July 29, 2026 • 70 mins
In the fall of 1995, hunters in rural Carmel, New York discovered the remains of 12-year-old Josette Wright. The discovery set the town and local law enforcement into a frenzy, desperate to close the case even if doing so meant bending the law. In this exclusive interview with Paul Solotaroff, the award-winning investigative journalist and creator of the hit podcast The Devil's Quarry, Ben, Matt and Noel learn more about this harrowing tale of crime, cover-up and corruption. Tune in to learn how Paul's investigation may have just solved the case... and what happens next.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Name is Noah.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
They call me Ben. We're joined, as always with our
super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Faked. Most importantly, you
argue you are here. That makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. A quick disclaimer at the top, folks,
Tonight's episode contains graphic descriptions of true crimes, so listener
(00:50):
discretion is advised. In the woods outside of Caramel, New York,
a hunter discovers the bones of a twelve year old girl,
launching an investigator into a mystery that could be accurately
described as a real life horror film. Fortunately, folks, we
are not diving into this alone. We are joined with
(01:10):
none other than the award winning investigative journalist, longtime contributing
editor at Rolling Stone, the creator of Bone Valley season five,
The Devil's Quarry. We proudly present the legendary Paul solditarof.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
Wow Wow, I Feel like Connor McGregor.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Uh, the dire straits of true crime reporting that that
was a nod to a conversation we had off.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yes, watch your watch your legs there, Paul, If you're
jumping in as Connor, well.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Oh no, yeah, didn't he have a bit of a
bad showing? Uh this last time around? I heard it
was a little underwhelming.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Not every day could be the birthday, I guess. Uh, Paul,
let's uh speaking to jumping in. Let's dive in with
this at the beginning. Could you set the scene by
introducing our audience to a little bit more about your
past work and what led you toward investigative journalism, Like,
was there a single specific turning point you can recall
(02:13):
in your life or did you sort of always know
this is your vocation?
Speaker 5 (02:18):
I I bought my nose against investigative journalism after hitting
my forehead on fine Britt Walls. I'm the son of
one of the great literary literary editors of the second
half of the twentieth century, Ted Sulataro, who edited Roth
(02:41):
Mal discovered an entire generation extraordinary novelists and poets. And
I just assumed that as the firstborn I would roll
right down the assembly line and went the writers Workshop
at Iowa to become a novelist. They happily disabused me
(03:08):
of that idea very quickly. They said, yeah, you can
write a sentence, okay, but Jesus Christ, is this what
you're using for material? That shot me like a water
canon into the playwriting program, a graduate playwriting program at
(03:31):
the ILD School of Drama. They wasted even fewer seconds
informing me that again I had the wrong address and
politely referred me to the NU School of Social Work,
where I spent two and a half really unprofitable years
(03:54):
training to be a clinical psychologist. The only thing I
got out of that forty five k student debt was
my subject. So I got placed as a counselor in
(04:14):
training at a community mental health center in the Seth
Bronx and I arrived on the scene about an hour
and a half after this horrific calamity called the happy
Lands Disco fire, in which a couple of three four
(04:35):
hundred people were packed into a basement social club and
someone threw a bullets of cocktailer. Oh my gosh, an
orphaned about three hundred children in East Treemont. In the
Bronx and lo and behold. I suddenly was the designated
(04:55):
healer for fifteen or twenty children who were a speechless
with grief, with horror, dislocation. And at that point I
realized two things. I still was the person in the
room who needed the most help, but I needed to
(05:19):
give a voice to these voice, those kids. And when
the Village Voice inexplicably came calling in nineteen eighty eight
they needed an associate editor, I took the job so
that I could do something that I'd been yearing to
(05:40):
do since I was a nine year old getting mugged
on the subways of New York, and that was bully
the bullies. So journalism, especially in long form investigative journalism,
has given me a chance to get into the ring
with some of the more despicable characters and some of
(06:04):
the more despicable public policy as asters of the second
twentieth century.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
I love the idea of journalism as bullying the bullies.
I've never thought about that before, but we should need
that now, maybe more than ever. And there are some
folks that are stepping up and some folks that are
shrinking back, and you kind of really see who's really
got the goods in the face of you know, real
real bullies.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
Yeah, bullying that looks exactly like factious. Yeah. And just
to put a pin on this, the first story I
ever wrote was a product of just looking out over
the bridge in my notes. So every day I would
take my launch. The Village Voice used to be in
(06:51):
Greenwich Village. The Village Voice used to be the Premiere
America and Alt Newsweek, and it was an extraordinary place
for young talent too to develop, to grow a clip file,
(07:11):
and then to get the hell out and go right
for an outlet that actually got read and that actually
paid the writer. Every day I would take my lunch
on the West Side Docks. Now this is nineteen eighty eight,
the very pinnacle of the crack pandemic in New York City.
(07:34):
New York went from about three hundred murders here to
twenty seven one hundred in the span of three four years.
And crack was the original diseased back for Woule did
(07:57):
destroyed New York in a way I have never seen
a city gutted. We went from eleven thousand homeless population
to one hundred and fifty thousand primarily single income momb
and children demographic and what I saw on the west
(08:18):
side of the docks, which were in terrible disrepair and truly
a dangerous place, were ten twelve fourteen year old boys
selling their bodies for crack rocks to Wall streeterers who
were either on their lunch break or headed home through
the holland on anyone driving down the West Side Highway,
(08:42):
either to Brooklyn or to get to New Jersey saw
what I saw on a dale. They saw these shirtless
children strolling in November and December in a place with
no shelter from the wind, in an incredibly brutal winter,
(09:06):
and no one stopped. And I began to cultivate those kids.
I take them to breakfast, I take them to lunch,
and they told me the story that became this enormous bombshell. Again,
no intention of destroying. The one institution that pretended to
(09:30):
care about these kids, a fledgling nonprofit called Covenant Ants,
in which I thought, like most downtown New York, was
that those blue vans were out there saving these children.
Well they were. However, the founder and director of Covenant House,
(09:51):
father Bruce Ridder, was taking some of these children into
the front door and selling them out the back door.
Work for doms, and that story not only level Covenant
House and nominated for Appulitzer, it also really surfaced for
(10:13):
me exactly what my remit as a journalist was, which
was to get names and faiths as to the nameless
can face that's and to make sure that I told
their stories with the kind of power, granularity and gut
(10:34):
punching specificity that you couldn't look away.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Wow, Paul Okay, First of all, for folks who don't
know about the story and haven't read your writing, because
I'm assuming there's some of us out there, including myself,
who have not yet, where can we go to find
that pieces on that work?
Speaker 5 (10:56):
So that story is called Dead Boys, it isn't easy
to find. If I were more ambitious entrepreneur, I'd have
my website and i'd have someone curating it. I got.
But there are a couple of stories I wrote at
the Village Voice that are at this point in the Cannon.
(11:18):
That's one of them. Another called The Power and the
Gory about the world's most homicidal bodybuilder, a guy who
is utterly legendary, but he actually lived, I mean wound
up putting a bullet in his brain. That story is
(11:42):
included in the Best American Writing of the twentieth century.
So if you just google my name, all my stuff
pops on Rolling Stone. I've been at Rolling Stone now
for thirty three years and have used that ordinary platform
to break the NFL concussion scandal all to read Army
(12:06):
Medical Field hospital scandal. I've been able to walk into
some men off death row. I wrote a story that
helped exonerate forty two thousand drug offend drug defendants in
the state of Massachusetts. Aaron Bernandez story is mine. I've
(12:28):
been given the freedom and the green light to go
where my outrage takes me. And somebody's telling you guys
off stage in a country that is at this point
one outrage stacked upon another. I am never bored and
(12:53):
never wanting for work.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
That is, unfortunately in incredibly true. Paul, and as we
as we hear this culmination of your work that has
taken you to dangerous places mentally and physically, one of
the next questions we have to ask is that, given
(13:19):
the tragically high amount of unsolved cases of murder and
disappearances in the United States in particular and in the
world abroad, what drew you to the case of Josette right.
Speaker 5 (13:34):
Wonderful question. So I was rolling off a series of
cases that allowed me to dig deeply into the prison
industrial complex. I got the wrapper meet Mill out of
Prism in twenty eighteen, not because I fell in love
with Meek Mill. Trust me to know Meek is to
(13:56):
immediately fall out of love with me. For me was
the most visible example victim of what again all of
us know about and nobody talks about, the post incarceral
(14:18):
system in America. Probations parole, this endless long tail that
law enforcement uses to further impoverish and scapegoat people who
have served their turn, who have rehabilitated themselves, but walk
(14:41):
out of prison without their civil rights having forfeited them
by virtue of being a felon, so they can apply
for food stamps, can't apply for Section eight housing, can't
apply for government back college loans. And Nick was fameless
being portraed by a corrupt judge in Philadelphia and had
(15:07):
been violated on and off parole for eleven years to
the almost annihilation of his career for having allegedly sold
to crack Rocks to an undercover at the age of
eighteen and digging into his story, I saw that the entire.
Speaker 6 (15:31):
So called elite West Philly narcotics team was just an
armed robbery crew of guns badges, and wrote the story
that outed that terrific bunch of sociopaths in Bloop.
Speaker 5 (15:48):
Just another gang, right, just another day. I couldn't have
done those stories without the guidance and the the Sage
Council of the Innison Projects. So along the way I
got to be close professional acquaintances with Peter Neufeld, Barry Shack,
(16:10):
Nina Morrison, the guiding lights at the Innocence Project. And
it was Nina who told me, Well, she called me
one day and she said, you've written add infinitum about
big city police corruption. You have any interest in digging
into what small town policing looks like and how much
(16:34):
worse it is than Chicago, Cleveland, La Chicago pet which
invented police violence, Los Angeles Police Department, which perfected it.
You know, I thought I'd seen the worst that law
enforcement was capable of in the ramparts and crash scandals
(16:56):
in La Wrong. Just outside of New York City, fifty
miles from the Bronx. North of the Bronx stands the
town of Carmel, not to be confused with the Carmel
of Clint Eastwood. This is a working class, working core
(17:20):
white flight exer of the Bronx that was essentially a
ghost county until urban renewal sent a bunch of angry
white hard hats and blue collars fleeing for their lives
from the Bronx Queens Long Island to Midge State, New York,
(17:43):
where you could buy a Sears Roebuck kit home for
thirty five thousand dollars, PLoP it on the banks of
Lake Carmel or Lake Glenida, and live like a pauper kit.
