Relisten to The Girlfriends S1, Ep 8: The Girlfriends Vs Bierenbaum
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It was early in the morning on October 12, 2000. I arrived at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse to testify against Bob, and I was terrified. I remember saying to myself, "Just don't pass out, Carol. Don't pass out." And so with that pep talk over, I entered the building through the revolving door. I emptied my pockets into a tray, and I walked through the metal detectors.

Shortly after I was greeted by the prosecutors, they pointed out a woman with cropped red hair and told me it was Gail's sister, Elaine. We had spoken about her at the Mayflower a few times, but we didn't know anything about her. She just seemed like a traumatized sister. And that's exactly what she looked like in the courthouse that day. Traumatized, but determined.

Eventually, after some waiting around, it was my turn to testify. I walked out into the cavernous courtroom to see press, the judge, jury, and Bob's new wife. And there, in the chair where people on trial sit, was my ex-boyfriend Bob. He looked different. Older. More tired. He looked like a man.

But he did flash me this confusing smirk, a smirk till this day I still don't understand. When I got to the witness box, the prosecution told me to address the jury and then came the questions. How did you meet Bob? How long did you date for? What did he tell you about his wife? So I told them about the time I asked Bob if he killed his wife.

And when I explained how silent and weird he got, I could see the jury nodding along. And that's when I realized Bob was totally fucked. I'm Carol Fisher from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio. You're listening to The Girlfriends, Episode 8. The Girlfriends vs. Bierenbaum.

After I testified, I took the first flight out of New York that I could. I was not interested in sticking around, so I really knew very little about what actually went down at the trial.

But my brilliant researcher, Maddie, she got a hold of the transcripts, all 1,519 pages of them. So let's start from the beginning. The trial started on October 2nd, 2000, 15 years after Gail's death. By then, the case had gone from relative obscurity to one of the most covered court cases in New York City.

Reporter Catherine Eban made sure she kept her front row seat. By then, the courtroom was full. So my colleagues in the press corps all showed up. The place was packed almost every day. That's prosecutor Daniel Bibb. The press took up the first two rows. There was press from all over the place, not just New York. In front of the press in what's called the well, the attorney sat at two large wooden tables, the prosecution closest to the jurors' box.

There's three of us, Steve Sirocco, Adam Kaufman, and me sitting at the prosecution table, which is facing the bench. Then you have to the left, probably 10 feet away, is the defense table with Scott Greenfield, David Lewis, and Catherine Case. Those were Bob's attorneys, in case that's not obvious. You won't hear from them because they were not interested in appearing on this podcast.

Back to the courtroom, where in front of everybody with a huge American flag behind her sat the judge, Leslie Crocker Snyder. I don't really use a gavel, except I had a huge one that was given to me as a joke. And occasionally I'd use it to get the jury laughing. I remember her as a blonde-haired, no-nonsense judge with a big reputation.

She was not there to play. I mean, she was very strict and tough with the attorneys. And then sitting at the defense table, furthest away from the jury as possible, was Bob. I remember Bierenbaum. He had this sort of Stygian gloom that hung over him, reflected in the deep shadows under his eyes.

The trial lasted nine long days. During that time, the defense and prosecution agreed that Gail died at some point on July 7th, 1985. But that's where the similarities end. The defense argued that there was not enough evidence to prove that Bob killed her. Instead, they suggest all kinds of things could have happened to her that day.

They painted her as a woman with a lot of problems, very needy, once suicidal, greedy, motivated by money. It was, quote unquote, blaming the victim, which although was pre-Days of Me Too, I think was very distasteful. But the portrait of both of them emerged as two people who should have gotten divorced a long time before and there was an escalation of violent and horrible conduct.

The defense's second tack was a bit more tangible. In fact, it was a serious threat. At the beginning of the trial, they told the jury that they had just one witness to call, a star witness that swears he saw Gail Katz alive and well in the hours that the prosecution alleged she was dead.

