Relisten to The Girlfriends S1, Ep 2: Lobsters for Dinner

Published Dec 17, 2024, 11:00 AM

The Girlfriends

In Season 1, it’s 1995 and Carole Fisher is a high-flying divorcee looking for love in Las Vegas. It’s slim pickings in the medical community she work 
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Relisten to Season 1 of The Girlfriends. 

Carole is wined, dined and shouted at by Bob until they split. After their break up, Carole tells her friend Mindy about the skeletons in Bob's closet and they start investigating. 

If you are affected by any of our topics please reach out to NO MORE at https://nomore.org/girlfriends, a domestic violence charity we’ve partnered with.  

The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio.

For more from Novel visit novel.audio

Listen to our soundtrack on Spotify here or buy the album from Bandcamp. All proceeds go to our charity partner NoMore.

Follow Carole on social media here:

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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 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 them at no More dot org. That's no More Dot. 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 help me out of the private plane. I felt like I was a 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 night on a white horse, when these colors flying would come charging up and draw his sword, and 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 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 doctor 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. That's what I wanted. I wanted Bob to rescue me for 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 cloud. I'm Carol Fisher and from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio. You were listening to the Girlfriends episode two Lobsters for dinner.

You got you You.

So, this is the neighborhood my mom lives in, which is a little bit more affluent then with a real guard gate, not a fake one, but those kind of gates are really popular here with no guards.

It's his Vegas. It's also to 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 and I brought lunch. I went the whole food, I got you vegan stuff I got.

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 it's just like I.

Know, I just was thinking, why would we give you London weather.

Mom provided Anna with a warm welcome of flavored fruit waters three full by de utterance 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.

Yes, yes, this is vegangan amazing and this.

Is vegan vegan. 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 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.

Oh.

No one ever made the sand feel uncomfortable, But there was something about him that Sand 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 know a goddamn thing about the kitchen.

Mom's feelings around Bob and the kitchen stemmed 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, and he should have for carried and.

Flown to Maine to get them.

I mean serious.

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. 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.

The thing is, even though my mom had concerns about him, she never mentioned them to me again. She knew he looked good on paper. I mean, not to believe 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 Bereenbaum 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 as playing down in Mexico with other doctors and do cleft palettes 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 one hundred in less than three seconds. Were the other experiences why you felt like he saw his rage. So oh, I hung out a lot at his house, and he'd come to mind. But he had the nicer home. So when I didn't have my daughter and you 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? Will they have to be bob as a set? How much were these glasses? Will? They're eight dollars a piece. Yes, And so now I'm pissed. He's not backing down. So I go to my wallet and get out eight dollars 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's 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 and 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 siphless. And I was like, what the hell, I've not given you syphless? 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 sifless, Like there is no way I gave Bob sifless. 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, okay, is she okay? Said yeah, she's okay, 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 end for Vivian Julia Roberts's 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. A few weeks after Bob dumped me in the early summer of nineteen ninety five, 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 how I couldn't believe he'd broken up with me. The sifless 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 cats 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 had passed her time trying to solve mysteries faster than Molder 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 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 fiancee, Jeff. Jeff said, 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 dag 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 for this was nineteen ninety five, 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 microfish machines to flick through newspapers New york Er, 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 a life days ago, said yesterday that they fear their daughter is dead. Burreenbaum said he and his wife had marital problems, and he had argued with her just before she had walked out of their East eighty fifth Street apartment at eleven fifteen on July seventh. Bierenbaum said his wife said she was going for a walk in Central Park, as she did frequently to cool out. Please, said they cast barren Baum was never seen leaving the building.

It was like saucer eyes.

Oh God, if you had been so coming, so fucking so bad, helda li You're a lot.

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 the 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 not really my kind of movie. And Jeff said, it's Bob.

It's Bob, It's Bob.

So now they have a work in hypothesis based on a few old New York articles and a movie with the score of seventeen percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

And this becomes sort of this hobby of Jeff and mine because he's convinced Bob off this woman. I like the research, I like the games. It's like a scavenger hunt. To us, it's some 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 eight six seven six, 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 two. So we started meeting up at the Mayflower more regularly to talk about Mindy's findings. She even came up with the code name, inspired by her favorite children's book, Harriet the Spy Club, And that's when our investigation really began.

Oh 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. 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 to kill your dog because a bit rock?

Oh?

No.

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 fiance, 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 Peterborough and throw him over the bridge.

Between our meetings, Many tracked on evidence and brought an article 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.

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 this 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 promtoast, 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 PhD program at a prestigious university. Did not go somewhere without.

Talking to me.

We would fall asleep without hanging up the phone. There's a man named Robert Burambaum, 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.

Of 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 and Saturday.

She was a bit of a free spirit.

We were hippies back then, so you know, longhaired rock and Rollers.

Her mother promoted that having a man in your life made you complete, and without that you weren't.

And then she met bu whirlwind relationship, everything seemed great. I do know now, it wasn't also easy.

The girlfriends is produced by Novel for Ourheart Radio. For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. This series is hosted by me Carol Fisher and produced by Anna Sinfield. Our assistant producer is Julian Manyu Geratt 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 Wolf. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen and Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Luisa Gerstein. Story development by Isaac Fisher. Willard Foxton is creative director of Development. Special thanks to Sean Glenn, David Waters, might Le Raw, Katrina Norvel, David Wasserman, and beth Ann Mcaluso. 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

The Girlfriends

In Season 1, it’s 1995 and Carole Fisher is a high-flying divorcee looking for love in Las Vegas. It 
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