The Girlfriends S1/E7: Cowabunga

Novel. Hey listener. In this episode, we talk about domestic violence and death. There's also a bunch of empowered women, New York's feistiest young reporter, and an introduction to a new woman with a great nickname, and of course more swearing, because you know, I am who I am. If you do listen and are impacted by any of our themes, you can reach out to no More, a domestic violence charity we've partnered with. They have lots of great resources to help you or your loved ones. You can find

I just wanted to make sure it was free.

Yeah, good thing the beer and Bounce had two nannies, one for the day and one for the night.

Hi.

Hi, how are you doing good?

How are you all?

I'm good. I'm good, Which means almost twenty four hour visibility into Bob's North Dakota home. Now, the film recordings aren't so good, but this is definitely one of the most exciting eighty moments of our investigation because, knowing all I know now, it feels like everyone had an external view of Bob and min not they'd interact with him as a patient or a neighbor. It was rarely as intimate as someone sharing your home. I wanted to know how Bob was behaving behind closed doors as the DA

I was more involved with Janet, but Bob would come in on Thursday or Fridays.

This is Barb Cooper, the day nanny.

Yeah, they feel real comfortable around either one of them, necessarily, but I stuck it out. I loved the child and loved what I was doing.

He was weird, he was bizarre. I've never met anyone like him before.

That's Cheryl Sherrick, the night nanny. She used to arrive in the evening and sleep in the basement with the baby, who at that point required feeding every two to three hours.

The thing is they had a crip or anything. She's left in a car seat, which is not very comfortable for a baby.

For Cheryl, the vibe of the house was just well off, especially when Bob was there.

The house was always closed up. I could never open the blinds or anything, and he wouldn't let us answer.

The door to me.

She was always kind of creepy. They loved him as a doctor's here, but he would never treat anyone that smoked. He asked me if I smoked. If I did, they wouldn't hire me.

Overall, the nanny seemed to remember a home a little like this. The Beer and Bombs lived in a town called Grand Forks. Bob would fly to work at the hospital and min not and come back home for the weekends, so it was mostly just Janet, the nannies, and their baby. The nannies both described Janet as a loving mom who could at times also be a little emotionless but they never saw anything bad happen between her and Bob. When Janet got pregnant, she stopped working as a gynecologist and

They had me in the basement and they slept upstairs. There was one night he came into the nursery and I woke up and he was watching me sleep, and I don't know what he was planning to do, but he took off.

I imagine at this point Bob felt invincible, But the fact is he was being investigated that whole time. And on the morning of November thirtieth, nineteen ninety eight, just three weeks after his daughter was born, he was about to get a rude awakening. I'm Carol Fisher and from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio, You're listening to The Girlfriends episode seven Cowabunga.

We had pretty much finished our investigation, and we decided that he had already spent literally tens of thousands of dollars going across the country doing this investigation would be worth a couple of plane tickets to North Dakota to try and see what he had to say.

On November thirtieth, DA Prosecutor Dan Bibb sent the case investigators Andy Rosenswag and Tommy Pond to mine Not with the mission ask Bob if he was still represented by counsel, and if not, get him to talk on the spot, something they couldn't do if he was lawyered. Up that morning, they lurked around Bob's clinic and waited for him to arrive. When they spotted him approaching the building, they sped towards him on foot and confronted him with their ready prepared script.

He basically says, I'm still represented by an attorney, and that was that.

For Steve Sorako, the other prosecutor, it wasn't just about getting him to talk though disguise his intel gathering, the DA was sending a message.

What he knows is this is not over. This sense of security I have up here up north. The veil has been pierced and they're still looking at me. And he knows he's guilty.

And within a half hour there's a phone call from his lawyer and he said, Dan, this is Scott Greenfield. What's going on. Well, we're investigating the disappearance of Gail Burnbound and we want to know if he wanted to talk to us. You know, there is out raised and violing right the council. Scott, nobody violently anybody's right to council. As soon as my guys opened their mouth, he said, I'm represented by an attorney, and they walked away. Nobody

Dan knew that Bob was never actually going to testify in front of the grand jury. That's pretty rare, but it's a clever trick. Attorneys used to make sure they're notified if a grand jury is ever assembled, then they can keep tabs on the result and get their ducks in a row. That's what Greenfield was doing. He was essentially setting up a notification service, and nearly a year later, on September twenty second, nineteen ninety nine, Greenfield got what he was asking for.

I wrote him a letter saying, here you go, here's your opportunity. And he called me up and he said, what the hell, what are you doing? I said, Scott, you serve notice. I just told you that the grand jury is going on. What do you want to do.

