Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (47 page)

E R A S E D

inside the apartment, padlocked inside a closet just off a screened in

porch.

Ira Einhorn had stood unabashedly on his right not to be subject

to unreasonable search and seizure, under the Fourth Amendment,

even as he extinguished every human right and every civil right Holly

Maddux had— killing her, concealing her body, lying repeatedly to

her family and friends, and skipping bail when he was finally charged

with her murder.

He was able to hide behind the ‘‘protections’’ of the law even as the

smell of decomposition emanated from his apartment, nauseating

his neighbors. The smell was accompanied by a dark, unidentifiable

liquid oozing down through the floor of the closet into the apartment

below.

Within a week and a half of Holly’s disappearance, the downstairs

tenant, a university student—who had been away for a few days

attending a family wedding—returned to find what he called an

‘‘overpowering stench’’ so noxious that it made the kitchen unusable.

The student enlisted some brave friends who worked for days using

every cleaning agent available to counter the smell, but to no avail.

The landlord was called in. A roofer was called in. Over and over

again, Ira Einhorn said that he had no odor problem in his apartment

and that if any repair work was needed it had to be done without

anyone going near the closet on the back porch. Every time he had

guests over, from the day Holly went missing, he ordered them,

sometimes startling them, not to go near the porch. It was dangerous,

he said.

Horrifically, when police finally got the warrant that allowed

them to enter the apartment and force open the trunk, they found

Holly’s partially mummified body with one hand raised in a clawlike

position—as if she had been trying to push open the lid or claw her

way out of the trunk when she finally succumbed.

Einhorn reacted to the discovery with neither fear nor alarm.

‘‘You found what you found,’’ was all he said.

Q

The cases in the files I have compiled over these last five years of

investigations into missing women are voluminous, and the stories

all follow the same pattern. It took police four and a half years to get

a warrant to dig up the backyard of Navy Lieutenant Commander

Conclusion

3 0 1

Leonard Eddington, whose estranged twenty-nine-year-old wife,

Vickie, ‘‘went missing’’ in 1987—despite the fact that neighbors had

seen Eddington running an earthmover in the yard right after his

wife vanished. Sure enough, her skeletal remains were there all along,

her skull bashed in by a vicious bludgeoning. After a jury found that

he had staged his wife’s murder to look like a random kidnapping,

punching a hole in his wife’s tire and leaving her car on the side of a

highway four miles from their home near San Diego, Eddington still

maintained his innocence, claiming that he could not understand

how the discovery of his wife’s corpse in their backyard had led to his

conviction.

New York City police had to wait until Robert Bierenbaum moved

out of his Manhattan apartment—five years after his twenty-nine-year-old wife, Gail, disappeared—before they could conduct a foren-sic search, because they were never able to obtain a warrant. During

the first three months after he reported Gail missing, the Manhattan

surgeon allowed police into their apartment, but only after imposing

extraordinary conditions. They could look for fingerprints and at his

wife’s diary and address book, but they could not search for blood or

other forensic evidence.

Authorities were unable or unwilling to push the matter in order

to get a warrant to force a more thorough search. They suspected

Bierenbaum was responsible for his wife’s disappearance, but they

had no proof that she was dead and no idea what he might have done

with her body. He had refused to answer their tougher questions

about prior violence in the relationship, and had retained an attorney

and refused to cooperate any further. The district attorney felt that the

case was too weak to charge, and after nine months the investigation

was dropped. Fifteen years would pass before Bierenbaum would

stand trial for his wife’s murder.

Bierenbaum had told police that his wife left home on the morning

of July 7, 1985, to go sunbathing in Central Park, scantily clad in

shorts, a halter top, and sandals but wearing $10,000 worth of

jewelry—as patently ludicrous a cover story as ever conceived by an

eraser killer, as this was something a native New Yorker like Gail

Katz-Bierenbaum would never do in a park known as a paradise

for muggers and deviants. He claimed that he waited at home all

afternoon and that when she did not return, he went to a birthday

party at his sister’s home about twenty miles away in Montclair, New

Jersey.

