Relisten to The Girlfriends S1, Ep 7: Cowabunga
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In November of 1998, shortly after the torso was removed from Gail's grave, Bob and Janet welcomed their first child into the world, a daughter. The club and I learned that Janet was pregnant when the DA came to Las Vegas. We talked about the baby every now and then, wondering when the due date was and what Bob would be like as a father. We didn't know anything, but my God, we were curious.

So can you imagine how I felt when my producer, Anna, tracked down their nannies? Hi. Sorry for hanging up on you. I just wanted to make sure it was free. Yeah. Good thinking. The Bierenbaums had two nannies, one for the day and one for the night. Hi. Hi. How are you doing? Good. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. Which means almost 24-hour visibility into Bob's North Dakota home.

Now, the phone recordings aren't so good, but this is definitely one of the most exciting moments of our investigation because knowing all I know now, it feels like everyone had an external view of Bob and Minot. They'd interact with him as a patient or a neighbor. It was rarely as intimate as someone sharing your home. I wanted to know how Bob was behaving behind closed doors as the DA prosecutors were closing in on him.

I also just wanted to know if Janet was okay and their daughter. I was more involved with Janet, but Bob would come in on Thursday or Fridays. This is Barb Cooper, the day nanny. I didn't feel real comfortable around either one of them necessarily, but I stuck it out. I loved the child and loved what I was doing. He was weird. He was bizarre. I've never met anyone like him before.

That's Cheryl Sherrick, the night nanny. She used to arrive in the evening and sleep in the basement with the baby, who at that point required feeding every two to three hours. The thing is, they never had a crib or anything. She slept in a car seat, which is not very comfortable for a baby. For Cheryl, the vibe of the house was just, well, off, especially when Bob was there. The house was always closed up.

I could never open the blinds or anything, and he wouldn't let us answer the door. To me, he was always kind of creepy. They loved him as a doctor here, but he would never treat anyone that smoked. He asked me if I smoked. If I did, they wouldn't hire me. Overall, the nanny seemed to remember a home a little like this.

The Bierenbaums lived in a town called Grand Forks. Bob would fly to work at the hospital in Minot and come back home for the weekends. So it was mostly just Janet, the nannies, and their baby. The nannies both described Janet as a loving mom who could at times also be a little emotionless, but they never saw anything bad happen between her and Bob.

When Janet got pregnant, she stopped working as a gynecologist and started studying law. She was also writing a bit on the side, something she'd done a little before, even once consulting on scripts for ER. And Bob, he was being Bob. He loved his badly behaved golden retriever, worked hard, and flew a lot. One thing both nannies agree on was he was really sweet with his daughter. He seemed to love being a dad.

But Cheryl did have one really weird experience. I imagine at this point Bob felt invincible. But the fact is, he was being investigated that whole time.

And on the morning of November 30th, 1998, just three weeks after his daughter was born, he was about to get a rude awakening. I'm Carol Fisher, and from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio, you're listening to The Girlfriends, Episode 7, Cowabunga. Yes, I'm a girl.

We had pretty much finished our investigation and we decided that we'd already spent literally tens of thousands of dollars coming across the country to

doing this investigation would be worth a couple of plane tickets to North Dakota to try and see what he had to say. On November 30th, DA prosecutor Dan Bibb sent the case investigators Andy Rosenzweig and Tommy Pond to Minot with the mission: ask Bob if he was still represented by counsel, and if not, get him to talk on the spot, something they couldn't do if he was lawyered up. That morning, they lurked around Bob's clinic and waited for him to arrive.

When they spotted him approaching the building, they sped towards him on foot and confronted him with their ready, prepared script. They had a feeling that Bob would see them coming, that someone in Las Vegas would have told him that they'd been sniffing around. But instead, Bob just stood there and stared back at them like a deer in headlights. He basically says, I'm still represented by an attorney. And that was that.

For Steve Sirocco, the other prosecutor, it wasn't just about getting him to talk, though. Disguised as intel gathering, the DA was sending a message. What he knows is this is not over. This sense of security I have up here, up north, the veil has been pierced and they're still looking at me. And he knows he's guilty. And within a half hour, there's a phone call from his lawyer.

And he said, Dan, this is Scott Greenfield. What's going on? Well, we're investigating the disappearance of Gail Birnbaum. And we want to know if you want to talk to us. You know, there's outrageous violating right to counsel. Scott, nobody violated anybody's right to counsel. As soon as my guys opened their mouth, he said, I'm represented by an attorney. And they walked away. Nobody violated anything. And he said, are you going to the grand jury?

