August 14, 2023 • 37 mins
Bob learns that the DA are after him and when his arrest becomes a national news story, another Girlfriend surfaces.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Novel. Hey listener. In this episode, we talk about domestic
violence and death. There's also a bunch of empowered women,
New York's feistiest young reporter, and an introduction to a
new woman with a great nickname, and of course more swearing,
(00:27):
because you know, I am who I am. 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. They have lots of great resources
to help you or your loved ones. You can find
them at no More dot org. That's noo Moore dot org.
(00:56):
In November of nineteen ninety eight, shortly after the Horso
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 do date was and what
(01:17):
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. My producer Anna tracked down their nannies. Hi,
sorry for hanging up on you.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I just wanted to make sure it was free.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Yeah, good thing.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
The beer and Bounce had two nannies, one for the
day and one for the night.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Hi, how are you doing good?
Speaker 5 (01:47):
How are you all?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
I'm good. I'm good, Which means almost twenty four hour
visibility into Bob's North Dakota home. Now, the film recordings
aren't so good, but this is definitely one of the
most exciting eighty moments of our investigation because, knowing all
I know now, it feels like everyone had an external
view of Bob and min not they'd interact with him
(02:09):
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.
Speaker 6 (02:26):
I was more involved with Janet, but Bob would come
in on Thursday or Fridays.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
This is Barb Cooper, the day nanny.
Speaker 6 (02:35):
Yeah, they feel real comfortable around either one of them, necessarily,
but I stuck it out. I loved the child and
loved what I was doing.
Speaker 5 (02:43):
He was weird, he was bizarre. I've never met anyone
like him before.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
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.
Speaker 5 (02:59):
The thing is they had a crip or anything. She's
left in a car seat, which is not very comfortable
for a baby.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
For Cheryl, the vibe of the house was just well off,
especially when Bob was there.
Speaker 5 (03:13):
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, she was always kind of creepy.
They loved him as a doctor's here, but he would
never treat anyone that smoked. He asked me if I smoked.
If I did, they wouldn't entirely.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Overall, the nanny seemed to remember a home a little
like this. The Beer and Bombs lived in a town
called Grand Forks. Bob would fly to work at the
hospital and min not 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
(03:56):
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.
(04:19):
He loved as 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.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
They had me in the basement and they slept upstairs.
There was one night he came into the nursery and
I woke up and he was watching me sleep, and
I don't know what he was planning to do, but
he took off.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
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 thirtieth, nineteen ninety eight, just three
weeks after his daughter was born, he was about to
get a rude awakening. I'm Carol Fisher and from the
(05:17):
teams at Novel and iHeartRadio. You're listening to The Girlfriends
episode seven, Cowabunga.
Speaker 7 (05:59):
We had pretty much finished our investigation, and we decided
that he had already spent literally tens of thousands of
dollars going across the country doing this investigation. W'd be
worth a couple of plane tickets to North Dakota to
try and see what he had to say.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
On November thirtieth, DA Prosecutor Dan Bibb sent the case
investigators Andy Rosenswag and Tommy Pond to mine Not 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,
(06:39):
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
(07:01):
and stared back at them like a deer in headlights.
Speaker 7 (07:05):
He basically says I'm still represented by an attorney, And
that was that.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
For Steve Sorako, the other prosecutor, it wasn't just about
getting him to talk though disguise his intel gathering, the
DA was sending a message.
Speaker 8 (07:24):
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.
Speaker 7 (07:39):
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
Burnbound and we want to know if he wanted to
talk to us. You know, there's out raised and violing
right the council. Scott, nobody violently anybody's right to council.
(08:01):
As soon as my guys opened their mouth, he said,
I'm represented by an attorney and they walked away. Now
we violated anything, And he said, are you going to
the grand jury? I can't tell you whether we are
or we are, so grand jury is a secret proceeding,
can't do it in New York State. A defendant if
(08:23):
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 doctor Burnbaum wanted to testify before the grand jury.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
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 used 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. That's what Greenfield was doing. He was
essentially setting up a notification service, and nearly a year later,
(09:07):
on September twenty second, nineteen ninety nine, Greenfield got what
he was asking for.