At some point in late September or early October, Bob was in New Jersey attending the wedding of his close friend and flying buddy, Ernie Sussman. The night before the big day, Ernie invited some of his closest friends, including Bob and Janet, for dinner at an Italian restaurant.

I believe it was Friday evening, and I think there were four couple so some of my friends. We went out to a nice restaurant that evening, and I don't know how the subject came up, but we were talking about this doctor in Buffalo. His name was Anthony Pignataro, and he ended up doing plastic surgery and doing I guess liposuctions and even breast augments, even though he wasn't a bird certified plastic surgeon, and he ended up killing a woman. But like two thirds of the way into

I can't say if Bob knew it or not, but while he was running away from dinner parties in New Jersey. Women around the country were being called to testify against him in New York. A grand jury is a process where sixteen to twenty three jurors are randomly selected to come to court a few days a month, and here prosecutors lay out their case, witnesses and all. There is

He's charged with killing his wife.

Tops say he dumped her body in the ocean, throwing it from a plane. On December eighth, nineteen ninety nine, the grand jury cast their vote.

Fourteen years ago, a surgeon in New York City reported his wife missing. Now he's being charged with her murder. The investigation went from Long Island to Las Vegas and wound up in North Dakota.

In the days following the indictment, the news was everywhere and they did not spare any details.

They say they have new witnesses, new evidence, enough to build a murder case even without the body.

I remember the day I was getting ready for work.

This is Denise Cassenbaum, Gail's best friend.

I was getting dressed in my apartment and my sister call, She said, turn on the news.

This almost reads like a screenplay. But what's scary is that this is a true crime.

Turns out. Back in the nineties, news reporters were not too concerned with holding back the details before they had been proven in court.

A loving wife would complained constantly about our husband's violent temper, but instead of getting away from him. She tried to help and sadly paid for it with her life.

I was just like, oh my god, finally, you know, I was screaming.

I was just Yes, she was never seen again, and her family and cops didn't buy the doc's story.

We've always been certain that it was him.

He is the last person that saw her.

His story regarding her whereabouts and what happened never made any sense.

Seeing in court being accused of murdering my sister was such a relief.

I'm very gratified that after fourteen years, the person who murdered my sister is finally standing in a courtroom being charged with that murder. I'm only very very sorry that my parents are not alive to be here to see this. And I told him responsible for their deaths as well, because they died of a broken heart.

This was a tireless investigation. Believe me, For two das, here are two guys that you don't want after you if you're the bad guy.

Steve and I had agreed that we would be seeking half a million dollars baill, so we asked her five hundred thousand dollars and the attorney goes, yeah, okay, no, Megan Beer, and Baum.

Was released after putting up a half million bucks in bail. Now, if he's convicted of murder too, the doc's next big trip will be upstate for the comfort of a four x eight cel twenty five years to life.

I guess me and the other girl old friends were onto something all along, and it turns out another woman was too. When Bob was charged with Gail's murder, it was like a punch to the gut. Everybody wanted to talk about it, but I didn't have enough wind left in me to say his name. Instead, they'd call Mindy to ask for the latest gossip. But everything it changed. It was a real case now, with the real victim and a real potential murderer. Even Mindy wasn't excited by that anymore.

There was a shift from the sensational and the speculative to the real and present, so it was no longer funny.

We were really starting to doubt ourselves. If, like the investigators were saying, this case hinged on the testimony of all of us women who knew Bob, then what if we had gotten it wrong. What if we'd let in our game go too far?

What if he's not guilty, will he come after us for slander? And if he is guilty, will he come after us?

After us? But little did we know that while we were starting to doubt ourselves, another girlfriend was about to surface.

It was right after Burnbaum had been indicted. I got a phone call from a woman and she refused to identify herself. And she actually says to me, oh my god, I slept with this guy right after his wife disappeared. And I'm literally on the phone motioning to Steve to come into my office and basically telling him there's somebody we need to talk to.

I said, what's it all about, Goodwill, there's another one of his one of her better word girlfriends has just surfaced.

She refused to identify herself. She said, I'm afraid of him. She said. She called me back in a couple of days. A couple of days later, phone rings. It's the woman I had spoken to a day or two before, and she said, I'm Cary Carojuana.

I know Bob Bernbaum. We worked together in my Minas Medical Center in Brooklyn in nineteen eighty four nineteen eighty five, and this is my story.

I said, we'll see in a day or two booked flights to San Francisco, flew in one day, drove down to San Jose. Next we met in the diner of all places, and sat there while she told us the story.

And told them that when she first met Bob, she was a nurse working on the cardiovascular unit where Bob was undertaking a residency as a surgical intern. She didn't think much of them. He'd gotten a reputation for having a terrible bedside manner with patients and their families, and he was rude to the nurses. But outside of work, they had attended the same parties, and they would go to clubs or restaurants with the other young hospital staff.

