June 3, 2024 • 47 mins
To find an end to the story, the Girlfriends go back to the beginning.
If you’re affected by any of the themes in this show please reach out to DNA Doe Project, an organisation we’ve partnered with.
The Girlfriends: Our Lost Sister is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.
For more from Novel visit novel.audio
Listen to our soundtrack and buy the album from Bandcamp. All proceeds go to our charity partner DNA Doe Project.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Novel. Hey listener, here we are at our final episode.
I just wanted to let you know that we are
releasing our soundtrack as an EP. You can listen on
all reputable streaming platforms. You can also purchase the EP
(00:27):
by going to bandcamp dot com and searching for the
Girlfriend's Our Lost Sister soundtrack. All proceeds go to our
charity partner, DNA DO Project. In this final episode, we'll
be talking a lot about drug addiction. We'll also speak
about parental neglect, sex work, as well as acts of
(00:49):
extreme violence, including murder. But in amongst all this darkness,
you'll also hear a woman's story brought to life by
the people who loved her. If you feel impact did
by any of the themes while listening, I encourage you
to check out our charity partner, DNA DOE Project. They
work with law enforcement to identify Jane and John Does
(01:10):
using genetic genealogy in the hopes of reuniting the bodies
of unidentified people with their families. You can find them
at DNADO project dot org. And one more thing, you'll
probably hear more bad language from me. I mean, it's
the final episode, so why stop now? You know? So
(01:32):
far on the girlfriends our lost sister. The whole thing
is so horrific, it's almost like it's become this moral
obligation to find her.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
In ninety eight, did missing persons really want to deal with?
Nineteen eighty nine Torso?
Speaker 3 (01:48):
That watch though I don't know.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Hi, it's doctor Shapiro and I'd like to speak with
the deputy medical Examiner.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Do you mind if I send a text?
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Yeah, I might get something. What do you know?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Could you say perpetrator for me?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Who is she?
Speaker 6 (02:09):
Let's bring closure to another family. Let's open this door?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Hello? Hi?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Is this Anne?
Speaker 7 (02:18):
It is.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
When Anna reached out to Heidi Balch's family, they were
pretty shocked to hear from her, and trust me, I
can certainly relate to that, But despite their surprise, they
agreed to talk. So Anna explains the long complicated story
how a Torso washed up on Staten Island and was
buried in Gilkatz's grave for nearly a decade, and how
(02:59):
DNA testing avally proved that it wasn't Gael, and how
that Torso was then buried on Hart Island until twenty
and thirteen, when it was exhumed once again by the
Office of the chief medical Examiners. We ask Kiti's family
for records anything relating to the police or medical examiners
that they would be willing to share with us to
(03:20):
help us solve this mystery once and for all. They
forward us an email which they were sent by the
police back in twenty thirteen and included in there two
paragraphs down is a medical examiner case number R eight
nine zero five six three, which is a number some
(03:41):
discerning listeners may recognize because it's the same number that
we've had in our files for a year and a half.
It's the number that all the way back in nineteen
eighty nine was assigned to our Jane Do's Torso, the
one that was misidentified as Gail Cats. I can't believe
(04:02):
I'm saying this, Girlfriends, but we finally have the proof.
We found our lost sister, and her name is Heidi Balch.
I'm Carol Fisher and from the teams at Novel and
iHeart Podcast, this is the girlfriends our Lost Sister, Episode five.
Speaker 7 (04:22):
Her Legacy. Yes, okay, I've got a confession to make.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
I know. I always say I'm a Vegas girl because
that's my hometown and I love a little glitz and glamour.
But about seven years ago, I fell in love with
the man from New Orleans and I found myself in
a long distance relationship. Listener, don't fear this. One's a
really nice guy. But the deal was I would spend
(05:20):
more time out of Las Vegas if I could have
a lot of animals. So we purchased a home right
outside the city, and I'm happy to report that we
have a shitload of chickens, two geese, a lot of ducks,
five mini goats, one pet pig, two horses, and one pony.
Oh my gosh, and we have two cats.
Speaker 7 (05:42):
Anna, Anna, come on.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
For the past week, I've been introducing my producer Anna
to my menagerie. This is one of our cats.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Ferguson.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
She's here because she looked like she could do with
a good meal, but also because, and you're not gonna
fucking believe this, Heidi's aunt. She lives just fifteen minutes
down the road from me. I mean, you can't make
this ship up.
Speaker 8 (06:08):
That's when it comes to people being connected through the show.
This feels like the craziest example. You know, down the road,
go down.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
The road, going only four minutes away. I think this
is crazy. Throughout the series, we said that we want
to learn who our lost sister is, but all we
could find were gruesome details about her death, and today
we're hoping to find out about how she lived from
(06:37):
the people who knew her and loved her. What is
it this? Oh, it's says, isn't it cute? Drible cuts?
Is that a dinosaur? I think that's a bird. Could
(07:00):
we get out of the car and walk through an
old wooden gate towards a clapboard building with a porch
and a rocking chair. The front yard is full of
luscious greenery that's dripping from the heavy Louisiana rainfall. Him, Carol, Carol, Hello.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
Me too, Rita, Rita.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
We're greeted at the door by Rita, or Rusty to friends.
She's Heidi's aunt by marriage. Rusty's one of those beautiful
older women who just radiates a gentle, calm, warmth and
understated wisdom.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
It was a church.
Speaker 6 (07:47):
What is it you can now tell?
Speaker 1 (07:49):
I said it, as if we didn't have enough coincidences
back in the day, this converted church. It was called
Saint Anna, I mean, and come on, Rusty has lived
here for decades. And as the first person to ever
call it home. She says, you can feel the energy
of people in the building, and I can believe that.
(08:12):
She guides us through the house with its navy floorboards
and persian rugs lit up through the stained glass windows.
It's absolutely stunning. As we're taking it all in, we're
joined by Anne.
Speaker 9 (08:26):
I mean, I'm here, so nice to meet you.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
She's Heidi's cousin and Rusty's niece. Her dog says hello too.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
This looks like friendly, but just telling her how to jump.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
This looks like my dog.
Speaker 9 (08:37):
Yeah, yes, just like my dog.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Anne and Rusty seem to be cut from the same
Bohemian cloth AND's about eleven years older than Heidi. She's
in her early seventies. Now she's a wood turner and
artist and talks about driving around in a van for
half the year seeking adventures while she still can.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
So now we get to where its one.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Okay, we're coming to.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
The worm area.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
We were there On a dining room table surrounded by fruit, salad,
hot coffee, and granola bars are photos of Heidi and
her family throughout the years. There's one of Heidi as
a toddler being cuddled in the backseat of a car.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
She was two there and I was twelve.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
This is Lyle. She's an sister and another cousin of Heidie's.
Her wavy white hair is effortlessly tied back, and she's
wearing a pair of loose fitting traditional Nepalese trousers.
Speaker 10 (09:32):
We had a big record of the Singing Nuns and
we would dance to this song, and there was one
in particular we loved, and little two year old Heidi
would go over to the record player very delicately, lift
up the needle, put it back on the groove where
the song like. She never scratched the record, she never
(09:53):
missed putting it in the right place. I was just
amazed at her dexterity. We must have danced to that
song like a hundred times. I think it was a
song called Dominika Nika. Anyway, you can tell how much
we loved each other.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Yeah, this dancing little girl with a family of gorgeous hippies.
This isn't the story I was expecting. Here with Heidi's relatives,
I get a sense of a life she could have led,
full of art and color and music. I wish we
(10:30):
could tell that story, but that's not how things worked
out for Heidi. So what happened. To understand that, we
first need to learn about Heidi's parents, Tom and Gretchen,
who met in California in the early nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
There was a ten year age gap.
Speaker 9 (10:53):
She was twenty two and Tom was thirty two or whatever,
and he was not living a life that was about
having children or finding a wife.