Of course, unintended consequences. All those cops and firemen and
(18:08):
sanitation workers who did that installed eight septic systems and
immediately sent their gray water waste into these gorgeous man
made lakes that were oh, by the way, the reservoir
as system for you soon and oops. I have never
(18:29):
in my life encountered this profession anywhere except Putnam County.
They bring in a guy not every year, more often
than they want to admit, to mow the lakes mo
because when you introduce all that runoff nitrogen from septic
(18:54):
systems into fresh water which you get are massive spores
of E. Coli. E Coli in turn create these huge
blooms of algae. If you want to see Christmas in July,
go swimming in Lake Carmel. You will see weeds rising
(19:16):
thirty feet out of the lake beds floor. That's why
I could an amphibious lawn.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
That's it. I've never even heard of an amphibious lawnmower.
Law no, neither.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
You know. And I'm sure the guy who who owns
and runs the operates amphibious lawnmower has been deported, so
we know what jeuez. Well, all right, So in twenty twenty,
I get I get this call from Nina Morrison, who's
(19:54):
now a federal judge and a great one, telling me
that there are these two young men who falsely targeted, arrested, convicted,
and sent to prison for life for the murder of
twelve year old chist Ray. She said, Paul, if you
think you've seen a parent police corruption, wait until you
(20:18):
read these trial transcripts. Well, story short, I got up
there and I spent months with this genius. One of
those two kids, Anthony de Pippo, who was a ninth
grade dropout, three times, and who never never made it
(20:40):
to the tenth grade. This huge, hulking halt Hogan worshiped her,
who for giggles broke fluorescent lights and folding chairs over
his buddies heads in these impromptu backyard wrestling tournaments. David Stage,
(21:04):
that guy who had caught the hostile attention of the
Putnam Sheriff's office, had been grotesquely framed for the rape
and murder of this beautiful twelve year old child who
(21:24):
had gone missing in October nineteen, And it took the
cops a year and a half to not only coerce
Menace and brownbeat a false confession from Anthony's best friend,
a confession that implicated the two of them, but also
(21:46):
to coerce Menace and browbeat their stoner friends into falsely
testifying against them ninety seven, These two young men who
had the most innocuous criminal records possession of throwing a
(22:09):
trash can at a commuter train.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
Doesn't Anthony say, by the way, when you speak to
him in Devil's Quarry, you talk a little bit about
drug charges, and he says, yeah, you could call me
a drug dealer, but not a successful one.
Speaker 5 (22:25):
Exactly right, Anthony may be the only drug dealer in
the history of the continental United States to lose money
selling drugs, which will happen when you're consuming more of
your product than yourself. These two guys were part of
this kind of rag tag contingent of Wlatchkey kids. Kids
(22:52):
in the story, I called them sideways kids. These are
the kids at the back of the classroom whose feet
are constantly drumming under the table, who was staring off
in the space. These are kids who, if they'd grown
up ten miles south in Westchester, would have been flagged
for add or some you know or dyslexia and been
(23:15):
diagnosed and treated and going on to become dentists and
bond traders. But they grew up in a community in
which children, specially female children, were prey. And my initial
(23:38):
working title for the story that became The Devil you
Know was rape value. It was hard meeting a girl
now in her thirties forties who grew up in the
town and not been sexually violated by an authority figure
Jesus Christ, stepdad, principal teacher, the cops themselves. Over and
(24:03):
over I heard from these girls that in a town
with nowhere to go and nothing to do. They go
off to the woods with a forty and a joint,
and while away a Friday night, the cops always knew
where they were. They roll up, the boys would get cuffed,
the girls would get tossed into the back of the
(24:24):
cruiser and have to blow the cop to get out
of the cruise. And this community of predatory cops, literally
leg breaking cops who's only job, as far as I
could tell, and I investigated them thoroughly, was illegally coercing
(24:48):
campaign money for the reelection of this crooked sheriff who'd
been in power for twenty odd years. Those cops discovered
the remains of Joseph Right in a shallow grave thirteen
months after she went missing. By the way, those two
cops never bothered to investigate her disappearance in October of
(25:12):
ninety four, outside of talking to her teachers, her family,
throwing up a couple of missing fliers. Never did any legwork.
When she turns up day in ninety five with her
hands bound behind her, her panties stuffed down, her throat,
(25:34):
her skeletal throat, and her broad tied around a mandible
of her skull, those cops immediately thought, oh shit, maybe
we should have spent an hour here and there looking
into her, and immediately began to round up the kids
(25:55):
that they designated the usual suspects. Not only did they
sell this family, not only they sell this community an
enormous toxic pack of law, a pack of lies that
that family still clings to that family even after the
(26:16):
exoneration of these two young men. I will go into
that in a second, because it's a miracle that should
never have happened. But Anthony to Pippo, that ninth grade dropout,
did something so extraordinary that I just want to write
his Nobel speech. It is, in all my years of
(26:38):
writing about the wrongly convicted, of helping to exonerate the
wrongly convicted, I have never seen anything more extraordinary heroic
than what Anthony to Pippo did in the prison library
at Africa. It is I'll shorthand it by saying this
(26:59):
Anthony was finally exonerated by the best lawyer in America,
Mark Agnifilo. Mark Agnifilo is this extraordinary showman who, as
he says in the podcast, markets himself exclusively to people
who were some of those people. Harbie Weinstein, p Diddy.
(27:21):
He got Diddy off of thirty six or forty glaringly
flagrant sex drafting offenses. He's now representing Luigi Manngioni in
the trial of the Century that starts this fall. That's
who Mark Agnifilo is, and what Mark Agnifilo told me
was when he first met Anthony in the spring of
(27:47):
twenty sixteen, three months before that trial, his jaw dropped
open to listen, to sit across from this enormous man
with an intimidating goateee Anthony six five and a half
six six three, twenty benches an entire block, and Anthony,
(28:12):
as Mark agniffelow realized, was the best lawyer in the room.
And Mark Agnifflo said to himself and then said to me,
I realized I was going to win this trial after
my first five minutes with Anthony, because I had a
secret weapon that the prosecution didn't. I had the actual
best lawyer in America teach me how to try this case.
(28:35):
And when he tried that case in the fall of
twenty sixteen, it wasn't a contest. It was a slaughter.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
But we'll get to one thing I want to focus
on really quickly. Here is why those particular law enforcement
officers looked at these guys and those why were those
guys the go to potential bad guys in town that
may have done this kind of thing, And specifically about
a gentleman named Pat Costolato. I think, is how you
(29:07):
say his name?
Speaker 5 (29:08):
Yes? Castaldo? Yeah? Oh? Was he?
Speaker 2 (29:12):
And why is he like targeting these guys?
Speaker 5 (29:16):
So Pat Costaldo, as near as I could tell, was
the chief's leg breaker for this crooked sheriff, a goon
who was notorious for using his hands and his feet
to enfluce the wall in Putnam County. Big Bruiser looked
(29:37):
like something out of a trashy drug store detective novel
from the forties, slicked his hair back in a high
type pompadour, wore a mowhair top coat in the summer.
Clearly thought he was Popeye Doyle, although it was here
(29:58):
was like he can't even drive. Pa Costaldo seems to
have about three working neurons, and when he discovered when
his department stumbled upon the bones of Joseph, they were
(30:18):
under enormous pressure. Already a second beautiful child girl had
gone missing in Carmel six months prior, and so now
you had in a town of no violent crime, in
a town where the law enforcement largely consists of these
(30:39):
cops responding to bars and domestic spans, you have these
cops who have never, in their wives worked a murder,
and as near as I could tell, were never trained
to be cops in the first place.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
And they're pretty clear about their inexperience. When you speak
with some of these folks or dive into them in
Devil's Quarry, we've got to ask poll and pardon me
if this is a bit of a softball, but I
think our audience needs to hear it. How did this
lack of experience, plus they're already loose and fast nature
(31:15):
as law enforcement operatives, how did this inform what they
saw as their strategy? Because it sounds when I'm hearing
this through right and I'm reading your previous work, every
point of their investigation seems to focus less and less
(31:36):
on finding the actual murderer and more and more on
closing out the case.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
Exactly right, So let's step the stage for your listeners.
Josett Rights discovered November twenty ninety five in that shallow grave,
what those cops found was evidence of a serial killer.
(32:05):
At large, so she had been bound and gagged in
ritualistic and fetishistic style, meaning this was not the doer's
first rodeo. The staging and the concealment of the corpse
(32:27):
was planful, was meticulous, and were it not for the
fact that she was buried in a forest, forest with deer,
with coyotes, with other large rodents, that grave would have
(32:49):
held her remains for time immemorial. But one of those
browsing animals had dug and to part part of her
skull and made off with it, and that skull was
discovered underfoot by two hunters on the first day of
hunting season, So it wasn't this though the cops were
(33:11):
looking for her. Course, cops had no interest in finding Joseph.
They had written her off as a runaway a year aware.
Back to why they chose these guns. So, as I say,
there was enormous community pressure in a town, in a
county with no serious violence. And it's one of the
(33:34):
virtues of living in mystics, particularly the community that is
inhabited by New York cops by New York unfortunately not
enforced by New York cops. So who becomes a cop
in Putnam County. Who becomes a cop in the town
(33:55):
of Cornwall, It's two different streams of applicants. It's locals
who had the childhoods, got picked on, bullied, and aspired
to become cops to avenge themselves on the snop those
(34:17):
kids that rough them up at fourteen. The other tributary
to that talent pool is the kickouts from mid city
police forces, cops so bad that even mid city forces
could no longer afford to keep paying for settlements and
(34:41):
judgments against those cops for abusing their fellow citizens. On
top of that, as we discovered in Anthony's civil rights
trial against those cops after he won his conviction and
forced those cops to tell the truth in deposition, was
that where big city comps are sent to an academy
(35:04):
for six months, where that they're constantly trained and retrained,
particularly if they want to make rack. If you want
to become a sergeant, you've got to go for extra training.
You want to become a detective, There's a lot of
work to do to rise the ranks in the NYPD.
