July 24, 2023 • 38 mins
The search for Gail begins. After a rocky start, Gail’s sister Alayne, takes over the investigation into her disappearance. After four years of searching, the police make a shocking discovery.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Novel.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, listener, in this episode there's mentioned a murder, domestic violence,
drug abuse, and a dead body, but I do not
go into graphic detail. You also hear from a tenacious
cast of women and friends whose fight for justice is
truly truly inspiring. If you do listen and are impacted
(00:34):
by any of our themes, you can reach out to
no More, a domestic violence charity we've partnered with. They
have lots of great resources to help you or your
loved ones. You can find them at no More dot org.
That's no More dot org, mindy, a little louder? Hello, perfect,
(01:06):
So we're all on record. Yeah, and there goes your.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Talking them in the car?
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Give me a.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
She's putting her dogs in the car?
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Who does that?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Mindy?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yes, Carol, we're starting right now.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Are you sitting thankfully?
Speaker 5 (01:37):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I've learned so much about Gail recently. Gail was this
really educated young woman. She was pretty, she was tiny,
and she actually reminds me a little bit of me.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
That does sound like you, Smart and petitte and attractive.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
You know what else she had in common with us?
With you and I and our women friends?
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Dark haired? Which Jewish women.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Besides dark haired Jewish women with great personalities. She not
only thought, she believed that she could fix him and
you and I've been there with men.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
I can relate to that. But I don't think I
can fix them. I think I can fix me to
adapt to them. And I wonder who was fixing whom here.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That's a great point.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
You know.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
The other thing I'm not proud of is that I'm
not happy with some of the laughter we had over
this situation. Like I look back and I go, what
the hell was I thinking. It's not that we were
doing anything wrong. We didn't know. But as I've come
to no Gail, as I've come to get acquainted with Elaine,
(02:58):
we all have a very common bond and all could
have been great friends.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
You know, in our weird Harriet the spy way, we're
hoisting a red flag. There's something dangerous. We are concerned
about this. I mean, really, Carol, look at how much
angst we had about doing this.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah, I went kicking and screaming.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
So there is a lot of baggage that we carry.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, you know, part of me doing this mindy is
about like it's just time to own my story for
christ sake. The domestic abuse or the controlling behaviors of men.
It doesn't have to define most women. May that just
be part of our journey. May not that be a
(03:48):
complete story.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
You know, your definition of self changes daily. It's like Hamilton,
who tells you story? Because after you can't tell your
own story? Who tells your story?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
I look back on that time and even now. I mean,
you supported me then, and you support me now.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
And I support you because you're my crazy friend.
Speaker 5 (04:20):
I know.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
I miss you. I love you.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
I love you too. And get the dogs out of
the freaking car would you? From the teams at novel
and iHeartRadio, I'm Carol Fisher and you're listening to the
Girlfriends Episode four. Phone calls from Manhattan.
Speaker 6 (05:07):
I've got you, got.
Speaker 7 (05:08):
You, I've got you, got you.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
I've got you.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
This is what I found out about the days, months,
and years in New York after Gale went missing. In
the late afternoon on Monday, July eighth, nineteen eighty five,
Gail's sister Elaine, called her parents from a payphone from
the corner of Broadway and seventy fifth Street. She was
letting them know that she was headed back to law
(05:36):
school in DC.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
And my mother said to me, have you spoken to Gail?
Do you know where Gail is? And I said, no,
I'm driving in a car, you know, to Manhattan. Then
I'm my way to d see what's wrong? And she said,
Bob said that she went out and never came back.
And they had a birthday party in Jersey for his
(05:58):
sister's child and she never came home. And that did
seem really odd. Gail was about appearances. The idea that Gail,
no matter how annoyed she was with Bob, didn't come
home to attend a birthday party for her nephew by
marriage in New Jersey was very strange.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Elaine put the phone down and got back into the
car to start the five hour drive back to DC,
and then, over the course of twenty four hours, everyone
else's phones in New York started ringing. Everyone was saying
the same thing. Where is Gail.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Elaine called me and asked me if I had talked
to Gail?
Speaker 6 (06:50):
And I was like, what do you mean if I
talked to Gail?
Speaker 2 (06:52):
No, why Abby Bruce, Gail's cousin.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Hoe down, So now what are you talking about.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
She went out for a job, she.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Hasn't come home.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
It's been since yesterday.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
What do you mean she went for a jog and
she never came home.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
What did she have on?
Speaker 1 (07:06):
She had on her running shorts and her T shirt.
So I went out and started walking around and thinking,
you know where could she have possibly gone, walked over
to the park, came back, called my mother, who also
was like, what are you talking about? What do you
mean she's missing? So my mother hung up from me
(07:27):
and called my aunt.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
But when Abby's mom called Sylvia, she was already in hysterics.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
I need to find my child, We need to find her.
I remember her screaming at the top of her lungs.
So everybody was kind of making phone calls through the
rest of the day. Anyone heard from her, anyone heard
no one had heard from her. No one had heard
from her.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Next to get a call with Denise, Gale's best friend.
But it's not a Laine or Abby or Sylvia. He
called me, it's.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
Bob Scale with you what no bus? She never came home.
That's when I said, oh my god, I knew right away,
I said to my husband at that time.
Speaker 6 (08:18):
He killed him.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
On Monday evening, roughly thirty hours after Gail is said
to have gone missing Bob went to the nineteenth Precinct
on East ninety fifth Street and filed a police report.
He told the officer that he had been arguing with
his wife, Gail all morning and that around eleven am,
she stormed out of their home to cool off in
Central Park. He told them that she had a history
(08:44):
of depression and suicide attempts, which prompted the officer to
write EDP in the remarked section of the report. Now
EDP is shorthand for emotionally disturbed person. Gail is a
officially designated as New York's Missing Person's Squad number seven
eight one six, and her case is assigned to Detective
(09:07):
Tom O'Malley. Tom's first task is to start interviewing people
Gale's family, her college friends, Denise, Elaine, and they are
all talking about Bob.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Bob is acting weird, like some TV station wants to
put it on the six o'clock news, like two four
or seven, and he's like refusing to do it and
asking my mother if she'll drive in from Long Island
to do it, which is so strange. I mean, he
lives in Manhattan, where the TV studios are. This his wife.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
In the end, he does the interview, and this is
the only moment that you'll hear Bob's voice on this
podcast because he and his attorney he never got back
to our request for an interview. But here he is
talking about Gail in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 8 (10:08):
She's a graduate student psychology, takes out very seriously and
has patient responsibilities. Has patients were dependent on her, and
I think, no matter you know what, she wouldn't abandon
her patients.