3 0 2

E R A S E D

What he repeatedly failed to mention when asked by authori-ties to detail everything that happened that day was that he had

rented a small plane at an airport just a few miles from his sis-ter’s house and gone out for a two-hour solo flight that afternoon,

returning the plane just minutes before showing up for the birthday

party.

The couple’s two-and-a-half-year marriage was extremely volatile.

Bierenbaum was jealous and controlling, and was violent with Gail

on at least one previous occasion. Two years before she disappeared,

Gail told friends and relatives and reported to the police that Bob had

strangled her into unconsciousness. The report simply languished.

No investigation was ever performed, and Bierenbaum was never

arrested for the assault.

Bob begged his wife for forgiveness and promised her it would

never happen again. Gail, who was herself training to be a therapist,

demanded he go into counseling, and Bob eventually agreed. But

psychiatrist Michael Stone was so disturbed by what Bierenbaum

told him that he felt obligated to send Gail a letter warning her that

he believed she was in great danger from her husband. Bob was

unrepentant about his violent impulses, describing the episode with

Gail without apology and admitting that he had choked a previous

girlfriend as well, causing her to break off their engagement. He also

admitted to strangling his previous fiancée’s cat to death, and said he

attempted to kill Gail’s cat in the same way because it ‘‘didn’t listen’’

to him and was ‘‘ungrateful’’—exactly the way the therapist believed

Bierenbaum felt toward his wife.

Stone, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College

of Physicians and Surgeons and the author of one of the standard

texts on abnormal personalities, later devised his own classification

system for different types of murderers. He put Bierenbaum under

the same rubric as Jeffrey MacDonald, Charles Stuart, Richard Crafts,

and others as psychopaths who killed someone, generally their wife,

whom they viewed as in their way.

The day before Gail disappeared, she told a friend that she was

about to tell her husband she wanted a divorce. She borrowed money

to get her own place and began looking for an apartment. Gail was

afraid of her husband, but she mistakenly believed that the letter the

psychiatrist had written provided her with some protection, or at

least leverage. She told friends that if he did not agree to a divorce

settlement she would reveal the letter’s contents to his colleagues. She

Conclusion

3 0 3

also threatened to expose his and his father’s involvement in what

she said was a multimillion-dollar Medicare fraud scam.

After reporting Gail missing, Bierenbaum seemed uninterested in

any efforts to find his wife. He called police only once to check on

the progress of their investigation, failed to return their phone calls

to him, spent no time of his own looking for her, and began dating

other women within weeks of her disappearance. Four months after

his wife went missing, he moved a new girlfriend, a medical student,

into their apartment.

He was irritated when police woke him up one night and asked

him to come see a woman they had picked up whom they believed

resembled his wife.

‘‘I doubt it’s Gail,’’ he coolly told his new live-in girlfriend, when

she asked if she should collect her things and move out while he went

to the police station.

Over the years he came up with innumerable explanations for

his wife’s absence. He claimed that Gail’s therapist told him she was

depressed and suicidal, though the therapist had said no such thing.

He charged that she was into drugs, speculated that she was killed

by a disgruntled dealer or that she had run off with a boyfriend to

the Caribbean, and even joked that she was on an extended shopping

spree at Bloomingdale’s. He claimed to have hired a private detective

who found her working as a waitress in California. Others times he

said that his wife was seen walking around Central Park in a fugue

state.

Four years after Gail went missing, a partially decomposed torso

washed up on the shore of Staten Island. The corpse had been clearly

disarticulated: the head and each of the limbs were cut off with some

kind of tool. Although there was little left with which to identify the

remains, it was determined that the torso belonged to a woman of the

same size and age range as Gail. When some, but not all, irregularities

in the bones were matched to known X rays of Gail, a death certificate

was issued in her name, and her family was given the torso to bury

as their daughter. Because the body was deemed to have been in the

water for only about six months, Bob Bierenbaum seemed to be in

the clear.

Gail’s family was still nagged by doubts. They later had the body

exhumed and the bones tested for DNA, but the samples were too

degraded to get a reading. Her parents died without ever finding

out that the woman they had buried was not their daughter. Gail’s

3 0 4

E R A S E D

sister, Alayne, continued on her own to investigate the case and keep

the heat on Bob, knocking on doors and sending letters about Gail’s

disappearance to his neighbors and colleagues.