Speaker 10 (11:03):
My understanding was that he was just kind of a playboy,
and so I think he just liked to have sex,
and he liked to go out with different women, and
he wasn't looking for a relationship.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
And she got pregnant.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
When Tom's mother, who the family all called Nana, found
out about the pregnancy, she told Tom that he had
to do the right thing and marry Gretchen. She felt
like it was the only way to give the baby
a proper start in life. In the photos from their
wedding day, Gretchen is six months pregnant in a sixties
(11:39):
coat and a beehive hairdoo. Tom's in a pale suit
holding a glass of champagne. He looks like a deer
in the headlights. Heidi's born a few months later in
California on January seventh, nineteen sixty four. But within in
(12:00):
a few months, Tom and Gretchen's marriage is over and
Heidi gets stuck between two miserable parents.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
What struck me about Gretchen was how bitter She was
kind of toxic, and Tom became bitter as well. But
Tom was bitter about a lot of things. So both
parents full of that bitterness, really created an environment that
wasn't even close to the atmosphere baby needed. There was
(12:29):
no nurturing, there was no making the baby fly up
in the air and catch her, or having fun or
anything like that.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
At one point, a local woman is hired by the
family to look after baby Heidi, but before long, according
to Heidie's cousins, this woman takes Heidie's Nana to one side.
She tells her that from what she's seen at Gretchen's apartment,
she thinks Gretchen will be the death of Heidi and
that the family should get rid of her to protect
(13:00):
the baby.
Speaker 9 (13:02):
She said, you know, I have people in my neighborhood
who know how to take care of these kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Oh my gosh, So let me get this straight. This
devout Christian nanny is suggesting that they put a hit
out on Heidie's mom.
Speaker 9 (13:19):
Yeah, Nana was shocked, and of course Nana said no,
and you know, it wasn't even a consideration.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Nana didn't give up, though. The family tells us that
she tried to take custody of Heidi but was unsuccessful.
So in the end, she did whatever she could to
make Heidi's life as normal as possible. Whenever she came
to visit, big family meals with freshly pressed tablecloths, cute
girly dresses, riding up and down the curb on a
(13:51):
shiny new bike, some money or toys at birthdays and Christmases.
But back home with Heidie's mom, things weren't as right.
The family told us they suspected that Gretchen was working
as a sex worker from her apartment. They heard from
people that she had different men over while Heidi was there,
(14:13):
that she only had beer in the fridge. One time,
the cousins say Heidi came to Nana's house with a
cigarette burn on her. It's important to point out here
that we can't fact check these claims because we believe
Gretchen has passed away, and records show that Tom, Heidi's father,
died in twenty twenty three. We do know that Gretchen
(14:36):
told the detective who looked into Heidie's case that she
was going through a rough patch back then. It all
came to a head when Heidi was five. Gretchen turned
up at Tom's front door one day and said she
couldn't deal with raising Heidi anymore. She then walked away
and left the little girl to live with her equally
(14:58):
uninterested father.
Speaker 9 (15:00):
Tom did come home at night, and Heidie had learned
by six or seven to take a frozen dinner out
of the freezer and turn on the oven and make
it for herself.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Heidie's cousins Lyall and Robert show us some more pictures
of Heidi.
Speaker 10 (15:16):
She's not so old in this picture, and you can
see that face is someone's gone through.
Speaker 11 (15:21):
Some Yeah, she was just obviously really lonely.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
I mean, you look at these photos and there is
like a clear change.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, you know, she is just a normal.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Happy, cute kid when she's like two three.
Speaker 12 (15:40):
In these ones, and then there is something about her
eyes that just goes Yeah, that's.
Speaker 5 (15:45):
What I say.
Speaker 10 (15:45):
I feel like if we put all these pictures in
chronological order, you almost see the light go out in
her eyes.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
At school, Heidie's teachers noticed there was something wrong too.
In one of her report cards from first grade, it
says she almost never smiles. I believe she needs a
great deal of affection right now. But there are also
signs of Heidi's creativity and potential. One of her teachers
says she was an excellent reader who loved the Chronicles
(16:18):
of Narnia. They also say she was a talented writer,
producing many fine stories and poems with the wit and
humor that was unique to her. There are moments in
these reports that show flashes of Heidi's personality, a headstrong
young girl who simply wastes too much time doing what
she pleases instead of paying attention. One report from nineteen
(16:41):
seventy two, when she was eight, says that if Heidi
continues receiving the love, help, and understanding she has seen
from school and home, then I believe she will make
even greater social progress. But the love she received at
home didn't come from her dad. That was all Nana,
who continued to play a key maternal role in Heidi's life,
(17:02):
especially at Christmas when Heidi would go and visit. There
are real sweet photos of her sitting on Santa's knee.
That feel like glimpses of childhood joy. One time, Heidie's aunt,
Rusty remembers when they were all at Nana and Grampy's house.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Grampy was kind of a grumpy He was the one
who decorated the tree every year, that was his tradition,
and the tree that he brought in that year had
a bird in it, a live bird.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Grampy rescues the bird from the tree and brings it outside.
But while he's.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Gone, Nana said, let's have some fun on it, so
they started decorating the tree. Graffy was gone, and Heidi
was delighted. It was just wonderful to see her spirit
dancing around.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
But then the worst thing that could happen happened. Grampy
retired and decided he wanted to move to Florida, eleven
hundred miles away from Ohio.
Speaker 10 (18:07):
Nana just was wringing her hands about moving so far
away from Heidi, but.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Grampy's word was law in their relationship and she had
no choice but to go.
Speaker 10 (18:17):
So there was no longer visits to Nana's house, where
there really was stability and home cooked meals.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
By nineteen seventy two, Heidi loses regular contact with the
most important and loving figure in her life. A few
years later, in nineteen seventy six, the family are gathered
together for a golden wedding party. Looking at a photo
from the day, you can see twelve year old Heidi,
(18:44):
who looks like a young Jodie Foster, but to her
cousins she seems almost unrecognizable. She's already had several run
ins with the law and is experiencing things that her
older cousins can't even imagine.
Speaker 10 (18:59):
She was worried that she was pregnant and that she
might have hepatitis from shooting up with a dirty needle.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
I went into shock.
Speaker 10 (19:09):
I felt like I had gone from being the cousin
who's ten years older who can lead the dancing, to
feeling like I was a country bumpkin who had no experience.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
It was clear to everyone that Heidi was on a
downward spiral, and her father Tom seemed to be doing
nothing to stop it. Around that time, her aunt Rusty
stepped in. She moved Heidi in with her and her family.
Speaker 11 (19:35):
No.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
I thought, well, I could help her. No, and I
tried to give her some ground rules while we're at
the house, and she resisted everything. It was this bubble
that she was in. It seemed that it couldn't be penetrated.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
So she really protected herself, like with a shield of
armor around her.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
She did.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Eventually, Heidi was forced to attend a reform school in Ohio,
and for a while she was doing doing well. Heidi
seemed to thrive with a bit of discipline and structure.
She was a naturally bright young girl and started advancing
in her education again.
Speaker 11 (20:10):
And then the story goes that Tom came to visit her.
This is Robert, and he took her away. He took
her back. Tom had this thing about bucking the system,
you know, fuck the man. He hated any kind of authority,
and so I think he valued that in Heidi too
(20:30):
and encouraged it.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Back in Toledo with her dad, Heidi wanted out. At
just fourteen years old. She told her dad Tom she
was moving to California to follow her dreams of being
an actress and a model. She said she could get
a ride with some long distance truck driver she had met.
Heidie's family couldn't believe Tom was okay with it.
Speaker 11 (20:54):
You can't allow your daughter to just go and get
in a car with anyone. These are grown men. You
can't do it.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
You can't do it.
Speaker 11 (21:04):
And he's just like, got this dumbass smile and a
drink in his hand and a pipe. He was, in
a weird way, proud of her independence.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
But there was no talking to Tom or to Heidi.