It's a five-minute acquittal, if you believe this guy, because he says he sees her at a time when our theory is that she is dead and either in a bag, in a plane, or already in the Atlantic Ocean. Okay? Kills the case. Dead. Done. The prosecution's goal was to do their best to undermine the defense's case because, as the judge explained, the burden of proof was on them.

They needed to prove that the reason Gail was dead was because Bob killed her. In the prosecution's opening statement, Dan argued that Gail wasn't suicidal. In fact, multiple friends claimed she was happier than she had been in a while. Her psychiatrist, Sybil Barron, even remembers Gail getting a pedicure just days before she went missing. I think the line was, suicides don't get pedicures.

Then there was the portrayal of Gail as a drug fiend running with the wrong crowd. The prosecution made it clear that this was a gross exaggeration. Her boyfriend, Anthony Segalis, said he only did coke with Gail twice, so she certainly was not an addict. You know, everybody did cocaine in the 80s. It was everywhere. She was not this hardcore cokehead.

So some beginner coke user all of a sudden becomes this dyed-in-the-wool coke head and gets killed by a drug dealer who then disposes of her body? It made no sense whatsoever. People who get killed by drug dealers, their bodies are usually found. People who die of drug overdoses, their bodies are found. And that was the crux of the prosecution's case.

Gail's body had never been found. And the reason they theorize is because Bob killed Gail and threw her body out of a plane and into the Atlantic Ocean. They just had to prove it. This was no easy task. We were facing no body, no forensics, no admissions, an extremely difficult circumstantial case.

based in large part on things that the defendant had said to his friends and his girlfriends. You've already heard a lot of what's covered throughout the trial, our testimonies. But when I read through these transcripts, I discovered parts of the story that I've never heard before, things that shocked me. I also see what Prosecutor Steve meant when he described the trial as a production.

The prosecution called up 37 witnesses to the stand, all of us weaving threads of circumstantial evidence together to create an image of Bob for the jury. First up was Bob, the controlling boyfriend. I mean, who makes their wife have to sit on his lap to eat dinner? It was just so strange. He had to control everything that they did.

what they ate, where they went. Then there was violent Bob. He came running and leaped over the couch, pushed her down with his hands around her throat and strangled her. Sometimes the witness testimony made it seem like he wanted to kill Gail, like telling one of his friends that he hated Gail so much he could kill her or telling Gail that he would kill her if she left him.

One of the most controversial moments of the trial was when various witnesses started bringing up the Tarasov letter from Dr. Stone, the letter he had written warning Gail that Bob might kill her. The judge had disallowed this piece of physical evidence in the pretrial hearings, but she did not stop people from describing it in great detail.

One of the functions of the judge in any case is to try to balance both sides' rights. And I felt that allowing testimony about the nature of the letter, which I did, the Tarasov letter, but not allowing it in for the jury to see was a balancing of fairness to both sides. I'll never forget the defense arguing that having me testify to what the letter said was almost worse than having the letter admitted into evidence.

And they may have been right. At least it wouldn't have been the sister talking about it. And of course, it was that letter that Gail told multiple people she was going to use to blackmail Bob, forcing him into divorcing and continuing to pay her school tuition. But there was also something else that came out at trial, something I had never heard about before.

Gail told her friend Lee that she had evidence that Bob and his father were involved in Medicaid fraud and that she was planning on using that information as part of her ammunition against Bob. Gail had all this information ready to go on Saturday, July 6th, the day before she went missing. That day, she went to her hairdressers, to the gynecologist for a routine IUD checkup, and she saw friends even bumping into her fling, Anthony.

Everyone described her as happy and jovial. And the reason? She was going to ask Bob for a divorce that weekend. She was going to make him dinner. And then during dinner, she was going to talk to Bob about leaving. We have no idea what happened over that dinner, if she told him at all. But we do know that's not when she died.