There is no such pecking order. It's just next man
(35:27):
up in these small towns. Love story short These guys
not only had no homicide experience, they had no criminal detection.
If they didn't know what the Fifth Amendment was, they
didn't know what Brady Law was, they didn't know what
impeachment stuff they teach in the first week at the
police academy. These guys have never heard of and admitted
(35:50):
under us. So when you've got a howling community and
you live amongst those folks and they want someone to
rad did Friday? You go and arrest someone Friday. And
here were these two kids who had been selling PCP,
taking PCP, who've been bringing ecstasy in from New York City,
(36:14):
who were standing outside the high school selling weed. Who
better to go to rest? And who better to to
pick out a hat? Knowing these kids don't have a lawyer,
these kids dropped out of high school. We can work
(36:36):
these kids to our end. And that's what those comps did.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
Oh my gosh, I can't even begin to a picture
where this conversation is going to continue to go. But
we are going to go there. But first let's take
a quick break here where from our sponsor. Then we
be back with more from Paul. And we're back. Let's
jump right back in with Paul.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
I guess the big question for me is when when
that type of scenario, let's say, is happening, how on
earth as that police officer, that law enforcement officer who
is choosing to potentially do this to someone, how do
you how can you feel confident that it's going to
work with it? Because they have to face a judge
(37:24):
at some point, they have to potentially a jury, all
these other things like, there's process to go through. How
do you get the story to come out in the
favor of the thing you want it to be?
Speaker 5 (37:36):
With two fists. We have transcripts, we have recanting witnesses,
we have the story stories of all these kids that
they brutalized, of all these kids they stalked and terrorized.
A key witness, although he didn't testify a trial for
(38:01):
complicated reasons, but the one who first spun this fault
story was a severe special needs kid who was kind
of on the outside of the circle of these druggy
kids I named dom Neglia, a kid who'd been raised
(38:21):
in special ed and who was incredibly easy to manipulate
and terrorize. He's the one that the cops went hardest at,
not as the doer, but as the kid most likely
to flip on his friends, and that is in fact
(38:41):
what happened. But let me just step take two steps
to the right here, because the day that Joseph was discovered,
the day that those hallmark signs of a practice serial
(39:02):
predator being at large and being responsible for the murder
of this child, the cops had that guy in their sights.
That man, the town pedophile, the town terrorist of girls
(39:24):
and women, was extremely well known so the Putnam Sheriff's detectives,
extremely well known to the Carmel pad, extremely well known
to the Ken PD. This was a guy who had
run sexual ramppage through Putnham County and who, by the
(39:48):
time Josette disappears, had been charged with rake three times
by three different women, children children one is one eleven
and one age twelve, and the cops who had arrested
(40:10):
Gombert multiple times for burglary. He was a lifelong klectomaniac.
This is Howard Gumbert. Howard Gumbert, who this pathological drifter
whose m O by the way, he was handsome, he
was charismatic, drove a motorcycle looked like something out of
(40:33):
Happy Days. This guy had a sixth sense for vulnerable
single bonds. He had this extraordinarily extraordinary radar for women
who were lonely, who were susceptible to long form abuse
(40:56):
and hism was to move in with them within days
or weeks of them and then go to work not
only sexually violating those women, but their children. And again,
everyone in law enforcement in Putnam County, so seventy small towns,
(41:19):
each with its own police force, and then this free
range Sheriff's office knew and had dealings with Howard Gomber.
And yet of the dozens of people they dragged in
for questioning, they never even doorstepped Howard Gombret, by which
(41:39):
I mean they never even swung by his flop house
apartment and knocked on his door to ask him, where
were you on the night of October third, nineteen ninety
October fourth, nineteen ninety four. Never. It is unfathomable. And
(42:00):
I spent nine months writing that story, and then a
year making Season one of The Devil's Quarry, answering the
question of why those cops gave Howard Gombert a hunting
license to go on praying on the children of Putnam County.
(42:21):
I have an answer, but I can't tell I understood, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
We I mean, is it because of legal implications or
why can't you say.
Speaker 5 (42:31):
There is a great deal happening behind the scenes right now?
So let's step back, okay. And I'm sorry because we
keep getting we keep wanting to get to the foreground
of the story, and I keep taking you back when Yeah,
when I wrote the story in twenty twenty one, I
had the first and last nervous breakdown in my career.
(42:55):
For nine months, I had been warehousing the stories of
these six women who had been children. These were the
survivors of Howard Gomber. These were the women who threw,
who threw pluck or luck, hadn't been killed by him,
(43:19):
who had been raped and beaten and bound and gagged
when they were children, not all of them, but a
number of them as children. And there was something about
that kind of suffering that did to me what all
my years in the ghettos of North Philly, South l A,
(43:47):
South Side Chicago didn't. They took up residence in my soul,
and I couldn't break free. And I swore to myself
when I got better, I'm never going near this story again.
It is poison. However, a year ago, little more than
an year ago, I got a call from two of
(44:08):
those victims and both of them were sobbing. Both of
them said, oh my god, he's getting out. The state
of Connecticut is releasing this monster at the end of
twenty twenty six. Where will I live? He's been writing
me from prison. He must have a private detective. He
(44:31):
has tracked me down. He is sending me.
Speaker 7 (44:36):
Horrifying letters because stalking is part of his mo right, talking,
command control. All of the hallmarks of a lethal socioparts
are front and centered with this man. Howard Gombert finally
(44:57):
either was polatantly aster lee put County by those cops
or figured that jig was up. He moved fourteen miles
east to the border of Connecticut, just over the state line,
and instantly began looking for his next cast of victims.
(45:18):
And he found them very quickly, but he was fourteen
miles away. Those cops never so much as paid a
courtesy call on here. Long story short, he committed an
unspeakable crime against the seven year old girl in New Milford,
(45:43):
Connecticut in nineteen ninety nine. She told someone, and because
this was Connecticut, the cops actually listened to a victim
and arrested him immediately, not just arrested him, made it
criminal case, sent him into prison for thirty years, But
(46:04):
in Connecticut, thirty years actually turns out to be twenty five.
And so this December, unless something happens, Howard John Gombert
Junior will walk out of Cheshire Correctional not only a freeman,
but a man with no tail on him, no parole,
(46:26):
no probation, no custodial supervision. That man who has spent
most of his life at liberty camping in woods. This
is a survivalist.
Speaker 5 (46:38):
This is a man who grew up in a tent
a half mile behind his father's house in the woods,
surviving on what he caught or stole to eat in
the dead of a Northeast winter. This guy is walking
out of prison freeman.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Unless and that's a man that could disappear himself quite easily.
Speaker 5 (47:01):
Yes, he will go vanish mode the second he sets
foot outside those prison gates, and he knows every inch
of those words in Putnam County and the border of Connecticut.
Speaker 4 (47:19):
We're going to pause here for word from our sponsors,
and we'll return with more on the Devil's Quarry, and
we're back. I do want to ask one question here
before we lose it. Paul, I was going to ask
this earlier because a lot of our audience may not
(47:40):
be fully aware of this. As we as we shift
back right to Anthony's case and Andrew's case, they are
primarily going to trial based on these coerced witness statements
as you describe in detailing your investigation, and this trial
(48:02):
doesn't have any physical evidence, as you as you teach
us here. But I have to ask, what is the
legality of dropping charges against someone in exchange for a
signed statement relating to other crimes?
Speaker 7 (48:18):
Like?
Speaker 4 (48:19):
Is that legal?
Speaker 5 (48:21):
It's legal? Ish, Okay, And let's be clear the one
witness who sent Anthony and Andy to prison because those
friends of theirs who got to understand were either too
high too narctized to actually tell a convincing version of
(48:43):
the cops side of this right, and the jury Leslie
laughed at him. Anthony and Andy were convicted with that
a shred of physical evidence, without any provable connection to
the murdered girl, whom they had met once maybe twice
(49:04):
in passing. By the way, if you're looking into a
conviction with zero physical evidence, you can be very confident
that's a bogus conviction. It's really hard to murder somebody
and dispose of all the forensics. It is vanishingly difficult
(49:27):
to do. It only happens on dexter, right, it's in
real life. Murder is ugly, it's squalid, and it's impossible
to completely eradicate. Right. So on the strength of this
(49:47):
horrific persure, a young woman with severe behavioral, psychological, and
chemical issues, Denise Rose, on the strength of her testimony
e in the first time she told it was transparently false.
(50:10):
On the strength of her testimony and her testimony alone,
two young men were sent to max prison with the
worst what they call jacket you can wear behind bars,
convicted pedophile, rapist, murderer of a child. The fact that
Anthony and Andy lived long enough at Auburn at Dana
(50:34):
Mora at Attica, the worst prisons in America. The fact
that they survive long enough to fight for their freedom
is a miracle. Why did Denise Rose testify against her
former boyfriend Anthony Because she was in desperate trouble with
(50:56):
those cops. She had a huge rage problem. She had
battle rounded the car of a girl. She barely knew
she was facing a felmine account for that, she was
facing duise. She was about to go away for a
serious time. And for someone who was multiply addicted, the
(51:19):
idea of being in prison for seven years with at
your dope and your works was unimaginable to this child.
And that's what she was when she was bullied into
testifying against them. But again, she wasn't the only one.
These other kids who had been beaten into falsely testifying
(51:44):
also had minor drug charges pending against them. And you know,
you're talking about kids, and I see this over and
over in wrongful convictions. The folks who have been coerced
into lying are themselves as vulnerable as the kids who
(52:05):
get who got framed. Just by luck of the draw.
They're not the ones under the gun, but they could
easily be if they don't tell those cops what they
want to hear. Sir, back to your question, which.
Speaker 4 (52:19):
Was, oh, it's the is it is it legal for
that quid pro quo to exist?