He was at the nurses station in the cardiovscer I see you, and he was yelling at somebody on the phone, and it was obvious it was Gail that he was talking to, and I had to tell him a couple times, you know, please lower your voice. I mean, the nurses station was right next to where we recovered patients. From open heart surgery. It wasn't appropriate for him to be yelling at anybody at the nurses station.

Whatever people thought about Bob and Gail's relationship, when Gail went missing, it shook the staff.

I remember the first time I saw him come back. He looked horrible. He hadn't shaved, he was very disheveled. There evidently had been no word as to where she was or if she had run away, if something had happened to her and someone had taken her. We didn't know. In fact, I do remember going out to Central Park with people that I worked with, nurses, and we put up posters in Central Park with her picture.

Sometime at the end of July, about three weeks after Gail went missing, Karen rented a little beach house in the Hamptons for the week, just a vacation. Before she left, one of her colleagues told her that Bob was also going to be out in the Hamptons that week.

She had said, you know, why don't you get together with Bob. Maybe you could go out to dinner with him, give him some companionship. He's really lost without Gail.

So Karen obliged. After arriving in the Hampton's, She drove over to his rental house, which was a really large building with the pool just away from the ocean. Karen parked her car and Bob drove them out to a seafood restaurant on the water in sag Harbor. Over the meal, she started gently probing Bob for information about Gail.

He said that in the last month he had hired a private investigator and they found Gail in California and she was waiting tables on the coast. I mean, it didn't sound totally right, but he kind of convinced me that that was what he knew. At the time.

What Bob had told Karen was a lie. We spoke to the investigator and the investigator said, absolutely not, that's not true, but never found evidence of Gail anywhere.

Bob also described how Gail was a difficult wife and how on the day she went missing, they'd had a big argument.

They said she had no shoes on, and I said to him, I said, who lives in New York City and doesn't wear shoes to walk to Central Park from their apartment.

Again, another embellishment lie about what had happened that morning.

Sitting in the diner, Dan and Steve knew they'd stumbled onto something big. These are exactly the kinds of details they wanted, Bob telling different versions of Gail's disappearance, Bob lying. They even gave their new star witness.

A nickname, Karen Cawabunga Karen Cowabunga.

When Dan and Steve saw Karen Cowabunga, they saw a star witness. But I just see myself because just like me. After Bob told Karen all about Gayle's disappearance, she still went home with him.

I mean, he was different than he had been. I went from dreading even talking to him at work, to really sympathizing with his plight. I hadn't been with anybody in a while, so I think I was probably lonely horny, I cass, you could say. I mean, he was pretty persuasive, and I remember climbing upstairs to the bedroom.

Back in New York, they kept seeing each other. They'd go out for Japanese food, they went dancing in clubs down in the West Village. On the weekends, Bob would go back to the Hampton's and party at West Hampton Beach's famous club, the Marrakesh. He ditched his ll Bean clothing for Saturday Night Fever shirts with the shirttails tucked right in. All of this just a month or two after his wife had dispeared.

I was still having fun with him at that point, probably not even thinking about Gail, I'll be honest. And he wasn't either.

But after only six weeks of dating, Karen says, their relationship literally hit the curb.

We had gone out to dinner and we argued at the restaurant and we were in a cab. My recollection is a little bit fuzzy, just because I think I was pretty drunk at the time, but I remember the cab was still moving, and somehow he had pushed me out of the door onto the curb. And I remember my best friend in New York at the time was woman Carol, who was a nurse at my Moonodes and I called her and I was hysterical, crying. And I've talked to her since and she said I kept saying

Reached out to Bob for comment on this, but he never responded. These stories, like Bob allegedly pushing a woman out of a moving car are the ones I care about most. In fact, there's a lot I wish i'd known before I met Bob, some of which never made it into trial. That's after the break. On a warm day in early August two thousand, a young New York Times reporter by the name of Catherine Eban walked into the Manhattan Criminal Court for the first time.

I was completely new to legal reporting, but the beat had been sold to me. As you develop sources for life and you cover interesting trials, so you get a lot of ink that way.

Catherine had been told that if you want to get ahead on the biggest cases, you have to cover the pre trial hearings to secure an early scoop. The only problem is it was notoriously boring, you know.

Not necessarily considered a plum beat, because you're sitting in this dusty old press room and there's just a lot of stuff you have to cover that is not necessarily fascinating. But this was the first one.

The interesting thing about this stage in the legal process is that the hearings are close to everyone apart from the press, judge, lawyers, defendants and witnesses who were summoned. So Catherine was one of the only people present during Bob's pre trial hearing, not even a lane was invited in consider this a sneak peek.