Speaker 7 (09:13):
I wrote him a letter saying, here you go, here's
your opportunity. And he called me up and he said,
what the hell, what are you doing? I said, Scott,
you serve notice. I just told you that the grand
jury is going on. What do you want to do.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
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.
Speaker 9 (09:55):
I believe it was Friday evening, and I think there
were four couple so some of my 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
(10:16):
guess liposuctions and even breast augments, even though he wasn't
a bird 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
(10:39):
he just turned white like a ghost. And next thing,
you know, he told Johnny, 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.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
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
sixteen to twenty three jurors are randomly selected to come
to court a few days a month, and here prosecutors
(11:17):
lay out their case, witnesses and all. There is 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
(11:40):
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 refuse to go. Instead,
I spent the next few months wondering what was going on.
Sometimes curiosity would get the better of me, so me,
(12:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
The doctor under arrest.
Speaker 10 (12:20):
He's charged with killing his wife.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Tops say he dumped her body.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
In the ocean, throwing it from a plane.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
On December eighth, nineteen ninety nine, the grand jury cast
their vote.
Speaker 11 (12:34):
Fourteen 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.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
In the days following the indictment, the news was everywhere
and they did not spare any details.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
They say they have new witnesses, new evidence, enough to
build a murder case even without the body.
Speaker 12 (12:58):
I remember the day I was getting ready for work.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
This is Denise Cassenbaum, Gail's best friend.
Speaker 10 (13:06):
I was getting dressed in my apartment and my sister call,
She said, turn on the news.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
This almost reads like a screenplay. But what's scary is
that this is a true crime.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Turns out. Back in the nineties, news reporters were not
too concerned with holding back the details before they had
been proven in court.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
A loving wife would complained constantly about our husband's violent temper,
but instead of getting away from him, she tried to
help and sadly paid for it with her life.
Speaker 10 (13:35):
I was just like, oh my god, finally, you know,
I was screaming.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
I was just yes.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
She was never seen again, and her family and cops
didn't buy the doc's story.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
We've always been certain that it was him. He is
the last person that saw her.
Speaker 13 (13:57):
His story regarding her whereabouts and what happened never made
any sense.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Seeing in court being accused of murdering my sister was
such a relief.
Speaker 13 (14:09):
I'm very gratified that after fourteen years, the person who
murdered my sister is finally standing in a courtroom being
charged with that murder. I'm only very very sorry that
my parents are not alive to be here to see this.
And I told him responsible for their deaths as well,
because they died of a broken heart.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
This was a tireless investigation. Believe me, for two das,
here are two guys that you don't want after you
if you're the bad guy.
Speaker 7 (14:36):
Steve and I had agreed that we would be seeking
half a million dollars Baill, so we asked her five
hundred thousand dollars and the attorney goes yeah, okay, no,
Megan Beer and Baum.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
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 for the comfort of a four
x eight cel twenty five years to life.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I guess me and the other girl old friends were
onto something all along, and it turns out another woman
was too. When Bob was charged with Gail's murder, it
(15:25):
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 it changed.
It was a real case now, with the real victim
and a real potential murderer. Even Mindy wasn't excited by
(15:47):
that anymore.
Speaker 12 (15:48):
There was a shift from the sensational and the speculative
to the real and present, so it was no longer funny.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
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 in
our game go too far?
Speaker 12 (16:19):
What if he's not guilty, will he come after us
for slander? And if he is guilty, will he come
after us?
Speaker 1 (16:26):
After us? But little did we know that while we
were starting to doubt ourselves, another girlfriend was about to surface.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
It was right after Burnbaum 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 as his wife disappeared.
And I'm literally on the phone motioning to Steve to
(17:01):
come into my office and basically telling him there's somebody
we need to talk to.
Speaker 8 (17:06):
I said, what's it all about, Goodwill? There's another one
of his, one of her better word girlfriends.
Speaker 7 (17:11):
It's just surfaced. She refused to identify herself. She said,
I'm afraid of him. She said. She called me back
in a couple of days. A couple of days later,
phone rings. It's the woman I had spoken to a
day or two before, and she said, I'm Cary Carojuana.