Speaker 6 (10:22):
What do you think happened to your wife?
Speaker 8 (10:23):
I don't know. I don't know, but I'm worried.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Detective O'Malley started to build up a pretty damning picture
of Bob. Multiple people tell him about Bob's controlling behavior,
the strangulation, and the cat incident. O'Malley wanted to interview him,
but he knew he had to tread carefully. He didn't
want Bob to think he was a primary suspect and
(10:50):
lawyer up too soon, So during a casual phone call,
O'Malley invited Bob down to the station for a chat.
This is a note from Detective O'Malley ally's police report
from that day that my producer Anna found. It's dated
July thirteenth, just six days after Gale went missing. I
(11:10):
then asked him if he ever attempted to strangle his wife,
and he said, very abruptly, he did not want to
talk about it. When asked of any incident with the cat,
I received the same abrupt type answer no. As we concluded,
doctor Breenbaum said this doesn't look right, and people are
going to start to wonder. When I asked him what
he meant, he said, it's obvious, isn't it. After that interview,
(11:36):
Tom reached out to Elaine.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
And he said, Bob was not forthcoming. It's so weird.
Bob doesn't want my help. Bob does not want me
to find your sister. If my sister was leaving him
and going to live with some guy, going to live
with some girlfriend, going to Bora, Bora, or wherever the
(11:59):
heck she was doing, the first one she would have
called would have been me. She might not have called
me to admit that she was going to stay married
to the psychopath, but she certainly would have called me
to tell me she was leaving him, and I would
have been there to do all the things she needed
(12:21):
me to do.
Speaker 6 (12:22):
I mean, please, she was dead. She was dead.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
Or he hurt her terribly and he had her hidden somewhere.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
The next day, exactly a week after Gail went missing,
Bob and Gail's friends and family headed to Central Park
to distribute some missing posters. I'm looking at one right now.
The portrait of Gail is in black and white from
the photocopier. In it, her hair is layered and shoulder length.
She's smiling, but in that way where your eyes are
(12:56):
being blinded by the sun, or you don't quite want
your photo taken. And on the poster they've written her
height five to three, her weight one hundred and seven pounds,
brown hair and hazel eyes, a graduate student at Long
Island University, last seen at eleven am July seventh, nineteen
(13:17):
eighty five, and they offered a reward for any information.
I'm telling you this gives me chills. It just it
must have been terrifying.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
Part of me knew she was dead, but part of
me wanted to find her. Part of me wanted to
find her alive and know that she was still out
there somewhere.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
They papered the park with missing posters. Except my mother
told me it felt weird. It felt like there were
two camps. There was Bob and his friends, and there
(14:01):
was my mother and father and Gail's friends, and it
didn't feel that they had the same mission.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
At one point, Bob was handing out posters to passing
joggers with Gail's college friend Marianne. When she asked him
where he thought Gail might be, he said, I think
she's on a shopping spree at Bloomingdale's.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
You know what a jap she is?
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the term JAP,
it means Jewish American princess, and just in case it's
not clear, it's a condescending term. Bob then suggests that
Gail may have been overly affected when writing her recent
paper on depression, but Marianne disagreed with him. Gail didn't
seem depressed when she last saw her. Marianne's stance seemed
(14:50):
to annoy Bob, at which point he pointed over at
the gate and he said, how do you know she
just didn't climb that gate? How do you know Gail
isn't lying at the bottom of that reservoir.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
At one point, the New York Post did a story
on it, and there's everybody holding the missing posters in
front of their chest. Bob is holding it in front
of his face as if he doesn't want people to
see him, just like he didn't want to go on camera.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
After distributing posters, Denise and a group of Gail's friends
went back to Gail in Bob's apartment. It was then
that they all started quizzing, Bob, where's Gail, When did
you last see her? What were you arguing about?
Speaker 5 (15:41):
He acted like, oh, so upset Gail's missing.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
The group of women started looking around for clues.
Speaker 5 (15:49):
And that's when we said, where's the rug that used
to be here? This was a beautiful Asian.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Rug, and Bob said, oh, it had to be the
cat got sick.
Speaker 5 (16:02):
We all looked at each other why but he was
so stone cold. It's not as if he displayed any
emotion at all, so there was like nothing to react to.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
At one point, the phone rang, but Bob decided not
to pick it up. When the answering machine kicked in,
Gail's voice played out into the entire room, telling the
caller to leave a message. It must have been heartbreaking.
(16:40):
Along the way, Bob continued to share his theories. He
talked about Gail's drug use and how perhaps that's how
she had gotten into trouble.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
Listen, I'm not going to say my sister didn't do
any drugs. My sister had patience, and she was a
graduate student, and then she had this prestigious internship. My
sister was not someone who had a drug problem. I'm
not saying my sister never did any drugs, but that's
not who she was.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Everything the Cat's family knew started to stack up Bob's
past behavior, the fact that Gail was going to leave
him that very night, the way she apparently left with
hardly any belongings, and yet nobody had seen or heard
from her. They had become convinced that Bob killed Gail.
With only a week or two left before sitting for
(17:30):
her bar exam, Elaine had to make a hard call.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
I'll never forget. I was taking the Peeper Lar Review
class and I called John Peeper and I told him
what I was going through. He said, don't take the
word exam. I can't do that, which was sad for me.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
For Elaine, this was no longer a missing person's case,
but a homicide investigation. And if she wasn't going to
for the bar, then she'd settle for putting Bob behind bars.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Of course, I was a heartbroken that I did not
know where my sister was. But it wasn't because I
couldn't bear the truth that my sister just left for
another life and ignored her sister. It's because the facts
surrounding the situation made it impossible. She left her pocketbook,
(18:31):
you know, there with cigarettes, and she lives in a
building with doormen. There's a fire department on the same
block where they all whistled at my sexy sister. She's
allegedly wearing a tank top and short shorts. Nobody saw her.
