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Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised.
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Speaker 2: Hi. Hello. Rob?
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Speaker 3: Yep.
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Speaker 4: My name's Kathleen.
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Speaker 5: I'm a podcast producer.
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Speaker 6: I've been calling your brother trying to get a hold of you.
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Speaker 5: I just was really.
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Speaker 7: Wanting to talk to you.
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Speaker 1: Rob Squelante lives in Carmel, New York. His driveway is buckled, the grass has gone patchy, and there's a gap between the pavers and the steps to Rob's porch, as if someone went and kicked him in the teeth.
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Speaker 7: My co-worker Paul's coming up.
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Speaker 5: Paul, this is Rob.
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Speaker 3: How's it going, Paul?
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Speaker 5: All right.
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Speaker 8: Self?
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Speaker 5: I'm doing all right.
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Speaker 7: Good, good, good.
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Speaker 1: But Kathleen and I haven't come to discuss home repairs. Rob, you see, has history with Howard Gombert. It started in the early 90s, when Rob dated a girl our listeners know as Rachel R. We told Rachel's story in season one. She was a child of 12 when she accused Gombert of rape. Rob heard all about that from Rachel, too.
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Speaker 3: You know, he's just a sick fuck.
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Speaker 1: By the time Rob got with Rachel, Gombert had left her mom's house. but kept coming back for little visits. Rob knew what Gombert did to her, but says he never personally witnessed that side of Gombert.
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Speaker 3: He was always respectful to me.
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Speaker 8: I mean, it's not like he came after me or said stupid shit to me.
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Speaker 3: He was always pleasant to me.
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Speaker 5: How did he come off?
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Speaker 3: What was his vibe? Okay.
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Speaker 1: Until someone made him angry, says Rob.
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Speaker 3: But there'd be times that, I guess, that second person out, you'd think he'd be an asshole.
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Speaker 1: Rob says he asked Rachel if he should step in. He's a much bigger guy than Gombert is and could have squashed him like a bug. But Rachel, he says, kept begging him not to. And Gombert behaved like they were buddies, says Rob. Told Rob things he should have kept to himself. Here's an example. Rob told us he ran into Gombert at the laundromat in Carmel. This is early April of 1995, just before Robin went missing. As they stood and talked, Robin walked by them. Howard turned to him with a leer, says Rob.
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Speaker 3: He said he was going to get some of that.
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Speaker 8: He was hanging out with her prior because he was working in the laundromat. And her boyfriend was working in Burger King. And she'd walk over, hang out with him. And after that, he told me straight out he was going to get some of that.
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Speaker 3: Not even a week. If it was a week later, she disappeared.
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Speaker 1: Rob wasn't our only door knock in Putnam. My team and I spoke to as many people as we could in our quest to answer two questions. Who was Howard Gomber to Robin Murphy? And how on earth did she end up in his car just moments before she went missing?
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Speaker 2: Do you hear my madness?
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Speaker 1: Laughter hides my fears. Sorrows depths are endless. I'm Paul Solitarov, and this is Season 2 of The Devil's Quarry. Last season's listeners will recall Howard Gomber with a mix of nausea and revulsion. A skilled woodsman and practiced sadist, he preyed on young girls, right beneath the noses of cops and parents. By the time Robin vanished, Gombert had been accused of raping at least.
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Speaker 3: Four underage girls.
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Speaker 1: He called himself a warlock and wore a pendant with the star of Satan, among many advertisements of his evil. But he wasn't without his charm, or a fine-tuned ear for human frailty. Our reporter Kathleen Horan found some of his old friends. Denise Lanz and Eddie C. were tight with Gombert in the 90s. They were also friends with Rachel and her mom. They knew Howard was a burglar. He admitted as much to them. But aside from counting their stuff when he left, they saw him as a harmless scoundrel.
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Speaker 5: He was really good at picking on people.
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Speaker 7: If there was something or somebody was just even just wearing something or just like somebody.
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Speaker 5: Say ugly, was with somebody good looking, he'd just come out with something. And you would laugh your ass off.
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Speaker 3: Yeah.
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Speaker 9: If you were smoking pot with him, fucking forget about it.
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Speaker 3: You'd be crying.
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Speaker 9: Oh, yeah.
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Speaker 3: You would be crying.
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Speaker 9: You're laughing so hard, your fucking jaw hurt.
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Speaker 1: But both of them admitted that he could snap, suddenly switch personalities in a blink.
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Speaker 10: This is Howard.
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Speaker 3: Funny? Goodbye.
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Speaker 9: That's him, right there.
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Speaker 2: I'll light the switch.
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Speaker 1: Eddie specifically recalled a time Gombert flipped his lid. Eddie had just finished work when he bumped into Gombert's boss, a guy named Bill, who owned the laundromat Gombert worked at.
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Speaker 9: I was walking uptown, and Bill had just gotten a brand new washing machine for me. He just bought the laundromat. I was going up to Bob's Diner to get something to eat, and Bill stopped me and said, can you help me put the washing machine in and bring it to Carmel?