Speaker 14 (17:30):
I know Bob Bernbaum. We worked together in my Minas
Medical Center in Brooklyn in nineteen eighty four nineteen eighty five,
and this is my story.
Speaker 7 (17:42):
I said, we'll see in a day or two, booked
flights to San Francisco, flew in one day, drove down
to San Jose. Next we met in the diner of
all places, and sat there while she told us the story.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
And 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 them. 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,
(18:21):
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.
Speaker 15 (18:40):
He was at the nurses station in the cardiovscer I
see you, 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 times,
you know, please lower your voice. I mean, the nurses
station was right next to where we recovered patients from
(19:01):
open heart surgery. It wasn't appropriate for him to be
yelling at anybody at the nurses station.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Whatever people thought about Bob and Gail's relationship, when Gail
went missing, it shook the staff.
Speaker 15 (19:15):
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 and someone had taken her. We didn't know.
In fact, I do remember going out to Central Park
(19:37):
with people that I worked with, nurses, and we put
up posters in Central Park with her picture.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Sometime 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.
Speaker 15 (20:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
So Karen obliged. After arriving in the Hampton's, she drove
over to his rental house, which was a really large
building with the 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,
(20:35):
she started gently probing Bob for information about Gail.
Speaker 15 (20:39):
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.
Speaker 7 (20:57):
What Bob had told Karen was a lie. We spoke
to the investigator and the investigator said, absolutely not, that's
not true, but never found evidence of Gail anywhere.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Bob also described how Gail was a difficult wife and
how on the day she went missing, they'd had a
big argument.
Speaker 15 (21:18):
They 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.
Speaker 7 (21:27):
Again, another embellishment lie about what had happened.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
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.
Speaker 8 (21:49):
A nickname, Karen Kwabunga Karen Cowabunga.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
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 Gayle's disappearance, she still
went home with him.
Speaker 15 (22:07):
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 cass you could say. I mean, he was pretty persuasive,
(22:28):
and I remember climbing upstairs to the bedroom.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
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 Hampton's and party at West Hampton
Beach's famous club, The Marrakesh. He ditched his ll bean
clothing for Saturday Night Fever shirts with the shirttails tucked
(22:55):
right in. All of this just a month or two
after his wife had dispeared.
Speaker 15 (23:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
But after only six weeks of dating, Karen says, their
relationship literally hit the curb.
Speaker 15 (23:18):
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
(23:41):
my best friend in New York at the time was
woman Carol, who was a nurse at my Moonodes 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.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
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. On a warm
(24:43):
day in early August two thousand, a young New York
Times reporter by the name of Catherine Eban walked into
the Manhattan Criminal Court for the first time.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Catherine had been told that if you want to get
ahead on the biggest cases, you have to cover the
pre trial hearings to secure an early scoop. The only
problem is it was notoriously boring, you know.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
But this was the first one. The interesting thing about
this stage in the legal process is that the hearings
are close 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 pre trial hearing.
Not even a lane was invited. In consider this a
(25:59):
sneak peek.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
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.
Speaker 10 (26:19):
My name is Leslie Crocker Snyder, and I was the
judge who presided over the Barenbaum case in two thousand.
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.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
I think sometimes Berreenbaum 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.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
The primary purpose of pretrial hearings is for the judge
to decide what testimonial 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.
(27:16):
After Bob strangled Gail in nineteen eighty three, she demanded
that he went to therapy. His first appointment was with
doctor Stanley Bone, who after one session asked Bob if
he could talk to Gaile on the phone. Like I said,
Elaine wasn't there, but she requested the redacted transcripts afterwards.
Here she is reading doctor Stanley Bone's testimony from that
(27:39):
cold pre trial hearing.
Speaker 4 (27:42):
Question did you call her essentially to warn her?