We would fall asleep without hanging up the phone. She
did not go somewhere without talking to me, and I
(18:56):
began the one to two years us of proving that
Bob killed my sister.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
There's my notes on what I did.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
These are all the notes on all the phone calls
that I've had. The missing posters in here.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
When Elaine first arrived back in New York after dropping
out of law school, she immediately started collaborating with the
detectives from the Missing Person's Unit.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
It took the form of a deep relationship with Tom O'Malley,
and literally walking the beat with him, I mean sitting
there and missing persons with him, brainstorming with him.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
They would talk about the calls Tom would get from
people responding to the missing person's reports. A man who
claimed to see Gail sitting in a yoga position in
front of a brown stone near Washington Square. A doorman
from an apartment on fifty second Street thought he saw her,
but later he changed his mind. And a man said
(20:20):
he saw her and her friend at eighteen eighth Bagels
on East eighty first Street. She was spotted uptown on
the subway, downtown through Soho, and wandering around Tudor City.
None of these sightings could be verified by the detectives,
but they also could not be dismissed ultimately, though the
(20:41):
detectives already had a pretty good hunch who the last
person to see Gail was.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
I'll never forget. I was having a drink with Tom
O'Malley on one of those investigator cop bars, and less
Wolf came in and walked over and greeted us.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Less as a private investigator that Bobbitt hired to search
for Gail.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
And as he walked away, Tommy said, yeah, he's been
hired to, you know, hide evidence.
Speaker 6 (21:09):
Bob knew he did it.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
Bob wasn't hiring someone to help find Gail.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
He knew exactly where Gail was.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
We couldn't confirm this, but whatever way you slice it.
For Elaine, the official route didn't seem to be leading
to anything, so she tried a different tack. She offered
to pick up some of Gail's stuff from Bob's place.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
I was hoping that I could engage him in some way,
and I thought that it.
Speaker 6 (21:35):
Sounds so idiotic.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
Now he might break down and I'll never figure out.
I got up there and all of my sister's stuff
was in big trash backs. He didn't want her underwear,
he didn't want her perfume, he wanted her bike, her skis,
(21:58):
he wanted some expense and sieve crystal platter that my
aunt had bought them as a wedding gift. I argued
with him, you can't have that. I called my aunt
be on the phone and I said, Be, tell him
he has to give me the bowl. And I handed
(22:20):
him the phone and he let me take the ball.
And I realized I had made the biggest mistake. Had
I left the stuff, It may have haunted him. Instead,
I was taking out the trash.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
By this point, Bob had been interviewed a few times
by Detective O'Malley and his partner, Detective Dolcis. At first
it had been on a friendly, voluntary basis, but it
was becoming a parent that they were no longer treating
Gale's disappearance as a missing person's case. After five or
so interviews, he lawyered up and became increasingly hard to reach.
(23:02):
Whenever the cops or Gail's friends and family tried to
call him, they got his answering machine. Time passed and
still nothing. The Cat's family endured their first family gatherings
without Gail, their first young Kaipoor, the first passover, and
with each passing day, the family's grief cemented and the
(23:26):
wider public forgot about Gail. So Elaine started writing letters
to the editors and journalists of New York papers from
the perspective of her grieving mother.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
My name is Sylvia Katz. My daughter gil Katspierram disappeared
from her apartment.
Speaker 6 (23:51):
Nobody has heard from her.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
My son in law has been asked to take a
lie detector test along with other friends Gaels, but unlike
her friends who said yes, my son in law has
refused twice. He was the last person to see Gail.
Therefore everything that is known comes from him. He is uncooperative,
(24:14):
as is his family. We are very frustrated, and so
are the police. Please help us. Part of what I
was trying to do is really in good faith, get evidence.
Part of what I was trying to do if I
couldn't get evidence, is make sure that every single place
(24:37):
that Bob was people knew the truth. So by the spring,
I sent letters to every doctor that worked with Bob,
and at that point he was in a three hospital rotation,
and I sent them to all three hospitals. I used
a reverse phone book at the New York Public Library.
This is way before happy web stuff sending a letter
(25:01):
to every single person in the high rise apartment building.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Elaine started coming up with their own leads, talking to
people the police hadn't even interviewed.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
The woman downstairs told me that it was terrible living
under them. They fought constantly, especially on the weekends when
he was home, and it was awful. And what was
interesting about that day was how quiet it was, except
she heard furniture moving but it wasn't enough. There came
(25:37):
a time, the Missing Persons and the Homicide Bureau and
they all put their hands up and said, we just
don't have the evidence.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
Lady.
Speaker 4 (25:48):
I remember thinking double jeopardy. They're hoping for a better case.
And if they do it now and they fail and
they ever get really good evidence, he will be walking
around with impunity being able to say I beat it.
And I think that really would have killed us. But
(26:09):
my cousin, Hillard Weiss worked for the Legal Aid Society
and he got the DA's office to investigate.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
In August nineteen eighty six, a year and a month
since Gale went missing. The case was passed on to
the Manhattan District Attorney's office, but after just one year,
the investigation came to a halt and the case was
dropped yet again.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
So at the point at which they said we're not prosecuting,
I had nothing left to lose and I began a
different campaign. I would call him and I would say
I know you killed my sister. Everyone knows she killed
my sister, and you're not going to get away with that.
And I'm going to keep on leaving these messages yes,
(27:01):
and every time you have a new girlfriend. She's going
to hear these messages. I was dying for him to
sue me for slander. We might not have had beyond
a reasonable doubt for a criminal courtroom, but if he
sued me, I would get him under oath and a
(27:22):
deposition and a civil suit. He would have to prove
that I was lying, so I could act with absolute impunity.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
But Bob was never going to sue Elane. He knew
better than that. Instead, her messages went unanswered, and slowly
people started getting on with their lives. Even Bob continued
to work at my Monadese Hospital, where he now worked
as a heart surgeon.
Speaker 5 (27:57):
I went back to work, I went through my daily routine.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Denise Gale's friend.