The next morning, at around 10.30 a.m. on July 7th, Gail picked up a call from her former boss, Francesca Beal. Francesca wanted a doctor recommendation from Bob, but Gail was sounding off. And that is the last time anyone other than Bob saw or heard from Gail. As multiple people testified, no one saw her leave the apartment building, not the doorman, not the neighbors. Gail had vanished immediately.

leaving all of her possessions, including her wallet, cigarettes, credit cards, address book, and keys. This is the point in the prosecution's story where they stop talking about Gail and instead start talking about Bob. Because as you know, he wasn't acting like your typical grieving husband. He was constantly missing and not returning phone calls from the police.

He said the police could search his apartment, but when the forensics team showed up, his lawyer said they could only dust for fingerprints. He tried to avoid all the press. He avoided putting posters up in his building. He did not even interview the doorman. Basically, it never felt to Gail's family and friends like Bob was driving the search.

Instead, after a couple weeks, Bob was seen partying in the Hamptons, dressing like he was in Saturday Night Fever, and laughing at a comedy show. And then there were the romances, like Roberta Karnofsky, who challenged Bob over dinner about killing his wife, and Karen Caruana, his Hamptons fling. They all testified to...

The prosecutors brought on a lot of witnesses to show how everyone who interacted with Bob after Gail's disappearance seemed to come away with a slightly different story. I think he just didn't count on us remembering everything or talking about it. These were all professional women who said, your wife is missing and you did what? My argument was that the women here definitely would remember things like this because, again, there but for the grace of God go I.

You know, somebody is telling you how their wife disappeared. Wouldn't that sear into your brain? But as the defense argued, all our stories were just a smattering of circumstantial evidence. Witnesses recalling conversations they had 15 years ago. Is that really enough, they asked the jury, to say beyond any reasonable doubt that Bob killed Gail?

Even after being presented with all of the evidence from the Tarasov letter, Bob's lawyer argued that the notion that Bob controlled Gail went against the evidence. Instead, they explained that Bob jumped into new relationships fast because, why not? His wife cheated, did drugs, and ran off.

Finally, the defense referred to the moment Roberta challenged Bob over dinner, saying she believed he threw Gail out of a plane, a crackpot theory that Bob just did not need to respond to. But Dan and Steve did have a response to that theory, a piece of evidence that shows Roberta's idea wasn't so crackpot after all. That's after the break.

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So we all know the theory by now, or as the defense likes to call it, the Roberta theory. It's something that the prosecution were running with. But how do you prove it? Like, how could he have done that? How can you be flying a plane and pushing a body out of a plane at the same time? We were confident that if we didn't show the jury that this could be done, they're going to bring in somebody and say that this is impossible. So we actually found the airplane that he used.

It was in upstate New York. It was a complete and total wreck. But we used the exact same model and an NYPD helicopter. And what we did is we put two 50-pound bags of sand and a 10-pound bag of rice in a number of duffel bags and put them in the back of the plane. And it actually took off from Corwell Airport, same airport he used, and then trailed by an NYPD helicopter

They flew out over the ocean and they did three demonstrations. One where he simply just pushed open the passenger side door and pushed it out. One where he actually banked the plane, the door opened and it fell out of its own accord. And then the third one where he dragged the duffel bag across his body and put it out the pilot's side door.

And this sergeant is actually on the witness stand describing this whole thing to the jury using the video of it. It was very powerful. I've seen this video, and for me, it's hard to watch these bags of sand and rice and think about a woman inside. A woman who just the day before had done all the things that I would do. Had her hair done. Laughed with a friend in the park. And there she was in an airplane with Bob,

a place that I had been many times, a place where I had seen so much beauty. She was there in a bag. The jurors sat there, rapt attention. Not an eyeball wasn't on those television screens watching that demonstration. It was a moment that everybody paid close attention to because it was very strange. I mean, to reenact something that you think happened...

Based on circumstantial evidence and no actual proof. But essentially, that was their case. That was how they were going to build it. The prosecution then brought out a guy named Charles McKenna from the airline rental company who verified the booking and the invoice charged to Bierenbaum. He confirmed that Bob could have flown at least 80 miles out before turning around that day.