Speaker 7 (27:47):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (27:49):
Question and at that time did you warn her that
she may be in danger? And the witness said yes.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
After just one session, doctor Bone called Gail to warn her,
and then he refused to treat Bob again. Instead, he
referred him to another psychiatrist named doctor Shelley Duran, who
deja vu also asked Bob if she could speak to
Gail on the phone.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
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 doctor
Jurane answered, I didn't know if I would hear her voice.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Doctor Duran also refused to treat Bob again, and he
moved on to his third psychiatrist doctor Michael Stone, who
again after just one session, decided he needed to contact Gail.
He wrote her something called a Pterosov letter. That's the
letter Gail told Denise and Laine about, the one she
(28:57):
was going to use to blackmail Bob.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
It's on doctor Stone's letterhead Doctor Michael Stone, Central Park, West,
New York City. It's written to my sister, Gail Bierrembaum
in eighty fifth Street, and it says I have been
advised by doctor Stone that, for reasons of my own safety,
I should at this time live apart from my husband,
(29:25):
Doctor Robert Biurembaum. I further understand that, owing to the
unpredictable nature of my husband's physical assaults, and to the
chronic nature of the character logical abnormalities that underlie these assaults,
(29:46):
no firm date can as yet be fixed as to
when it might be safe to resume living together. If
I do not heed this advice, I must accept the consequences,
including the possibility of personal injury or death at the
(30:08):
hands of my husband, and absolve Doctor Stone of responsibility
for any such eventuality. And there's a line at the
end of it from my sister's signature and I don't
believe she ever signed it.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
The Pterosoft letter is named after a woman named Tatiana Terrasov,
who was murdered by her a strange 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 Todtiana that she was in danger. In
(30:53):
addition to sending the Pterosoft letter, Doctor Stone gave Bob
an offer. He said he would continue to treat under
two conditions. First, doctor 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
(31:14):
the insurance request, but he did let doctor Stone talk
to his mom and dad.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Of course, Beerenbaum'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
(31:43):
for reporting the implications for patient confidentiality were pretty profound.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
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.
Speaker 7 (32:00):
Our argument was that since Bob had authorized doctor 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.
Speaker 10 (32:18):
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 Berenbaum, nevertheless, the doctor patient
(32:40):
privilege had not been waived because the people to whom
the relationship was disclosed were only involved so that the
psychologists could aid the defendant in his treatment.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
We don't know exactly what it was that made the
psychiatrists 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 doctor Stone had previously given.
Anna learned that during his first session with Bob, while
discussing the time he strangled Gil for smoking, Bob told
(33:17):
doctor 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
(33:38):
fit of rage after they broke up. We have tried
to confirm the story about Bob's first fiance, 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
(34:00):
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
doctor Michael Stone is telling the truth, this information comes
from Bob himself. Either way, There's something about these pre
(34:21):
trials 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 pre trials were over,
(34:45):
Dan and Steve's attention turned to prepping for the real thing.
Speaker 8 (34:50):
It's very important.
Speaker 7 (34:51):
It's almost like a movie.
Speaker 8 (34:52):
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
told randomly pick names out of a hat. He'll be first,
he'll be second, she'll be third.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
And that's when, after months of telling them I didn't
want to be involved, they subpoenaed me. 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.
Speaker 10 (35:28):
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.
Speaker 7 (35:43):
It's a five minute a quinta. If you believe this guy.
Speaker 8 (35:46):
Once you're thinks she's alive. When we chase he's dead.
That case is over.
Speaker 7 (35:50):
There were audible gasps from the jury.
Speaker 4 (35:53):
I remember turning to my brother and saying, what did
they say?
Speaker 1 (36:17):
The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for Ourheart Radio. For
more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The series is
hosted by me Carol Fisher and produced by Anna Sinfield.
Our assistant producer is Julian Manu Gera Patten, and our
researcher is Madeline Parr. The editor is Veronica Simmons. Max
(36:42):
O'Brien is our executive producer. Our fact checker is Valeria Rocca.
Production management from Sharie Houston and Charlotte woolf Sound design,
mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen and Nicholas Alexander. Music
supervision by Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Luisa Gerstein.
(37:05):
Story development by Isaac Fisher. Willard Foxton is creative director
of Development. Special thanks to Shawn Glynn, David Waters, might
Lely Raw, Katrina Norvel, David Wasserman, and beth Anne Mcaluso.