And so in nineteen seventy eight, with their dad's consent,
fourteen year old Heidi gets in the truck with this
random guy and sets off to make it big in California.
(21:49):
California was the furthest fourteen year old Heidi Bulch had
ever been from her family. Like so many other teen girls,
she had aspirations of being a star and an actress
or maybe a model. She didn't have all the details
figured out yet. Heidi's family don't know much about her
life at this point, but what they do know is
(22:10):
that she never made it big in Hollywood. We're pretty
sure that she didn't book any acting gigs, and she
decided that at five foot one, she was too short
to make it as a catalog model. So, at age sixteen,
Heidi packs up her life and once again, with her
father's blessing, she decides to move, this time to New
(22:35):
York City. When Heidi arrives in the Big Apple, her
dreams have changed, well kind of, because of her height.
She thinks she might have better luck as a hand
and face model, so she starts putting a portfolio together.
Picturing a sixteen year old Heidi alone in New York,
(22:58):
it makes me think of my own daughter when she
was sixteen. She was still in school, she was learning
to drive a car and starting to think about colleges.
As a mother, it's hard for me to understand how
anyone could let their child go off alone into a
city as dangerous as New York in the eighties, Heidi
(23:20):
no doubt considered herself pretty street wise, and in a
lot of ways she was, but she was also just
a kid in need of some love and guidance. According
to her family, Heidie's dad paid the rent on a
studio apartment for her, but he never visited. Heidi was
left to fend for herself. Her life became increasingly turbulent.
(23:47):
She was falling deeper into the throes of drug addiction,
and she got arrested multiple times. According to her cousin, Robert,
who was living in New York at the time. Within
a few years of being in the city, Heidie found
herself an infamous Island jail Rikers her robbery and assault.
Speaker 11 (24:06):
Heidi was a tough character by that point, so she
prided herself in knowing how to navigate being in Rikers
and she would ask for different things like socks and cigarettes,
whatever underpants, and she could barter use them to her advantage.
But she took real pride in being able to handle herself.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
After Heidi came out of Rikers when she was around
twenty one, her family arranged for her to go to
Florida for a few months to stay with Nana. While there,
she spoke about getting clean and even got her high
school ged. But this brief respite from her life in
New York didn't last. Once she returned to the city,
she fell back into her old ways. She'd stop buy
(24:51):
and visit her family, who were living in the city,
every once in a while for dinner or to get
a few extra bucks, but they weren't seeing very much
of her. A lot of her life was a mystery
to them.
Speaker 11 (25:02):
We knew she was addicted to drugs and using her
sexuality in some way.
Speaker 9 (25:09):
She was really on the downward spiral, and it may
have even been around a discussion about being a sex worker.
She just came out with this statement. She said, well,
you know, I'm a lesbian.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
But after coming out as a lesbian, Heidi suddenly marries
a man.
Speaker 9 (25:28):
She met this guy who was attempting to get a
green card and struck a deal.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Allegedly, he gave Heidi fifteen hundred dollars to marry him.
It seems very much like a business transaction. As far
as we know, there was no real relationship. Heidi's addiction
continued to spiral. At various points in the mid to
late eighties, her family tried to step in.
Speaker 9 (25:58):
I was living in New York and my parents, Heidie's
aunt and uncle were making one more effort to try
to get her into drug rehabilitation. And the last night
before she said she would go, and my folks were
going to take her. They had gotten a hotel room
(26:20):
about a half a block away from where they lived.
I remember being in the hotel room and Heidi was
going into the bathroom like every twenty minutes, and you know,
it was sort of obvious that she was taking drugs.
(26:41):
She was using needles and heroin by that point, and
I remember seeing her legs in her arms in that
way that really advanced drug addicts have pustules of sores.
And it was already that she had had an AIDS diagnosis,
(27:09):
and she wanted a smoothie and I said, well, I
can go over to Orange Julius, you know, one of
those corner store places in New York, and get you one.
And she said, you know, I'm organic.
Speaker 12 (27:30):
That's great, and it was just so funny, like it
was like, oh my god, she's organic, and she wasn't
there the next morning.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
A Heidie's life in New York was, to put it,
mildly unpredictable. But in amongst all the chaos, there was
one person in her life that she would never bail on,
her beloved Nana. Every January on her birthday, Heidi would
(28:15):
call Nana and they catch up a little.
Speaker 9 (28:17):
And Nana would say, oh, I want to send you
a check, and you know, it's so nice to hear
from you, and you know, it was kind of a
way to know that she was alive and well.
Speaker 10 (28:27):
And it was nineteen ninety when she doesn't call Nana,
and now it's been a year almost and so everybody
was knowing something's going on.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Increasingly worrying for Heidi's welfare, Nana reaches out to Heidie's
green card husband to see if he's heard from her,
and he.
Speaker 9 (28:44):
Said, oh, yeah, she's fine. You know, she's over on
the Alphabet Land Avenue A, and I haven't really seen
her seen her, but I know other people have seen
her and just led Nana on. That went on for
a number of years, and so Nana was not suspecting anymore.
She believed it and said, oh, well, she's just like
(29:07):
in more trouble and you know she's she's on drugs.
Because the fake husband was reassuring Nana for his own
self interest, that she was alive. Nana died in nineteen
ninety six, so she never knew whether Heidi was really
(29:28):
missing or.
Speaker 12 (29:28):
Not, and probably it was better that way for Nana.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Oh, without a doubt.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
When Nana died, these calls stopped and Heidi's family were
left wondering what happened to her. Robert tried to console
himself with fantasies of Heidi having turned her life around.
Speaker 11 (29:48):
My narrative, the thing that I hope was that she
joined a cult and she was like in Arizona and
changed her name to Sunbeam. And you know, she was
gotten clean and healthy.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
But as time went on, nobody had spoken directly with
Heidi for several years, the family began to wonder whether
something serious had happened. Throughout the nineties, the family tried
to make Heidie's father, Tom, file a missing person's report,
but he.
Speaker 10 (30:20):
Refused because of his dislike of any authority, Like that's
why he kept telling our mom, no, don't report it yet.
Somehow he maybe was scared or just disliked the police
so much or something.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I can't understand how any parent could go years without
knowing if their child is alive or dead and do nothing.
The rest of the family felt torn. They were desperately
worried for Heidie's welfare, but they wanted to respect Tom's
wishes as her father, so they stood by until eventually,
(30:56):
in two thousand and one, Heidie's aunt Robin, took matters
into her own hands.
Speaker 9 (31:03):
My mother just couldn't stand it anymore, and so she
just decided I have to report her missing.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Over the years, the family checked in with the police,
but there was no sign of Heidi anywhere. There also
wasn't any media attention, not like there was in Gail's case.
Heidie's face didn't appear in the news or on a
milk carton under missing. I have to wonder if it's
because Heidi was a sex worker and a drug addict.
(31:33):
She wasn't a perfect victim, and maybe she reflected backup
people the kind of life they wanted to hide away from.
Given how much Heidi means to me, to Anna, to Mindy,
to Elaine, to all of us girlfriends, it's heartbreaking to
think that for so long her story was just ignored.
(31:57):
Until twenty thirteen, when Heidi's ain't Row gets a very
important visit for.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Hope Well detectives knocked on her door and said, could
this be your niece?
Speaker 9 (32:08):
My mother took one month with the pictures and she said,
that's Heidi.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
This was when the family learned that Heidi was dead
and that the serial killer Joel Rifkin was responsible for
her murder.
Speaker 11 (32:21):
And then my sister Anne, she got right on the
commuter start investigating and she tells me, you know, Heidie
was decapitated.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
It was all so much darker, so much more heartbreaking
than they ever could have imagined.
Speaker 11 (32:39):
I mean, it was one of those moments though, where
were you when you found out? When the towers came
down or whatever?
Speaker 10 (32:48):
It was definitely shocking. It was, I mean, kind of
knocked my breath out.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Trying to come to terms with what's happened. The family
seek out as much information as they can. They come
across old news articles about Heidi's death before she was identified,
articles they may have read a few years previously, without
knowing the connection they had.