Speaker 5 (28:03):
I used to ride the bus and I'd look out
the window on the bus, and sometimes i'd see somebody
that looked like her, and you know, I'd get this
rush inside me like a girl, you know, And of
course I realized it wasn't but I never stopped looking
(28:25):
for her, So for a lot of years it was
still that feeling inside me. Then maybe she is alive,
Maybe she is out there.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Elaine decided that after three years of grief and anger.
She needed to choose herself.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
During the summer of nineteen eighty eight, my father had
been hospitalized with heart disease. They discovered a massive brain tumor.
That's around the time that I decided I had to live.
I left Larry because he reminded me of Gail.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Larry was Elaine's long term boyfriend.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
I stopped allowing my mother to talk to me about
my sister. I went on New York magazine personal ads
and found a husband literally.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
And while Elaine was on her honeymoon with her new husband,
a human torso washed up on the shores of Staten Island,
a torso that they believe could.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Belong to Gail.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
It was a calm day on Staten Island when the
torso washed up just north of the Verrizanto Narrows Bridge.
She was carried in by the water and laid on
the beach waiting to be found. Without overwhelming you with details,
it was clear that she had been at sea for
a while and that it was not her choice. This
(30:13):
happened on May twenty first, nineteen eighty nine, which makes
it roughly four years since Gail went missing. Obviously, it's
hard to verify who a torso belongs to it first glance,
But for New York's Chief Medical Examiner, Charles Hirsch, the
age and size of the torso on the shore it
seemed to match up enough to warrant further testing, and
(30:36):
once again Elaine had to put her own life to
one side.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
The saga began of trying to identify the torso. They
tried DNA testing, but it was in the water for
so long. The DNA testing was not sophisticated enough back
in nineteen eighty nine. And I remember it was the
(31:03):
fall of eighty nine when during one of those trillion
conversations that I had racking my brain about how am
I going to identify this torso? I remembered that my
sister had a cox It's bone injury. And we looked
far and wide for those X rays. We couldn't find them.
(31:27):
Then we remembered that she had that injury when she
was at NYU and she didn't have health insurance, so
she used my health insurance card to get X rays,
and we got all these X rays, and it was
the radiology report of the torso comparing it to the
(31:51):
X rays that we found that sufficiently for the medical
examiner allowed them to change Jane Doe Torso on the
death certificate to gil Cat's Spearmbam.
Speaker 6 (32:14):
And finally I felt that I.
Speaker 4 (32:16):
Found my sister and I had her and she was safe.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
A few months later, Gail's family finally had a burial.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
I remember there was a scene at the burial site
because I wanted to open the coffin. I wanted to
see my sister, and I cried and screamed, and people
who were bigger than me, which wasn't so hard, physically
(32:50):
restrained me.
Speaker 6 (32:52):
They would not let me.
Speaker 7 (32:53):
See her, and we buried her.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Gail's gravestone is small, nestled closely to the ground. Its
inscription reads Gail Beth beloved daughter, granddaughter, and sister March eighth,
nineteen fifty six to July seventh, nineteen eighty five, Forever
in our hearts. I'm sure it meant a lot to
(33:35):
give Gail a place to rest. Usually Jewish burials take
place within twenty four hours, yet the Cats has had
to wait four years. But whatever sense of closure that
gave them, it didn't last long. Within six months of
the burial, Sylvia Elaine's mother was diagnosed with an aggressive
(33:55):
form of cancer.
Speaker 4 (33:57):
My mother buried daughter and she was dead by June.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Then just six years later, Elaine's father, Manny Katz, also
died from cancer, something he battled for years. He was
buried next to his daughter and his wife in the
Mountain Zion Cemetery family plot in Queens.
Speaker 6 (34:23):
That's when I stopped.
Speaker 4 (34:25):
I could not leave my brother alone, so I promised
myself that Bob would not kill me too.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
But when Elaine cat stops, she doesn't really stop.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
She was so angry that he was out there walking
around living his life. As long as her sister was gone,
she was going to find a way to make him pay.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
This is Abby Bruce, Elaine's cousin.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
There wasn't a thing you could say to her do.
It was an obsession. And what's amazing to me about
her is that along with that obsession she lived her life.
She got married, she had children, she opened a law firm.
I mean, she's an amazing person. But there was no
question in my mind that she was never going to
(35:22):
give up.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And so every once in a while, Elaine would pick
up a part of the case, or in a moment
of sudden fury, she'd call Bob again to leave a
message on his machine while he was at work.
Speaker 4 (35:37):
You killed my sister, and I know you think you
got away with it. I will always hound you and
haunt you, and I will keep at the police, I
will keep at the press. I will always find you
as long as you are a licensed and registered physician.
(36:00):
No matter where you go, I will find you.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
And thanks to me, he did.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Go straightened to my unsuspecting arms in Las Vegas, Nevada.
But it didn't take long for him to run again.
While we were meeting up to talk about him at
the Mayflower Restaurant, he was packing his bags and heading
to one of the coldest places in America, North Dakota.
(36:37):
I know surprised us too.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
There was a period where there was a vault and
he was writing snowblower injuries in the minor newspaper.
Speaker 5 (36:48):
He was just smart guying, but women found him creepy.
Speaker 4 (36:53):
I will never forget him saying we have a cold
case Bureau, and I'd like to open up Gil's case.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
We'd like to have the three hour lunches, we'd like
to have a cocktailer after work.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
And we'd like to investigating homicides.
Speaker 4 (37:09):
And I mentioned, you know the Torso and I'll never
forget him saying what Torso.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for Our Heart Radio.
For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The series
is hosted by me Carol Fisher and produced by Anna Sinfield.
Our assistant producer is Julian Manyu Gera Patten, and our
researcher is Madeline Parr. The editor is Veronica Simmons. Max
(37:51):
O'Brien is our executive producer. Our fact checker is Valeria Rocca.
Production management from Sharie Houston and Charlotte woolf Sound design,
mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen and Nicholas Alexander. Music
supervision by Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Luisa Gerstein.
(38:14):
Story development by Isaac Fisher. Willard Foxton is creative director
of Development. Special thanks to Shawn Glynn, David Waters, might
Ley Rowl, Katrina Noravel, David Wasserman, and Beth Anne Mcaluso.
(38:36):
We did reach out to Bob and his legal team
to ask if he'd like to comment on the podcast,
but we never heard back.