(37:27):
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
Novel. Hey listener. In this episode, we talk about domestic
violence and death. There's also a bunch of empowered women,
New York's feistiest young reporter, and an introduction to a
new woman with a great nickname, and of course more swearing,
(00:27):
because you know, I am who I am. 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. They have lots of great resources
to help you or your loved ones. You can find
them at no More dot org. That's noo Moore dot org.
(00:56):
In November of nineteen ninety eight, shortly after the Horso
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 do date was and what
(01:17):
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. My producer Anna tracked down their nannies. Hi,
sorry for hanging up on you.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I just wanted to make sure it was free.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Yeah, good thing.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
The beer and Bounce had two nannies, one for the
day and one for the night.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Hi, how are you doing good?
Speaker 5 (01:47):
How are you all?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
I'm good. I'm good, Which means almost twenty four hour
visibility into Bob's North Dakota home. Now, the film recordings
aren't so good, but this is definitely one of the
most exciting eighty moments of our investigation because, knowing all
I know now, it feels like everyone had an external
view of Bob and min not they'd interact with him
(02:09):
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.
Speaker 6 (02:26):
I was more involved with Janet, but Bob would come
in on Thursday or Fridays.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
This is Barb Cooper, the day nanny.
Speaker 6 (02:35):
Yeah, they feel real comfortable around either one of them, necessarily,
but I stuck it out. I loved the child and
loved what I was doing.
Speaker 5 (02:43):
He was weird, he was bizarre. I've never met anyone
like him before.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
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.
Speaker 5 (02:59):
The thing is they had a crip or anything. She's
left in a car seat, which is not very comfortable
for a baby.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
For Cheryl, the vibe of the house was just well off,
especially when Bob was there.
Speaker 5 (03:13):
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, she was always kind of creepy.
They loved him as a doctor's here, but he would
never treat anyone that smoked. He asked me if I smoked.
If I did, they wouldn't entirely.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Overall, the nanny seemed to remember a home a little
like this. The Beer and Bombs lived in a town
called Grand Forks. Bob would fly to work at the
hospital and min not 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
(03:56):
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.
(04:19):
He loved as 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.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
They had me in the basement and they slept upstairs.
There was one night he came into the nursery and
I woke up and he was watching me sleep, and
I don't know what he was planning to do, but
he took off.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
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 thirtieth, nineteen ninety eight, just three
weeks after his daughter was born, he was about to
get a rude awakening. I'm Carol Fisher and from the
(05:17):
teams at Novel and iHeartRadio. You're listening to The Girlfriends
episode seven, Cowabunga.
Speaker 7 (05:59):
We had pretty much finished our investigation, and we decided
that he had already spent literally tens of thousands of
dollars going across the country doing this investigation. W'd be
worth a couple of plane tickets to North Dakota to
try and see what he had to say.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
On November thirtieth, DA Prosecutor Dan Bibb sent the case
investigators Andy Rosenswag and Tommy Pond to mine Not 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,
(06:39):
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
(07:01):
and stared back at them like a deer in headlights.
Speaker 7 (07:05):
He basically says I'm still represented by an attorney, And
that was that.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
For Steve Sorako, the other prosecutor, it wasn't just about
getting him to talk though disguise his intel gathering, the
DA was sending a message.
Speaker 8 (07:24):
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.
Speaker 7 (07:39):
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
Burnbound and we want to know if he wanted to
talk to us. You know, there's out raised and violing
right the council. Scott, nobody violently anybody's right to council.
(08:01):
As soon as my guys opened their mouth, he said,
I'm represented by an attorney and they walked away. Now
we violated anything, And he said, are you going to
the grand jury? I can't tell you whether we are
or we are, so grand jury is a secret proceeding,
can't do it in New York State. A defendant if
(08:23):
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 doctor Burnbaum wanted to testify before the grand jury.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
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 used 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. That's what Greenfield was doing. He was
essentially setting up a notification service, and nearly a year later,
(09:07):
on September twenty second, nineteen ninety nine, Greenfield got what
he was asking for.
