was going through.

Speaker 42 He said, Don't take the bar exam. You can't do that.
Which was sad for me.

Speaker 38 For Elaine, this was no longer a missing person's 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.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 42 It's because the facts surrounding the situation made it impossible.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 42 And I began the

Speaker 50 one to two-year process

Speaker 42 of proving

Speaker 42 that Bob

Speaker 42 killed my sister.

Speaker 2 There's a lot going on in Hollywood.

Speaker 3 How are you supposed to stay on top of it all?

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Speaker 5 Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives.

Speaker 9 Where do you see the business actually heading?

Speaker 10 Featuring the iconic journalists of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton.

Speaker 12 The only constant in Hollywood is change.

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Speaker 35 Sometimes the truth is just a matter of perspective.

Speaker 42 There's my notes on what I did.

Speaker 42 These are all the notes on all the phone calls that I've had.

Speaker 42 Ah, the missing poster's in here.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 42 It took the form of a deep relationship with Tom O'Malley and literally walking the beat with him. I mean, sitting there and missing persons with him, brainstorming with him.

Speaker 38 They would talk about the calls Tom would get from people responding to the missing persons' reports.

Speaker 38 A man who claimed to see Gail sitting in a yoga position in front of a brown stone near Washington Square. A doorman from an apartment on 52nd Street thought he saw her, but later he changed his mind.

Speaker 38 And a man said he saw her and her friend at HH Bagels on East 81st Street. She was spotted uptown on the subway, downtown through Soho, and wandering around Tudor City.

Speaker 38 None of these sightings could be verified by the detectives, but they also could not be dismissed.

Speaker 38 Ultimately, though, the detectives already had a pretty good hunch who the last person to see Gail was.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 38 Les is a private investigator that Bob had hired to search for Gail.

Speaker 42 And as he walked away, Tommy said, yeah, he's been hired to, you know, hide evidence.

Speaker 42 Bob knew he did it. Bob wasn't hiring someone to help find Gail.
He knew exactly where Gail was.

Speaker 38 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 tact.

Speaker 38 She offered to pick up some of Gail's stuff from Bob's place.

Speaker 42 I was hoping

Speaker 42 that I could engage him in some way, and I thought that it sounds so idiotic now, he might break down.

Speaker 42 And I'll never forget, I got up there, and all of my sister's stuff

Speaker 50 was in big trash bags.

Speaker 50 He didn't want her underwear, he didn't want her perfume, he wanted her bike, her skis.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 38 I called my aunt B on the phone and I said, B, tell him he has to give me the bowl.

Speaker 38 And I

Speaker 42 handed him the phone and he let me take the bowl. And I realized i had made the biggest mistake had i left the stuff it may have haunted him

Speaker 42 instead i was taking out the trash

Speaker 38 by this point bob had been interviewed a few times by detective o'mally and his partner detective dalsis

Speaker 38 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 person's case.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Time passed and still nothing. The Katz family endured their first family gatherings without Gail.

Speaker 38 their first Yom Kippur, the first Passover, and with each passing day, the family's grief cemented, and the wider public forgot about Gail.

Speaker 38 So Elaine started writing letters to the editors and journalists of New York papers from the perspective of her grieving mother.

Speaker 42 My name is Sylvia Katz. My daughter, Gail Katz-Birama, disappeared from her apartment.
Nobody has heard from her.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 42 Part of what I was trying to do is really, in good faith, get evidence.

Speaker 42 Part of what I was trying to do, if I couldn't get evidence, is make sure that every single place that Bob was,

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 42 I used a reverse phone book at the New York Public Library. This is way before Happy Webb stuff,

Speaker 42 sending a letter to every single person in the high-rise apartment building.

Speaker 38 Elaine started coming up with her own leads, talking to people the police hadn't even interviewed.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 42 And what was interesting about that day was how quiet it was.

Speaker 42 Except she heard furniture moving.

Speaker 38 But it wasn't enough.

Speaker 42 There came a time, the missing persons and the homicide bureau, and

Speaker 42 they all put their hands up and said, we just don't have the evidence, lady.

Speaker 42 I remember thinking, double jeopardy. They're hoping for a better case.

Speaker 42 And if they do it now and they fail fail and they ever get really good evidence, he will be walking around with impunity, being able to say, I beat it.

