The Girlfriends S2/E5: Her Legacy

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 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

In ninety eight, did missing persons really want to deal with? Nineteen eighty nine Torso?

That watch though I don't know.

Hi, it's doctor Shapiro and I'd like to speak with the deputy medical Examiner.

Do you mind if I send a text?

Yeah, I might get something. What do you know?

Could you say perpetrator for me?

Who is she?

Let's bring closure to another family. Let's open this door?

Hello? Hi?

Is this Anne?

It is.

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 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

Her Legacy. Yes, okay, I've got a confession to make.

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 more time out of Las Vegas if I could have

Anna, Anna, come on.

For the past week, I've been introducing my producer Anna to my menagerie. This is one of our cats.

Ferguson.

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.

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.

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 the people who knew her and loved her. What is it this? Oh, it's says, isn't it cute? Drible cuts?

Me too, Rita, Rita.

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.

It was a church.

What is it you can now tell?

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. 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.

I mean, I'm here, so nice to meet you.

She's Heidi's cousin and Rusty's niece. Her dog says hello too.

This looks like friendly, but just telling her how to jump.

This looks like my dog.

Yeah, yes, just like my dog.

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.

So now we get to where its one.

Okay, we're coming to.

The worm area.

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.

She was two there and I was twelve.

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.

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 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

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 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.

There was a ten year age gap.

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.

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.

And she got pregnant.

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 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

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 no nurturing, there was no making the baby fly up in the air and catch her, or having fun or anything like that.

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 the baby.

She said, you know, I have people in my neighborhood who know how to take care of these kinds of things.

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.

Yeah, Nana was shocked, and of course Nana said no, and you know, it wasn't even a consideration.

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 shiny new bike, some money or toys at birthdays and Christmases. But back home with Heidie's mom, things weren't as right.

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.

Heidie's cousins Lyall and Robert show us some more pictures of Heidi.

She's not so old in this picture, and you can see that face is someone's gone through.

Some Yeah, she was just obviously really lonely.

I mean, you look at these photos and there is like a clear change.

Yeah, you know, she is just a normal.

Happy, cute kid when she's like two three.

In these ones, and then there is something about her eyes that just goes Yeah, that's.

What I say.

I feel like if we put all these pictures in chronological order, you almost see the light go out in her eyes.

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 of Narnia. They also say she was a talented writer, producing many fine stories and poems with the wit and

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.

Grampy rescues the bird from the tree and brings it outside. But while he's.

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.

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.

Nana just was wringing her hands about moving so far away from Heidi, but.

Grampy's word was law in their relationship and she had no choice but to go.

So there was no longer visits to Nana's house, where there really was stability and home cooked meals.

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, 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.

She was worried that she was pregnant and that she might have hepatitis from shooting up with a dirty needle.

I went into shock.

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.

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.

No.

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.

So she really protected herself, like with a shield of armor around her.

She did.

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.

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 and encouraged it.

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.

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.

You can't do it.

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.

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. 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

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.

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,

We knew she was addicted to drugs and using her sexuality in some way.

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.

But after coming out as a lesbian, Heidi suddenly marries a man.

She met this guy who was attempting to get a green card and struck a deal.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 call Nana and they catch up a little.

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.

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.

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.

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 in more trouble and you know she's she's on drugs. Because the fake husband was reassuring Nana for his own

Not, and probably it was better that way for Nana.

Oh, without a doubt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, in two thousand and one, Heidie's aunt Robin, took matters into her own hands.

My mother just couldn't stand it anymore, and so she just decided I have to report her missing.

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. She wasn't a perfect victim, and maybe she reflected backup people the kind of life they wanted to hide away from.

Hope Well detectives knocked on her door and said, could this be your niece?

My mother took one month with the pictures and she said, that's Heidi.

This was when the family learned that Heidi was dead and that the serial killer Joel Rifkin was responsible for her murder.

And then my sister Anne, she got right on the commuter start investigating and she tells me, you know, Heidie was decapitated.

It was all so much darker, so much more heartbreaking than they ever could have imagined.

I mean, it was one of those moments though, where were you when you found out? When the towers came down or whatever?

It was definitely shocking. It was, I mean, kind of knocked my breath out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And that just.

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 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.

There'd be sixteen other women still alive.

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.

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.

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?

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 of Gail Cats. So we thought it fitting to introduce them to the woman who visited her all those years, Gail's sister Elaine.

Hi, Hi, we have something terrible in common.

I am so sorry, thank you, I am so sorry to you.

Oh, thank you.

You know.

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, and that she was cared about for a period of time, when for twenty five years it was a total mystery.

You know, Heide's torso gave my family an enormous amount of peace and closure.

Burying her.

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.

That's a big heart that you have.

We know and appreciate that there was loving energy going her way.

In Heidi's story, that means a lot.

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 Heidi would make of all of this.

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 hand model or an actress who's doing brilliant work.

But maybe this is the legacy we've been waiting for.

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.

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.

I love that.

I'd like to think that, Gail and Heidi, you're just friends somewhere in the ethers.

I was thinking that too, in the ethers, but maybe it was like a destiny right thing and a divine intervention.

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 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 not only found her but named her two, we're here

In the Jewish tradition, if you visit a grave site, you leave a stone, and I think we should leave a stone here.

I love that.

Let's leave the snow.

Where are you going to place it?

I'm going to go down there, walking right out to the water's edge. Mindy gently lays down the stone.

Is that something you say when you do this?

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.

Okay, Siri, can you say y?

Score?

Okay? How to get your credit report?

Now?

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.

Heidi, balch okay, are you ready.

Showcat on me? Moments an don't gonna.

Should be.

Taken sho.

Heidi, okay, shall oh that's any one?

Yeah, it's enough.

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, one for Heidi and one for Gail. This story is 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,

Novel