Speaker 5 (38:48):
Novel
Novel.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, listener, in this episode there's mentioned a murder, domestic violence,
drug abuse, and a dead body, but I do not
go into graphic detail. You also hear from a tenacious
cast of women and friends whose fight for justice is
truly truly inspiring. If you do listen and are impacted
(00:34):
by any of our themes, you can reach out to
no More, a domestic violence charity we've partnered with. They
have lots of great resources to help you or your
loved ones. You can find them at no More dot org.
That's no More dot org, mindy, a little louder? Hello, perfect,
(01:06):
So we're all on record. Yeah, and there goes your.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Talking them in the car?
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Give me a.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
She's putting her dogs in the car?
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Who does that?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Mindy?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yes, Carol, we're starting right now.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Are you sitting thankfully?
Speaker 5 (01:37):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I've learned so much about Gail recently. Gail was this
really educated young woman. She was pretty, she was tiny,
and she actually reminds me a little bit of me.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
That does sound like you, Smart and petitte and attractive.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
You know what else she had in common with us?
With you and I and our women friends?
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Dark haired? Which Jewish women.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Besides dark haired Jewish women with great personalities. She not
only thought, she believed that she could fix him and
you and I've been there with men.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
I can relate to that. But I don't think I
can fix them. I think I can fix me to
adapt to them. And I wonder who was fixing whom here.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That's a great point.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
You know.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
The other thing I'm not proud of is that I'm
not happy with some of the laughter we had over
this situation. Like I look back and I go, what
the hell was I thinking. It's not that we were
doing anything wrong. We didn't know. But as I've come
to no Gail, as I've come to get acquainted with Elaine,
(02:58):
we all have a very common bond and all could
have been great friends.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
You know, in our weird Harriet the spy way, we're
hoisting a red flag. There's something dangerous. We are concerned
about this. I mean, really, Carol, look at how much
angst we had about doing this.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah, I went kicking and screaming.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
So there is a lot of baggage that we carry.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, you know, part of me doing this mindy is
about like it's just time to own my story for
christ sake. The domestic abuse or the controlling behaviors of men.
It doesn't have to define most women. May that just
be part of our journey. May not that be a
(03:48):
complete story.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
You know, your definition of self changes daily. It's like Hamilton,
who tells you story? Because after you can't tell your
own story? Who tells your story?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
I look back on that time and even now. I mean,
you supported me then, and you support me now.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
And I support you because you're my crazy friend.
Speaker 5 (04:20):
I know.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
I miss you. I love you.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
I love you too. And get the dogs out of
the freaking car would you? From the teams at novel
and iHeartRadio, I'm Carol Fisher and you're listening to the
Girlfriends Episode four. Phone calls from Manhattan.
Speaker 6 (05:07):
I've got you, got.
Speaker 7 (05:08):
You, I've got you, got you.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
I've got you.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
This is what I found out about the days, months,
and years in New York after Gale went missing. In
the late afternoon on Monday, July eighth, nineteen eighty five,
Gail's sister Elaine, called her parents from a payphone from
the corner of Broadway and seventy fifth Street. She was
letting them know that she was headed back to law
(05:36):
school in DC.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
And my mother said to me, have you spoken to Gail?
Do you know where Gail is? And I said, no,
I'm driving in a car, you know, to Manhattan. Then
I'm my way to d see what's wrong? And she said,
Bob said that she went out and never came back.
And they had a birthday party in Jersey for his
(05:58):
sister's child and she never came home. And that did
seem really odd. Gail was about appearances. The idea that Gail,
no matter how annoyed she was with Bob, didn't come
home to attend a birthday party for her nephew by
marriage in New Jersey was very strange.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Elaine put the phone down and got back into the
car to start the five hour drive back to DC,
and then, over the course of twenty four hours, everyone
else's phones in New York started ringing. Everyone was saying
the same thing. Where is Gail.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Elaine called me and asked me if I had talked
to Gail?
Speaker 6 (06:50):
And I was like, what do you mean if I
talked to Gail?
Speaker 2 (06:52):
No, why Abby Bruce, Gail's cousin.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Hoe down, So now what are you talking about.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
She went out for a job, she.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Hasn't come home.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
It's been since yesterday.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
What do you mean she went for a jog and
she never came home.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
What did she have on?
Speaker 1 (07:06):
She had on her running shorts and her T shirt.
So I went out and started walking around and thinking,
you know where could she have possibly gone, walked over
to the park, came back, called my mother, who also
was like, what are you talking about? What do you
mean she's missing? So my mother hung up from me
(07:27):
and called my aunt.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
But when Abby's mom called Sylvia, she was already in hysterics.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
I need to find my child, We need to find her.
I remember her screaming at the top of her lungs.
So everybody was kind of making phone calls through the
rest of the day. Anyone heard from her, anyone heard
no one had heard from her. No one had heard
from her.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Next to get a call with Denise, Gale's best friend.
But it's not a Laine or Abby or Sylvia. He
called me, it's.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
Bob Scale with you what no bus? She never came home.
That's when I said, oh my god, I knew right away,
I said to my husband at that time.
Speaker 6 (08:18):
He killed him.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
On Monday evening, roughly thirty hours after Gail is said
to have gone missing Bob went to the nineteenth Precinct
on East ninety fifth Street and filed a police report.
He told the officer that he had been arguing with
his wife, Gail all morning and that around eleven am,
she stormed out of their home to cool off in
Central Park. He told them that she had a history
(08:44):
of depression and suicide attempts, which prompted the officer to
write EDP in the remarked section of the report. Now
EDP is shorthand for emotionally disturbed person. Gail is a
officially designated as New York's Missing Person's Squad number seven
eight one six, and her case is assigned to Detective
(09:07):
Tom O'Malley. Tom's first task is to start interviewing people
Gale's family, her college friends, Denise, Elaine, and they are
all talking about Bob.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Bob is acting weird, like some TV station wants to
put it on the six o'clock news, like two four
or seven, and he's like refusing to do it and
asking my mother if she'll drive in from Long Island
to do it, which is so strange. I mean, he
lives in Manhattan, where the TV studios are. This his wife.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
In the end, he does the interview, and this is
the only moment that you'll hear Bob's voice on this
podcast because he and his attorney he never got back
to our request for an interview. But here he is
talking about Gail in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 8 (10:08):
She's a graduate student psychology, takes out very seriously and
has patient responsibilities. Has patients were dependent on her, and
I think, no matter you know what, she wouldn't abandon
her patients.