Speaker 42 I think that really would have killed us.

Speaker 42 But my cousin, Hillard Weiss, worked for the Legal Aid Society, and he got the DA's office to investigate.

Speaker 38 In August 1986, a year and a month since Gail went missing, the case was passed on to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

Speaker 38 But after just one year, the investigation came to a halt and the case was dropped yet again.

Speaker 42 So at the point at which they said, we're not prosecuting, I had nothing left to lose. And I began a different campaign.

Speaker 42 I would call him and I would say,

Speaker 42 I know you killed my sister. Everyone knows you killed my sister.
And you're not going to get away with it.

Speaker 42 And I'm going to keep on leaving these messages.

Speaker 42 And every time you have a new girlfriend, she's going to hear these messages.

Speaker 42 I was dying for him to sue me for slander. We might not have head beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminal courtroom.
But if he sued me,

Speaker 42 I would get him under oath in a deposition in a civil suit.

Speaker 42 He would have to prove that I was lying

Speaker 42 so I could act with absolute impunity.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Even Bob continued to work at Maimonides Hospital where he now worked as a heart surgeon.

Speaker 53 I went back to work. I went through my daily routine.

Speaker 38 Denise, Gail's friend.

Speaker 53 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.

Speaker 54 And I, you know, I'd get this rush inside me like, is it Gail?

Speaker 54 You know, and of course I realized it wasn't, but I never stopped looking looking for her.

Speaker 54 So for a lot of years, it was still that feeling inside me that maybe she is alive. Maybe she is out there.

Speaker 38 Elaine decided that after three years of grief and anger, she needed to choose herself.

Speaker 42 It was during the summer of 1988, my father.

Speaker 42 had been hospitalized with heart disease. They discovered a massive brain tumor.

Speaker 42 That's around the time that I decided I had to live.

Speaker 42 I left Larry because he reminded me of Gail.

Speaker 38 Larry was Elaine's long-term boyfriend.

Speaker 42 I stopped allowing my mother to talk to me about my sister. I went on New York Magazine personal ads and found a husband, literally.

Speaker 38 And while Elaine was on her honeymoon with her new husband, a human torso washed up on the shores of Staten Island.

Speaker 38 A torso that they believe could belong to Gail.

Speaker 2 There's a lot going on in Hollywood.

Speaker 3 How are you supposed to stay on top of it all?

Speaker 4 Variety has the solution.

Speaker 5 Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives.

Speaker 9 Where do you see the business actually heading?

Speaker 10 Featuring the iconic journalists of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton.

Speaker 12 The only constant in Hollywood is change.

Speaker 5 Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Daily Variety, and listen now.

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Speaker 22 Add a little

Speaker 14 to your life.

Speaker 20 Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 41 We've all heard the stories. Missing persons, double lives, suspicious basements.
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Speaker 1 This is Andrea Gunning from Betrayal. Are there two sides to every story? Academy Award nominee Robin Wright stars in The Girlfriend on Prime September 10th.

Speaker 1 A spine-tingling psychological thriller that will make you question everything you think you know.

Speaker 1 Laura has the dream job, job, the perfect husband, and a son she'd die for. But when her beloved Daniel brings home his new girlfriend Cherry, played by Olivia Cook, something feels off.

Speaker 1 Is Cherry the sweet, innocent girl she appears to be? Or is there something more manipulative beneath the surface? And how far will a mother go to protect her son?

Speaker 1 Also starring Lori Davidson, the girlfriend is a twisted game of cat and mouse where nothing is what it seems and everyone has something to hide.

Speaker 1 Don't miss the girlfriend streaming exclusively on Prime September 10th.

Speaker 35 Sometimes the truth is just a matter of perspective.

Speaker 38 It was a calm day on Staten Island when the torso washed up just north of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

Speaker 38 She was carried in by the water and laid on the beach waiting to be found.

Speaker 38 Without overwhelming you with details, it was clear that she had been at sea for a while and that it was not her choice.

Speaker 38 This happened on May 21st, 1989, which makes it roughly four years since Gail went missing.

Speaker 38 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 and the shore, it seemed to match up enough to warrant further testing.

Speaker 38 And once again, Elaine had to put her own life to one side.

Speaker 42 The saga began of trying to

Speaker 42 identify the torso.

