2: Lobsters for Dinner
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For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living Associates have been committed to creating a vibrant culture and delivering exceptional services, making Brightview a great place to work and live. If you're looking for a rewarding opportunity to serve your local community and grow, we want you to join our team. Brightview Senior Living is growing and actively seeking vibrant associates to join our community teams, including directors, healthcare, activities, hospitality, and dining. Apply today at careers.brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal employment opportunities.

Text BVJOBS to 97211 to apply. Novel. Hey, listener. In this episode, there are mentions of violence against women, coercive control, and murder. There's also plenty of lighter stories about my life and friends. You even get to meet my mom, and believe it or not, she is a hoot.

Now, I think I swear a few times too, and given my age, it's just too late to make a polite woman of me now. So consider yourself warned. If you do listen and are impacted by any of our themes, you can reach out to Know 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 them at nomore.org. That's N-O-M-O-R-E dot org. There's nothing quite like flying in a small twin engine plane. The turbulence, the way the engine roars at you. There's always a moment in liftoff when you feel like you're taking life into your own hands. And I guess that's where the thrill is.

On one of my favorite trips with Bob, we flew out over the Valley of Fire and into California's Death Valley. The mountain ridges and grand expanses of sand were absolutely breathtaking. Eventually, we touched down on a small, unattended strip in the middle of the national park. Bob took my hand and helped me out of the private plane. I felt like I was in Pretty Woman.

When I was a little girl, my mama used to lock me in the attic when I was bad, which was pretty often. And I would pretend I was a princess trapped in the tower by a wicked queen. And then suddenly this knight on a white horse with these colors flying would come charging up and draw his sword. He would climb up the tower and rescue me. My life hadn't been easy lately, especially when it came to men.

I'd been married twice already, and both marriages had ended horribly. My first marriage, it ended in a plain old sad divorce. And the second marriage, well, while I was separated from my husband, he took his own life. By the time I met Bob, I was juggling being a single parent to my nine-year-old daughter and trying to build a career.

And then suddenly here I was, hiking out to the Furnace Creek Oasis with the picnic hamper full of cheese, hummus, grapes, and shrimp cocktail, all prepared by my Dr. Bob. It was one of the most romantic dates of my life. I'd gotten the fairy tale. So what happened after he climbed up the tower and rescued her? She rescues him right back. I'm here.

That's what I wanted. I wanted Bob to rescue me from my normal, private, jetless life, and I wanted to rescue him from his past in return. Up in the sky, it felt like I could have it all. So even when things started to get weird on the ground, I kept my head in the clouds. I'm Carol Fisher, and from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio, you're listening to The Girlfriends, Episode 2, Lobsters for Dinner. ♪

So this is the neighborhood my mom lives in which is a little bit more affluent than with a real guard gate, not a fake one. But those kind of gates are really popular here with no guards. It's just Vegas. It's a false sense of security. Yeah, right.

I'm driving over to my mom's house with a trunk full of snacks. I've told my producer Anna to brace herself. It's going to be full of Jewish ladies talking over one another eating. All right, I brought lunch. I went to Whole Foods. I got you vegan stuff. I even got you kombucha. Oh my God, of course I drank kombucha. Look at me. I know my guests.

Mindy's here too. Her and my mom are very close. We didn't want to give you this weather. Well, it's just like London, so I feel like... I know, I just was thinking, why would we give you London weather? So this is my mom.

Mom provided Anna with a warm welcome of flavored fruit waters, three full-body deodorants that she was told in great detail she could use anywhere, and a vegan magazine she had picked up at the grocery store. Equipped with her new offerings, Anna was eventually invited to sit down for lunch.

Do you know what's vegan and what's not? Yes. This is vegan. Amazing. And this is vegan. This is vegan tuna. It's really good. Oh, amazing. If you ever wondered what it was like to be mothered by three Jewish ladies at the same time, well, this is it. So what are we talking about after? You. We're talking about the cycle. Hi.

I first introduced Bob to my mom and my stepdad, Stan, after we'd been dating for about a month, and I was so excited. My mom wanted me to find a good Jewish doctor, and I had. So I was really looking forward to seeing that warm, proud, you know, he did good, Carol, look on her face. But they both thought he was a little odd.