Haunted by the resurgence of news about his missing wife and his

sister-in-law’s ongoing campaign, Bierenbaum left New York, relo-cating to Las Vegas, where he established a lucrative cosmetic surgery

practice specializing in breast augmentation and reconstruction. He

drove a sports car with the personalized license plate ‘‘NIPNTUK,’’

dated numerous women, then seriously began looking for another

wife—getting engaged to several different women but breaking it off

when he found something he didn’t like about them.

He believed he had put the stain of his past behind him. No

one in Las Vegas knew about his missing wife, and he wanted to

keep it that way. When a woman he was seeing asked him if he’d

ever been married, he refused to answer the question. To break the

awkwardness, she tried a joke: ‘‘What did you do, kill her?’’

Bierenbaum looked stricken, his skin flushing red. ‘‘What do you

know
?’’ he demanded, over and over again.

That woman and a friend of hers who had also briefly dated

Bierenbaum became suspicious and began looking into his back-ground, jokingly dubbing themselves the ‘‘Harriet-the-Spy Club.’’

What they learned horrified them. Word quickly spread around Las

Vegas. The doctor had always forbidden his office staff to open his

mail and had refused to advertise his practice. Suddenly things that

had just seemed strange began to seem sinister. Was ‘‘Dr. Bob’’ a

man on the run?

Bierenbaum picked up and moved again, marrying an OB-GYN

and following her to North Dakota, where she had been offered a

job. Once again, he thought he could start over in anonymity. But

a year later, in 1997, the district attorney’s office decided to reopen

the Bierenbaum case, largely as a favor to one of the office’s top

investigators who was about to retire and did not want to leave

feeling that Gail’s killer had gotten away with murder. Alayne Katz

gave permission for the body she had been told was her sister’s to be

exhumed once again for further DNA testing, which this time ruled

conclusively that the torso did not belong to Gail.

Alayne was disconsolate. Bob was no closer to being arrested, and

now she didn’t even have the comfort of believing her sister was at rest.

As the authorities began reinvestigating the case, however, they

found a few more damning facts. Another former girlfriend of

Conclusion

3 0 5

Bierenbaum, who had done some of her own poking around after

learning about his missing wife, discovered that he had altered

his flight log on the day Gail disappeared. They also learned that

Bierenbaum had sent out the living room rug to be cleaned right after

his wife went missing.

The case was still wholly circumstantial. There was no body, no

proof of death, no forensic evidence. But the political will was now

there to take the case to trial, to put the evidence before a jury and let

the chips fall where they may.

The theory advanced by the prosecution was that Bierenbaum

killed his wife in the apartment the day he said she went missing.

Using his surgical skills, he dismembered her five-foot three-inch,

110-pound body and packed her remains into a suitcase or flight

bag, which he dropped into the ocean during the plane flight he had

kept hidden from authorities. Like that in the Peterson case, much

of the evidence dealt with consciousness of guilt, the myriad lies

Bierenbaum told as well as the omission of crucial facts.

In November 2000 he was convicted of second-degree murder and

sentenced to twenty years to life in prison. Second-degree murder

does not require a showing of premeditation, but one of the most

chilling facts in the case seemed to indicate that Bierenbaum had

considered in advance how to kill his wife without leaving any trace

of evidence.

Years before she disappeared, Gail and Bob happened to see

something on television about the murder trial of Claus von Bülow,

a socialite who was accused of putting his wife, Sonny, into an

irreversible coma by injecting her with insulin. Von Bülow was

convicted of attempted murder, but the verdict was overturned, and

he was acquitted at a second trial.

As Gail related the story to a relative, Bierenbaum remarked, ‘‘The

problem with Claus von Bülow is that he left evidence. I would not

leave evidence.’’

Q

No real investigation of a missing person can begin until and

unless the spouse or partner gives permission for a thorough search

of the house or apartment in which she or he or both of them have

been living. To use legal blockades to prevent police from carefully

investigating the very epicenter of a disappearance is to admit that

3 0 6