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Speaker 1: And he helped Bill get the washer into his truck. They drove to Laundromat together to offload it, where they ran into Howard Gombert.
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Speaker 9: I'll never forget that. He was fucking fuming. He had, like, his fucking face was red. He's like, these fucking posters. Hey, keep putting these fucking posters up. And he kept ripping them down.
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Speaker 1: And which posters was he enraged by? The missing person flyers that went up around town when Josette and Robin went missing. Someone had plastered them on the windows of the laundromat. Eddie doesn't recall whether the posters were for Josette or Robin, but Howard's rage stands out 30 years later.
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Speaker 9: So he's there ripping all the posters down. I mean, that whole plaza was plastered with posters, and he wanted them off the laundromat window.
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Speaker 6: At the time, did anyone know that he was kind of more of a serious criminal type?
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Speaker 11: No, no, I don't think any of us had any clue.
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Speaker 1: That's Sharon, who worked at the Burger King back then. She, too, has troubling memories of Gombert.
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Speaker 11: I just thought, what the hell are they doing going hanging out with like a 30-year-old? I'm already, in my mind, this guy's a freaking creep. You know, these are 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds, and you're partying with them? But we do know why they all went down there, because you'd give them alcohol and give them weed. So that's why they'd all hang out down there.
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Speaker 6: How close was the laundromat to the Burger King?
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Speaker 2: It was close.
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Speaker 11: Like, if you're at the back of the drive-thru and you look straight ahead, you'd see the laundromat.
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Speaker 1: The laundromat is where Robin came to know Gombert. Her buddy James Blaisdell got to know him there, too.
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Speaker 10: He would talk to us like he was just like one of us and all that stuff, trying to act like he was younger. But at the same time, I'm like, it honestly sounds like he's acting.
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Speaker 3: He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. But he just gave off this vibe like, I'm not really your friend.
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Speaker 1: Rob and her boyfriend, Matt, would occasionally hang at Gombert's place. It was a shabby little flat above a garage from Carmel. Gombert shared it with his girlfriend, Anne-Marie, and their toddler daughter. James remembers being over there with him.
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Speaker 10: It definitely was one room with a bedroom and a bath type of situation. Very old wood, almost kind of graying in places. A little bit of warped wood. floor because it was unprotected so it had worn away in a couple places not a whole lot of furnishings very sparse and we basically sat down and we started listening to a cd that had just come out it was dennis leary's no cure for cancer comedy album was it funny It was very funny. And it was made more funny because that was when he brought out some marijuana. And Matt and Robin did not partake, but me, Gompert, and his girlfriend did.
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Speaker 1: James wasn't tight with Anne-Marie, but he does recall her.
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Speaker 3: She was very nice.
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Speaker 10: She looked a little bit like Robin with how they wore their hair and.
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Speaker 3: The the type of makeup they used.
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Speaker 10: So they both had kind of like this almost really pale-ish ivory cheeks thing going on.
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Speaker 3: She was very reserved.
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Speaker 10: Looking back on it, I don't know if this is my memory with knowing things now, putting it into things in the past, but it almost looked like she.
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Speaker 3: Always looked to him before she did anything.
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Speaker 6: Do you remember once you met Robin what your first impression was or what you thought about her at first?
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Speaker 7: I just thought that we probably would get along really well. We were a little bit similar.
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Speaker 1: That's Anne Marie, who's long since left Carmel and set up in another coastal state. Kathleen reached her by phone last spring.
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Speaker 3: In what ways?
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Speaker 5: Looks a little bit. Both of us were fairly tall. Both had really dark hair.
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Speaker 1: And they both worked a registered shop, right? Which is where they met and bonded.
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Speaker 5: I definitely considered her a friend.
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Speaker 7: I remember driving her around. I knew she had her license, but I remember doing most of the driving a lot of times.
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Speaker 5: She was down to earth. She had a level head, and she was trying to just make her way in the world as a teenager.
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Speaker 7: But you don't know exactly what you're doing wrong as a teenager because you don't have a frame of reference for it.
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Speaker 5: You know, 30 years ago, I probably thought I knew a lot, too.
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Speaker 7: And now I look back and, yeah, I probably didn't know as much as I thought I did.
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Speaker 6: What did you love at that time? Like, what things were you obsessed with or music or hobbies or?
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Speaker 7: There wasn't a whole lot of things that I did at that point.
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Speaker 5: Well, it.
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Speaker 1: Wasn't so much she didn't as she couldn't. Because everywhere she went, she had a devil on her shoulder. She says he stalked her every move. And then he put a knife to her throat. The tale of Anne-Marie and Gombert appears in Robin's case file. I'd read those pages while reporting our last season. Then this year I went back to it and found something chilling. A timeline of Gombert unraveling in the weeks before Robin vanished. You might remember that Anne-Marie owned a red and black sports car. The little Pontiac Sunbird Gombert borrowed all the time. In her sit-down with the cops, she talked about that car and the fact that Gombert used it to pick up Josette Wright just before she disappeared forever. And then Anne-Marie dove deeper with those cops, talked about her siege of terror at Gombert's hands, a siege that ran three years and very nearly got her killed. She was all of 16 when she met him, a shy girl living in New Fairfield, Connecticut. Gombert was almost 30 at the time. They were introduced by mutual friends. Anne-Marie the Jr. at New Fairfield High, he the swaggering bad boy on a motorcycle who pulled over to hand her flowers. She was a guns and roses freak in those days, and Gombert, if you squinted, had just a touch of axle in him. Within months, if not weeks, she fell pregnant by Gombert and left her family for him. The sexual and physical assaults began soon after.