No one ever made Stan feel uncomfortable, but there was something about him that Stan said, "Oh my goodness, this guy is really strange." He was an expert in everything. He could do everything. And when I'm talking about the kitchen, he didn't know a goddamn thing about the kitchen.

Mom's feelings around Bob in the kitchen stem from a disastrous early meeting where Bob offered to come over and cook lobsters for dinner. But when he said lobsters, he meant live lobsters. And when he said live lobsters, he meant live lobsters that he expected my mom and stepdad to buy. We had to get lobster for him. Not a very good start. And dummies, we did that.

Anything for Carol. You should have friggin' flown to Maine to get them. I mean, seriously. When we arrived at the house, Bob didn't seem interested in stopping to talk to my mom at all. Instead, he rushed straight into the kitchen to start cooking the lobsters she had purchased. Ah!

We watched on as he dramatically plunged the crustaceans into boiling salted water, leaving a trail of mess in his wake. Everything was upside down, and it didn't bother him at all. It was disastrous. I mean, I didn't need him to clean up. I needed a cleaning crew with about eight people. Ha!

The thing is, even though my mom had concerns about him, she never mentioned him to me again. She knew he looked good on paper. I mean, not to belabor the point, but he was a flying Jewish doctor, for God's sake. So sure, he was a messy lobster cook, but you could barely make a move in Las Vegas without somebody telling you how accomplished Bob Bierenbaum was. The thing about Bobby is...

He was at the top of his game on most everything. This is Ernie Sussman, a local urologist who Bob befriended after he gave him flying lessons. I'm sure he was well-respected by the medical community. He would fly his plane down to Mexico with other doctors and do cleft palates and do these free clinics. So he had a good heart, and he was a pure plastic surgeon. It wasn't just about the money. It was all of those accomplishments that made me overlook some of his oddities.

like how I heard he hated smokers so much that he refused to treat them, or how he would spend hours upon hours at his computer ignoring me, or the way his temper could go from zero to 100 in less than three seconds. ♪

Were there other experiences where you felt like you saw his rage? So I hung out a lot at his house. He'd come to mine, but he had the nicer home. So when I didn't have my daughter and we were in a shared custody and she was with her dad, I would go over and spend time at his house. So I was emptying the dishwasher one day and Bob was nearby and one of the glasses fell out of my hands as I'm putting it in the cabinet.

And you might have thought that I broke something that was a treasured antique. I've never quite seen anything like it. His voice was raised. He's flushed. He's pissed. He's really mad at me for breaking this glass. And I am perplexed. Like, I broke a glass, Bob. What the hell? It's a glass. He's like, well, you don't understand. It's part of a set. Well, where'd you get it? Well, they have to be bought as a set.

Well, how much were these glasses? Well, they're $8 a piece. And so now I'm pissed. He's not backing down. So I go to my wallet and get out $8 and I hand it to him and said, here's for the glass. That was probably the first time that I ever really experienced him mad at me.

I had witnessed him be frustrated with others, but now it's directed at me and it didn't feel good. It didn't feel normal. And my reaction was, fuck you. But then after something like that, we would do a flurry of fun stuff. Like he flew us for a romantic weekend away to Sedona, Arizona, where we met up with his sister and her family. He once flew us across the country to Florida, just so I could take my daughter to visit my grandmother.

In fact, at one point during our relationship, he took my daughter skiing for the day when I was busy at work. But actually, one of our most memorable trips was a weekend away to a conference. During the flight there, I noticed that Bob started to get really quiet. And at first, I tried to ignore it. It's like a weekend away. I'm excited. I don't have my daughter with me. We're going to have so much fun. But Bob didn't let up. And by the time we got to the hotel, he was visibly angry. ♪

When I asked him what was wrong, he turned to me not saying a word and he just put his hands up in the air and he goes, look at these dots, Carol. Look at these dots on my hand. Carol, you've given me syphilis. And I was like, what the hell? I've not given you syphilis. How could I have done that? But he wouldn't believe me and started accusing me of being unfaithful.