Then, New York's chief medical examiner, Charles Hirsch, described how easy it would be for a skilled surgeon to dismember a body in as little as 10 minutes with the kitchen knife in order to fit it in a duffel bag. If he acted fast enough, he may have even been able to fold her in without the graphic mutilation. But the real clincher to the flight theory was when they brought out Roberta Karnofsky.

She told the jury about the moment she and Sharon found his altered flight log. At this point in the trial, the prosecution brought out a brand new piece of evidence. They had subpoenaed Bob and forced him to turn over the original flight log. And right there, for everyone to see, was the alteration, just as Roberta was describing it. The 7 of July 7th had been crudely changed to an 8,

It's even in the wrong color ink. I'm like, Steve, this is a home run. He goes, yeah, why the hell didn't Birnbaum just burn the thing? I said, because he's anal. Because he saves everything. He couldn't let it go. But then, just as it was looking like a landslide victory for the prosecution, the defense played the ace up their sleeve, their star witness.

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In the weeks following Gail's disappearance, the missing person squad received seven or eight calls from people claiming to have seen her. Among them was a retired textiles manufacturer, Joel Davis. On October 18, 2000, the eighth and last day of testimony, the defense called Joel to the stand.

So Joel Davis walks to the courtroom and says hello to us. He's walking in. So he takes the stand and David Lewis takes him through direct. Joel described how on the afternoon of July 7th at H&H Bagel on 81st Street and 2nd Avenue, he noticed an attractive woman wearing a distinctive T-shirt with a complex and colorful print.

Three to five weeks later, he sees Gail's missing poster and recognizes her as the woman he saw at the bagel shop. At around five in the morning, he calls the missing person's number to report it. This was not looking good for the prosecution. He was pretty strong. And I think everyone in the courtroom thought that's the end of the prosecution case because he was absolutely adamant that he had seen Gail late enough in the day so that the defendant couldn't have killed her.

Steve's like, oh, there's a problem. One juror thinks she's alive when we say she's dead. That case is over. Down to tubes. Steve gets up and, you know, the adage is you don't ask a question on cross-examination that you don't know the answer to. Well, that's not 100% true.

When Steve stepped up to question Joel, he had a clear tactic: spin Joel around enough times that he ends up undoing his own testimony. He started by asking Joel to clarify details, like what did this woman actually look like? To which Joel responded that the woman he saw was with another woman, carrying a large beach bag. They were deeply tanned with a lot of oil all over their bodies.

He said that he was probably in her presence for between five and ten minutes while they waited in line for takeout. But then it all starts getting a bit seedy. The first thing that caught Joel's eye was her T-shirt. He was in the print business, and he was impressed with the T-shirt's European printing style.

But then his eyes drifted to her body, which he found very attractive. When asked to describe her, he says her face reminded him of a friend's sister-in-law. But she was built like his ex-wife. 5'1", well-defined, and a very good body. He describes her as voluptuous, like she's really built, you know? And Gail was as flat as a board. He'd previously said he was pretty positive, whereas now he was 100% sure.

he changed where he'd seen her. He changed the clothes she was wearing. At one point, when asked whether he saw photos of Gail, he said, I didn't see the picture, but I did see the picture, you know.

All he's doing is he's basically taking a knife and he's stabbing himself in the chest with every word that comes out of his mouth. Stevie is just spinning him around in circles. Steve then drilled deeper into Joel's physical description of Gail. He pulled out some transcripts of a previous interview where Joel had described the woman in the bagel shop as tall and statuesque. He said he'd noticed her because he was a leg and ass man. Jesus Christ.

He's describing a woman that is completely opposite of who Gail Birnbaum was physically. It was kind of amusing how he described her as, you know, so statuesque and what a great body and tall. And then he withdrew that a little bit. He gets so flustered and he goes, can I explain? Steve leans down to me. He goes, what do you think? I go, 100%. Let him explain.