Speaker 10 (33:13):
I think I saw the headline that said head has
aids and I just felt like I couldn't talk about it,
or I just didn't, you know, I didn't know how
to process it. I didn't know what to do with it.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
The callous, in dismissive way Heidie was spoken about by
the press after her death is a fucked up mirror
image of the way Joel Rifkin saw her and his
other victims. He spoke about it in the book From
the Mouth of a Monster.
Speaker 10 (33:48):
I didn't read the whole book, but I have it
in my mind that he said, well, I picked these
kind of girls because no one's looking for them. They
don't have families that care.
Speaker 7 (33:58):
And that just.
Speaker 10 (34:00):
Felt like a dagger in my heart to be well,
how long did it take for us to report it.
We wouldn't have known, like within a week or two,
because no one was in that close touch with her.
But by that summer we could have said, we should
(34:21):
get some help in case we can't find her. You know,
if we had reported it, maybe it would have led
to him being caught.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
There'd be sixteen other women still alive.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Lyle Robert and Anne have been trying to figure out
how their cousin, the girl they shared Christmases with, who
played the danting nuns on repeat until the record nearly
wore out, who had dreams of being a star, how
it is that she could have gone down so a
different road to them.
Speaker 10 (35:03):
It makes me realize that intact, consistent, reliable love that
our parents gave us, How valuable that is, how important
that is. Like I could be right where Heidi was
if I had had Uncle Tom.
Speaker 11 (35:22):
And I mean she did have love from Nana, yeah
and whatever Tom, in a weird way, there were little
pockets of it, you know, So she wasn't completely deprived.
I'm not. It's we're just still trying to sort it
out and figure it out, Like, how does a life
go so wrong? You know, how does that happen?
Speaker 1 (35:53):
After the twenty and thirteen police investigation, all of Heidi's remains,
including her torso, were finally reunited and cremated as one.
The family had some kind of closure, But what they
didn't know until we came along was that Heidi's torso
had been buried for nearly ten years in the grave
(36:15):
of Gail Cats. So we thought it fitting to introduce
them to the woman who visited her all those years,
Gail's sister Elaine.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Hi, Hi, we have something terrible in common.
Speaker 6 (36:32):
I am so sorry, thank you, I am so sorry
to you.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 13 (36:39):
You know.
Speaker 9 (36:39):
I think that it's only since we got connected with
Anna and learned the story of the misidentified torso and
realized that there was a lot of peace that we
have felt knowing that somebody loved her and buried her,
(37:01):
and that she was cared about for a period of time,
when for twenty five years it was a total mystery.
Speaker 6 (37:13):
You know, Heide's torso gave my family an enormous amount
of peace and closure.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Burying her.
Speaker 6 (37:23):
We finally felt that, you know, we had some part
of my sister back. So thank you for lending her
to me and my family.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
That's a big heart that you have.
Speaker 9 (37:38):
We know and appreciate that there was loving energy going
her way.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
In Heidi's story, that means a lot.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
As we end the call with the Lane, the Louisiana
sky is getting dark. Still strew across the table in
front of us are the documents and photographs. It gives
us snapshots in the Heidi's too short life, and it
might be the rainstorm or maybe the spirits in the
house that Rusty talked about. But the lights start to
flicker on and off, and the conversation turns to what
(38:17):
Heidi would make of all of this.
Speaker 9 (38:21):
At one point, when she was in her teen years,
she said to me, you know, what I really want
is to be on the cover of a magazine and
have my mother see me on the cover of a
magazine when I'm famous. Like the motivation was to be
discovered by her mother. Yeah, and she's not a famous
(38:45):
hand model or an actress who's doing brilliant work.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
But maybe this is the legacy we've been waiting for.
Speaker 9 (38:54):
Maybe this is being on the cover of the magazine
in some weird way, and I think she will be
represented now with a story. It's more than the blood
and gore on the internet.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
I'm glad that you all are telling it. I also
have the sense that the girlfriends are growing in numbers. Yes,
and count me in.
Speaker 5 (39:26):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I'd like to think that, Gail and Heidi, you're just
friends somewhere in the ethers.
Speaker 14 (39:32):
I was thinking that too, in the ethers, but maybe
it was like a destiny right thing and a divine intervention.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Today, Heidi's ashes are scattered underneath a palm tree somewhere
in Florida. It's nice to imagine her there, soaking up
the sun. Finally at peace. I'm back on the shores
of Staten Island, where Heidi first entered our story. Mindy
(40:26):
and Anna are with me. The three of us are
gathered here one final time, in this beautiful, slightly melancholy
spot to say goodbye. We started this journey with one
mission to find our lost sister, and now that we've
(40:47):
not only found her but named her two, we're here
to give her a proper sendoff. So we're gonna do
it in the only way we know how. Very Jewish,
a little slap dash with a lot of heart.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
In the Jewish tradition, if you visit a grave site,
you leave a stone, and I think we should leave
a stone here.
Speaker 10 (41:12):
I love that.
Speaker 14 (41:12):
Let's leave the snow.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Where are you going to place it?
Speaker 1 (41:19):
I'm going to go down there, walking right out to
the water's edge. Mindy gently lays down the stone.
Speaker 5 (41:26):
Is that something you say when you do this?
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Normally you say yes? Score? Jitsker is a special memorial
prayer for the departed, where you say the name of
the dead you wish to honor. It means may God remember,
But sadly and a little ironically, we don't remember the words.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Okay, Siri, can you say y?
Speaker 10 (41:49):
Score?
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Okay? How to get your credit report?
Speaker 12 (41:54):
Now?
Speaker 1 (41:56):
We warned you slap dash, But eventually Mindy finds what
she's looking for. So, dear listener, we'd like you to
join us in taking a moment to remember.
Speaker 8 (42:07):
Heidi, balch okay, are you ready.
Speaker 13 (42:27):
Showcat on me? Moments an don't gonna.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Should be.
Speaker 5 (42:58):
Taken sho.
Speaker 4 (43:35):
Heidi, okay, shall oh that's any one?
Speaker 9 (43:47):
Yeah, it's enough.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
There's there's gotta be a shorter one. I'd like to
imagine that Hidie and Gil are looking down on us
from the ethers, both of them laughing at me. Mindy
and Anna as we awkwardly make our way off the beach,
leaving behind two unassuming stones just on the water's edge,
(44:11):
one for Heidi and one for Gail. This story is
(44:35):
for all of us. It's for Gail and for her
sister Elaine. It's for Anne and Rusty and Lyle and Robert.
But most of all, this story is for Heidi Balch,
who is no longer our lost sister. Because we found you, Heidi,
and we will never forget you. The girlfriends Our Lost
(45:20):
Sister is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more
from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show is hosted
by me Carol Fisher, and our chief investigator is Mindy Shapiro.
To find me on social media, search Carol A. Fisher
That's Carol with an E. The season is written and
(45:40):
produced by Anna Sinfield and Lee Meyer. Our assistant producer
is Madeline Parr. The editor is Joe Wheeler. Max O'Brien
is our executive producer. Our fact checker is Dania Suleiman.
Production management from Sharie Houston and Charlotte Wolf. Sound design,
mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen and Nicholas Alexander music
(46:05):
supervision by Anna Sinfield and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed
and performed by Luisa Gerstein and produced by Louisa Gerstein
and Nicholas Alexander. The series artwork was designed by Christina Limkuhl.
Story development by Anna Sinfield. Willard Foxton is creative director
(46:27):
of Development. Our executive producers at iHeart Podcasts are Katrina
Norvel and Nikki Etour special thanks to Canter, Daniella Guessenheit,
and Leona Hamid, plus Elie Canter, Carrie Lieberman, and Will
Pearson at iHeart Podcasts, as well as Carly Frankel and
the whole team at WME, and a special shout out
(46:49):
to Vince Hayward, my life partner in True Crime for
taking on the role of girlfriend's confidante and lead tech support.