And just for the record, I need you to know that I did not give Bob syphilis. Like, there is no way I gave Bob syphilis. Instead, what I did do is I snuck off to make a phone call to my mother, and I told her I really needed to get home right away because I did not feel safe. But I had a problem. I was stuck out in the middle of nowhere, and I didn't know how to get back.

I was just so worried about her. And I thought, this guy is up to something. So it turns out, my mother then called Mindy. Nan called and said, Carol's with Bob and she has to fly home from somewhere in the middle of the country. I don't know where they had landed. I don't remember. And we have to get her home.

And I said, OK, is she OK? Said, yeah, she's OK, but she can't continue the flight. I didn't. I told him to get lost. I booked a commercial flight and I headed back to Las Vegas alone. When Bob got back, we continued to date for a little while, but it was never the same.

Bob did go to the doctor for his hands and was diagnosed with some kind of contact dermatitis, which is a pretty common ailment for surgeons. But he never apologized because apologizing, well, it really wasn't Bob's thing. And then after six months of dating, he broke up with me. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't devastated. And while I knew intellectually things weren't right, there was still this part of me that thought we could make it work.

Perhaps I'd be able to change him. And in turn, I'd get to live that pretty woman ending I had always dreamt of. Turns out, if you're into your pretty woman trivia, in the original script, there was not a happy ending for Vivian, Julia Roberts' character, either. She doesn't get her man or her fairy tale. Her life just continues as if they never met. I can see why they changed it, because the reality sucks. ♪

Oh, hey, we're invited to the Johnson Summer Pool Party this Saturday. I said we'd bring our famous potato salad. Oh, Saturday? But that's when the Blinds guys come in to give us a quote. Those appointments take forever. Oh, yeah, I meant to tell you. I already found everything we need at Blinds.com. They're totally online, so we don't have to wait around all day just to get a quote. I talked to a Blinds.com designer, and they're sending us free samples.

Oh, Blinds.com? I've heard of them. Yeah, they've been around for over 25 years. But not everyone knows they can also handle the measuring and installation for a fraction of what the other guys charge. Plus, they have a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Well, Blinds.com sounds like a no-brainer. Guess I'll cancel... Already done. That gives you time to make the potato salad. Yes, dear.

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A few weeks after Bob dumped me in the early summer of 1995, I met up with Mindy at our favorite strip mall restaurant, The Mayflower, on the corner of Sahara and Decatur. We loved it there. It was upscale but not pretentious, and they had the best Chinese fusion food in the city. When we arrived, we sat down at our table, ordered our usual Mayflower shrimp and grilled lemongrass chicken salad, and started to gossip.

Conversationally, there was really only one thing on the menu. Bob. Hal, I couldn't believe he'd broken up with me. The syphilis allegation and all the questions we still had about who this guy really was. Mindy felt like he never really reached his true potential. Probably because he was an asshole. I was always surprised that he didn't run for office. Even, you know, like...

president of the Clark County Medical Association or some community board or something like that. And then I said, oh, you obviously don't know about the skeletons in his closet. And I go, what skeletons in the closet? So here I am realizing at that moment that I might be the only person in Las Vegas to know about Bob's missing wife.

Mindy clearly doesn't know anything. She didn't even know he was married before. So I start breaking it down. Before Bob moved to Las Vegas, he was married to a woman named Gail Katz. Now, Gail mysteriously went missing. And at one point, Bob was accused of murdering her. Apparently, he was fully investigated and deemed innocent. But his wife, Gail? Well, she had never been found. ♪

Oh, my God. This was like, yeah, unsolved mysteries. There's something you need to know about Mindy. Growing up, she read Harriet the Spy, The Hardy Boys, and Sherlock Holmes. As an adult, she would pass her time trying to solve mysteries faster than Mulder and Scully. Last year, her favorite TV show was Only Murders in the Building.

She's a true crime nut, and I had essentially just handed her a real-life case to solve. I was intrigued to the point of, like, let's nail him. That evening, Mindy hurried home to share her discovery with her fiancé, Jeff. Jeff said, I

I knew it. I knew it from the minute I touched his hand. An electric spark went through my body. Like when you have one of those gag things that you put in your palm and it causes you to vibrate, you know? It felt like that. I knew it. And I'm going, yeah, right. As Jeff and Mindy were riling each other up, I was getting on with my life, bouncing back from the breakup, taking my daughter to school.