Speaker 5 (52:25):
Right? Well, this is something that has been haranged over
in drug trial and murder trial after drug trial and
murder trus It's really hard to make these cases without
a cooperating witness. Very often that cooperating with witness is
tainted by his or her own criminal involvement. And so
(52:50):
in case after case after case, you see these kinds
of deals being struck. You know, a good defense lawyer
will make of that. But are there are there examples
I know of where the cops not only cause charges
to be set aside, but white and blackmail judges when
(53:16):
and co werce prosecutors. Absolutely, in this case, I can't
speak to that. But what I can tell you is
the devil in the Devil unit, the devil in the
Devil's quarry isn't just Howard Gomberg. It isn't just the
(53:37):
demon in the woods. It is also the crooked cops
of the Putnam County Chapf's Department who are as dangerous
to public safety as this man who had a nearly
twenty year run of sexual violence against children. And again,
(54:00):
these kinds of things are really hard to bring off
in a big city. For that is, in big cities
we have oversights. You know, we have a civilian review board,
we have good, strong legal aiden lawyers in Putnam County. Again,
(54:21):
there's nobody watching the watchers. There's nobody investigating the crooked sheriff,
which was how he was able to hold office for decades.
He was followed in by a no less morally objectionable sheriff.
(54:42):
It's just part and parcel of what happens in seventy
four percent of America, seventy four percent of America, as
as it's not only senior lawmen, but judge, jury and hangman.
A sheriff. Seventy four percent of America is lorded over
(55:03):
by one man, a sheriff who has extra judicial power
and answers to no one except the voters. That was
the case in staunchly Republican Putnam Catholic, where they kept
electing the same crooks over and over record.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
Okay, so we said this person, Howard Combert, which we
are fairly certain or definitely certain, is responsible for many horrifying,
unspeakable things that you've been writing about. He gets out
at the end of this year, potentially. I'm looking for
(55:42):
an image of him online and I can only find
the one that's that's featured in Rolling Stone in your
article from June ninth, twenty twenty six, which is it's
him as a young man. So now he's getting out
of prison, and no one is going to wreckogies this
human being.
Speaker 4 (56:02):
And no parole is insane.
Speaker 5 (56:04):
It's madness. So I spoke earlier about dealings behind the scene.
We are in aggressive and high level talks with the
top law enforcement community of New York State, the state
of Connecticut, and it's a little soon to comment on
(56:30):
those discussions, but we are doing everything our power to
see to it that the communities of Putnam County New
Fairfield County are protected from this man for the fourth
Seal future.
Speaker 2 (56:48):
One last question, do you we're talking about how it's
harder to pull off this kind of thing in a
bigger city, with the style of corruption that we're seeing
on display or within the Devil's Quarry, Do listen to it.
If you have a chance. You find it everywhere. All
three of us have looked pretty hard at the Atlanta
(57:11):
Missing and Murdered Children case. And I'm thinking now about
your writing and work on dead boys fas sects and
slow suicide on the West Side Docks, and I'm wondering
if you see any connection in big cities with that
same kind of thing, where there are wealthy, powerful human
beings that are taking advantage of especially children, for their
(57:37):
own proclivities. Do you see connections there?
Speaker 5 (57:42):
Absolutely, and it happens over and over again. So there
there's this long history of the wealthy and the powerful
using these challenge communities as their ATMs and their snack bars,
(58:06):
by which you're as as they're kind of canned hunting preserves.
And you know, it isn't just big cities. I saw
exactly this happened at close range in Putnam County. Again
speaking to all of these girls who've grown up there
(58:28):
and who had as a right of passage at thirteen
fourteen fifteen been violated by a sheriff's deputy, by a
guidance counselor by you know, by a living boyfriend. There's
(58:50):
there's very little to keep the powerful and the predatory
away from the most vulnerable population. It's country, namely chure,
and wherever I go there it is. I just wrote
(59:12):
a story that won the National of the Los Angeles
Press Club Award about this extraordinary gang um unit in
the LAPD Revolutionary best bunch of cops I've ever met,
but even they were helpless against an American nightmare called
(59:34):
Figaroa Avenue. Figaroa in Los Angeles is a two and
a half mile run on strip of thirteen and fourteen
year old girls selling their bodies for twenty dollars. It
happens three sixty five, It happens rain, sleet, snow, It
(59:54):
is all day, every day you drive down FIGAROA part
of its control by the uber criminals, part of it's
controlled by the grape street crips, part of it by
the bloods, and you realize, here are the limits of
law enforcement. They literally can't do anything about these ten
(01:00:16):
twelve thousand children either kickouts from the foster character system,
runaways from abusive homes, selling their bodies in broad daylight,
and twelve thousand kids mostly black and brown, mostly from
ten miles away. You know, they grew up in Nickerson
(01:00:37):
Garden projects, they grew up, you know, in Ramona Heights,
and you know, in some cases these fourteen girl girls
are are filling the frigids of their destitute families are
And again, it's really hard to arrest your way out
(01:00:57):
of a slow motion nightmare like.
Speaker 4 (01:01:03):
That, especially with no system support systems in place.
Speaker 5 (01:01:07):
Right exactly right, the very system that was supposed to
protect those children is effectively leading them to slaughter or
foster care system of Southern California. And you know, what
you realize is that we will always out of these
horrific scenarios in which the powerful exercise their urges and
(01:01:35):
demons at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable.
What you hope for we as Americans like to believe
is true is that there is this dedicated community of
people whose tasks and whose mission in life it is
(01:01:57):
to protect those people. And I've written about great cops,
heroic cops. Cops need statues of them there in every city.
But it's really hard to be a great cop and
(01:02:19):
be the finger in the dyke of a society in
which there is this much disparity of wealth and power
and this large subpopulation of needy and desperate folk. And
what I found just to get us back to Putam County.
(01:02:39):
So where do we stand now? There are two cases,
both of those missing girls, Josette Right, who's bones were discovered,
Robin Murphy's she disappeared six months after Josette. Her body
was never found, her family has never been to a trial,
Her family had has never been notified of a suspect.
(01:03:03):
In both cases, the law enforcement of Putnam County horribly
failed not only those girls but the entire community, and
we made Devil's Quarry to shame them, to expose them
(01:03:23):
esceptually to blackmailment to doing their jobs. Here's what happened.
Two weeks before our series dropped season one, Devil's Quarry dropped,
the Putnam Shriff's Office announced it was reopening these two
long dead cold cases and in fact appointing a county
(01:03:43):
wide task force to delve into them from the very beginning.
That's encouraging, But again, I know way too much about
the law enforcement community in Putham County, way too much
about how they're trained or not, about either supervised or not,
and I had very very little confidence in that task
(01:04:07):
for us to actually solve the star at Quirks.
Speaker 4 (01:04:11):
But Paul, we must thank you not blowing spoke here.
We must thank you for fighting the good fight. Your
passion is contagious and you have put yourself honestly in
harm's way on various levels for pursuing justice.
Speaker 5 (01:04:29):
Here.
Speaker 4 (01:04:30):
What do we hope the audience can take away from
the Devil's Quarry? But if we're speaking directly to people
as they're experiencing this investigation, what should change for them?
At the end of the show.
Speaker 5 (01:04:43):
One of the things that I realized afresh in reporting
the story is that justice isn't a ballistic Redston state deal.
It's an all of us agreement. All of us bear
responsibility for Joset right for Robin Murphy. By that. We
all have cell phones, we all have social media. We
(01:05:06):
have been urging our listeners and by the way, we
have an enormous hit on our hands with this series.
If you're new to this show, give it five minutes.
You will lose the next eight hours of your life.
It is impossible to stop listening once you start. We
are urging, begging our listeners to vote with their voices,
(01:05:32):
to call, to write the Attorney General's Office of New
York State. Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York State,
has the power to indefinitely remand Howard Gombert to civil
commitment under the Sexual Violent Predator's Law. Please, if you
(01:05:54):
are someone who is passionate about protecting girls, about protecting
an entire county community, please listen and then add your
voice to antis, because it will be the collective that
finally gets justice for those two families, and that finally
(01:06:16):
allows the parents and children of Putnam County in New
York and Fairfield County in Connecticut to sleep perfectly.
Speaker 4 (01:06:28):
Put and again, Paul SOLITARIOFF, thank you so much for
being so generous with your time. Everybody tuning in here
on Netflix or your podcast platform of choice, you can
find The Devil's Quarry now available wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Speaker 5 (01:06:48):
Jim, thank you so very much.
Speaker 4 (01:06:50):
You're brought Eric, And there we have it, fellow conspiracy realist.
This is a hero story. We're talking off air. Paul
is in addition to being a phenomenal reporter, he is
a man of principle who sacrificed a lot.
Speaker 5 (01:07:10):
Here.
Speaker 4 (01:07:11):
We have to have him back on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
Guys, dude, some of the conversations we just had off
my author good Lord, more to come. Let's just put
it that way. And the man has some stories. I
know I hung back a little bit on that one
because I was just enraptured by the stories this guy
was telling him. But I look forward to, you know,
hanging out with him again down the line.
Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
Well, let's just we're not gonna say it fully, Paul,
but we did just talk about the current president of
the United States in time that you spent with him,
and that kind of thing, while we may not say
it on a podcast like this, is that kind of
stuff is worth hearing for human beings.
Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Insight into the character of an individual where it's really
easy to make some guesses as to how this guy
conducts himself behind closed doors. So to hear firsthand that
not only where we write it's grosser and worse than
we could have imagined, it doesn't form some of the
things that it's easy to imagine, wonder about this man
and be like, Okay, now I'm gonna stop being gas
(01:08:11):
lit and just kind of believe that it's probably worse
than we imagine.
Speaker 4 (01:08:16):
And please check out Paul's earlier work on Covenant House
on the investigations that he mentioned in the course of
our conversation tonight. We would love to hear your thoughts, folks,
because we've also received leads from you, our fellow conspiracy realist,
regarding stories of small town cover ups and corruption. They
(01:08:36):
happen everywhere. As Paul was saying, so hit us up.
Thank you for tuning in. You can find us on
the lines, you can call us on a phone. You
can always send us an email.
Speaker 3 (01:08:45):
Yes, If you want to find us online, you can
reach out to the handles Conspiracy Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show,
depending on which social media platform is your favorite.
Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
We have a phone number. It is one eight three
three STDWYT. If you are going to call in about
something like this, know that your phone number shows up
for us. But the rest of it is just whatever
you want to say, what you want to call yourself,
and we are very discreet and we will not be
sharing that with anyone unless we talk to you about
(01:09:15):
it first, or you give us permission in that voicemail.
Just a reminder about that. If you want to send
us an email, we are.