The Girlfriends will return with the brand news story and
a new host soon.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
Novel
Novel. Hey listener, here we are at our final episode.
I just wanted to let you know that we are
releasing our soundtrack as an EP. You can listen on
all reputable streaming platforms. You can also purchase the EP
(00:27):
by going to bandcamp dot com and searching for the
Girlfriend's Our Lost Sister soundtrack. All proceeds go to our
charity partner, DNA DO Project. In this final episode, we'll
be talking a lot about drug addiction. We'll also speak
about parental neglect, sex work, as well as acts of
(00:49):
extreme violence, including murder. But in amongst all this darkness,
you'll also hear a woman's story brought to life by
the people who loved her. If you feel impact did
by any of the themes while listening, I encourage you
to check out our charity partner, DNA DOE Project. They
work with law enforcement to identify Jane and John Does
(01:10):
using genetic genealogy in the hopes of reuniting the bodies
of unidentified people with their families. You can find them
at DNADO project dot org. And one more thing, you'll
probably hear more bad language from me. I mean, it's
the final episode, so why stop now? You know? So
(01:32):
far on the girlfriends our lost sister. The whole thing
is so horrific, it's almost like it's become this moral
obligation to find her.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
In ninety eight, did missing persons really want to deal with?
Nineteen eighty nine Torso?
Speaker 3 (01:48):
That watch though I don't know.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Hi, it's doctor Shapiro and I'd like to speak with
the deputy medical Examiner.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Do you mind if I send a text?
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Yeah, I might get something. What do you know?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Could you say perpetrator for me?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Who is she?
Speaker 6 (02:09):
Let's bring closure to another family. Let's open this door?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Hello? Hi?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Is this Anne?
Speaker 7 (02:18):
It is.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
When Anna reached out to Heidi Balch's family, they were
pretty shocked to hear from her, and trust me, I
can certainly relate to that, But despite their surprise, they
agreed to talk. So Anna explains the long complicated story
how a Torso washed up on Staten Island and was
buried in Gilkatz's grave for nearly a decade, and how
(02:59):
DNA testing avally proved that it wasn't Gael, and how
that Torso was then buried on Hart Island until twenty
and thirteen, when it was exhumed once again by the
Office of the chief medical Examiners. We ask Kiti's family
for records anything relating to the police or medical examiners
that they would be willing to share with us to
(03:20):
help us solve this mystery once and for all. They
forward us an email which they were sent by the
police back in twenty thirteen and included in there two
paragraphs down is a medical examiner case number R eight
nine zero five six three, which is a number some
(03:41):
discerning listeners may recognize because it's the same number that
we've had in our files for a year and a half.
It's the number that all the way back in nineteen
eighty nine was assigned to our Jane Do's Torso, the
one that was misidentified as Gail Cats. I can't believe
(04:02):
I'm saying this, Girlfriends, but we finally have the proof.
We found our lost sister, and her name is Heidi Balch.
I'm Carol Fisher and from the teams at Novel and
iHeart Podcast, this is the girlfriends our Lost Sister, Episode five.
Speaker 7 (04:22):
Her Legacy. Yes, okay, I've got a confession to make.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
I know. I always say I'm a Vegas girl because
that's my hometown and I love a little glitz and glamour.
But about seven years ago, I fell in love with
the man from New Orleans and I found myself in
a long distance relationship. Listener, don't fear this. One's a
really nice guy. But the deal was I would spend
(05:20):
more time out of Las Vegas if I could have
a lot of animals. So we purchased a home right
outside the city, and I'm happy to report that we
have a shitload of chickens, two geese, a lot of ducks,
five mini goats, one pet pig, two horses, and one pony.
Oh my gosh, and we have two cats.
Speaker 7 (05:42):
Anna, Anna, come on.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
For the past week, I've been introducing my producer Anna
to my menagerie. This is one of our cats.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Ferguson.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
She's here because she looked like she could do with
a good meal, but also because, and you're not gonna
fucking believe this, Heidi's aunt. She lives just fifteen minutes
down the road from me. I mean, you can't make
this ship up.
Speaker 8 (06:08):
That's when it comes to people being connected through the show.
This feels like the craziest example. You know, down the road,
go down.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
The road, going only four minutes away. I think this
is crazy. Throughout the series, we said that we want
to learn who our lost sister is, but all we
could find were gruesome details about her death, and today
we're hoping to find out about how she lived from
(06:37):
the people who knew her and loved her. What is
it this? Oh, it's says, isn't it cute? Drible cuts?
Is that a dinosaur? I think that's a bird. Could
(07:00):
we get out of the car and walk through an
old wooden gate towards a clapboard building with a porch
and a rocking chair. The front yard is full of
luscious greenery that's dripping from the heavy Louisiana rainfall. Him, Carol, Carol, Hello.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
Me too, Rita, Rita.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
We're greeted at the door by Rita, or Rusty to friends.
She's Heidi's aunt by marriage. Rusty's one of those beautiful
older women who just radiates a gentle, calm, warmth and
understated wisdom.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
It was a church.
Speaker 6 (07:47):
What is it you can now tell?
Speaker 1 (07:49):
I said it, as if we didn't have enough coincidences
back in the day, this converted church. It was called
Saint Anna, I mean, and come on, Rusty has lived
here for decades. And as the first person to ever
call it home. She says, you can feel the energy
of people in the building, and I can believe that.
(08:12):
She guides us through the house with its navy floorboards
and persian rugs lit up through the stained glass windows.
It's absolutely stunning. As we're taking it all in, we're
joined by Anne.
Speaker 9 (08:26):
I mean, I'm here, so nice to meet you.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
She's Heidi's cousin and Rusty's niece. Her dog says hello too.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
This looks like friendly, but just telling her how to jump.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
This looks like my dog.
Speaker 9 (08:37):
Yeah, yes, just like my dog.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Anne and Rusty seem to be cut from the same
Bohemian cloth AND's about eleven years older than Heidi. She's
in her early seventies. Now she's a wood turner and
artist and talks about driving around in a van for
half the year seeking adventures while she still can.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
So now we get to where its one.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Okay, we're coming to.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
The worm area.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
We were there On a dining room table surrounded by fruit, salad,
hot coffee, and granola bars are photos of Heidi and
her family throughout the years. There's one of Heidi as
a toddler being cuddled in the backseat of a car.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
She was two there and I was twelve.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
This is Lyle. She's an sister and another cousin of Heidie's.
Her wavy white hair is effortlessly tied back, and she's
wearing a pair of loose fitting traditional Nepalese trousers.
Speaker 10 (09:32):
We had a big record of the Singing Nuns and
we would dance to this song, and there was one
in particular we loved, and little two year old Heidi
would go over to the record player very delicately, lift
up the needle, put it back on the groove where
the song like. She never scratched the record, she never
(09:53):
missed putting it in the right place. I was just
amazed at her dexterity. We must have danced to that
song like a hundred times. I think it was a
song called Dominika Nika. Anyway, you can tell how much
we loved each other.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Yeah, this dancing little girl with a family of gorgeous hippies.
This isn't the story I was expecting. Here with Heidi's relatives,
I get a sense of a life she could have led,
full of art and color and music. I wish we
(10:30):
could tell that story, but that's not how things worked
out for Heidi. So what happened. To understand that, we
first need to learn about Heidi's parents, Tom and Gretchen,
who met in California in the early nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
There was a ten year age gap.
Speaker 9 (10:53):
She was twenty two and Tom was thirty two or whatever,
and he was not living a life that was about
having children or finding a wife.