Speaker 42 They tried DNA testing, but it was in the water for so long. The DNA testing was not sophisticated enough back in 1989.

Speaker 42 And I remember

Speaker 42 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 a coccyx bone injury.

Speaker 42 And we looked far and wide. for those x-rays.

Speaker 50 We couldn't find them.

Speaker 42 Then we remembered that she had that injury when she was at NYU

Speaker 42 and she didn't have health insurance.

Speaker 42 So she used my health insurance card to get x-rays. And we got all these x-rays.

Speaker 42 And it was the radiology report of the torso

Speaker 42 comparing it to the x-rays that we found

Speaker 44 that sufficiently

Speaker 42 for the medical examiner allowed them

Speaker 42 to change

Speaker 42 Jane Doe torso on the death certificate to Gail Cad Spirambam.

Speaker 42 And finally,

Speaker 42 I felt that I found my sister and I had her and she was safe.

Speaker 38 A few months later, Gail's family finally had a burial.

Speaker 42 I remember there was a scene at the burial site

Speaker 42 because I wanted to open the coffin. I wanted to see my sister.

Speaker 45 And I

Speaker 42 cried and screamed.

Speaker 42 And people who were bigger than me, which wasn't so hard,

Speaker 42 physically restrained me.

Speaker 42 They would not let me see her.

Speaker 44 And we buried her.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 I'm sure it meant a lot to give Gail a place to rest. Usually Jewish burials take place within 24 hours, yet the Casses had to wait four years.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 42 My mother buried her daughter, and she was dead by June.

Speaker 38 Then, just six years later, Elaine's father, Manny Katz, also died from cancer, something he battled for years.

Speaker 38 He was buried next to his daughter and his wife in the Mount Zion Cemetery family plot in Queens.

Speaker 42 That's when I stopped. I could not

Speaker 44 leave my brother alone.

Speaker 42 So

Speaker 42 I promised myself that Bob would not kill me, too.

Speaker 38 But when Elaine Katz stops, she doesn't really stop.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 38 This is Abby Bruce, Elaine's cousin.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 39 She opened a law firm.

Speaker 51 I mean, she's an amazing person. But there was no question in my mind that she was never going to give up.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 50 You killed my sister.

Speaker 50 And I know you think you got away with it.

Speaker 42 I will always hound you and haunt you.

Speaker 45 And I will keep

Speaker 42 at the police.

Speaker 42 I will keep at the press.

Speaker 42 I will always find you as long as you are a licensed and registered physician. No matter where you go,

Speaker 42 I will find you.

Speaker 36 And thanks to me, he did go.

Speaker 38 Straight into my unsuspecting arms in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Speaker 38 But it didn't take long for him to run again.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 49 There was a period where there was a wall and he was writing snowblower injuries in the My Not newspaper.

Speaker 10 He was just a smart guy, but women found him creepy.

Speaker 42 I will never forget him saying, we have a cold case bureau and I'd like to open up Gail's case.

Speaker 42 We like to have the three-hour lunches, we like to have a cocktail after work, and we like investigating homicides.

Speaker 42 And I mentioned, you know, the torso, and I will never forget him saying, what torso?

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Our assistant producer is Julian Manugera-Patten, and our researcher is Madeline Parr.

Speaker 38 The editor is Veronica Simmons. Max O'Brien is our executive producer.
Our fact checker is Valeria Roca.

Speaker 38 Production management from Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolf.

Speaker 38 Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander.

Speaker 38 Music supervision by Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein.
Story development by Isaac Fisher. Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development.

Speaker 38 Special thanks to Sean Glynn, David Waters, Might Villy Raule, Katrina Noravelle, David Wasserman, and Beth Ann McAluso.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 36 Novel.

Speaker 15 Ah, smart water.

Speaker 35 Pure, crisp taste, perfectly refreshing.

Speaker 35 Wow, that's really good water. With electrolytes for taste, it's the kind of water that says, I have my life together.
I'm still pretending the laundry on the chair is part of the decor.

Speaker 35 Yet, here you are, making excellent hydration choices.

Speaker 32 I do feel more sophisticated.

Speaker 35 That's called having a taste for taste. Huh, a taste for taste.

Speaker 38 I like that. Smart water.

Speaker 35 For those with a taste for taste, grab yours today.

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Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.