Speaker 4 (01:09:22):
The entities the redeach piece of correspondence we receive. Be
well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back. Given
the nature of these topics, of course, our same rules
apply for email. We will do our best to maintain
your anonymity, and we will make sure that we have
(01:09:44):
your express permission in correspondence before sharing anything with the
wider world conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:10:11):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Name is Noah.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
They call me Ben. We're joined, as always with our
super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Faked. Most importantly, you
argue you are here. That makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. A quick disclaimer at the top, folks,
Tonight's episode contains graphic descriptions of true crimes, so listener
(00:50):
discretion is advised. In the woods outside of Caramel, New York,
a hunter discovers the bones of a twelve year old girl,
launching an investigator into a mystery that could be accurately
described as a real life horror film. Fortunately, folks, we
are not diving into this alone. We are joined with
(01:10):
none other than the award winning investigative journalist, longtime contributing
editor at Rolling Stone, the creator of Bone Valley season five,
The Devil's Quarry. We proudly present the legendary Paul solditarof.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
Wow Wow, I Feel like Connor McGregor.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Uh, the dire straits of true crime reporting that that
was a nod to a conversation we had off.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yes, watch your watch your legs there, Paul, If you're
jumping in as Connor, well.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Oh no, yeah, didn't he have a bit of a
bad showing? Uh this last time around? I heard it
was a little underwhelming.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Not every day could be the birthday, I guess. Uh, Paul,
let's uh speaking to jumping in. Let's dive in with
this at the beginning. Could you set the scene by
introducing our audience to a little bit more about your
past work and what led you toward investigative journalism, Like,
was there a single specific turning point you can recall
(02:13):
in your life or did you sort of always know
this is your vocation?
Speaker 5 (02:18):
I I bought my nose against investigative journalism after hitting
my forehead on fine Britt Walls. I'm the son of
one of the great literary literary editors of the second
half of the twentieth century, Ted Sulataro, who edited Roth
(02:41):
Mal discovered an entire generation extraordinary novelists and poets. And
I just assumed that as the firstborn I would roll
right down the assembly line and went the writers Workshop
at Iowa to become a novelist. They happily disabused me
(03:08):
of that idea very quickly. They said, yeah, you can
write a sentence, okay, but Jesus Christ, is this what
you're using for material? That shot me like a water
canon into the playwriting program, a graduate playwriting program at
(03:31):
the ILD School of Drama. They wasted even fewer seconds
informing me that again I had the wrong address and
politely referred me to the NU School of Social Work,
where I spent two and a half really unprofitable years
(03:54):
training to be a clinical psychologist. The only thing I
got out of that forty five k student debt was
my subject. So I got placed as a counselor in
(04:14):
training at a community mental health center in the Seth
Bronx and I arrived on the scene about an hour
and a half after this horrific calamity called the happy
Lands Disco fire, in which a couple of three four
(04:35):
hundred people were packed into a basement social club and
someone threw a bullets of cocktailer. Oh my gosh, an
orphaned about three hundred children in East Treemont. In the
Bronx and lo and behold. I suddenly was the designated
(04:55):
healer for fifteen or twenty children who were a speechless
with grief, with horror, dislocation. And at that point I
realized two things. I still was the person in the
room who needed the most help, but I needed to
(05:19):
give a voice to these voice, those kids. And when
the Village Voice inexplicably came calling in nineteen eighty eight
they needed an associate editor, I took the job so
that I could do something that I'd been yearing to
(05:40):
do since I was a nine year old getting mugged
on the subways of New York, and that was bully
the bullies. So journalism, especially in long form investigative journalism,
has given me a chance to get into the ring
with some of the more despicable characters and some of
(06:04):
the more despicable public policy as asters of the second
twentieth century.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
I love the idea of journalism as bullying the bullies.
I've never thought about that before, but we should need
that now, maybe more than ever. And there are some
folks that are stepping up and some folks that are
shrinking back, and you kind of really see who's really
got the goods in the face of you know, real
real bullies.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
Yeah, bullying that looks exactly like factious. Yeah. And just
to put a pin on this, the first story I
ever wrote was a product of just looking out over
the bridge in my notes. So every day I would
take my launch. The Village Voice used to be in
(06:51):
Greenwich Village. The Village Voice used to be the Premiere
America and Alt Newsweek, and it was an extraordinary place
for young talent too to develop, to grow a clip file,
(07:11):
and then to get the hell out and go right
for an outlet that actually got read and that actually
paid the writer. Every day I would take my lunch
on the West Side Docks. Now this is nineteen eighty eight,
the very pinnacle of the crack pandemic in New York City.
(07:34):
New York went from about three hundred murders here to
twenty seven one hundred in the span of three four years.
And crack was the original diseased back for Woule did
(07:57):
destroyed New York in a way I have never seen
a city gutted. We went from eleven thousand homeless population
to one hundred and fifty thousand primarily single income momb
and children demographic and what I saw on the west
(08:18):
side of the docks, which were in terrible disrepair and truly
a dangerous place, were ten twelve fourteen year old boys
selling their bodies for crack rocks to Wall streeterers who
were either on their lunch break or headed home through
the holland on anyone driving down the West Side Highway,
(08:42):
either to Brooklyn or to get to New Jersey saw
what I saw on a dale. They saw these shirtless
children strolling in November and December in a place with
no shelter from the wind, in an incredibly brutal winter,
(09:06):
and no one stopped. And I began to cultivate those kids.
I take them to breakfast, I take them to lunch,
and they told me the story that became this enormous bombshell. Again,
no intention of destroying. The one institution that pretended to
(09:30):
care about these kids, a fledgling nonprofit called Covenant Ants,
in which I thought, like most downtown New York, was
that those blue vans were out there saving these children.
Well they were. However, the founder and director of Covenant House,
(09:51):
father Bruce Ridder, was taking some of these children into
the front door and selling them out the back door.
Work for doms, and that story not only level Covenant
House and nominated for Appulitzer, it also really surfaced for
(10:13):
me exactly what my remit as a journalist was, which
was to get names and faiths as to the nameless
can face that's and to make sure that I told
their stories with the kind of power, granularity and gut
(10:34):
punching specificity that you couldn't look away.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Wow, Paul Okay, First of all, for folks who don't
know about the story and haven't read your writing, because
I'm assuming there's some of us out there, including myself,
who have not yet, where can we go to find
that pieces on that work?
Speaker 5 (10:56):
So that story is called Dead Boys, it isn't easy
to find. If I were more ambitious entrepreneur, I'd have
my website and i'd have someone curating it. I got.
But there are a couple of stories I wrote at
the Village Voice that are at this point in the Cannon.
(11:18):
That's one of them. Another called The Power and the
Gory about the world's most homicidal bodybuilder, a guy who
is utterly legendary, but he actually lived, I mean wound
up putting a bullet in his brain. That story is
(11:42):
included in the Best American Writing of the twentieth century.
So if you just google my name, all my stuff
pops on Rolling Stone. I've been at Rolling Stone now
for thirty three years and have used that ordinary platform
to break the NFL concussion scandal all to read Army
(12:06):
Medical Field hospital scandal. I've been able to walk into
some men off death row. I wrote a story that
helped exonerate forty two thousand drug offend drug defendants in
the state of Massachusetts. Aaron Bernandez story is mine. I've
(12:28):
been given the freedom and the green light to go
where my outrage takes me. And somebody's telling you guys
off stage in a country that is at this point
one outrage stacked upon another. I am never bored and
(12:53):
never wanting for work.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
That is, unfortunately in incredibly true. Paul, and as we
as we hear this culmination of your work that has
taken you to dangerous places mentally and physically, one of
the next questions we have to ask is that, given
(13:19):
the tragically high amount of unsolved cases of murder and
disappearances in the United States in particular and in the
world abroad, what drew you to the case of Josette right.
Speaker 5 (13:34):
Wonderful question. So I was rolling off a series of
cases that allowed me to dig deeply into the prison
industrial complex. I got the wrapper meet Mill out of
Prism in twenty eighteen, not because I fell in love
with Meek Mill. Trust me to know Meek is to
(13:56):
immediately fall out of love with me. For me was
the most visible example victim of what again all of
us know about and nobody talks about, the post incarceral
(14:18):
system in America. Probations parole, this endless long tail that
law enforcement uses to further impoverish and scapegoat people who
have served their turn, who have rehabilitated themselves, but walk
(14:41):
out of prison without their civil rights having forfeited them
by virtue of being a felon, so they can apply
for food stamps, can't apply for Section eight housing, can't
apply for government back college loans. And Nick was fameless
being portraed by a corrupt judge in Philadelphia and had
(15:07):
been violated on and off parole for eleven years to
the almost annihilation of his career for having allegedly sold
to crack Rocks to an undercover at the age of
eighteen and digging into his story, I saw that the entire.
Speaker 6 (15:31):
So called elite West Philly narcotics team was just an
armed robbery crew of guns badges, and wrote the story
that outed that terrific bunch of sociopaths in Bloop.
Speaker 5 (15:48):
Just another gang, right, just another day. I couldn't have
done those stories without the guidance and the the Sage
Council of the Innison Projects. So along the way I
got to be close professional acquaintances with Peter Neufeld, Barry Shack,
(16:10):
Nina Morrison, the guiding lights at the Innocence Project. And
it was Nina who told me, Well, she called me
one day and she said, you've written add infinitum about
big city police corruption. You have any interest in digging
into what small town policing looks like and how much
(16:34):
worse it is than Chicago, Cleveland, La Chicago pet which
invented police violence, Los Angeles Police Department, which perfected it.
You know, I thought I'd seen the worst that law
enforcement was capable of in the ramparts and crash scandals
(16:56):
in La Wrong. Just outside of New York City, fifty
miles from the Bronx. North of the Bronx stands the
town of Carmel, not to be confused with the Carmel
of Clint Eastwood. This is a working class, working core
(17:20):
white flight exer of the Bronx that was essentially a
ghost county until urban renewal sent a bunch of angry
white hard hats and blue collars fleeing for their lives
from the Bronx Queens Long Island to Midge State, New York,
(17:43):
where you could buy a Sears Roebuck kit home for
thirty five thousand dollars, PLoP it on the banks of
Lake Carmel or Lake Glenida, and live like a pauper kit.