Speaker 10 (11:03):
My understanding was that he was just kind of a playboy,
and so I think he just liked to have sex,
and he liked to go out with different women, and
he wasn't looking for a relationship.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
And she got pregnant.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
When Tom's mother, who the family all called Nana, found
out about the pregnancy, she told Tom that he had
to do the right thing and marry Gretchen. She felt
like it was the only way to give the baby
a proper start in life. In the photos from their
wedding day, Gretchen is six months pregnant in a sixties
(11:39):
coat and a beehive hairdoo. Tom's in a pale suit
holding a glass of champagne. He looks like a deer
in the headlights. Heidi's born a few months later in
California on January seventh, nineteen sixty four. But within in
(12:00):
a few months, Tom and Gretchen's marriage is over and
Heidi gets stuck between two miserable parents.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
What struck me about Gretchen was how bitter She was
kind of toxic, and Tom became bitter as well. But
Tom was bitter about a lot of things. So both
parents full of that bitterness, really created an environment that
wasn't even close to the atmosphere baby needed. There was
(12:29):
no nurturing, there was no making the baby fly up
in the air and catch her, or having fun or
anything like that.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
At one point, a local woman is hired by the
family to look after baby Heidi, but before long, according
to Heidie's cousins, this woman takes Heidie's Nana to one side.
She tells her that from what she's seen at Gretchen's apartment,
she thinks Gretchen will be the death of Heidi and
that the family should get rid of her to protect
(13:00):
the baby.
Speaker 9 (13:02):
She said, you know, I have people in my neighborhood
who know how to take care of these kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Oh my gosh, So let me get this straight. This
devout Christian nanny is suggesting that they put a hit
out on Heidie's mom.
Speaker 9 (13:19):
Yeah, Nana was shocked, and of course Nana said no,
and you know, it wasn't even a consideration.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Nana didn't give up, though. The family tells us that
she tried to take custody of Heidi but was unsuccessful.
So in the end, she did whatever she could to
make Heidi's life as normal as possible. Whenever she came
to visit, big family meals with freshly pressed tablecloths, cute
girly dresses, riding up and down the curb on a
(13:51):
shiny new bike, some money or toys at birthdays and Christmases.
But back home with Heidie's mom, things weren't as right.
The family told us they suspected that Gretchen was working
as a sex worker from her apartment. They heard from
people that she had different men over while Heidi was there,
(14:13):
that she only had beer in the fridge. One time,
the cousins say Heidi came to Nana's house with a
cigarette burn on her. It's important to point out here
that we can't fact check these claims because we believe
Gretchen has passed away, and records show that Tom, Heidi's father,
died in twenty twenty three. We do know that Gretchen
(14:36):
told the detective who looked into Heidie's case that she
was going through a rough patch back then. It all
came to a head when Heidi was five. Gretchen turned
up at Tom's front door one day and said she
couldn't deal with raising Heidi anymore. She then walked away
and left the little girl to live with her equally
(14:58):
uninterested father.
Speaker 9 (15:00):
Tom did come home at night, and Heidie had learned
by six or seven to take a frozen dinner out
of the freezer and turn on the oven and make
it for herself.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Heidie's cousins Lyall and Robert show us some more pictures
of Heidi.
Speaker 10 (15:16):
She's not so old in this picture, and you can
see that face is someone's gone through.
Speaker 11 (15:21):
Some Yeah, she was just obviously really lonely.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
I mean, you look at these photos and there is
like a clear change.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, you know, she is just a normal.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Happy, cute kid when she's like two three.
Speaker 12 (15:40):
In these ones, and then there is something about her
eyes that just goes Yeah, that's.
Speaker 5 (15:45):
What I say.
Speaker 10 (15:45):
I feel like if we put all these pictures in
chronological order, you almost see the light go out in
her eyes.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
At school, Heidie's teachers noticed there was something wrong too.
In one of her report cards from first grade, it
says she almost never smiles. I believe she needs a
great deal of affection right now. But there are also
signs of Heidi's creativity and potential. One of her teachers
says she was an excellent reader who loved the Chronicles
(16:18):
of Narnia. They also say she was a talented writer,
producing many fine stories and poems with the wit and
humor that was unique to her. There are moments in
these reports that show flashes of Heidi's personality, a headstrong
young girl who simply wastes too much time doing what
she pleases instead of paying attention. One report from nineteen
(16:41):
seventy two, when she was eight, says that if Heidi
continues receiving the love, help, and understanding she has seen
from school and home, then I believe she will make
even greater social progress. But the love she received at
home didn't come from her dad. That was all Nana,
who continued to play a key maternal role in Heidi's life,
(17:02):
especially at Christmas when Heidi would go and visit. There
are real sweet photos of her sitting on Santa's knee.
That feel like glimpses of childhood joy. One time, Heidie's aunt,
Rusty remembers when they were all at Nana and Grampy's house.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Grampy was kind of a grumpy He was the one
who decorated the tree every year, that was his tradition,
and the tree that he brought in that year had
a bird in it, a live bird.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Grampy rescues the bird from the tree and brings it outside.
But while he's.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Gone, Nana said, let's have some fun on it, so
they started decorating the tree. Graffy was gone, and Heidi
was delighted. It was just wonderful to see her spirit
dancing around.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
But then the worst thing that could happen happened. Grampy
retired and decided he wanted to move to Florida, eleven
hundred miles away from Ohio.
Speaker 10 (18:07):
Nana just was wringing her hands about moving so far
away from Heidi, but.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Grampy's word was law in their relationship and she had
no choice but to go.
Speaker 10 (18:17):
So there was no longer visits to Nana's house, where
there really was stability and home cooked meals.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
By nineteen seventy two, Heidi loses regular contact with the
most important and loving figure in her life. A few
years later, in nineteen seventy six, the family are gathered
together for a golden wedding party. Looking at a photo
from the day, you can see twelve year old Heidi,
(18:44):
who looks like a young Jodie Foster, but to her
cousins she seems almost unrecognizable. She's already had several run
ins with the law and is experiencing things that her
older cousins can't even imagine.
Speaker 10 (18:59):
She was worried that she was pregnant and that she
might have hepatitis from shooting up with a dirty needle.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
I went into shock.
Speaker 10 (19:09):
I felt like I had gone from being the cousin
who's ten years older who can lead the dancing, to
feeling like I was a country bumpkin who had no experience.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
It was clear to everyone that Heidi was on a
downward spiral, and her father Tom seemed to be doing
nothing to stop it. Around that time, her aunt Rusty
stepped in. She moved Heidi in with her and her family.
Speaker 11 (19:35):
No.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
I thought, well, I could help her. No, and I
tried to give her some ground rules while we're at
the house, and she resisted everything. It was this bubble
that she was in. It seemed that it couldn't be penetrated.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
So she really protected herself, like with a shield of
armor around her.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
She did.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Eventually, Heidi was forced to attend a reform school in Ohio,
and for a while she was doing doing well. Heidi
seemed to thrive with a bit of discipline and structure.
She was a naturally bright young girl and started advancing
in her education again.
Speaker 11 (20:10):
And then the story goes that Tom came to visit her.
This is Robert, and he took her away. He took
her back. Tom had this thing about bucking the system,
you know, fuck the man. He hated any kind of authority,
and so I think he valued that in Heidi too
(20:30):
and encouraged it.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Back in Toledo with her dad, Heidi wanted out. At
just fourteen years old. She told her dad Tom she
was moving to California to follow her dreams of being
an actress and a model. She said she could get
a ride with some long distance truck driver she had met.
Heidie's family couldn't believe Tom was okay with it.
Speaker 11 (20:54):
You can't allow your daughter to just go and get
in a car with anyone. These are grown men. You
can't do it.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
You can't do it.
Speaker 11 (21:04):
And he's just like, got this dumbass smile and a
drink in his hand and a pipe. He was, in
a weird way, proud of her independence.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
But there was no talking to Tom or to Heidi.
And so in nineteen seventy eight, with their dad's consent,
fourteen year old Heidi gets in the truck with this
random guy and sets off to make it big in California.