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Speaker 7: With most abusers, they come off looking sincere and trying to make themselves look like the better person.
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Speaker 5: He was also a very good liar.
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Speaker 7: And I think, in a weird sort of way, he.
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Speaker 5: Believed his own lies.
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Speaker 1: At the time, Gombert didn't have a place of his own. so they flopped with his friends in New Fairfield. That place was a hellhole to hear Anne-Marie tell it. The heat rarely worked, the stove was on the blink, and the neighbors called the cops on Gombert's friends, who came and went at all hours. It's where Anne-Marie wintered through her pregnancy. But after three years with Gombert, she couldn't take it anymore. She ran to the Putnam Sheriff's Office for help and dropped heavy charges on him.
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Speaker 5: Before Robin.
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Speaker 7: disappeared when I tried to leave him in February and I put charges against him. I charged him with rape and sodomy. I didn't know much about the criminal justice system. I remember not getting a whole lot of information or getting a lot of support on my side. I had heard he was trying to make me look like the bad person, like all of that was consensual. Because there were pictures. I had heard he was trying to say that the charges were trumped up because it was consensual.
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Speaker 1: Gombert's lawyer was a man named Robert Leder. You'll recall him as Gombert's rep in the Rachel R.
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Speaker 2: Case.
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Speaker 1: When he convinced a Carmel judge to force a panicked child to face down her alleged rapist in court. You'll also recall him as Anthony DePippo's lawyer, while hiding from him that he was still Gombert's lawyer. That betrayal, which would have led to his disbarment, was in large part why Anthony was doomed to an unfair trial, and a false conviction. Leader rebutted Anne-Marie's rape charge by slipping a photo album to the D.A., That album was full of Polaroids Gombert had taken.
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Speaker 7: I remember looking back at that and going, none of those pictures look like I.
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Speaker 5: Was consenting to them. And some of them actually show signs of abuse.
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Speaker 1: Nonetheless, Leder convinced the DA that those photos were, quote, boudoir shots, unquote.
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Speaker 7: So it's sad that I didn't know that much about justice back then.
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Speaker 5: But what do you do when you're 18 and never was involved in all of that?
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Speaker 1: Those pictures of her torment got passed around the courthouse. None of those so-called stewards of the law did anything to help her.
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Speaker 7: And then, like I said, I don't know what happened afterwards or why I was being subpoenaed.
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Speaker 5: It was a whole weird thing.
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Speaker 7: And it's sad because there was nobody there to guide me through it. And, you know, eventually I dropped that charge.
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Speaker 1: But if Anne-Marie thought the worst was behind her, well, she hadn't factored for Gombert. Once he had his hooks in a woman, he hung on like grim death. He peppered Anne-Marie with pleas and apologies. She relented and went back to him. But after a couple of weeks, she woke up one morning to find Gombert in a rage, she says. He yanked her out of bed and dragged her down to the garage. He popped the trunk of her car and told her to get in. I'm going to drive you to the Bronx, he snarled. I know guys there are going to show you what rape is really all about. Anne-Marie screamed and ran upstairs. Gombert, who didn't have a car of his own, took off for work in hers. She phoned a friend who drove her and the baby to a safe house in Connecticut.
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Speaker 7: I was in a shelter, and then I was beginning to learn some of those abusive tendencies because.
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Speaker 5: All the women there are going through the same things.
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Speaker 1: Gombert responded by dyeing his hair black, leaving dead flowers on the windshield of her car, and stalking her at her job at Sears.
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Speaker 7: I was fully involved in not taking the same routes home each night and just trying to live my life without being followed.
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Speaker 1: She renewed her order of protection. She moved to a different shelter after he tracked her to the first one.
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Speaker 5: You know, he did follow me to four different places and threatened me with a knife and told me not to scream.
00:19:02
Speaker 1: According to the case file, he didn't just threaten. He carjacked her in public. She was stuck in traffic in Danbury, Connecticut when he ran up to her window, put that knife to her throat, and told her to shove over. She screamed so loud that the drivers behind her blared their horns. Gomber dropped the knife and fled. She drove straight to the cops and told them everything. And still she couldn't escape him. He barraged her with pleading letters. All were multiple pages, saying the same thing over and over. The apologies and self-pity. Then the demand that she come back. This went on for weeks and didn't stop there. He kept coming to the mall where she worked.
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Speaker 7: I had been contacted by security a couple of times because they knew what was going on and they would be like, hey, he's here, just staying in the back.
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Speaker 5: So they were very protective of me, thankfully. And then.
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Speaker 7: the back sort of back hallways of the mall we would use to get to the food court. And you're walking down the back hallway and you're reading, you know, stuff all over the walls.