Speaker 7 (09:13):
I wrote him a letter saying, here you go, here's
your opportunity. And he called me up and he said,
what the hell, what are you doing? I said, Scott,
you serve notice. I just told you that the grand
jury is going on. What do you want to do.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
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.
Speaker 9 (09:55):
I believe it was Friday evening, and I think there
were four couple so some of my 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
(10:16):
guess liposuctions and even breast augments, even though he wasn't
a bird 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
(10:39):
he just turned white like a ghost. And next thing,
you know, he told Johnny, 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.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
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
sixteen to twenty three jurors are randomly selected to come
to court a few days a month, and here prosecutors
(11:17):
lay out their case, witnesses and all. There is 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
(11:40):
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 refuse to go. Instead,
I spent the next few months wondering what was going on.
Sometimes curiosity would get the better of me, so me,
(12:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
The doctor under arrest.
Speaker 10 (12:20):
He's charged with killing his wife.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Tops say he dumped her body.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
In the ocean, throwing it from a plane.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
On December eighth, nineteen ninety nine, the grand jury cast
their vote.
Speaker 11 (12:34):
Fourteen 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.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
In the days following the indictment, the news was everywhere
and they did not spare any details.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
They say they have new witnesses, new evidence, enough to
build a murder case even without the body.
Speaker 12 (12:58):
I remember the day I was getting ready for work.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
This is Denise Cassenbaum, Gail's best friend.
Speaker 10 (13:06):
I was getting dressed in my apartment and my sister call,
She said, turn on the news.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
This almost reads like a screenplay. But what's scary is
that this is a true crime.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Turns out. Back in the nineties, news reporters were not
too concerned with holding back the details before they had
been proven in court.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
A loving wife would complained constantly about our husband's violent temper,
but instead of getting away from him, she tried to
help and sadly paid for it with her life.
Speaker 10 (13:35):
I was just like, oh my god, finally, you know,
I was screaming.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
I was just yes.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
She was never seen again, and her family and cops
didn't buy the doc's story.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
We've always been certain that it was him. He is
the last person that saw her.
Speaker 13 (13:57):
His story regarding her whereabouts and what happened never made
any sense.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Seeing in court being accused of murdering my sister was
such a relief.
Speaker 13 (14:09):
I'm very gratified that after fourteen years, the person who
murdered my sister is finally standing in a courtroom being
charged with that murder. I'm only very very sorry that
my parents are not alive to be here to see this.
And I told him responsible for their deaths as well,
because they died of a broken heart.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
This was a tireless investigation. Believe me, for two das,
here are two guys that you don't want after you
if you're the bad guy.
Speaker 7 (14:36):
Steve and I had agreed that we would be seeking
half a million dollars Baill, so we asked her five
hundred thousand dollars and the attorney goes yeah, okay, no,
Megan Beer and Baum.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
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 for the comfort of a four
x eight cel twenty five years to life.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I guess me and the other girl old friends were
onto something all along, and it turns out another woman
was too. When Bob was charged with Gail's murder, it
(15:25):
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 it changed.
It was a real case now, with the real victim
and a real potential murderer. Even Mindy wasn't excited by
(15:47):
that anymore.
Speaker 12 (15:48):
There was a shift from the sensational and the speculative
to the real and present, so it was no longer funny.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
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 in
our game go too far?
Speaker 12 (16:19):
What if he's not guilty, will he come after us
for slander? And if he is guilty, will he come
after us?
Speaker 1 (16:26):
After us? But little did we know that while we
were starting to doubt ourselves, another girlfriend was about to surface.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
It was right after Burnbaum 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 as his wife disappeared.
And I'm literally on the phone motioning to Steve to
(17:01):
come into my office and basically telling him there's somebody
we need to talk to.
Speaker 8 (17:06):
I said, what's it all about, Goodwill? There's another one
of his, one of her better word girlfriends.
Speaker 7 (17:11):
It's just surfaced. She refused to identify herself. She said,
I'm afraid of him. She said. She called me back
in a couple of days. A couple of days later,
phone rings. It's the woman I had spoken to a
day or two before, and she said, I'm Cary Carojuana.