I can't tell you whether we are or we aren't. It's a grand jury is a secret proceeding. Can't do it. In New York State, a defendant, if he is aware that there is a proceeding in the grand jury going on that may involve him, has an absolute right to testify before that grand jury. Within a day or two, I had a letter serving statutory notice that Dr. Birnbaum wanted to testify before the grand jury.

Dan knew that Bob was never actually going to testify in front of the grand jury. That's pretty rare, but it's a clever trick attorneys use to make sure they're notified if a grand jury is ever assembled.

then they can keep tabs on the result and get their ducks in a row. So that's what Greenfield was doing. He was essentially setting up a notification service. And nearly a year later, on September 22nd, 1999, Greenfield got what he was asking for. I wrote him a letter saying, here you go, here's your opportunity. And he called me up. He said, what the hell were you doing? I said, Scott, you served notice.

I just told you that the grand jury is going on. What do you want to do? At some point in late September or early October, Bob was in New Jersey attending the wedding of his close friend and flying buddy Ernie Sussman. The night before the big day, Ernie invited some of his closest friends, including Bob and Janet, for dinner at an Italian restaurant. I believe it was Friday evening.

And I think there were four couples. So some of my closest friends, we went out to a nice restaurant that evening. And I don't know how the subject came up, but we were talking about this doctor in Buffalo. His name was Anthony Pignataro. And he ended up doing plastic surgery and doing, I guess, liposuctions and even breast augments, even though he wasn't a board-certified plastic surgeon. And he ended up killing a woman.

But like two-thirds of the way into the story, Bobby turned white. And I never saw him break a sweat, no matter what he did, whether he was in surgery or flying in that bad weather. But he just turned white like a ghost. And next thing you know, he's told Janet, you know, I'm tired. I think we need to get going. After he left, we made comment. Boy, like, he really blew out of here in a hurry. It was just very unusual.

I can't say if Bob knew it or not, but while he was running away from dinner parties in New Jersey, women around the country were being called to testify against him.

In New York, a grand jury is a process where 16 to 23 jurors are randomly selected to come to court a few days a month and hear prosecutors lay out their case, witnesses and all. There's no judge, no defendant, and it's all in secret. At the end of the process, which can last weeks or months, the jurors decide if charges should be brought against the defendant.

a proper trial would then take place where they'll be found guilty or not guilty. Now, I'm explaining this because I didn't understand what it meant when Dan and Steve first reached out to me and asked me to testify. The only thing I was sure of is I didn't want to do it. So I refused to go.

Instead, I spent the next few months wondering what was going on. Sometimes curiosity would get the better of me. So me, Mom, and Mindy, we would call up Bob's clinic in North Dakota to see if he was still accepting appointments. When the receptionist started to offer us dates or suggest a consultation, we would hang up. No arrest yet, I guess. Until...

Tonight, a doctor under arrest. He's charged with killing his wife. Cops say he dumped her body in the ocean, throwing it from a plane. On December 8th, 1999, the grand jury cast their vote. 14 years ago, a surgeon in New York City reported his wife missing. Now he's being charged with her murder. The investigation went from Long Island to Las Vegas and wound up in North Dakota. My child.

In the days following the indictment, the news was everywhere, and they did not spare any details. They say they have new witnesses, new evidence, enough to build a murder case even without the body. I remember the day I was getting ready for work. This is Denise Kassenbaum, Gail's best friend. I was getting dressed in my apartment, and my sister called. She said, turn on the news.

This almost reads like a screenplay, but what's scary is that this is a true crime. Turns out, back in the 90s, news reporters were not too concerned with holding back the details before they had been proven in court. A loving wife would complain constantly about her husband's violent temper, but instead of getting away from him, she tried to help. And sadly, paid for it with her life. I was just like, oh my God, finally. You know, I was screaming.

I was just, yes.

She was never seen again, and her family and cops didn't buy the Doc's story. We've always been certain that it was him. He is the last person that saw her. His story regarding her whereabouts and what happened never made any sense. Seeing Bob in court being accused of murdering my sister was such a relief. I'm very gratified that after 14 years, the person who murdered my sister is finally standing in a courtroom.

This was a tireless investigation. Believe me, the two DAs here are two guys that you don't want after you if you're the bad guy. Steve and I agreed that we would be seeking half a million dollars bail.