(21:49):
California was the furthest fourteen year old Heidi Bulch had
ever been from her family. Like so many other teen girls,
she had aspirations of being a star and an actress
or maybe a model. She didn't have all the details
figured out yet. Heidi's family don't know much about her
life at this point, but what they do know is
(22:10):
that she never made it big in Hollywood. We're pretty
sure that she didn't book any acting gigs, and she
decided that at five foot one, she was too short
to make it as a catalog model. So, at age sixteen,
Heidi packs up her life and once again, with her
father's blessing, she decides to move, this time to New
(22:35):
York City. When Heidi arrives in the Big Apple, her
dreams have changed, well kind of, because of her height.
She thinks she might have better luck as a hand
and face model, so she starts putting a portfolio together.
Picturing a sixteen year old Heidi alone in New York,
(22:58):
it makes me think of my own daughter when she
was sixteen. She was still in school, she was learning
to drive a car and starting to think about colleges.
As a mother, it's hard for me to understand how
anyone could let their child go off alone into a
city as dangerous as New York in the eighties, Heidi
(23:20):
no doubt considered herself pretty street wise, and in a
lot of ways she was, but she was also just
a kid in need of some love and guidance. According
to her family, Heidie's dad paid the rent on a
studio apartment for her, but he never visited. Heidi was
left to fend for herself. Her life became increasingly turbulent.
(23:47):
She was falling deeper into the throes of drug addiction,
and she got arrested multiple times. According to her cousin, Robert,
who was living in New York at the time. Within
a few years of being in the city, Heidie found
herself an infamous Island jail Rikers her robbery and assault.
Speaker 11 (24:06):
Heidi was a tough character by that point, so she
prided herself in knowing how to navigate being in Rikers
and she would ask for different things like socks and cigarettes,
whatever underpants, and she could barter use them to her advantage.
But she took real pride in being able to handle herself.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
After Heidi came out of Rikers when she was around
twenty one, her family arranged for her to go to
Florida for a few months to stay with Nana. While there,
she spoke about getting clean and even got her high
school ged. But this brief respite from her life in
New York didn't last. Once she returned to the city,
she fell back into her old ways. She'd stop buy
(24:51):
and visit her family, who were living in the city,
every once in a while for dinner or to get
a few extra bucks, but they weren't seeing very much
of her. A lot of her life was a mystery
to them.
Speaker 11 (25:02):
We knew she was addicted to drugs and using her
sexuality in some way.
Speaker 9 (25:09):
She was really on the downward spiral, and it may
have even been around a discussion about being a sex worker.
She just came out with this statement. She said, well,
you know, I'm a lesbian.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
But after coming out as a lesbian, Heidi suddenly marries
a man.
Speaker 9 (25:28):
She met this guy who was attempting to get a
green card and struck a deal.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Allegedly, he gave Heidi fifteen hundred dollars to marry him.
It seems very much like a business transaction. As far
as we know, there was no real relationship. Heidi's addiction
continued to spiral. At various points in the mid to
late eighties, her family tried to step in.
Speaker 9 (25:58):
I was living in New York and my parents, Heidie's
aunt and uncle were making one more effort to try
to get her into drug rehabilitation. And the last night
before she said she would go, and my folks were
going to take her. They had gotten a hotel room
(26:20):
about a half a block away from where they lived.
I remember being in the hotel room and Heidi was
going into the bathroom like every twenty minutes, and you know,
it was sort of obvious that she was taking drugs.
(26:41):
She was using needles and heroin by that point, and
I remember seeing her legs in her arms in that
way that really advanced drug addicts have pustules of sores.
And it was already that she had had an AIDS diagnosis,
(27:09):
and she wanted a smoothie and I said, well, I
can go over to Orange Julius, you know, one of
those corner store places in New York, and get you one.
And she said, you know, I'm organic.
Speaker 12 (27:30):
That's great, and it was just so funny, like it
was like, oh my god, she's organic, and she wasn't
there the next morning.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
A Heidie's life in New York was, to put it,
mildly unpredictable. But in amongst all the chaos, there was
one person in her life that she would never bail on,
her beloved Nana. Every January on her birthday, Heidi would
(28:15):
call Nana and they catch up a little.
Speaker 9 (28:17):
And Nana would say, oh, I want to send you
a check, and you know, it's so nice to hear
from you, and you know, it was kind of a
way to know that she was alive and well.
Speaker 10 (28:27):
And it was nineteen ninety when she doesn't call Nana,
and now it's been a year almost and so everybody
was knowing something's going on.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Increasingly worrying for Heidi's welfare, Nana reaches out to Heidie's
green card husband to see if he's heard from her,
and he.
Speaker 9 (28:44):
Said, oh, yeah, she's fine. You know, she's over on
the Alphabet Land Avenue A, and I haven't really seen
her seen her, but I know other people have seen
her and just led Nana on. That went on for
a number of years, and so Nana was not suspecting anymore.
She believed it and said, oh, well, she's just like
(29:07):
in more trouble and you know she's she's on drugs.
Because the fake husband was reassuring Nana for his own
self interest, that she was alive. Nana died in nineteen
ninety six, so she never knew whether Heidi was really
(29:28):
missing or.
Speaker 12 (29:28):
Not, and probably it was better that way for Nana.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Oh, without a doubt.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
When Nana died, these calls stopped and Heidi's family were
left wondering what happened to her. Robert tried to console
himself with fantasies of Heidi having turned her life around.
Speaker 11 (29:48):
My narrative, the thing that I hope was that she
joined a cult and she was like in Arizona and
changed her name to Sunbeam. And you know, she was
gotten clean and healthy.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
But as time went on, nobody had spoken directly with
Heidi for several years, the family began to wonder whether
something serious had happened. Throughout the nineties, the family tried
to make Heidie's father, Tom, file a missing person's report,
but he.
Speaker 10 (30:20):
Refused because of his dislike of any authority, Like that's
why he kept telling our mom, no, don't report it yet.
Somehow he maybe was scared or just disliked the police
so much or something.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I can't understand how any parent could go years without
knowing if their child is alive or dead and do nothing.
The rest of the family felt torn. They were desperately
worried for Heidie's welfare, but they wanted to respect Tom's
wishes as her father, so they stood by until eventually,
(30:56):
in two thousand and one, Heidie's aunt Robin, took matters
into her own hands.
Speaker 9 (31:03):
My mother just couldn't stand it anymore, and so she
just decided I have to report her missing.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Over the years, the family checked in with the police,
but there was no sign of Heidi anywhere. There also
wasn't any media attention, not like there was in Gail's case.
Heidie's face didn't appear in the news or on a
milk carton under missing. I have to wonder if it's
because Heidi was a sex worker and a drug addict.
(31:33):
She wasn't a perfect victim, and maybe she reflected backup
people the kind of life they wanted to hide away from.
Given how much Heidi means to me, to Anna, to Mindy,
to Elaine, to all of us girlfriends, it's heartbreaking to
think that for so long her story was just ignored.
(31:57):
Until twenty thirteen, when Heidi's ain't Row gets a very
important visit for.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Hope Well detectives knocked on her door and said, could
this be your niece?
Speaker 9 (32:08):
My mother took one month with the pictures and she said,
that's Heidi.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
This was when the family learned that Heidi was dead
and that the serial killer Joel Rifkin was responsible for
her murder.
Speaker 11 (32:21):
And then my sister Anne, she got right on the
commuter start investigating and she tells me, you know, Heidie
was decapitated.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
It was all so much darker, so much more heartbreaking
than they ever could have imagined.
Speaker 11 (32:39):
I mean, it was one of those moments though, where
were you when you found out? When the towers came
down or whatever?
Speaker 10 (32:48):
It was definitely shocking. It was, I mean, kind of
knocked my breath out.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Trying to come to terms with what's happened. The family
seek out as much information as they can. They come
across old news articles about Heidi's death before she was identified,
articles they may have read a few years previously, without
knowing the connection they had.
