Few things are more devastating than a loved one going missing. On The Vanished podcast from Wondery Post, Marissa Jones tells stories of missing persons that have gone overlooked by mainstream media. She gets the story from friends and family of the missing person and frequently talks with law enforcement and others close to the case. Marissa wants to help families find their vanished loved ones or a sense of peace. In a recent episode of The Vanished, Marissa looks into the
disappearance of James Foster Chance. The forty eight year old man from Texas went missing in March of twenty twenty one, last seen by his neighbors cleaning up after a storm. Devastated and without any leads, James family began searching for him, but in their search, they began uncovering clues that James was not the man they thought he was, and worse, that he may have disappeared on purpose. You're about to
hear a preview of The Vanished while you're listening. Follow The Vanished on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen ad free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.
Every neighborhood has its share of mysteries. We can live our entire lives and barely know the people just one door down. I have a summerhouse in Southampton, a couple of hours outside of New York. This part of the Hamptons is called the Bayside. It's quiet, peaceful, a place to escape from the city in the hot summer months. Sampson and Jackie Guillot have a house on the same street as me.
My name is Jacqueline Guillot and we're married thirty five years.
We're married fifty two years.
Coming here since the eighties. Most of the houses on our street are single story with wooden clappered fronts. But there's one house on the street that stands out for starters. It's just bigger than most of the other houses. It's two stories instead of one, and it's the only one on the street with a separate guesthouse out back. And then there's the way it looks.
The house is spectacular, with windows and windows and windows.
Everything about it is over the top.
There's a pond with goldfish, lots of fish, and a waterfall to the pond too.
It's bigger, bolder, brasher than anything else on the street. In twenty ten, my wife Dawn and I bought the house next door. It wasn't long before a man popped over to our house to introduce himself. He was dressed like a maintenance man, green khaki pants, a long sleeve workshire and a faded baseball cap. He welcomed us to the neighborhood, and then he handed us a folder of press clippings.
I literally just took them and said thank you. But he wanted us to have them, you know, he really wanted Joe.
To have him.
There were articles that a psychiatrist, doctor Isaac Hirshkoff, had written, and articles that had been written about him. In mid August, an invitation arrived to a summer barbecue next door, hosted by doctor Hirshkoff Ike. This would be the last of three big summer parties he threw every year. It was a warm afternoon. I chatted with a few people, sipped on my glass of wine, and began to wander around. At some point I found myself in the living room.
There was a fake giraft, bust, Venetian masks, plastic parrots hanging from the ceiling, even a giant gong. But what struck me most with the photographs, lots and lots of photographs, and in nearly every one of them there was ice Kershkoff with a different celebrity, ike with Henry Kissinger, ike with Ellie Wizzell, ike with Brookshields, ike with Gwyneth Paltrow, even ike with OJ Simpson. It was like one of those diners where the walls are covered with pictures of
celebrity patrons. At that moment, the man himself appeared. He greeted me like a long lost friend, and said that my wife and I should come over soon for a drink, and then he was gone. Sure enough, a few days after the summer party, the same maintenance man we'd met before showed up at our door again. This time he brought an invitation for drinks. It was very formal, as
if he was reading from a script. I mean, like, doctor Hirshkoff, want you to come over right at such at such a time, on such and such a day.
The formality of it blew me away, and he was very, very exacting.
About how it had to go.
So we went.
Rangeous evenings I've ever had in the Hamptons.
Or anywhere else for that matter, but definitely the Hamptons. Ike and his wife Becky welcomed us in and ushered us to a round kitchen table. There were snacks laid out, carrots and celery. I served white wine.
So what I remember is him talking incessantly about being a sex therapist and a celebrity therapist. And I can't remember the details, but it just really sticks in my mind that he kept going on and on about that. It was more like a monologue than a dialogue. That's what I remember. What do you remember?
I just remember thinking, these people are I felt suffocated.
I talked about his work.
I've never seen anything like it.
But I remember thinking he was very brazen about the details of his life, considering we were strangers, and also considering what he does. He did talk about an NBA sports guys and yeah, a Yankees player.
I just thought he lacked a lot of discretion given.
His feel We listened politely as he went on and on.
I just remember looking towards the door.
Finally, after about an hour, I said we needed to get home.
And we got up to leave, and it was very clear that I wanted a photograph.
A photograph of me.
I think he came out instead, Well, we'd like to get a picture of you, and it was just Joe. It wasn't Joe and I.
So I let I take my picture, hit it to his wall, and then we left as fast as we could.
I remember getting to her home, collapsing on a couch or something.
Dawn told me she never wanted to go back. There was no sign of the maintenance man the night Dawn and I went over, but I knew he was still around. Sometimes we'd be on our deck and we'd see him outside working in the yard. When I returned to the Hamptons the following summer, I noticed something strange at the house next door. I would see the maintenance man out on the property doing his usual work in the backyard, but Ike Hershkoff was gone. I would never see him,
or his wife, Becky, and the Hamptons again. There were no more summer parties. It was as if they had simply disappeared. And that's when I learned that everything I had thought i'd known about my neighbor was wrong.
It's a wild story.
That's the maintenance man, the guy who came to our door with the press clippings, The guy we saw working around the yard. That was Marty Markowitz, the same guy who had first gone to see doctor Isaac Hirshkoff as a patient nearly thirty years earlier