Of course, unintended consequences. All those cops and firemen and
(18:08):
sanitation workers who did that installed eight septic systems and
immediately sent their gray water waste into these gorgeous man
made lakes that were oh, by the way, the reservoir
as system for you soon and oops. I have never
(18:29):
in my life encountered this profession anywhere except Putnam County.
They bring in a guy not every year, more often
than they want to admit, to mow the lakes mo
because when you introduce all that runoff nitrogen from septic
(18:54):
systems into fresh water which you get are massive spores
of E. Coli. E Coli in turn create these huge
blooms of algae. If you want to see Christmas in July,
go swimming in Lake Carmel. You will see weeds rising
(19:16):
thirty feet out of the lake beds floor. That's why
I could an amphibious lawn.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
That's it. I've never even heard of an amphibious lawnmower.
Law no, neither.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
You know. And I'm sure the guy who who owns
and runs the operates amphibious lawnmower has been deported, so
we know what jeuez. Well, all right, So in twenty twenty,
I get I get this call from Nina Morrison, who's
(19:54):
now a federal judge and a great one, telling me
that there are these two young men who falsely targeted, arrested, convicted,
and sent to prison for life for the murder of
twelve year old chist Ray. She said, Paul, if you
think you've seen a parent police corruption, wait until you
(20:18):
read these trial transcripts. Well, story short, I got up
there and I spent months with this genius. One of
those two kids, Anthony de Pippo, who was a ninth
grade dropout, three times, and who never never made it
(20:40):
to the tenth grade. This huge, hulking halt Hogan worshiped her,
who for giggles broke fluorescent lights and folding chairs over
his buddies heads in these impromptu backyard wrestling tournaments. David Stage,
(21:04):
that guy who had caught the hostile attention of the
Putnam Sheriff's office, had been grotesquely framed for the rape
and murder of this beautiful twelve year old child who
(21:24):
had gone missing in October nineteen, And it took the
cops a year and a half to not only coerce
Menace and brownbeat a false confession from Anthony's best friend,
a confession that implicated the two of them, but also
(21:46):
to coerce Menace and browbeat their stoner friends into falsely
testifying against them ninety seven, These two young men who
had the most innocuous criminal records possession of throwing a
(22:09):
trash can at a commuter train.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
Doesn't Anthony say, by the way, when you speak to
him in Devil's Quarry, you talk a little bit about
drug charges, and he says, yeah, you could call me
a drug dealer, but not a successful one.
Speaker 5 (22:25):
Exactly right, Anthony may be the only drug dealer in
the history of the continental United States to lose money
selling drugs, which will happen when you're consuming more of
your product than yourself. These two guys were part of
this kind of rag tag contingent of Wlatchkey kids. Kids
(22:52):
in the story, I called them sideways kids. These are
the kids at the back of the classroom whose feet
are constantly drumming under the table, who was staring off
in the space. These are kids who, if they'd grown
up ten miles south in Westchester, would have been flagged
for add or some you know or dyslexia and been
(23:15):
diagnosed and treated and going on to become dentists and
bond traders. But they grew up in a community in
which children, specially female children, were prey. And my initial
(23:38):
working title for the story that became The Devil you
Know was rape value. It was hard meeting a girl
now in her thirties forties who grew up in the
town and not been sexually violated by an authority figure
Jesus Christ, stepdad, principal teacher, the cops themselves. Over and
(24:03):
over I heard from these girls that in a town
with nowhere to go and nothing to do. They go
off to the woods with a forty and a joint,
and while away a Friday night, the cops always knew
where they were. They roll up, the boys would get cuffed,
the girls would get tossed into the back of the
(24:24):
cruiser and have to blow the cop to get out
of the cruise. And this community of predatory cops, literally
leg breaking cops who's only job, as far as I
could tell, and I investigated them thoroughly, was illegally coercing
(24:48):
campaign money for the reelection of this crooked sheriff who'd
been in power for twenty odd years. Those cops discovered
the remains of Joseph Right in a shallow grave thirteen
months after she went missing. By the way, those two
cops never bothered to investigate her disappearance in October of
(25:12):
ninety four, outside of talking to her teachers, her family,
throwing up a couple of missing fliers. Never did any legwork.
When she turns up day in ninety five with her
hands bound behind her, her panties stuffed down, her throat,
(25:34):
her skeletal throat, and her broad tied around a mandible
of her skull, those cops immediately thought, oh shit, maybe
we should have spent an hour here and there looking
into her, and immediately began to round up the kids
(25:55):
that they designated the usual suspects. Not only did they
sell this family, not only they sell this community an
enormous toxic pack of law, a pack of lies that
that family still clings to that family even after the
(26:16):
exoneration of these two young men. I will go into
that in a second, because it's a miracle that should
never have happened. But Anthony to Pippo, that ninth grade dropout,
did something so extraordinary that I just want to write
his Nobel speech. It is, in all my years of
(26:38):
writing about the wrongly convicted, of helping to exonerate the
wrongly convicted, I have never seen anything more extraordinary heroic
than what Anthony to Pippo did in the prison library
at Africa. It is I'll shorthand it by saying this
(26:59):
Anthony was finally exonerated by the best lawyer in America,
Mark Agnifilo. Mark Agnifilo is this extraordinary showman who, as
he says in the podcast, markets himself exclusively to people
who were some of those people. Harbie Weinstein, p Diddy.
(27:21):
He got Diddy off of thirty six or forty glaringly
flagrant sex drafting offenses. He's now representing Luigi Manngioni in
the trial of the Century that starts this fall. That's
who Mark Agnifilo is, and what Mark Agnifilo told me
was when he first met Anthony in the spring of
(27:47):
twenty sixteen, three months before that trial, his jaw dropped
open to listen, to sit across from this enormous man
with an intimidating goateee Anthony six five and a half
six six three, twenty benches an entire block, and Anthony,
(28:12):
as Mark agniffelow realized, was the best lawyer in the room.
And Mark Agnifflo said to himself and then said to me,
I realized I was going to win this trial after
my first five minutes with Anthony, because I had a
secret weapon that the prosecution didn't. I had the actual
best lawyer in America teach me how to try this case.
(28:35):
And when he tried that case in the fall of
twenty sixteen, it wasn't a contest. It was a slaughter.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
But we'll get to one thing I want to focus
on really quickly. Here is why those particular law enforcement
officers looked at these guys and those why were those
guys the go to potential bad guys in town that
may have done this kind of thing, And specifically about
a gentleman named Pat Costolato. I think, is how you
(29:07):
say his name?
Speaker 5 (29:08):
Yes? Castaldo? Yeah? Oh? Was he?
Speaker 2 (29:12):
And why is he like targeting these guys?
Speaker 5 (29:16):
So Pat Costaldo, as near as I could tell, was
the chief's leg breaker for this crooked sheriff, a goon
who was notorious for using his hands and his feet
to enfluce the wall in Putnam County. Big Bruiser looked
(29:37):
like something out of a trashy drug store detective novel
from the forties, slicked his hair back in a high
type pompadour, wore a mowhair top coat in the summer.
Clearly thought he was Popeye Doyle, although it was here
(29:58):
was like he can't even drive. Pa Costaldo seems to
have about three working neurons, and when he discovered when
his department stumbled upon the bones of Joseph, they were
(30:18):
under enormous pressure. Already a second beautiful child girl had
gone missing in Carmel six months prior, and so now
you had in a town of no violent crime, in
a town where the law enforcement largely consists of these
(30:39):
cops responding to bars and domestic spans, you have these
cops who have never, in their wives worked a murder,
and as near as I could tell, were never trained
to be cops in the first place.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
And they're pretty clear about their inexperience. When you speak
with some of these folks or dive into them in
Devil's Quarry, we've got to ask poll and pardon me
if this is a bit of a softball, but I
think our audience needs to hear it. How did this
lack of experience, plus they're already loose and fast nature
(31:15):
as law enforcement operatives, how did this inform what they
saw as their strategy? Because it sounds when I'm hearing
this through right and I'm reading your previous work, every
point of their investigation seems to focus less and less
(31:36):
on finding the actual murderer and more and more on
closing out the case.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
Exactly right, So let's step the stage for your listeners.
Josett Rights discovered November twenty ninety five in that shallow grave,
what those cops found was evidence of a serial killer.
(32:05):
At large, so she had been bound and gagged in
ritualistic and fetishistic style, meaning this was not the doer's
first rodeo. The staging and the concealment of the corpse
(32:27):
was planful, was meticulous, and were it not for the
fact that she was buried in a forest, forest with deer,
with coyotes, with other large rodents, that grave would have
(32:49):
held her remains for time immemorial. But one of those
browsing animals had dug and to part part of her
skull and made off with it, and that skull was
discovered underfoot by two hunters on the first day of
hunting season, So it wasn't this though the cops were
(33:11):
looking for her. Course, cops had no interest in finding Joseph.
They had written her off as a runaway a year aware.
Back to why they chose these guns. So, as I say,
there was enormous community pressure in a town, in a
county with no serious violence. And it's one of the
(33:34):
virtues of living in mystics, particularly the community that is
inhabited by New York cops by New York unfortunately not
enforced by New York cops. So who becomes a cop
in Putnam County. Who becomes a cop in the town
(33:55):
of Cornwall, It's two different streams of applicants. It's locals
who had the childhoods, got picked on, bullied, and aspired
to become cops to avenge themselves on the snop those
(34:17):
kids that rough them up at fourteen. The other tributary
to that talent pool is the kickouts from mid city
police forces, cops so bad that even mid city forces
could no longer afford to keep paying for settlements and
(34:41):
judgments against those cops for abusing their fellow citizens. On
top of that, as we discovered in Anthony's civil rights
trial against those cops after he won his conviction and
forced those cops to tell the truth in deposition, was
that where big city comps are sent to an academy
(35:04):
for six months, where that they're constantly trained and retrained,
particularly if they want to make rack. If you want
to become a sergeant, you've got to go for extra training.
You want to become a detective, There's a lot of
work to do to rise the ranks in the NYPD.
There is no such pecking order. It's just next man
(35:27):
up in these small towns. Love story short These guys
not only had no homicide experience, they had no criminal detection.