So we asked for $500,000 and the attorney goes, yeah, okay, he'll make it. Bierenbaum was released after putting up a half million bucks in bail. Now, if he's convicted of murder too, the doc's next big trip will be upstate to the comfort of a four by eight cell for 25 years to life. I guess me and the other girlfriends were onto something all along. And it turns out another woman was too.

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When Bob was charged with Gail's murder, it was like a punch to the gut. Everybody wanted to talk about it, but I didn't have enough wind left in me to say his name.

Instead, they'd call Mindy to ask for the latest gossip. But everything had changed. It was a real case now with a real victim and a real potential murderer. Even Mindy wasn't excited by that anymore. There was a shift from the sensational and the speculative to the real and present case.

So it was no longer funny. We were really starting to doubt ourselves. If, like the investigators were saying, this case hinged on the testimony of all of us women who knew Bob, then what if we had gotten it wrong? What if we'd let our game go too far? What if he's not guilty? Will he come after us for slander? And if he is guilty, will he come after us after us?

But little did we know that while we were starting to doubt ourselves, another girlfriend was about to surface. It was right after Birnbaum had been indicted. I got a phone call from a woman and she refused to identify herself. And she actually says to me, Oh my God, I slept with this guy right after his wife disappeared.

And I'm literally on the phone, motioning to Steve to come into my office and basically telling him there's somebody we need to talk to. I said, what's it all about? He goes, well, there's another one of his, one of our better girlfriends has just surfaced. She refused to identify herself. She said, I'm afraid of him. She said she'd call me back in a couple of days. A couple of days later, the phone rings.

It's the woman I had spoken to a day or two before, and she said... I'm Karen Caruana. I know Bob Bierenbaum. We worked together at my modern-day medical center in Brooklyn in 1984, 1985, and this is my story. I said, we'll see you in a day or two. Booked flights to San Francisco, flew in one day, drove down to San Jose the next. We met in a diner, of all places, and...

and sat there while she told us the story. Karen told them that when she first met Bob, she was a nurse working on the cardiovascular unit where Bob was undertaking a residency as a surgical intern. She didn't think much of him. He'd gotten a reputation for having a terrible bedside manner with patients and their families, and he was rude to the nurses.

But outside of work, they had attended the same parties and they would go to clubs or restaurants with the other young hospital staff. Karen even met Gail a few times, only enough to make introductions. But she remembers her as small and submissive. There was always a feeling that things were just not right. He was at the nurse's station.

in the cardiovascular ICU and he was yelling at somebody on the phone and it was obvious it was Gail that he was talking to. And I had to tell him a couple of times, you know,

Please lower your voice. I mean, the nurse's station was right next to where we recovered patients from open-heart surgery. It wasn't appropriate for him to be yelling at anybody at the nurse's station. Whatever people thought about Bob and Gail's relationship, when Gail went missing, it shook the staff.

I remember the first time I saw him come back, he looked horrible. He hadn't shaved. He was very disheveled. There evidently had been no word as to where she was or if she had run away, if something had happened to her or someone had taken her. We didn't know. In fact, I do remember going out to Central Park with people that I worked with, nurses, and we put up posters in Central Park with her picture.

Some time at the end of July, about three weeks after Gail went missing, Karen rented a little beach house in the Hamptons for the week. Just a vacation. Before she left, one of her colleagues told her that Bob was also going to be out in the Hamptons that week. She had said, you know, why don't you get together with Bob? Maybe you could go out to dinner with him, give him some companionship. He's really lost without Gail. So Karen obliged.

After arriving in the Hamptons, she drove over to his rental house, which was a really large building with a pool just away from the ocean. Karen parked her car, and Bob drove them out to a seafood restaurant on the water in Sag Harbor. Over the meal, she started gently probing Bob for information about Gail. He said that in the last month,

He had hired a private investigator and they found Gail in California. And she was waiting tables on the coast. I mean, it didn't sound totally right, but he kind of convinced me that that was what he knew at the time. What Bob had told Karen was a lie. We spoke to the investigator and the investigator said, "Absolutely not. That's not true." Never found evidence of Gail anywhere.

Bob also described how Gail was a difficult wife and how on the day she went missing, they'd had a big argument. He said she had no shoes on. And I said to him, I said, who lives in New York City and doesn't wear shoes to walk to Central Park from their apartment? Again, another embellishment lie about what had happened that morning. Sitting in the diner, Dan and Steve knew they'd stumbled onto something big.