Speaker 14 (17:30):
I know Bob Bernbaum. We worked together in my Minas
Medical Center in Brooklyn in nineteen eighty four nineteen eighty five,
and this is my story.
Speaker 7 (17:42):
I said, we'll see in a day or two, booked
flights to San Francisco, flew in one day, drove down
to San Jose. Next we met in the diner of
all places, and sat there while she told us the story.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
And 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 them. 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,
(18:21):
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.
Speaker 15 (18:40):
He was at the nurses station in the cardiovscer I
see you, 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 times,
you know, please lower your voice. I mean, the nurses
station was right next to where we recovered patients from
(19:01):
open heart surgery. It wasn't appropriate for him to be
yelling at anybody at the nurses station.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Whatever people thought about Bob and Gail's relationship, when Gail
went missing, it shook the staff.
Speaker 15 (19:15):
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 and someone had taken her. We didn't know.
In fact, I do remember going out to Central Park
(19:37):
with people that I worked with, nurses, and we put
up posters in Central Park with her picture.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Sometime 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.
Speaker 15 (20:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
So Karen obliged. After arriving in the Hampton's, she drove
over to his rental house, which was a really large
building with the 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,
(20:35):
she started gently probing Bob for information about Gail.
Speaker 15 (20:39):
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.
Speaker 7 (20:57):
What Bob had told Karen was a lie. We spoke
to the investigator and the investigator said, absolutely not, that's
not true, but never found evidence of Gail anywhere.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Bob also described how Gail was a difficult wife and
how on the day she went missing, they'd had a
big argument.
Speaker 15 (21:18):
They 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.
Speaker 7 (21:27):
Again, another embellishment lie about what had happened.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
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.
Speaker 8 (21:49):
A nickname, Karen Kwabunga Karen Cowabunga.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
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 Gayle's disappearance, she still
went home with him.
Speaker 15 (22:07):
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 cass you could say. I mean, he was pretty persuasive,
(22:28):
and I remember climbing upstairs to the bedroom.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
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 Hampton's and party at West Hampton
Beach's famous club, The Marrakesh. He ditched his ll bean
clothing for Saturday Night Fever shirts with the shirttails tucked
(22:55):
right in. All of this just a month or two
after his wife had dispeared.
Speaker 15 (23:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
But after only six weeks of dating, Karen says, their
relationship literally hit the curb.
Speaker 15 (23:18):
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
(23:41):
my best friend in New York at the time was
woman Carol, who was a nurse at my Moonodes 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.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
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. On a warm
(24:43):
day in early August two thousand, a young New York
Times reporter by the name of Catherine Eban walked into
the Manhattan Criminal Court for the first time.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Catherine had been told that if you want to get
ahead on the biggest cases, you have to cover the
pre trial hearings to secure an early scoop. The only
problem is it was notoriously boring, you know.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
But this was the first one. The interesting thing about
this stage in the legal process is that the hearings
are close 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 pre trial hearing.
Not even a lane was invited. In consider this a
(25:59):
sneak peek.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
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.
Speaker 10 (26:19):
My name is Leslie Crocker Snyder, and I was the
judge who presided over the Barenbaum case in two thousand.
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.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
I think sometimes Berreenbaum 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.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
The primary purpose of pretrial hearings is for the judge
to decide what testimonial 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.
(27:16):
After Bob strangled Gail in nineteen eighty three, she demanded
that he went to therapy. His first appointment was with
doctor Stanley Bone, who after one session asked Bob if
he could talk to Gaile on the phone. Like I said,
Elaine wasn't there, but she requested the redacted transcripts afterwards.
Here she is reading doctor Stanley Bone's testimony from that
(27:39):
cold pre trial hearing.
Speaker 4 (27:42):
Question did you call her essentially to warn her?
Speaker 7 (27:47):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (27:49):
Question and at that time did you warn her that
she may be in danger? And the witness said yes.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
After just one session, doctor Bone called Gail to warn her,
and then he refused to treat Bob again. Instead, he
referred him to another psychiatrist named doctor Shelley Duran, who
deja vu also asked Bob if she could speak to
Gail on the phone.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
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 doctor
Jurane answered, I didn't know if I would hear her voice.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Doctor Duran also refused to treat Bob again, and he
moved on to his third psychiatrist doctor Michael Stone, who
again after just one session, decided he needed to contact Gail.