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Speaker 5: And I'm looking at it and I'm reading it. And then I'm like, holy shit.
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Speaker 2: Yep.
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Speaker 7: He left me fricking letters on the walls of the fricking mall.
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Speaker 1: Here's an excerpt from one of them, as read by our colleague Rob.
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Speaker 4: I must have hurt you much more than I'll ever know to have you hate me this badly. I'll never be able to express to you just how sorry I am for hurting you like I did. The guilt of hurting you like I did still keeps me awake and brings tears to my eyes. By hurting you as much as I totally regret it, there is nothing I can do now about it except respect your wishes and and stay away in hopes that one day you will at least give me a chance to explain.
00:21:09
Speaker 7: I took pictures and reported it as another incident because I did have a restraining order at that point.
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Speaker 1: At the end of the day, though, she was just a kid of 19 with a toddler nowhere to turn. And then out of nowhere, the letters and stalking stopped. No explanation, no final letter from Gombert. He just went dark one day. Meanwhile, she learned a troubling fact. Gomber was pursuing a friendship with Robin Murphy. He called her house off and saying he was desperate to be in touch with Anne-Marie. He begged Robin to talk to him at the laundromat, then go mediate with Anne-Marie on his behalf.
00:21:55
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, I was in the middle of that, even though I wasn't there.
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Speaker 1: Having quit her job at ShopRite, she hadn't seen Robin in weeks. her at home to try and warn.
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Speaker 7: Her when i left him i did reach out to her um when i lived in a woman's shelter for a period of time but i just told her to be careful around him.
00:22:19
Speaker 6: If you could have talked to her on the phone if you could have reached her when you called her that time what would you have told her.
00:22:26
Speaker 7: That he's probably not what he appears to be um That he was unstable.
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Speaker 5: And that you should probably keep your distance.
00:22:41
Speaker 1: Three days after Gompert pulled a knife on Anne-Marie, Robin Murphy vanished forever. Anne-Marie would spend years replaying that message in her head, agonized that she hadn't done more to warn her. Five years ago, I reached out to Gombert in prison. I was winding down nine months of reporting and needed to speak to him for comment. Over the course of two phone calls, we talked for a half hour. Both calls ended with angry hang-ups. You heard one of them at the end of season one. They're all telling the same story about you.
00:23:34
Speaker 5: Your M.O.
00:23:35
Speaker 2: Never varies.
00:23:36
Speaker 1: Several months later, though, I got a letter from Gombert. Though addressed to me, it included a copy of a second letter. one he'd sent to an ex-girlfriend in 2017. In the body of that letter, he wrote hundreds of words about Robin. Recently, I re-read both of those letters, scanning them for clues about his relationship with Robin and any breadcrumbs about the night she went missing. The first thing Gombert writes about is how he relied on Robin's support during his breakup with Anne-Marie. My colleague Rob reads some excerpts from those letters.
00:24:13
Speaker 4: Now let's talk a little about Robin. I was going through pure hell with Anne-Marie. Robin was there for me. Robin always did her best to make me laugh and smile. I did tell her that I didn't always treat Anne-Marie well either. In fact, I could be a complete asshole at times. Her answer to that was that she knew that she had eyes.
00:24:35
Speaker 1: Then he writes his account of the night Robin went missing.
00:24:39
Speaker 4: The last time that I saw her, it was outside the laundromat. Well, we talked for about five to 15 minutes or so. She had to go see her boyfriend and then make a phone call. Then she was going to come back and try to talk to Anne Marie for me. The only thing that I never told the police is what that phone call she was going to make was about. The call was to some guy that she was supposed to get some weed from for me and her.
00:25:04
Speaker 1: As I read that, it struck me that Gombert was doing what he does, pointing the finger at anyone but himself. and casting suspicion on an unnamed third party, a mysterious weed dealer in Carmel. His inference couldn't have been more obvious. The weed dealer had snatched Robin, not him. But here's the problem with Gombert's implication. Robin Murphy didn't smoke weed. We talked to everyone we could find who knew her as a teen. And to a man and woman, they all said the same thing. Robin Murphy was no pothead. So no, Robin didn't call a drug dealer from Burger King. But back to Gombert's letter and his version of the facts.
00:25:47
Speaker 4: It was raining on and off that night. When she left to walk over to Burger King where her boyfriend worked, I stood there and watched her until she was around 60, 80 feet from Burger King. Then went inside and started cleaning the laundromat. A little bit later, 10, 20 minutes, I realized that I had forgotten to bring my dirty laundry with me. as I usually did at least once a week. So I went home real quick and grabbed it, came straight back, and put it into the wash.
00:26:15
Speaker 1: That's the April 9th timeline, according to Gombert. But even by his telling, there's a significant hole, a span of about an hour in which no one saw him.
00:26:25
Speaker 5: By that time, it was raining again.
00:26:28
Speaker 4: I cleaned up some, collected all the trash, did what I could with customers still there. It was pouring when I ran out to put the trash into the dumpster. And I was soaked by the time I got back into the laundromat.