If they didn't know what the Fifth Amendment was, they
didn't know what Brady Law was, they didn't know what
impeachment stuff they teach in the first week at the
police academy. These guys have never heard of and admitted
(35:50):
under us. So when you've got a howling community and
you live amongst those folks and they want someone to
rad did Friday? You go and arrest someone Friday. And
here were these two kids who had been selling PCP,
taking PCP, who've been bringing ecstasy in from New York City,
(36:14):
who were standing outside the high school selling weed. Who
better to go to rest? And who better to to
pick out a hat? Knowing these kids don't have a lawyer,
these kids dropped out of high school. We can work
(36:36):
these kids to our end. And that's what those comps did.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
Oh my gosh, I can't even begin to a picture
where this conversation is going to continue to go. But
we are going to go there. But first let's take
a quick break here where from our sponsor. Then we
be back with more from Paul. And we're back. Let's
jump right back in with Paul.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
I guess the big question for me is when when
that type of scenario, let's say, is happening, how on
earth as that police officer, that law enforcement officer who
is choosing to potentially do this to someone, how do
you how can you feel confident that it's going to
work with it? Because they have to face a judge
(37:24):
at some point, they have to potentially a jury, all
these other things like, there's process to go through. How
do you get the story to come out in the
favor of the thing you want it to be?
Speaker 5 (37:36):
With two fists. We have transcripts, we have recanting witnesses,
we have the story stories of all these kids that
they brutalized, of all these kids they stalked and terrorized.
A key witness, although he didn't testify a trial for
(38:01):
complicated reasons, but the one who first spun this fault
story was a severe special needs kid who was kind
of on the outside of the circle of these druggy
kids I named dom Neglia, a kid who'd been raised
(38:21):
in special ed and who was incredibly easy to manipulate
and terrorize. He's the one that the cops went hardest at,
not as the doer, but as the kid most likely
to flip on his friends, and that is in fact
(38:41):
what happened. But let me just step take two steps
to the right here, because the day that Joseph was discovered,
the day that those hallmark signs of a practice serial
(39:02):
predator being at large and being responsible for the murder
of this child, the cops had that guy in their sights.
That man, the town pedophile, the town terrorist of girls
(39:24):
and women, was extremely well known so the Putnam Sheriff's detectives,
extremely well known to the Carmel pad, extremely well known
to the Ken PD. This was a guy who had
run sexual ramppage through Putnham County and who, by the
(39:48):
time Josette disappears, had been charged with rake three times
by three different women, children children one is one eleven
and one age twelve, and the cops who had arrested
(40:10):
Gombert multiple times for burglary. He was a lifelong klectomaniac.
This is Howard Gumbert. Howard Gumbert, who this pathological drifter
whose m O by the way, he was handsome, he
was charismatic, drove a motorcycle looked like something out of
(40:33):
Happy Days. This guy had a sixth sense for vulnerable
single bonds. He had this extraordinarily extraordinary radar for women
who were lonely, who were susceptible to long form abuse
(40:56):
and hism was to move in with them within days
or weeks of them and then go to work not
only sexually violating those women, but their children. And again,
everyone in law enforcement in Putnam County, so seventy small towns,
(41:19):
each with its own police force, and then this free
range Sheriff's office knew and had dealings with Howard Gomber.
And yet of the dozens of people they dragged in
for questioning, they never even doorstepped Howard Gombret, by which
(41:39):
I mean they never even swung by his flop house
apartment and knocked on his door to ask him, where
were you on the night of October third, nineteen ninety
October fourth, nineteen ninety four. Never. It is unfathomable. And
(42:00):
I spent nine months writing that story, and then a
year making Season one of The Devil's Quarry, answering the
question of why those cops gave Howard Gombert a hunting
license to go on praying on the children of Putnam County.
(42:21):
I have an answer, but I can't tell I understood, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
We I mean, is it because of legal implications or
why can't you say.
Speaker 5 (42:31):
There is a great deal happening behind the scenes right now?
So let's step back, okay. And I'm sorry because we
keep getting we keep wanting to get to the foreground
of the story, and I keep taking you back when Yeah,
when I wrote the story in twenty twenty one, I
had the first and last nervous breakdown in my career.
(42:55):
For nine months, I had been warehousing the stories of
these six women who had been children. These were the
survivors of Howard Gomber. These were the women who threw,
who threw pluck or luck, hadn't been killed by him,
(43:19):
who had been raped and beaten and bound and gagged
when they were children, not all of them, but a
number of them as children. And there was something about
that kind of suffering that did to me what all
my years in the ghettos of North Philly, South l A,
(43:47):
South Side Chicago didn't. They took up residence in my soul,
and I couldn't break free. And I swore to myself
when I got better, I'm never going near this story again.
It is poison. However, a year ago, little more than
an year ago, I got a call from two of
(44:08):
those victims and both of them were sobbing. Both of
them said, oh my god, he's getting out. The state
of Connecticut is releasing this monster at the end of
twenty twenty six. Where will I live? He's been writing
me from prison. He must have a private detective. He
(44:31):
has tracked me down. He is sending me.
Speaker 7 (44:36):
Horrifying letters because stalking is part of his mo right, talking,
command control. All of the hallmarks of a lethal socioparts
are front and centered with this man. Howard Gombert finally
(44:57):
either was polatantly aster lee put County by those cops
or figured that jig was up. He moved fourteen miles
east to the border of Connecticut, just over the state line,
and instantly began looking for his next cast of victims.
(45:18):
And he found them very quickly, but he was fourteen
miles away. Those cops never so much as paid a
courtesy call on here. Long story short, he committed an
unspeakable crime against the seven year old girl in New Milford,
(45:43):
Connecticut in nineteen ninety nine. She told someone, and because
this was Connecticut, the cops actually listened to a victim
and arrested him immediately, not just arrested him, made it
criminal case, sent him into prison for thirty years, But
(46:04):
in Connecticut, thirty years actually turns out to be twenty five.
And so this December, unless something happens, Howard John Gombert
Junior will walk out of Cheshire Correctional not only a freeman,
but a man with no tail on him, no parole,
(46:26):
no probation, no custodial supervision. That man who has spent
most of his life at liberty camping in woods. This
is a survivalist.
Speaker 5 (46:38):
This is a man who grew up in a tent
a half mile behind his father's house in the woods,
surviving on what he caught or stole to eat in
the dead of a Northeast winter. This guy is walking
out of prison freeman.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Unless and that's a man that could disappear himself quite easily.
Speaker 5 (47:01):
Yes, he will go vanish mode the second he sets
foot outside those prison gates, and he knows every inch
of those words in Putnam County and the border of Connecticut.
Speaker 4 (47:19):
We're going to pause here for word from our sponsors,
and we'll return with more on the Devil's Quarry, and
we're back. I do want to ask one question here
before we lose it. Paul, I was going to ask
this earlier because a lot of our audience may not
(47:40):
be fully aware of this. As we as we shift
back right to Anthony's case and Andrew's case, they are
primarily going to trial based on these coerced witness statements
as you describe in detailing your investigation, and this trial
(48:02):
doesn't have any physical evidence, as you as you teach
us here. But I have to ask, what is the
legality of dropping charges against someone in exchange for a
signed statement relating to other crimes?
Speaker 7 (48:18):
Like?
Speaker 4 (48:19):
Is that legal?
Speaker 5 (48:21):
It's legal? Ish, Okay, And let's be clear the one
witness who sent Anthony and Andy to prison because those
friends of theirs who got to understand were either too
high too narctized to actually tell a convincing version of
(48:43):
the cops side of this right, and the jury Leslie
laughed at him. Anthony and Andy were convicted with that
a shred of physical evidence, without any provable connection to
the murdered girl, whom they had met once maybe twice
(49:04):
in passing. By the way, if you're looking into a
conviction with zero physical evidence, you can be very confident
that's a bogus conviction. It's really hard to murder somebody
and dispose of all the forensics. It is vanishingly difficult
(49:27):
to do. It only happens on dexter, right, it's in
real life. Murder is ugly, it's squalid, and it's impossible
to completely eradicate. Right. So on the strength of this
(49:47):
horrific persure, a young woman with severe behavioral, psychological, and
chemical issues, Denise Rose, on the strength of her testimony
e in the first time she told it was transparently false.
(50:10):
On the strength of her testimony and her testimony alone,
two young men were sent to max prison with the
worst what they call jacket you can wear behind bars,
convicted pedophile, rapist, murderer of a child. The fact that
Anthony and Andy lived long enough at Auburn at Dana
(50:34):
Mora at Attica, the worst prisons in America. The fact
that they survive long enough to fight for their freedom
is a miracle. Why did Denise Rose testify against her
former boyfriend Anthony Because she was in desperate trouble with
(50:56):
those cops. She had a huge rage problem. She had
battle rounded the car of a girl. She barely knew
she was facing a felmine account for that, she was
facing duise. She was about to go away for a
serious time. And for someone who was multiply addicted, the
(51:19):
idea of being in prison for seven years with at
your dope and your works was unimaginable to this child.
And that's what she was when she was bullied into
testifying against them. But again, she wasn't the only one.
These other kids who had been beaten into falsely testifying
(51:44):
also had minor drug charges pending against them. And you know,
you're talking about kids, and I see this over and
over in wrongful convictions. The folks who have been coerced
into lying are themselves as vulnerable as the kids who
(52:05):
get who got framed. Just by luck of the draw.
They're not the ones under the gun, but they could
easily be if they don't tell those cops what they
want to hear. Sir, back to your question, which.
Speaker 4 (52:19):
Was, oh, it's the is it is it legal for
that quid pro quo to exist?
Speaker 5 (52:25):
Right? Well, this is something that has been haranged over
in drug trial and murder trial after drug trial and
murder trus It's really hard to make these cases without
a cooperating witness. Very often that cooperating with witness is
tainted by his or her own criminal involvement. And so
(52:50):
in case after case after case, you see these kinds
of deals being struck. You know, a good defense lawyer
will make of that. But are there are there examples
I know of where the cops not only cause charges
to be set aside, but white and blackmail judges when
(53:16):
and co werce prosecutors. Absolutely, in this case, I can't
speak to that. But what I can tell you is
the devil in the Devil unit, the devil in the
Devil's quarry isn't just Howard Gomberg. It isn't just the
(53:37):
demon in the woods. It is also the crooked cops
of the Putnam County Chapf's Department who are as dangerous
to public safety as this man who had a nearly
twenty year run of sexual violence against children. And again,
(54:00):
these kinds of things are really hard to bring off
in a big city. For that is, in big cities
we have oversights. You know, we have a civilian review board,
we have good, strong legal aiden lawyers in Putnam County. Again,
(54:21):
there's nobody watching the watchers. There's nobody investigating the crooked sheriff,
which was how he was able to hold office for decades.