Speaker 10 (33:13):
I think I saw the headline that said head has
aids and I just felt like I couldn't talk about it,
or I just didn't, you know, I didn't know how
to process it. I didn't know what to do with it.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
The callous, in dismissive way Heidie was spoken about by
the press after her death is a fucked up mirror
image of the way Joel Rifkin saw her and his
other victims. He spoke about it in the book From
the Mouth of a Monster.
Speaker 10 (33:48):
I didn't read the whole book, but I have it
in my mind that he said, well, I picked these
kind of girls because no one's looking for them. They
don't have families that care.
Speaker 7 (33:58):
And that just.
Speaker 10 (34:00):
Felt like a dagger in my heart to be well,
how long did it take for us to report it.
We wouldn't have known, like within a week or two,
because no one was in that close touch with her.
But by that summer we could have said, we should
(34:21):
get some help in case we can't find her. You know,
if we had reported it, maybe it would have led
to him being caught.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
There'd be sixteen other women still alive.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Lyle Robert and Anne have been trying to figure out
how their cousin, the girl they shared Christmases with, who
played the danting nuns on repeat until the record nearly
wore out, who had dreams of being a star, how
it is that she could have gone down so a
different road to them.
Speaker 10 (35:03):
It makes me realize that intact, consistent, reliable love that
our parents gave us, How valuable that is, how important
that is. Like I could be right where Heidi was
if I had had Uncle Tom.
Speaker 11 (35:22):
And I mean she did have love from Nana, yeah
and whatever Tom, in a weird way, there were little
pockets of it, you know, So she wasn't completely deprived.
I'm not. It's we're just still trying to sort it
out and figure it out, Like, how does a life
go so wrong? You know, how does that happen?
Speaker 1 (35:53):
After the twenty and thirteen police investigation, all of Heidi's remains,
including her torso, were finally reunited and cremated as one.
The family had some kind of closure, But what they
didn't know until we came along was that Heidi's torso
had been buried for nearly ten years in the grave
(36:15):
of Gail Cats. So we thought it fitting to introduce
them to the woman who visited her all those years,
Gail's sister Elaine.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Hi, Hi, we have something terrible in common.
Speaker 6 (36:32):
I am so sorry, thank you, I am so sorry
to you.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 13 (36:39):
You know.
Speaker 9 (36:39):
I think that it's only since we got connected with
Anna and learned the story of the misidentified torso and
realized that there was a lot of peace that we
have felt knowing that somebody loved her and buried her,
(37:01):
and that she was cared about for a period of time,
when for twenty five years it was a total mystery.
Speaker 6 (37:13):
You know, Heide's torso gave my family an enormous amount
of peace and closure.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Burying her.
Speaker 6 (37:23):
We finally felt that, you know, we had some part
of my sister back. So thank you for lending her
to me and my family.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
That's a big heart that you have.
Speaker 9 (37:38):
We know and appreciate that there was loving energy going
her way.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
In Heidi's story, that means a lot.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
As we end the call with the Lane, the Louisiana
sky is getting dark. Still strew across the table in
front of us are the documents and photographs. It gives
us snapshots in the Heidi's too short life, and it
might be the rainstorm or maybe the spirits in the
house that Rusty talked about. But the lights start to
flicker on and off, and the conversation turns to what
(38:17):
Heidi would make of all of this.
Speaker 9 (38:21):
At one point, when she was in her teen years,
she said to me, you know, what I really want
is to be on the cover of a magazine and
have my mother see me on the cover of a
magazine when I'm famous. Like the motivation was to be
discovered by her mother. Yeah, and she's not a famous
(38:45):
hand model or an actress who's doing brilliant work.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
But maybe this is the legacy we've been waiting for.
Speaker 9 (38:54):
Maybe this is being on the cover of the magazine
in some weird way, and I think she will be
represented now with a story. It's more than the blood
and gore on the internet.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
I'm glad that you all are telling it. I also
have the sense that the girlfriends are growing in numbers. Yes,
and count me in.
Speaker 5 (39:26):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I'd like to think that, Gail and Heidi, you're just
friends somewhere in the ethers.
Speaker 14 (39:32):
I was thinking that too, in the ethers, but maybe
it was like a destiny right thing and a divine intervention.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Today, Heidi's ashes are scattered underneath a palm tree somewhere
in Florida. It's nice to imagine her there, soaking up
the sun. Finally at peace. I'm back on the shores
of Staten Island, where Heidi first entered our story. Mindy
(40:26):
and Anna are with me. The three of us are
gathered here one final time, in this beautiful, slightly melancholy
spot to say goodbye. We started this journey with one
mission to find our lost sister, and now that we've
(40:47):
not only found her but named her two, we're here
to give her a proper sendoff. So we're gonna do
it in the only way we know how. Very Jewish,
a little slap dash with a lot of heart.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
In the Jewish tradition, if you visit a grave site,
you leave a stone, and I think we should leave
a stone here.
Speaker 10 (41:12):
I love that.
Speaker 14 (41:12):
Let's leave the snow.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Where are you going to place it?
Speaker 1 (41:19):
I'm going to go down there, walking right out to
the water's edge. Mindy gently lays down the stone.
Speaker 5 (41:26):
Is that something you say when you do this?
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Normally you say yes? Score? Jitsker is a special memorial
prayer for the departed, where you say the name of
the dead you wish to honor. It means may God remember,
But sadly and a little ironically, we don't remember the words.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Okay, Siri, can you say y?
Speaker 10 (41:49):
Score?
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Okay? How to get your credit report?
Speaker 12 (41:54):
Now?
Speaker 1 (41:56):
We warned you slap dash, But eventually Mindy finds what
she's looking for. So, dear listener, we'd like you to
join us in taking a moment to remember.
Speaker 8 (42:07):
Heidi, balch okay, are you ready.
Speaker 13 (42:27):
Showcat on me? Moments an don't gonna.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Should be.
Speaker 5 (42:58):
Taken sho.
Speaker 4 (43:35):
Heidi, okay, shall oh that's any one?
Speaker 9 (43:47):
Yeah, it's enough.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
There's there's gotta be a shorter one. I'd like to
imagine that Hidie and Gil are looking down on us
from the ethers, both of them laughing at me. Mindy
and Anna as we awkwardly make our way off the beach,
leaving behind two unassuming stones just on the water's edge,
(44:11):
one for Heidi and one for Gail. This story is
(44:35):
for all of us. It's for Gail and for her
sister Elaine. It's for Anne and Rusty and Lyle and Robert.
But most of all, this story is for Heidi Balch,
who is no longer our lost sister. Because we found you, Heidi,
and we will never forget you. The girlfriends Our Lost
(45:20):
Sister is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more
from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show is hosted
by me Carol Fisher, and our chief investigator is Mindy Shapiro.
To find me on social media, search Carol A. Fisher
That's Carol with an E. The season is written and
(45:40):
produced by Anna Sinfield and Lee Meyer. Our assistant producer
is Madeline Parr. The editor is Joe Wheeler. Max O'Brien
is our executive producer. Our fact checker is Dania Suleiman.
Production management from Sharie Houston and Charlotte Wolf. Sound design,
mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen and Nicholas Alexander music
(46:05):
supervision by Anna Sinfield and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed
and performed by Luisa Gerstein and produced by Louisa Gerstein
and Nicholas Alexander. The series artwork was designed by Christina Limkuhl.
Story development by Anna Sinfield. Willard Foxton is creative director
(46:27):
of Development. Our executive producers at iHeart Podcasts are Katrina
Norvel and Nikki Etour special thanks to Canter, Daniella Guessenheit,
and Leona Hamid, plus Elie Canter, Carrie Lieberman, and Will
Pearson at iHeart Podcasts, as well as Carly Frankel and
the whole team at WME, and a special shout out
(46:49):
to Vince Hayward, my life partner in True Crime for
taking on the role of girlfriend's confidante and lead tech support.
The Girlfriends will return with the brand news story and
a new host soon.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
Novel
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