These are exactly the kinds of details they wanted. Bob telling different versions of Gail's disappearance. Bob lying. They even gave their new star witness a nickname. Karen Cowabunga. Karen Cowabunga.

When Dan and Steve saw Karen Cowabunga, they saw a star witness. But I just see myself. Because just like me, after Bob told Karen all about Gail's disappearance, she still went home with him. I mean, he was different than he had been. I went from dreading even talking to him at work to really sympathizing with his plight.

I hadn't been with anybody in a while, so I think I was probably lonely, horny, I guess you could say. I mean, he was pretty persuasive. And I remember climbing upstairs to the bedroom. Back in New York, they kept seeing each other. They'd go out for Japanese food. They went dancing in clubs down in the West Village. On the weekends, Bob would go back to the Hamptons and party at West Hampton Beach's famous club, the Marrakesh.

He ditched his L.L. Bean clothing for Saturday Night Fever shirts with the shirt tails tucked right in. All of this just a month or two after his wife had disappeared. I was still having fun with him. At that point, probably not even thinking about Gail, I'll be honest. And he wasn't either. But after only six weeks of dating, Karen says their relationship literally hit the curb. We had gone out to dinner and we argued at the restaurant.

And we were in a cab. My recollection is a little bit fuzzy just because I think I was pretty drunk at the time. But I remember the cab was still moving and somehow he had pushed me out of the door onto the curb. And I remember my best friend in New York at the time was a woman, Carol, who was a nurse at Maimonides. And I called her and I was hysterical, crying.

And I've talked to her since, and she said, I kept saying that he hurt me. He hurt me. We reached out to Bob for comment on this, but he never responded. These stories, like Bob allegedly pushing a woman out of a moving car, are the ones I care about most. In fact, there's a lot I wish I'd known before I met Bob, some of which never made it into trial. That's after the break.

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On a warm day in early August 2000, a young New York Times reporter by the name of Catherine Eban walked into the Manhattan criminal court for the first time. I was completely new to legal reporting.

But the beat had been sold to me as you develop sources for life and you cover interesting trials. So you get a lot of ink that way. Catherine had been told that if you want to get ahead on the biggest cases, you have to cover the pretrial hearings to secure an early scoop.

The only problem is it was notoriously boring. You know, not necessarily considered a plum beat because you're sitting in this dusty old press room and there's just a lot of stuff you have to cover that is not necessarily fascinating. But this was the first one.

The interesting thing about this stage in the legal process is that the hearings are closed to everyone apart from the press, judge, lawyers, defendants, and witnesses who were summoned. So Catherine was one of the only people present during Bob's pretrial hearing. Not even Elaine was invited in. Consider this a sneak peek. I remember it vividly because it was August and the air conditioning in this courtroom was insane.

And it was absolutely empty. I was one of the few people sitting in the audience, shivering with cold, with the judge up there. My name is Leslie Crocker Snyder, and I was the judge who presided over the Birnbaum case in 2000.

Some of the defendants called me the ice princess, which was kind of ridiculous because actually I'm a very warm, outgoing person, but not on the bench. I think sometimes Bierenbaum wasn't even there, so it was just his lawyers. And as I sat listening, this kind of remarkable story was unfolding, and I got very interested in it. The primary purpose of pretrial hearings is for the judge to decide what testimony or evidence is permissible in court.

In Bob's case, this process went on for the best part of nine months, and in that time they covered a lot of ground. But for the prosecution, there was one major argument, whether or not the psychiatrist's testimony should be included.

After Bob strangled Gail in 1983, she demanded that he went to therapy. His first appointment was with Dr. Stanley Bone, who after one session asked Bob if he could talk to Gail on the phone. Like I said, Elaine wasn't there, but she requested the redacted transcripts afterwards. Here she is reading Dr. Stanley Bone's testimony from that cold pre-trial hearing.

And the witness said, "Yes."

After just one session, Dr. Bone called Gail to warn her, and then he refused to treat Bob again. Instead, he referred him to another psychiatrist named Dr. Shelley Duran, who, déjà vu, also asked Bob if she could speak to Gail on the phone. And then the question was, did you feel at that time you had an ethical duty to warn her that she might be in danger from the defendant?

And Dr. Duran answered, I didn't know if I would hear her voice. Dr. Duran also refused to treat Bob again, and he moved on to his third psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Stone, who again, after just one session, decided he needed to contact Gail. He wrote her something called a Tarasov letter.