He was followed in by a no less morally objectionable sheriff.
(54:42):
It's just part and parcel of what happens in seventy
four percent of America, seventy four percent of America, as
as it's not only senior lawmen, but judge, jury and hangman.
A sheriff. Seventy four percent of America is lorded over
(55:03):
by one man, a sheriff who has extra judicial power
and answers to no one except the voters. That was
the case in staunchly Republican Putnam Catholic, where they kept
electing the same crooks over and over record.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
Okay, so we said this person, Howard Combert, which we
are fairly certain or definitely certain, is responsible for many horrifying,
unspeakable things that you've been writing about. He gets out
at the end of this year, potentially. I'm looking for
(55:42):
an image of him online and I can only find
the one that's that's featured in Rolling Stone in your
article from June ninth, twenty twenty six, which is it's
him as a young man. So now he's getting out
of prison, and no one is going to wreckogies this
human being.
Speaker 4 (56:02):
And no parole is insane.
Speaker 5 (56:04):
It's madness. So I spoke earlier about dealings behind the scene.
We are in aggressive and high level talks with the
top law enforcement community of New York State, the state
of Connecticut, and it's a little soon to comment on
(56:30):
those discussions, but we are doing everything our power to
see to it that the communities of Putnam County New
Fairfield County are protected from this man for the fourth
Seal future.
Speaker 2 (56:48):
One last question, do you we're talking about how it's
harder to pull off this kind of thing in a
bigger city, with the style of corruption that we're seeing
on display or within the Devil's Quarry, Do listen to it.
If you have a chance. You find it everywhere. All
three of us have looked pretty hard at the Atlanta
(57:11):
Missing and Murdered Children case. And I'm thinking now about
your writing and work on dead boys fas sects and
slow suicide on the West Side Docks, and I'm wondering
if you see any connection in big cities with that
same kind of thing, where there are wealthy, powerful human
beings that are taking advantage of especially children, for their
(57:37):
own proclivities. Do you see connections there?
Speaker 5 (57:42):
Absolutely, and it happens over and over again. So there
there's this long history of the wealthy and the powerful
using these challenge communities as their ATMs and their snack bars,
(58:06):
by which you're as as they're kind of canned hunting preserves.
And you know, it isn't just big cities. I saw
exactly this happened at close range in Putnam County. Again
speaking to all of these girls who've grown up there
(58:28):
and who had as a right of passage at thirteen
fourteen fifteen been violated by a sheriff's deputy, by a
guidance counselor by you know, by a living boyfriend. There's
(58:50):
there's very little to keep the powerful and the predatory
away from the most vulnerable population. It's country, namely chure,
and wherever I go there it is. I just wrote
(59:12):
a story that won the National of the Los Angeles
Press Club Award about this extraordinary gang um unit in
the LAPD Revolutionary best bunch of cops I've ever met,
but even they were helpless against an American nightmare called
(59:34):
Figaroa Avenue. Figaroa in Los Angeles is a two and
a half mile run on strip of thirteen and fourteen
year old girls selling their bodies for twenty dollars. It
happens three sixty five, It happens rain, sleet, snow, It
(59:54):
is all day, every day you drive down FIGAROA part
of its control by the uber criminals, part of it's
controlled by the grape street crips, part of it by
the bloods, and you realize, here are the limits of
law enforcement. They literally can't do anything about these ten
(01:00:16):
twelve thousand children either kickouts from the foster character system,
runaways from abusive homes, selling their bodies in broad daylight,
and twelve thousand kids mostly black and brown, mostly from
ten miles away. You know, they grew up in Nickerson
(01:00:37):
Garden projects, they grew up, you know, in Ramona Heights,
and you know, in some cases these fourteen girl girls
are are filling the frigids of their destitute families are
And again, it's really hard to arrest your way out
(01:00:57):
of a slow motion nightmare like.
Speaker 4 (01:01:03):
That, especially with no system support systems in place.
Speaker 5 (01:01:07):
Right exactly right, the very system that was supposed to
protect those children is effectively leading them to slaughter or
foster care system of Southern California. And you know, what
you realize is that we will always out of these
horrific scenarios in which the powerful exercise their urges and
(01:01:35):
demons at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable.
What you hope for we as Americans like to believe
is true is that there is this dedicated community of
people whose tasks and whose mission in life it is
(01:01:57):
to protect those people. And I've written about great cops,
heroic cops. Cops need statues of them there in every city.
But it's really hard to be a great cop and
(01:02:19):
be the finger in the dyke of a society in
which there is this much disparity of wealth and power
and this large subpopulation of needy and desperate folk. And
what I found just to get us back to Putam County.
(01:02:39):
So where do we stand now? There are two cases,
both of those missing girls, Josette Right, who's bones were discovered,
Robin Murphy's she disappeared six months after Josette. Her body
was never found, her family has never been to a trial,
Her family had has never been notified of a suspect.
(01:03:03):
In both cases, the law enforcement of Putnam County horribly
failed not only those girls but the entire community, and
we made Devil's Quarry to shame them, to expose them
(01:03:23):
esceptually to blackmailment to doing their jobs. Here's what happened.
Two weeks before our series dropped season one, Devil's Quarry dropped,
the Putnam Shriff's Office announced it was reopening these two
long dead cold cases and in fact appointing a county
(01:03:43):
wide task force to delve into them from the very beginning.
That's encouraging, But again, I know way too much about
the law enforcement community in Putham County, way too much
about how they're trained or not, about either supervised or not,
and I had very very little confidence in that task
(01:04:07):
for us to actually solve the star at Quirks.
Speaker 4 (01:04:11):
But Paul, we must thank you not blowing spoke here.
We must thank you for fighting the good fight. Your
passion is contagious and you have put yourself honestly in
harm's way on various levels for pursuing justice.
Speaker 5 (01:04:29):
Here.
Speaker 4 (01:04:30):
What do we hope the audience can take away from
the Devil's Quarry? But if we're speaking directly to people
as they're experiencing this investigation, what should change for them?
At the end of the show.
Speaker 5 (01:04:43):
One of the things that I realized afresh in reporting
the story is that justice isn't a ballistic Redston state deal.
It's an all of us agreement. All of us bear
responsibility for Joset right for Robin Murphy. By that. We
all have cell phones, we all have social media. We
(01:05:06):
have been urging our listeners and by the way, we
have an enormous hit on our hands with this series.
If you're new to this show, give it five minutes.
You will lose the next eight hours of your life.
It is impossible to stop listening once you start. We
are urging, begging our listeners to vote with their voices,
(01:05:32):
to call, to write the Attorney General's Office of New
York State. Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York State,
has the power to indefinitely remand Howard Gombert to civil
commitment under the Sexual Violent Predator's Law. Please, if you
(01:05:54):
are someone who is passionate about protecting girls, about protecting
an entire county community, please listen and then add your
voice to antis, because it will be the collective that
finally gets justice for those two families, and that finally
(01:06:16):
allows the parents and children of Putnam County in New
York and Fairfield County in Connecticut to sleep perfectly.
Speaker 4 (01:06:28):
Put and again, Paul SOLITARIOFF, thank you so much for
being so generous with your time. Everybody tuning in here
on Netflix or your podcast platform of choice, you can
find The Devil's Quarry now available wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Speaker 5 (01:06:48):
Jim, thank you so very much.
Speaker 4 (01:06:50):
You're brought Eric, And there we have it, fellow conspiracy realist.
This is a hero story. We're talking off air. Paul
is in addition to being a phenomenal reporter, he is
a man of principle who sacrificed a lot.
Speaker 5 (01:07:10):
Here.
Speaker 4 (01:07:11):
We have to have him back on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
Guys, dude, some of the conversations we just had off
my author good Lord, more to come. Let's just put
it that way. And the man has some stories. I
know I hung back a little bit on that one
because I was just enraptured by the stories this guy
was telling him. But I look forward to, you know,
hanging out with him again down the line.
Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
Well, let's just we're not gonna say it fully, Paul,
but we did just talk about the current president of
the United States in time that you spent with him,
and that kind of thing, while we may not say
it on a podcast like this, is that kind of
stuff is worth hearing for human beings.
Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Insight into the character of an individual where it's really
easy to make some guesses as to how this guy
conducts himself behind closed doors. So to hear firsthand that
not only where we write it's grosser and worse than
we could have imagined, it doesn't form some of the
things that it's easy to imagine, wonder about this man
and be like, Okay, now I'm gonna stop being gas
(01:08:11):
lit and just kind of believe that it's probably worse
than we imagine.
Speaker 4 (01:08:16):
And please check out Paul's earlier work on Covenant House
on the investigations that he mentioned in the course of
our conversation tonight. We would love to hear your thoughts, folks,
because we've also received leads from you, our fellow conspiracy realist,
regarding stories of small town cover ups and corruption. They
(01:08:36):
happen everywhere. As Paul was saying, so hit us up.
Thank you for tuning in. You can find us on
the lines, you can call us on a phone. You
can always send us an email.
Speaker 3 (01:08:45):
Yes, If you want to find us online, you can
reach out to the handles Conspiracy Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show,
depending on which social media platform is your favorite.
Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
We have a phone number. It is one eight three
three STDWYT. If you are going to call in about
something like this, know that your phone number shows up
for us. But the rest of it is just whatever
you want to say, what you want to call yourself,
and we are very discreet and we will not be
sharing that with anyone unless we talk to you about
(01:09:15):
it first, or you give us permission in that voicemail.
Just a reminder about that. If you want to send
us an email, we are.
Speaker 4 (01:09:22):
The entities the redeach piece of correspondence we receive. Be
well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back. Given
the nature of these topics, of course, our same rules
apply for email. We will do our best to maintain
your anonymity, and we will make sure that we have
(01:09:44):
your express permission in correspondence before sharing anything with the
wider world conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:10:11):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio
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