Speaker 6 (10:22):
What do you think happened to your wife?
Speaker 8 (10:23):
I don't know. I don't know, but I'm worried.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Detective O'Malley started to build up a pretty damning picture
of Bob. Multiple people tell him about Bob's controlling behavior,
the strangulation, and the cat incident. O'Malley wanted to interview him,
but he knew he had to tread carefully. He didn't
want Bob to think he was a primary suspect and
(10:50):
lawyer up too soon, So during a casual phone call,
O'Malley invited Bob down to the station for a chat.
This is a note from Detective O'Malley ally's police report
from that day that my producer Anna found. It's dated
July thirteenth, just six days after Gale went missing. I
(11:10):
then asked him if he ever attempted to strangle his wife,
and he said, very abruptly, he did not want to
talk about it. When asked of any incident with the cat,
I received the same abrupt type answer no. As we concluded,
doctor Breenbaum said this doesn't look right, and people are
going to start to wonder. When I asked him what
he meant, he said, it's obvious, isn't it. After that interview,
(11:36):
Tom reached out to Elaine.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
And he said, Bob was not forthcoming. It's so weird.
Bob doesn't want my help. Bob does not want me
to find your sister. If my sister was leaving him
and going to live with some guy, going to live
with some girlfriend, going to Bora, Bora, or wherever the
(11:59):
heck she was doing, the first one she would have
called would have been me. She might not have called
me to admit that she was going to stay married
to the psychopath, but she certainly would have called me
to tell me she was leaving him, and I would
have been there to do all the things she needed
(12:21):
me to do.
Speaker 6 (12:22):
I mean, please, she was dead. She was dead.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
Or he hurt her terribly and he had her hidden somewhere.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
The next day, exactly a week after Gail went missing,
Bob and Gail's friends and family headed to Central Park
to distribute some missing posters. I'm looking at one right now.
The portrait of Gail is in black and white from
the photocopier. In it, her hair is layered and shoulder length.
She's smiling, but in that way where your eyes are
(12:56):
being blinded by the sun, or you don't quite want
your photo taken. And on the poster they've written her
height five to three, her weight one hundred and seven pounds,
brown hair and hazel eyes, a graduate student at Long
Island University, last seen at eleven am July seventh, nineteen
(13:17):
eighty five, and they offered a reward for any information.
I'm telling you this gives me chills. It just it
must have been terrifying.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
Part of me knew she was dead, but part of
me wanted to find her. Part of me wanted to
find her alive and know that she was still out
there somewhere.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
They papered the park with missing posters. Except my mother
told me it felt weird. It felt like there were
two camps. There was Bob and his friends, and there
(14:01):
was my mother and father and Gail's friends, and it
didn't feel that they had the same mission.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
At one point, Bob was handing out posters to passing
joggers with Gail's college friend Marianne. When she asked him
where he thought Gail might be, he said, I think
she's on a shopping spree at Bloomingdale's.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
You know what a jap she is?
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the term JAP,
it means Jewish American princess, and just in case it's
not clear, it's a condescending term. Bob then suggests that
Gail may have been overly affected when writing her recent
paper on depression, but Marianne disagreed with him. Gail didn't
seem depressed when she last saw her. Marianne's stance seemed
(14:50):
to annoy Bob, at which point he pointed over at
the gate and he said, how do you know she
just didn't climb that gate? How do you know Gail
isn't lying at the bottom of that reservoir.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
At one point, the New York Post did a story
on it, and there's everybody holding the missing posters in
front of their chest. Bob is holding it in front
of his face as if he doesn't want people to
see him, just like he didn't want to go on camera.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
After distributing posters, Denise and a group of Gail's friends
went back to Gail in Bob's apartment. It was then
that they all started quizzing, Bob, where's Gail, When did
you last see her? What were you arguing about?
Speaker 5 (15:41):
He acted like, oh, so upset Gail's missing.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
The group of women started looking around for clues.
Speaker 5 (15:49):
And that's when we said, where's the rug that used
to be here? This was a beautiful Asian.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Rug, and Bob said, oh, it had to be the
cat got sick.
Speaker 5 (16:02):
We all looked at each other why but he was
so stone cold. It's not as if he displayed any
emotion at all, so there was like nothing to react to.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
At one point, the phone rang, but Bob decided not
to pick it up. When the answering machine kicked in,
Gail's voice played out into the entire room, telling the
caller to leave a message. It must have been heartbreaking.
(16:40):
Along the way, Bob continued to share his theories. He
talked about Gail's drug use and how perhaps that's how
she had gotten into trouble.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
Listen, I'm not going to say my sister didn't do
any drugs. My sister had patience, and she was a
graduate student, and then she had this prestigious internship. My
sister was not someone who had a drug problem. I'm
not saying my sister never did any drugs, but that's
not who she was.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Everything the Cat's family knew started to stack up Bob's
past behavior, the fact that Gail was going to leave
him that very night, the way she apparently left with
hardly any belongings, and yet nobody had seen or heard
from her. They had become convinced that Bob killed Gail.
With only a week or two left before sitting for
(17:30):
her bar exam, Elaine had to make a hard call.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
I'll never forget. I was taking the Peeper Lar Review
class and I called John Peeper and I told him
what I was going through. He said, don't take the
word exam. I can't do that, which was sad for me.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
For Elaine, this was no longer a missing person's case,
but a homicide investigation. And if she wasn't going to
for the bar, then she'd settle for putting Bob behind bars.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Of course, I was a heartbroken that I did not
know where my sister was. But it wasn't because I
couldn't bear the truth that my sister just left for
another life and ignored her sister. It's because the facts
surrounding the situation made it impossible. She left her pocketbook,
(18:31):
you know, there with cigarettes, and she lives in a
building with doormen. There's a fire department on the same
block where they all whistled at my sexy sister. She's
allegedly wearing a tank top and short shorts. Nobody saw her.