He wrote her something called a Pterosov letter. That's the
letter Gail told Denise and Laine about, the one she
(28:57):
was going to use to blackmail Bob.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
It's on doctor Stone's letterhead Doctor Michael Stone, Central Park, West,
New York City. It's written to my sister, Gail Bierrembaum
in eighty fifth Street, and it says I have been
advised by doctor Stone that, for reasons of my own safety,
I should at this time live apart from my husband,
(29:25):
Doctor Robert Biurembaum. I further understand that, owing to the
unpredictable nature of my husband's physical assaults, and to the
chronic nature of the character logical abnormalities that underlie these assaults,
(29:46):
no firm date can as yet be fixed as to
when it might be safe to resume living together. If
I do not heed this advice, I must accept the consequences,
including the possibility of personal injury or death at the
(30:08):
hands of my husband, and absolve Doctor Stone of responsibility
for any such eventuality. And there's a line at the
end of it from my sister's signature and I don't
believe she ever signed it.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
The Pterosoft letter is named after a woman named Tatiana Terrasov,
who was murdered by her a strange 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 Todtiana that she was in danger. In
(30:53):
addition to sending the Pterosoft letter, Doctor Stone gave Bob
an offer. He said he would continue to treat under
two conditions. First, doctor 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
(31:14):
the insurance request, but he did let doctor Stone talk
to his mom and dad.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Of course, Beerenbaum'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
(31:43):
for reporting the implications for patient confidentiality were pretty profound.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
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.
Speaker 7 (32:00):
Our argument was that since Bob had authorized doctor 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.
Speaker 10 (32:18):
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 Berenbaum, nevertheless, the doctor patient
(32:40):
privilege had not been waived because the people to whom
the relationship was disclosed were only involved so that the
psychologists could aid the defendant in his treatment.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
We don't know exactly what it was that made the
psychiatrists 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 doctor Stone had previously given.
Anna learned that during his first session with Bob, while
discussing the time he strangled Gil for smoking, Bob told
(33:17):
doctor 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
(33:38):
fit of rage after they broke up. We have tried
to confirm the story about Bob's first fiance, 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
(34:00):
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
doctor Michael Stone is telling the truth, this information comes
from Bob himself. Either way, There's something about these pre
(34:21):
trials 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 pre trials were over,
(34:45):
Dan and Steve's attention turned to prepping for the real thing.
Speaker 8 (34:50):
It's very important.
Speaker 7 (34:51):
It's almost like a movie.
Speaker 8 (34:52):
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
told randomly pick names out of a hat. He'll be first,
he'll be second, she'll be third.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
And that's when, after months of telling them I didn't
want to be involved, they subpoenaed me. 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.
Speaker 10 (35:28):
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.
Speaker 7 (35:43):
It's a five minute a quinta. If you believe this guy.
Speaker 8 (35:46):
Once you're thinks she's alive. When we chase he's dead.
That case is over.
Speaker 7 (35:50):
There were audible gasps from the jury.
Speaker 4 (35:53):
I remember turning to my brother and saying, what did
they say?
Speaker 1 (36:17):
The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for Ourheart Radio. For
more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The series is
hosted by me Carol Fisher and produced by Anna Sinfield.
Our assistant producer is Julian Manu Gera Patten, and our
researcher is Madeline Parr. The editor is Veronica Simmons. Max
(36:42):
O'Brien is our executive producer. Our fact checker is Valeria Rocca.
Production management from Sharie Houston and Charlotte woolf Sound design,
mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen and Nicholas Alexander. Music
supervision by Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Luisa Gerstein.
(37:05):
Story development by Isaac Fisher. Willard Foxton is creative director
of Development. Special thanks to Shawn Glynn, David Waters, might
Lely Raw, Katrina Norvel, David Wasserman, and beth Anne Mcaluso.
(37:27):
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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