That's the letter Gail told Denise and Elaine about, the one she was going to use to blackmail Bob. It's on Dr. Stone's letterhead, Dr. Michael Stone, Central Park West, New York City. It's written to my sister, Gail Bierenbaum, at 85th Street. And it says, I have been advised by Dr. Stone that for reasons of my own safety, I should at this time live apart from my husband, Dr. Robert Bierenbaum.

I further understand that owing to the unpredictable nature of my husband's physical assaults and to the chronic nature of the characterological abnormalities that underlie these assaults, no firm date can as yet be fixed as to when it might be safe to resume living together.

And there's a line at the end of it for my sister's signature. And I don't believe she ever signed it.

The Tarasov letter is named after a woman named Tatiana Tarasov, who was murdered by her estranged boyfriend after he told his therapist that he intended to kill her. The legal requirement to send a letter like this was introduced after it was determined that his therapist had an ethical duty to warn Tatiana that she was in danger.

In addition to sending the terrace off letter, Dr. Stone gave Bob an offer. He said he would continue to treat Bob under two conditions. First, Dr. Stone asked to talk to Bob's parents, and then he said he wanted them to pay for his life insurance just in case anything should happen to him as a result of treating their son. Bob refused the insurance request, but he did let Dr. Stone talk to his mom and dad.

Of course, Birnbaum's attorneys did not want this testimony introduced because it spoke to his motive. And the psychiatric associations in the day were watching this case closely because of the battle over whether this testimony was going to be admissible. So that turned out to be a very rich vein for reporting. The implications for patient confidentiality were pretty profound.

It's truly damning evidence, but if the judge let it in, it would be setting a dangerous precedent for future cases, and who knows how that could be exploited. Our argument was that since Bob had authorized Dr. Stone to share information about their sessions with Gail and with his parents, that that was a waiver of privilege. The judge disagreed with us.

I made some rulings that I think both sides thought were controversial in that I would not allow the three doctors to testify on the ground that although the doctors and the defendant had spoken to other people, namely the defendant's parents and to Gail Bierenbaum, nevertheless, the doctor-patient privilege had not been waived.

because the people to whom the relationship was disclosed were only involved so that the psychologist could aid the defendant in his treatment. We don't know exactly what it was that made the psychiatrist react to Bob the way they did, but my producer, Anna, has been looking into it, and this is what we learned.

Based on interviews Dr. Stone had previously given, Anna learned that during his first session with Bob, while discussing the time he strangled Gail for smoking, Bob told Dr. Stone it was not the first time he had strangled a woman. Back when Bob was still a medical intern, before he even met Gail, he was engaged to a girl he met in medical school.

In these interviews, Stone said Bob told him that not only did he strangle her, but he also admitted to killing her cat in a fit of rage after they broke up. We have tried to confirm the story about Bob's first fiancé, but sadly the woman in question died from cancer last year and she'd never spoken publicly about her relationship with Bob. Anna did track down her family, who said she was a very private person.

But over a series of texts, her sister confirmed that Bob had been abusive towards her. She didn't know the details, but the fact is this. If Dr. Michael Stone is telling the truth, this information comes from Bob himself. Either way, there's something about these pretrials that I find very hard to swallow.

I understand the point of the justice system. I understand the concept of innocent until proven guilty. And I understand the importance of doctor-patient privilege. But as a woman who fell for Bob's charms, these details that were held back feel really significant to me. After the pretrials were over, Dan and Steve's attention turned to prepping for the real thing.

It's very important. It's almost like a movie. A trial is a production. And the order of witnesses as to how they're going to impact and fit together is something that has to be thought out. You just don't randomly pick names out of a hat. He'll be first, he'll be second, she'll be third. And that's when, after months of telling them I didn't want to be involved, they subpoenaed me. Oh, oh, oh.

I had to go to New York, I had to stand in the witness box, and for the first time in four years, I had to come face-to-face with my ex-boyfriend, Bob. That's next time on The Girlfriends.

They painted her as a woman with a lot of problems, very needy, once suicidal, totally promiscuous. It was quote-unquote blaming the victim. It's a five-minute acquittal if you believe this guy. One juror thinks she's alive when we say she's dead. That case is over. There were audible gasps from the jury. I remember turning to my brother and saying, what did they say? I'm in a good eye.

The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more from Novel, visit novel.audio. The series is hosted by me, Carol Fisher, and produced by Anna Sinfield. Our assistant producer is Julian Manugarapattin, and our researcher is Madeline Parr.

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

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

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

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