I guess the difference is that Bob's story wasn't new to me. He had told it to me on our first date, and despite our ups and downs, I still believed him. But Mindy, oh my gosh, she was like a dog with a bone. She had to investigate further.

This was 1995, and we couldn't just type into Google like you can today. But Mindy, she had seen enough detective shows to know that all the big libraries will have some sort of newspaper archive. So off she heads to Clark County Public Library on Flamingo and Maryland Parkway, a huge red bricked campus-style building complex. ♪

It was Mindy's first real-life Watson and Holmes moment. She started searching what little she could on the library computers. Then she headed to the microfiche machines to flick through newspapers, New Yorker, New York Times, The Post. I was searching his name and her name and coming up with very little except for this one little snippet.

The parents of a surgeon's wife who disappeared after walking out of her Eastside apartment 11 days ago said yesterday that they fear their daughter is dead. Burenbaum said he and his wife had marital problems and he had argued with her just before she had walked out of their East 85th Street apartment at 1115 on July 7th. Burenbaum said his wife said she was going for a walk in Central Park as she did frequently to cool out.

A few nights later, Mindy and Jeff are sitting on the sofa watching the movie Boxing Helena.

It's a notoriously terrible movie about a murderous plastic surgeon who falls in love with a woman and kidnaps her. In order to keep her imprisoned in his house, he starts amputating parts of her body until finally she's just a torso. You want to scream, Elena? Come on, then, scream! Scream for help! Not really my kind of movie. And Jeff said...

It's Bob. It's Bob. So now they have a working hypothesis based on a few old New York articles and a movie with a score of 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. And this becomes sort of this hobby of Jeff and mine because he's like convinced Bob off this woman. I like the research. I like the games. It's like a scavenger hunt to us. It's

stupid thing to occupy us. From then on, it became their bit. When Mindy was at work or at an event, Jeff would send her little messages. At that point, there was no instant messaging. We still carried beepers and Jeff would use the numbers like 8-6-7-6.

And I'd be like staring at my phone, writing the letters down like it was a crossword puzzle. And it would be, oh, torso. By this point, Mindy had gone deep enough into the morbid curiosity rabbit hole that there was no way out. And before too long, she dragged me in too. So we started meeting up with the Mayflower more regularly to talk about Mindy's findings.

She even came up with a code name inspired by her favorite children's book, "The Harriet the Spy Club." And that's when our investigation really began.

Hi, this is Nikki Glaser from the Nikki Glaser podcast. Say yes to summer and get cash back on many of your favorite brands with PayPal, which let's face it, comes in very handy during the summertime. Everyone is ready for summer activities, which is why using PayPal is a great way to say yes to summertime fun. Say yes to those concert tickets to go see that band you were into back in high school. Say yes to that bikini that you are too scared to try in at the store because the lighting might be bad and you might get discouraged.

but that you know you'll look amazing in when you try it on for the first time at the resort when you get there. You can also send money to friends via PayPal, which means going halfsies with your best friend when she visits this summer. With even more cash back in your pocket when you pay with PayPal, saying yes to summertime fun just got a whole lot easier. Make sure to download the PayPal app. An account with PayPal is required to send and receive money. Redeem points for cash and other options. Terms apply. Have you made the switch to NYX?

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For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living Associates have been committed to creating a vibrant culture and delivering exceptional services, making Brightview a great place to work and live. If you're looking for a rewarding opportunity to serve your local community and grow, we want you to join our team. Brightview Senior Living is growing and actively seeking vibrant associates to join our community teams, including directors, healthcare, activities, hospitality, and dining. Apply today at careers.brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal employment opportunities.

Text BVJOBS to 97211 to apply.

After Mindy and I had met up at the Mayflower a few times, my mom got a bit envious, so we started inviting her along. At first, it looked a lot like the lunch with Anna the vegan. We would talk about Bob and laugh over a plate of spring rolls. Mom would bitch about his lobster cooking skills. And, you know, Mindy would bring up the time Bob made me sit on his lap at a medical mixer. That gave me reflux. Yeah.