We would fall asleep without hanging up the phone. She
did not go somewhere without talking to me, and I
(18:56):
began the one to two years us of proving that
Bob killed my sister.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
There's my notes on what I did.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
These are all the notes on all the phone calls
that I've had. The missing posters in here.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
When Elaine first arrived back in New York after dropping
out of law school, she immediately started collaborating with the
detectives from the Missing Person's Unit.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
It took the form of a deep relationship with Tom O'Malley,
and literally walking the beat with him, I mean sitting
there and missing persons with him, brainstorming with him.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
They would talk about the calls Tom would get from
people responding to the missing person's reports. A man who
claimed to see Gail sitting in a yoga position in
front of a brown stone near Washington Square. A doorman
from an apartment on fifty second Street thought he saw her,
but later he changed his mind. And a man said
(20:20):
he saw her and her friend at eighteen eighth Bagels
on East eighty first Street. She was spotted uptown on
the subway, downtown through Soho, and wandering around Tudor City.
None of these sightings could be verified by the detectives,
but they also could not be dismissed ultimately, though the
(20:41):
detectives already had a pretty good hunch who the last
person to see Gail was.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
I'll never forget. I was having a drink with Tom
O'Malley on one of those investigator cop bars, and less
Wolf came in and walked over and greeted us.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Less as a private investigator that Bobbitt hired to search
for Gail.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
And as he walked away, Tommy said, yeah, he's been
hired to, you know, hide evidence.
Speaker 6 (21:09):
Bob knew he did it.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
Bob wasn't hiring someone to help find Gail.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
He knew exactly where Gail was.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
We couldn't confirm this, but whatever way you slice it.
For Elaine, the official route didn't seem to be leading
to anything, so she tried a different tack. She offered
to pick up some of Gail's stuff from Bob's place.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
I was hoping that I could engage him in some way,
and I thought that it.
Speaker 6 (21:35):
Sounds so idiotic.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
Now he might break down and I'll never figure out.
I got up there and all of my sister's stuff
was in big trash backs. He didn't want her underwear,
he didn't want her perfume, he wanted her bike, her skis,
(21:58):
he wanted some expense and sieve crystal platter that my
aunt had bought them as a wedding gift. I argued
with him, you can't have that. I called my aunt
be on the phone and I said, Be, tell him
he has to give me the bowl. And I handed
(22:20):
him the phone and he let me take the ball.
And I realized I had made the biggest mistake. Had
I left the stuff, It may have haunted him. Instead,
I was taking out the trash.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
By this point, Bob had been interviewed a few times
by Detective O'Malley and his partner, Detective Dolcis. At first
it had been on a friendly, voluntary basis, but it
was becoming a parent that they were no longer treating
Gale's disappearance as a missing person's case. After five or
so interviews, he lawyered up and became increasingly hard to reach.
(23:02):
Whenever the cops or Gail's friends and family tried to
call him, they got his answering machine. Time passed and
still nothing. The Cat's family endured their first family gatherings
without Gail, their first young Kaipoor, the first passover, and
with each passing day, the family's grief cemented and the
(23:26):
wider public forgot about Gail. So Elaine started writing letters
to the editors and journalists of New York papers from
the perspective of her grieving mother.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
My name is Sylvia Katz. My daughter gil Katspierram disappeared
from her apartment.
Speaker 6 (23:51):
Nobody has heard from her.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
My son in law has been asked to take a
lie detector test along with other friends Gaels, but unlike
her friends who said yes, my son in law has
refused twice. He was the last person to see Gail.
Therefore everything that is known comes from him. He is uncooperative,
(24:14):
as is his family. We are very frustrated, and so
are the police. Please help us. Part of what I
was trying to do is really in good faith, get evidence.
Part of what I was trying to do if I
couldn't get evidence, is make sure that every single place
(24:37):
that Bob was people knew the truth. So by the spring,
I sent letters to every doctor that worked with Bob,
and at that point he was in a three hospital rotation,
and I sent them to all three hospitals. I used
a reverse phone book at the New York Public Library.
This is way before happy web stuff sending a letter
(25:01):
to every single person in the high rise apartment building.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Elaine started coming up with their own leads, talking to
people the police hadn't even interviewed.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
The woman downstairs told me that it was terrible living
under them. They fought constantly, especially on the weekends when
he was home, and it was awful. And what was
interesting about that day was how quiet it was, except
she heard furniture moving but it wasn't enough. There came
(25:37):
a time, the Missing Persons and the Homicide Bureau and
they all put their hands up and said, we just
don't have the evidence.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
Lady.
Speaker 4 (25:48):
I remember thinking double jeopardy. They're hoping for a better case.
And if they do it now and they fail and
they ever get really good evidence, he will be walking
around with impunity being able to say I beat it.
And I think that really would have killed us. But
(26:09):
my cousin, Hillard Weiss worked for the Legal Aid Society
and he got the DA's office to investigate.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
In August nineteen eighty six, a year and a month
since Gale went missing. The case was passed on to
the Manhattan District Attorney's office, but after just one year,
the investigation came to a halt and the case was
dropped yet again.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
So at the point at which they said we're not prosecuting,
I had nothing left to lose and I began a
different campaign. I would call him and I would say
I know you killed my sister. Everyone knows she killed
my sister, and you're not going to get away with that.
And I'm going to keep on leaving these messages yes,
(27:01):
and every time you have a new girlfriend. She's going
to hear these messages. I was dying for him to
sue me for slander. We might not have had beyond
a reasonable doubt for a criminal courtroom, but if he
sued me, I would get him under oath and a
(27:22):
deposition and a civil suit. He would have to prove
that I was lying, so I could act with absolute impunity.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
But Bob was never going to sue Elane. He knew
better than that. Instead, her messages went unanswered, and slowly
people started getting on with their lives. Even Bob continued
to work at my Monadese Hospital, where he now worked
as a heart surgeon.
Speaker 5 (27:57):
I went back to work, I went through my daily routine.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Denise Gale's friend.
Speaker 5 (28:03):
I used to ride the bus and I'd look out
the window on the bus, and sometimes i'd see somebody
that looked like her, and you know, I'd get this
rush inside me like a girl, you know, And of
course I realized it wasn't but I never stopped looking
(28:25):
for her, So for a lot of years it was
still that feeling inside me. Then maybe she is alive,
Maybe she is out there.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Elaine decided that after three years of grief and anger.