00:26:43
Speaker 1: Now here's what we do know about the day Robin vanished. It's pulled entirely from police records and witnesses. The afternoon of Palm Sunday, April 9th, 1995, Gombrich called Robin's house and left a message for her. We don't know what it said, but we do know this. That evening, she grabbed the keys and blew out of the house in a hurry. She didn't even bother to put on makeup, which for Robin was unheard of. Peeling out in her mom's wagon, she swung past the cemetery and made the short drive to Shoprite Plaza. Next, per Robin's case file, she pulled into the lot and parked by Burger King. There she ran into Gombert. The cops asked Gombert what happened next. He said that Robin got into his car and they drove the 60 or so yards to the laundromat. There he said they spent about 15 minutes chatting in his parked car. That chat, he said, was all about Aunt Marie and his hopes that Robin could help him win her back. At that point, said Gombert, Robin got out of the car and started back to Burger King on foot. The time was 7.30 and she needed to use their payphone. That was the last time he saw her, said Gombert. But Robin never made it to Burger King. Contrary to what Gombert told police, however, Multiple witnesses placed Robin in the laundromat that evening. One of them says Robin made a phone call from the payphone there. And we know her friend James missed a call from her around the same time. Jeremy, you'll recall, managed the Burger King that night. He remembers seeing Gombert in the drive-thru lane. By then, it was after 9 p.m.
00:28:29
Speaker 12: He just drove his car around the building and stopped at the window, did not order food, just stopped directly at the window. And I opened up the window and asked, you know, what's up? And he says, hey, is Robin in there? And I, you know, look over into the dining room, don't see her in her spot. And I said, no, she's not there. He says, you know, she stood me up. She was supposed to meet me.
00:28:51
Speaker 1: Hours later, says Jeremy, Gomber drove through again, asking once more if Robin was there. That's when he huddled outside with Mark Stein. Mark's the kid who worked there with Matt. He was seen that night whispering and laughing with Gombert out by the Burger King dumpsters.
00:29:12
Speaker 12: Standing close by so he can see like around the corner for when I'm coming so he can kind of dart back into work. So he's probably standing there and Howard's sitting in the car still. So he's like talking through the window and it It just felt odd to me. It seemed like he was, you know, trying to tell me that, you know, say that, oh, I never saw her.
00:29:34
Speaker 1: Did it feel like he was establishing an alibi?
00:29:37
Speaker 12: Right away, that's, it felt, and then very next day, that's what I was telling people.
00:29:42
Speaker 1: Sharon, who worked that night at Burger King, thought that was plenty weird, too.
00:29:47
Speaker 11: Why is he coming in saying Robin stood him up? Where is she? But then he's telling the detective he saw her. So that was the first thing we thought was suspicious.
00:30:03
Speaker 1: Days later, Jeremy's co-workers searched the hill behind Shoprite. There they found Robin's personal things scattered in the brush. But her so-called friend Gombert wasn't part of that search. It was then that the cops went looking for Gombert again. They made their way to his last known address, the house of his old friend Willie McCracken. McCracken had let him flop there in the weeks before Robin vanished. McCracken confirmed that on the night she went missing... Gombert came back there around 9 p.m. Then said McCracken he headed out again, which left an hour of Gombert's movements unaccounted for. Next, Willie told the cops that Gombert had left town, sold his furniture, cleared out in a rush. Why'd he leave, asked the cops. Willie told them about a conversation he'd had with Gombert, in which Gombert said the cops had found a shirt behind Shopperite. Bloody shirt belonging to Robin Murphy. There's no mention of a bloody shirt in the case file, because no clothes were found in any of the searches. Only Gombert raised that detail while speaking to Willie. Oh, and one last thing Willie told the cops. He said Gombert told him he was sick of being blamed for, quote, everything bad that happens in this town, unquote, and that he was going back to his father's house in Connecticut. A day later, Gomber was found on the lawn of his father's house. He'd opened a box of sleeping pills and downed a handful of them. Soon he was parapsychotic, incoherent, and soaked in his own urine. And close to death.
00:31:46
Speaker 2: The End.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: The Devil's Quarry is a production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company No. 1. I'm your creator and host, Paul Solitarov. Executive producers are Jason Flom, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardus, and Gilbert King. Our senior producer is Hannah Beal. Our producers are Jackie Pauley, Austin Smith, and Kathleen Horne. Our field reporter is Kathleen Horne. Our editor is Matthew Nelson. Production support from Cara Kornhaber. Fact-checking by Peter Bresnan. Our sound designer is Britt Spangler. And our engineer is Austin Smith. Original music arranged and produced by Alexis Quadrato at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Head of production, Matthew Nelson. Head of marketing and operations, Jeff Clyburn. Publicist, Nathaniel Baruch. Art Director, Andrew Nelson. Social Media Manager, Sarah Gibbons. Legal Review provided by Gibson Dunn. And our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is performed by Alexis Quadrato at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Vocals by Rob Reddy of California Corns. Written by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick at the Florida Department of Corrections Hardy Correctional Facility. If you have any information to share about the events covered in this series, please call 1-888-257-7694.