Do you have a stain on your pants that she needs to cover up or what's the deal here? And I would talk about his totally irrational anger. Do you remember when Bob wanted to kill your dog because it bit Brooke? The fact is, I didn't think I had actually dated a murderer. It was just nice to trash on a guy who had treated me so badly, to share some laughter and a glass of wine with my girlfriends.

But then we started getting other women in Bob's life involved. I paid a visit to Bob's old receptionist and office manager, who had plenty of stories about Bob's anger. After a few meetings, I called up Stephanie Youngblood, Bob's first fiancé in Las Vegas, and asked her to join us. And with her, we began to formulate theories about Gail's disappearance.

One of them involved Bob's dad Marvin's apparent access to a dog lab. She had information that he did cardiologic research at a dog lab.

which fed into our dismemberment thing that Marvin was somehow involved and he brought the body to the dog lab and, you know, dissect the body and put it in the duffel bag and then go off to Teterboro and throw him over the bridge.

Between our meetings, Mindy tracked down evidence and brought in articles she had found in the library and from searching the early internet. She started coming up with some crazy theories. We created our own little game of Clue, you know. There was blood on the rug. Oh, he wrapped her in the rug. He took the rug. It was a New York apartment. It couldn't be too big of a rug. Yeah.

It's like the amount of mental energy I could have won the Nobel Prize. The more we met, the more I started to believe it was really possible that Bob had something to do with his wife's disappearance. It's not that any one piece of evidence gave us a gotcha moment. I just started to get a feeling that something wasn't right. It turned out that my clubmates all had stories like mine. A Bob flying off the handle and so many questions about Gail.

But the fact is, sitting in the Mayflower restaurant, sharing conspiracy theories and prawn toast, we barely knew anything about Bob and Gail's life in New York. We were miles away. At the time she was murdered, my sister was physically fit, mentally fit. In the middle of a Ph.D. program at a prestigious university, she did not go somewhere without talking to me.

We would fall asleep without hanging up the phone. There's a man named Robert Bierenbaum, and he killed her for one very simple reason. And I wish that I knew then what I know now. Yes, Gail educated me and all that have come after her. Elaine Katz, if you're listening, I am sorry it took so long for us to realize your sister's disappearance was not a game.

Next time, we go to New York. I'm not saying that Gail was boy crazy. I was boy crazy. Gail was love crazy. Gail had a way about her that she would attract a lot of attention. Gail was engaged like twice before she graduated high school. Insanity. She was a bit of a free spirit. We were hippies back then. So, you know, long head, rock and rollers. Ha ha.

Her mother promoted that having a man in your life made you complete. And without that, you weren't. And then she met Bob. Whirlwind relationship. Everything seemed great. I do know now. It wasn't all so easy. The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

The series is hosted by me, Carol Fisher, and produced by Anna Sinfield. Our assistant producer is Julian Manugarra-Patton, and our researcher is Madeline Parr. The editor is Veronica Simmons. Max O'Brien is our executive producer. Our fact checker is Valeria Rocha. Production management from Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolfe.

Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein. Story development by Isaac Fisher. Willard Foxton is creative director of development. Special thanks to Sean Glynn, David Waters, Mithily Rao, Katrina Norvell, David Wasserman, and Bethann Macaluso.

We did reach out to Bob and his legal team to ask if he'd like to comment on the podcast, but we never heard back. Novel. Does money stress you out? Let Facet flip your financial chaos into clarity. Finding Facet immediately put us at ease. Facet's innovative approach to financial planning ensures your money works as hard as you do, enabling members to experience the joys of having your finances in order. That makes us facet for life now, I guess. Visit facet.com.

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Brightview Senior Living is growing and actively seeking vibrant associates to join our community teams, including directors, health care, activities, hospitality, and dining. Apply today at careers.brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal employment opportunities. Text BVJOBS to 97211 to apply. Whether you're a newborn baby with delicate, dry skin, or a fully grown adult whose skin is a little parched,

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