I remember it vividly because it was August and the air conditioning in this courtroom was insane, and it was absolutely empty. I was one of the few people sitting in the audience, shivering with cold with the judge up there.

My name is Leslie Crocker Snyder, and I was the judge who presided over the Barenbaum case in two thousand. Some of the defendants called me the ice Princess, which was kind of ridiculous because actually I'm a very warm, outgoing person, but not on the bench.

I think sometimes Berreenbaum wasn't even there, so it was just his lawyers, and as I sat listening, this kind of remarkable story was unfolding, and I got very interested in it.

The primary purpose of pretrial hearings is for the judge to decide what testimonial evidence is permissible in court. In Bob's case, this process went on for the best part of nine months, and in that time they covered a lot of ground. But for the prosecution, there was one major argument whether or not the psychiatrist's testimony should be included. After Bob strangled Gail in nineteen eighty three, she demanded

Question did you call her essentially to warn her?

Yes?

Question and at that time did you warn her that she may be in danger? And the witness said yes.

After just one session, doctor Bone called Gail to warn her, and then he refused to treat Bob again. Instead, he referred him to another psychiatrist named doctor Shelley Duran, who deja vu also asked Bob if she could speak.

To Gail on the phone, and then the question was did you feel at that time you had an ethical duty to warn her that she might be in danger from the defendant, and doctor Juran answered, I didn't know if I would hear her voice.

Doctor Duran also refused to treat Bob again, and he moved on to his third psychiatrist, doctor Michael Stone. Who again after just one session, decided he needed to contact Gail. He wrote her something called a Pterosov letter. That's the letter Gail told Denise and Laine about the one she was going to use to blackmail Bob.

It's on doctor Stone's letterhead Doctor Michael Stone, Central Park, West, New York City. It's written to my sister, Gail Bierrembaum in eighty fifth Street, and it says I have been advised by doctor Stone that, for reasons of my own safety, I should at this time live apart from my husband,

The Pterosoft letter is named after a woman named Tatiana Terrasov, who was murdered by her a strange boyfriend after he told his therapist that he intended to kill her. The legal requirement to send a letter like this was introduced after it was determined that his therapist had an ethical duty to warn Todtiana that she was in danger. In addition to sending the Pterosoft letter, Doctor Stone gave Bob an offer. He said he would continue to treat under

Of course, Beerenbaum's attorneys did not want this testimony introduced because it spoke to his motive, and the psychiatric associations in the day were watching this case closely because of the battle over whether this testimony was going to be admissible. So that turned out to be a very rich vein for reporting the implications for patient confidentiality were pretty profound.

It's truly damning evidence, but if the judge let it in, it would be setting a dangerous precedent for future cases, and who knows how that could be exploited.

Our argument was that since Bob had authorized doctor Stone to share information about their sessions with Gail and with his parents, that that was a waiver of privilege. The judge disagreed with us.

I made some rulings that I think both sides thought were controversial, in that I would not allow the three doctors to testify on the ground that although the doctors and the defendant had spoken to other people, namely the defendant's parents and to Gail Berenbaum, Nevertheless, the doctor patient privilege had not been waived because the people to whom the relationship was disclosed were only involved so that the psychologists could aid the defendant in his treatment.

We don't know exactly what it was that made the psychiatrists react to Bob the way they did, but my producer, Anna has been looking into it, and this is what we learned based on interviews doctor Stone had previously given. Anna learned that during his first session with Bob, while discussing the time he strangled Gil for smoking. Bob told doctor Stone it was not the first time he had strangled a woman. Back when Bob was still a medical intern, before he even met Gail, he was engaged to a

It's very important. It's almost like a movie.

A trial is a production, and the order of witnesses as to how they're going to impact and fit together is something that has to be thought out. You just told randomly pick names out of a hat. He'll be first, he'll be second, she'll be third.

And that's when, after months of telling them I didn't want to be involved, they subpoenaed me. I had to go to New York. I had to stand in the witness box and for the first time in four years, I had to come face to face with my ex boyfriend, Bob. That's next time.

On the girlfriends, they painted her as a woman with a lot of problems, very needy, once suicidal, totally promiscuous. It was quote unquote blaming the victim.

It's a five minute a quinta. If you believe this guy.

Once you're thinks she's alive. When we say he's dead, that case is over.

There were audible gasps from the jury.

I remember turning to my brother and saying what did they say?

The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for Ourheart Radio. For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The series is hosted by me Carol Fisher and produced by Anna Sinfield. Our assistant producer is Julian Manu Gera Patten, and our researcher is Madeline Parr. The editor is Veronica Simmons. Max O'Brien is our executive producer. Our fact checker is Valeria Rocca. Production management from Sharie Houston and Charlotte woolf Sound design,

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