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: Hi. Hello. Rob?
00:00:20
Speaker 3: Yep.
00:00:20
Speaker 4: My name's Kathleen.
00:00:21
Speaker 5: I'm a podcast producer.
00:00:23
Speaker 6: I've been calling your brother trying to get a hold of you.
00:00:25
Speaker 5: I just was really.
00:00:26
Speaker 7: Wanting to talk to you.
00:00:28
Speaker 1: Rob Squelante lives in Carmel, New York. His driveway is buckled, the grass has gone patchy, and there's a gap between the pavers and the steps to Rob's porch, as if someone went and kicked him in the teeth.
00:00:43
Speaker 7: My co-worker Paul's coming up.
00:00:46
Speaker 5: Paul, this is Rob.
00:00:46
Speaker 3: How's it going, Paul?
00:00:48
Speaker 5: All right.
00:00:50
Speaker 8: Self?
00:00:50
Speaker 5: I'm doing all right.
00:00:51
Speaker 7: Good, good, good.
00:00:52
Speaker 1: But Kathleen and I haven't come to discuss home repairs. Rob, you see, has history with Howard Gombert. It started in the early 90s, when Rob dated a girl our listeners know as Rachel R. We told Rachel's story in season one. She was a child of 12 when she accused Gombert of rape. Rob heard all about that from Rachel, too.
00:01:16
Speaker 3: You know, he's just a sick fuck.
00:01:19
Speaker 1: By the time Rob got with Rachel, Gombert had left her mom's house. but kept coming back for little visits. Rob knew what Gombert did to her, but says he never personally witnessed that side of Gombert.
00:01:34
Speaker 3: He was always respectful to me.
00:01:35
Speaker 8: I mean, it's not like he came after me or said stupid shit to me.
00:01:41
Speaker 3: He was always pleasant to me.
00:01:44
Speaker 5: How did he come off?
00:01:46
Speaker 3: What was his vibe? Okay.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: Until someone made him angry, says Rob.
00:01:52
Speaker 3: But there'd be times that, I guess, that second person out, you'd think he'd be an asshole.
00:01:58
Speaker 1: Rob says he asked Rachel if he should step in. He's a much bigger guy than Gombert is and could have squashed him like a bug. But Rachel, he says, kept begging him not to. And Gombert behaved like they were buddies, says Rob. Told Rob things he should have kept to himself. Here's an example. Rob told us he ran into Gombert at the laundromat in Carmel. This is early April of 1995, just before Robin went missing. As they stood and talked, Robin walked by them. Howard turned to him with a leer, says Rob.
00:02:35
Speaker 3: He said he was going to get some of that.
00:02:37
Speaker 8: He was hanging out with her prior because he was working in the laundromat. And her boyfriend was working in Burger King. And she'd walk over, hang out with him. And after that, he told me straight out he was going to get some of that.
00:02:54
Speaker 3: Not even a week. If it was a week later, she disappeared.
00:03:02
Speaker 1: Rob wasn't our only door knock in Putnam. My team and I spoke to as many people as we could in our quest to answer two questions. Who was Howard Gomber to Robin Murphy? And how on earth did she end up in his car just moments before she went missing?
00:03:29
Speaker 2: Do you hear my madness?
00:03:36
Speaker 1: Laughter hides my fears. Sorrows depths are endless. I'm Paul Solitarov, and this is Season 2 of The Devil's Quarry. Last season's listeners will recall Howard Gomber with a mix of nausea and revulsion. A skilled woodsman and practiced sadist, he preyed on young girls, right beneath the noses of cops and parents. By the time Robin vanished, Gombert had been accused of raping at least.
00:04:36
Speaker 3: Four underage girls.
00:04:39
Speaker 1: He called himself a warlock and wore a pendant with the star of Satan, among many advertisements of his evil. But he wasn't without his charm, or a fine-tuned ear for human frailty. Our reporter Kathleen Horan found some of his old friends. Denise Lanz and Eddie C. were tight with Gombert in the 90s. They were also friends with Rachel and her mom. They knew Howard was a burglar. He admitted as much to them. But aside from counting their stuff when he left, they saw him as a harmless scoundrel.
00:05:15
Speaker 5: He was really good at picking on people.
00:05:17
Speaker 7: If there was something or somebody was just even just wearing something or just like somebody.
00:05:25
Speaker 5: Say ugly, was with somebody good looking, he'd just come out with something. And you would laugh your ass off.
00:05:33
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:05:35
Speaker 9: If you were smoking pot with him, fucking forget about it.
00:05:37
Speaker 3: You'd be crying.
00:05:37
Speaker 9: Oh, yeah.
00:05:38
Speaker 3: You would be crying.
00:05:39
Speaker 9: You're laughing so hard, your fucking jaw hurt.
00:05:42
Speaker 1: But both of them admitted that he could snap, suddenly switch personalities in a blink.
00:05:48
Speaker 10: This is Howard.
00:05:49
Speaker 3: Funny? Goodbye.
00:05:51
Speaker 9: That's him, right there.