She needed to choose herself.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
During the summer of nineteen eighty eight, my father had
been hospitalized with heart disease. They discovered a massive brain tumor.
That's around the time that I decided I had to live.
I left Larry because he reminded me of Gail.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Larry was Elaine's long term boyfriend.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
I stopped allowing my mother to talk to me about
my sister. I went on New York magazine personal ads
and found a husband literally.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
And while Elaine was on her honeymoon with her new husband,
a human torso washed up on the shores of Staten Island,
a torso that they believe could.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Belong to Gail.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
It was a calm day on Staten Island when the
torso washed up just north of the Verrizanto Narrows Bridge.
She was carried in by the water and laid on
the beach waiting to be found. Without overwhelming you with details,
it was clear that she had been at sea for
a while and that it was not her choice. This
(30:13):
happened on May twenty first, nineteen eighty nine, which makes
it roughly four years since Gail went missing. Obviously, it's
hard to verify who a torso belongs to it first glance,
But for New York's Chief Medical Examiner, Charles Hirsch, the
age and size of the torso on the shore it
seemed to match up enough to warrant further testing, and
(30:36):
once again Elaine had to put her own life to
one side.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
The saga began of trying to identify the torso. They
tried DNA testing, but it was in the water for
so long. The DNA testing was not sophisticated enough back
in nineteen eighty nine. And I remember it was the
(31:03):
fall of eighty nine when during one of those trillion
conversations that I had racking my brain about how am
I going to identify this torso? I remembered that my
sister had a cox It's bone injury. And we looked
far and wide for those X rays. We couldn't find them.
(31:27):
Then we remembered that she had that injury when she
was at NYU and she didn't have health insurance, so
she used my health insurance card to get X rays,
and we got all these X rays, and it was
the radiology report of the torso comparing it to the
(31:51):
X rays that we found that sufficiently for the medical
examiner allowed them to change Jane Doe Torso on the
death certificate to gil Cat's Spearmbam.
Speaker 6 (32:14):
And finally I felt that I.
Speaker 4 (32:16):
Found my sister and I had her and she was safe.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
A few months later, Gail's family finally had a burial.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
I remember there was a scene at the burial site
because I wanted to open the coffin. I wanted to
see my sister, and I cried and screamed, and people
who were bigger than me, which wasn't so hard, physically
(32:50):
restrained me.
Speaker 6 (32:52):
They would not let me.
Speaker 7 (32:53):
See her, and we buried her.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Gail's gravestone is small, nestled closely to the ground. Its
inscription reads Gail Beth beloved daughter, granddaughter, and sister March eighth,
nineteen fifty six to July seventh, nineteen eighty five, Forever
in our hearts. I'm sure it meant a lot to
(33:35):
give Gail a place to rest. Usually Jewish burials take
place within twenty four hours, yet the Cats has had
to wait four years. But whatever sense of closure that
gave them, it didn't last long. Within six months of
the burial, Sylvia Elaine's mother was diagnosed with an aggressive
(33:55):
form of cancer.
Speaker 4 (33:57):
My mother buried daughter and she was dead by June.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Then just six years later, Elaine's father, Manny Katz, also
died from cancer, something he battled for years. He was
buried next to his daughter and his wife in the
Mountain Zion Cemetery family plot in Queens.
Speaker 6 (34:23):
That's when I stopped.
Speaker 4 (34:25):
I could not leave my brother alone, so I promised
myself that Bob would not kill me too.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
But when Elaine cat stops, she doesn't really stop.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
She was so angry that he was out there walking
around living his life. As long as her sister was gone,
she was going to find a way to make him pay.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
This is Abby Bruce, Elaine's cousin.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
There wasn't a thing you could say to her do.
It was an obsession. And what's amazing to me about
her is that along with that obsession she lived her life.
She got married, she had children, she opened a law firm.
I mean, she's an amazing person. But there was no
question in my mind that she was never going to
(35:22):
give up.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And so every once in a while, Elaine would pick
up a part of the case, or in a moment
of sudden fury, she'd call Bob again to leave a
message on his machine while he was at work.
Speaker 4 (35:37):
You killed my sister, and I know you think you
got away with it. I will always hound you and
haunt you, and I will keep at the police, I
will keep at the press. I will always find you
as long as you are a licensed and registered physician.
(36:00):
No matter where you go, I will find you.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
And thanks to me, he did.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Go straightened to my unsuspecting arms in Las Vegas, Nevada.
But it didn't take long for him to run again.
While we were meeting up to talk about him at
the Mayflower Restaurant, he was packing his bags and heading
to one of the coldest places in America, North Dakota.
(36:37):
I know surprised us too.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
There was a period where there was a vault and
he was writing snowblower injuries in the minor newspaper.
Speaker 5 (36:48):
He was just smart guying, but women found him creepy.
Speaker 4 (36:53):
I will never forget him saying we have a cold
case Bureau, and I'd like to open up Gil's case.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
We'd like to have the three hour lunches, we'd like
to have a cocktailer after work.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
And we'd like to investigating homicides.
Speaker 4 (37:09):
And I mentioned, you know the Torso and I'll never
forget him saying what Torso.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for Our Heart Radio.
For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The series
is hosted by me Carol Fisher and produced by Anna Sinfield.
Our assistant producer is Julian Manyu Gera Patten, and our
researcher is Madeline Parr. The editor is Veronica Simmons. Max
(37:51):
O'Brien is our executive producer. Our fact checker is Valeria Rocca.
Production management from Sharie Houston and Charlotte woolf Sound design,
mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen and Nicholas Alexander. Music
supervision by Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Luisa Gerstein.
(38:14):
Story development by Isaac Fisher. Willard Foxton is creative director
of Development. Special thanks to Shawn Glynn, David Waters, might
Ley Rowl, Katrina Noravel, David Wasserman, and Beth Anne Mcaluso.
(38:36):
We did reach out to Bob and his legal team
to ask if he'd like to comment on the podcast,
but we never heard back.
Speaker 5 (38:48):
Novel
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