He said, he's going to explode. He did explode with utter nonsense. Joel started fumbling and said he did in fact see a woman in the bagel shop. But he confused that woman with not only Gail, but the body of his ex-wife, who was small, and with the face of his friend's ex-sister-in-law, who was tall but had a similar face to Gail's.

If you are confused, don't worry. So is Joel, and so is everyone in that courtroom. There were audible gasps from the jury. I mean, audible. And he finishes, and Steve leaves down. I go, sit down. He goes, I got a couple more questions. I said, sit down. To really put the final nail in Joel's coffin, Dan and Steve called up Elaine with a huge photo of Gail in a bikini.

I went up on the witness stand and I identified the photo and it showed a side profile of her in a bikini. And the picture depicted her as a flat-chested woman. It was like a television moment, really. That witness had been destroyed. And that doesn't really happen that often in trials, that you're able to show that the witness was either lying or mistaken. And that was it.

The trial was over, the jury was charged, and then the alternates were dismissed. You have alternate jurors in case someone gets sick. And one of the alternates, beautiful woman, walked down and sat next to me. And she squeezed my hand and she said, "I hope they convict." And there I had yet another sister.

After around six hours of deliberation over two days, the jury reached their verdict. Ladies and gentlemen, have you reached a verdict? And the foreperson said yes. Say as to the sole count of the indictment, charging murder on the second degree, how do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty? I remember turning to my brother and saying, what did they say? And he said, guilty. I said, yes.

And I squeezed my brother's hand so hard it hurt. And at the same time I did that, I took my fist and I banged it on my own thigh. And I felt free at last. And just like that, we got him. My sister called me. She said, guilty. And I started screaming, yay!

I'll never forget my mother calling me, screaming on the phone. He's guilty. He's guilty. He's guilty. About 15 times and just sobbing, just sobbing. On November 29th, 2000, Judge Crocker Snyder sentenced Bob to 20 years to life.

I tried to consider everything, the evidence, the horrible nature of the crime, but also that it had been at that point 15 years, I guess, and that he had done a lot of good things. Birnbaum was a horrible person in what he did, but even if it was to expiate his guilt, he spent the last 15 years helping kids in Mexico and doing a lot of good things. And

In no way did that detract from the horrible nature of the crime, but I also thought he deserved some credit for that. The minimum would have been 15 to life, a maximum 25 to life, and I gave him 20 years to life. This was a tough sentence in that I felt I should factor in what little good he had done, but it was some good. When I first learned about the verdict, I had mixed feelings. Oh.

A part of me felt so bad for Bob because I had always wanted to believe that he was just overworked. Gail was a tough wife and he had just snapped. One moment of anger costing him 20 years of his life. But making this series has changed my mind. In those intervening years, Bob dated so many women that didn't feel safe around him. He allegedly pushed Karen out of a moving taxi. He screamed and raged at me.

He was so controlling that a therapist told Stephanie that she could be in danger if she continued to date him. He showed no empathy and no remorse to any of Gail's family. Bob's charity work in Mexico, treating children with cleft palates, it was definitely good, but I just don't think it has anything to do with it. He killed a woman, a woman who was in an intimate relationship with him.

A woman just like me or Mindy or Roberta or Stephanie or Karen. And there's nothing to say that he couldn't have done it again. If you're good at math, you've already figured out that Bob was convicted in 2000 and finished serving his 20-year sentence in 2020. And well, there's been some recent developments. That's next time on The Girlfriends. Oh, oh, oh.

I had 20 years of, like, solid peace. I never thought about Bob for 20 years anymore. And then the parole process started. Mindy. What? I've got the transcripts from Bob's parole hearing. Oh, my God. Tell me what happened on July 7th, 1985. We were arguing with each other, and things escalated. How did you attack her, sir? ♪

Elaine, hello. Hi, nice to meet you, Carol and Mindy. Nice to meet you, Elaine. Very nice to meet you. 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, Miley 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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