00:05:53
Speaker 2: I'll light the switch.
00:05:58
Speaker 1: Eddie specifically recalled a time Gombert flipped his lid. Eddie had just finished work when he bumped into Gombert's boss, a guy named Bill, who owned the laundromat Gombert worked at.
00:06:09
Speaker 9: I was walking uptown, and Bill had just gotten a brand new washing machine for me. He just bought the laundromat. I was going up to Bob's Diner to get something to eat, and Bill stopped me and said, can you help me put the washing machine in and bring it to Carmel?
00:06:24
Speaker 1: And he helped Bill get the washer into his truck. They drove to Laundromat together to offload it, where they ran into Howard Gombert.
00:06:33
Speaker 9: I'll never forget that. He was fucking fuming. He had, like, his fucking face was red. He's like, these fucking posters. Hey, keep putting these fucking posters up. And he kept ripping them down.
00:06:45
Speaker 1: And which posters was he enraged by? The missing person flyers that went up around town when Josette and Robin went missing. Someone had plastered them on the windows of the laundromat. Eddie doesn't recall whether the posters were for Josette or Robin, but Howard's rage stands out 30 years later.
00:07:05
Speaker 9: So he's there ripping all the posters down. I mean, that whole plaza was plastered with posters, and he wanted them off the laundromat window.
00:07:18
Speaker 6: At the time, did anyone know that he was kind of more of a serious criminal type?
00:07:24
Speaker 11: No, no, I don't think any of us had any clue.
00:07:27
Speaker 1: That's Sharon, who worked at the Burger King back then. She, too, has troubling memories of Gombert.
00:07:33
Speaker 11: I just thought, what the hell are they doing going hanging out with like a 30-year-old? I'm already, in my mind, this guy's a freaking creep. You know, these are 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds, and you're partying with them? But we do know why they all went down there, because you'd give them alcohol and give them weed. So that's why they'd all hang out down there.
00:07:51
Speaker 6: How close was the laundromat to the Burger King?
00:07:54
Speaker 2: It was close.
00:07:54
Speaker 11: Like, if you're at the back of the drive-thru and you look straight ahead, you'd see the laundromat.
00:07:59
Speaker 1: The laundromat is where Robin came to know Gombert. Her buddy James Blaisdell got to know him there, too.
00:08:07
Speaker 10: He would talk to us like he was just like one of us and all that stuff, trying to act like he was younger. But at the same time, I'm like, it honestly sounds like he's acting.
00:08:20
Speaker 3: He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. But he just gave off this vibe like, I'm not really your friend.
00:08:33
Speaker 1: Rob and her boyfriend, Matt, would occasionally hang at Gombert's place. It was a shabby little flat above a garage from Carmel. Gombert shared it with his girlfriend, Anne-Marie, and their toddler daughter. James remembers being over there with him.
00:08:49
Speaker 10: It definitely was one room with a bedroom and a bath type of situation. Very old wood, almost kind of graying in places. A little bit of warped wood. floor because it was unprotected so it had worn away in a couple places not a whole lot of furnishings very sparse and we basically sat down and we started listening to a cd that had just come out it was dennis leary's no cure for cancer comedy album was it funny It was very funny. And it was made more funny because that was when he brought out some marijuana. And Matt and Robin did not partake, but me, Gompert, and his girlfriend did.
00:09:41
Speaker 1: James wasn't tight with Anne-Marie, but he does recall her.
00:09:46
Speaker 3: She was very nice.
00:09:48
Speaker 10: She looked a little bit like Robin with how they wore their hair and.
00:09:52
Speaker 3: The the type of makeup they used.
00:09:55
Speaker 10: So they both had kind of like this almost really pale-ish ivory cheeks thing going on.
00:10:04
Speaker 3: She was very reserved.
00:10:06
Speaker 10: Looking back on it, I don't know if this is my memory with knowing things now, putting it into things in the past, but it almost looked like she.
00:10:16
Speaker 3: Always looked to him before she did anything.
00:10:24
Speaker 6: Do you remember once you met Robin what your first impression was or what you thought about her at first?
00:10:32
Speaker 7: I just thought that we probably would get along really well. We were a little bit similar.
00:10:36
Speaker 1: That's Anne Marie, who's long since left Carmel and set up in another coastal state. Kathleen reached her by phone last spring.
00:10:46
Speaker 3: In what ways?
00:10:49
Speaker 5: Looks a little bit. Both of us were fairly tall. Both had really dark hair.
00:10:54
Speaker 1: And they both worked a registered shop, right? Which is where they met and bonded.
00:11:01
Speaker 5: I definitely considered her a friend.
00:11:05
Speaker 7: I remember driving her around. I knew she had her license, but I remember doing most of the driving a lot of times.
00:11:16
Speaker 5: She was down to earth. She had a level head, and she was trying to just make her way in the world as a teenager.
00:11:23
Speaker 7: But you don't know exactly what you're doing wrong as a teenager because you don't have a frame of reference for it.
00:11:29
Speaker 5: You know, 30 years ago, I probably thought I knew a lot, too.
00:11:33
Speaker 7: And now I look back and, yeah, I probably didn't know as much as I thought I did.
00:11:39
Speaker 6: What did you love at that time? Like, what things were you obsessed with or music or hobbies or?
00:11:46
Speaker 7: There wasn't a whole lot of things that I did at that point.
00:11:52
Speaker 5: Well, it.
00:11:59
Speaker 1: Wasn't so much she didn't as she couldn't. Because everywhere she went, she had a devil on her shoulder. She says he stalked her every move. And then he put a knife to her throat. The tale of Anne-Marie and Gombert appears in Robin's case file. I'd read those pages while reporting our last season. Then this year I went back to it and found something chilling. A timeline of Gombert unraveling in the weeks before Robin vanished. You might remember that Anne-Marie owned a red and black sports car. The little Pontiac Sunbird Gombert borrowed all the time. In her sit-down with the cops, she talked about that car and the fact that Gombert used it to pick up Josette Wright just before she disappeared forever. And then Anne-Marie dove deeper with those cops, talked about her siege of terror at Gombert's hands, a siege that ran three years and very nearly got her killed. She was all of 16 when she met him, a shy girl living in New Fairfield, Connecticut. Gombert was almost 30 at the time. They were introduced by mutual friends. Anne-Marie the Jr. at New Fairfield High, he the swaggering bad boy on a motorcycle who pulled over to hand her flowers. She was a guns and roses freak in those days, and Gombert, if you squinted, had just a touch of axle in him. Within months, if not weeks, she fell pregnant by Gombert and left her family for him. The sexual and physical assaults began soon after.
00:14:03
Speaker 7: With most abusers, they come off looking sincere and trying to make themselves look like the better person.
00:14:10
Speaker 5: He was also a very good liar.
00:14:12
Speaker 7: And I think, in a weird sort of way, he.
00:14:19
Speaker 5: Believed his own lies.
00:14:22
Speaker 1: At the time, Gombert didn't have a place of his own. so they flopped with his friends in New Fairfield. That place was a hellhole to hear Anne-Marie tell it. The heat rarely worked, the stove was on the blink, and the neighbors called the cops on Gombert's friends, who came and went at all hours. It's where Anne-Marie wintered through her pregnancy. But after three years with Gombert, she couldn't take it anymore. She ran to the Putnam Sheriff's Office for help and dropped heavy charges on him.
00:14:52
Speaker 5: Before Robin.
00:14:57
Speaker 7: disappeared when I tried to leave him in February and I put charges against him. I charged him with rape and sodomy. I didn't know much about the criminal justice system. I remember not getting a whole lot of information or getting a lot of support on my side. I had heard he was trying to make me look like the bad person, like all of that was consensual. Because there were pictures. I had heard he was trying to say that the charges were trumped up because it was consensual.
00:15:47
Speaker 1: Gombert's lawyer was a man named Robert Leder. You'll recall him as Gombert's rep in the Rachel R.
00:15:53
Speaker 2: Case.
00:15:54
Speaker 1: When he convinced a Carmel judge to force a panicked child to face down her alleged rapist in court. You'll also recall him as Anthony DePippo's lawyer, while hiding from him that he was still Gombert's lawyer. That betrayal, which would have led to his disbarment, was in large part why Anthony was doomed to an unfair trial, and a false conviction. Leader rebutted Anne-Marie's rape charge by slipping a photo album to the D.A., That album was full of Polaroids Gombert had taken.
00:16:28
Speaker 7: I remember looking back at that and going, none of those pictures look like I.
00:16:33
Speaker 5: Was consenting to them. And some of them actually show signs of abuse.
00:16:40
Speaker 1: Nonetheless, Leder convinced the DA that those photos were, quote, boudoir shots, unquote.
00:16:46
Speaker 7: So it's sad that I didn't know that much about justice back then.
00:16:51
Speaker 5: But what do you do when you're 18 and never was involved in all of that?
00:16:56
Speaker 1: Those pictures of her torment got passed around the courthouse. None of those so-called stewards of the law did anything to help her.
00:17:06
Speaker 7: And then, like I said, I don't know what happened afterwards or why I was being subpoenaed.
00:17:12
Speaker 5: It was a whole weird thing.
00:17:13
Speaker 7: And it's sad because there was nobody there to guide me through it. And, you know, eventually I dropped that charge.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: But if Anne-Marie thought the worst was behind her, well, she hadn't factored for Gombert. Once he had his hooks in a woman, he hung on like grim death. He peppered Anne-Marie with pleas and apologies. She relented and went back to him. But after a couple of weeks, she woke up one morning to find Gombert in a rage, she says. He yanked her out of bed and dragged her down to the garage. He popped the trunk of her car and told her to get in. I'm going to drive you to the Bronx, he snarled. I know guys there are going to show you what rape is really all about. Anne-Marie screamed and ran upstairs. Gombert, who didn't have a car of his own, took off for work in hers. She phoned a friend who drove her and the baby to a safe house in Connecticut.
00:18:13
Speaker 7: I was in a shelter, and then I was beginning to learn some of those abusive tendencies because.
00:18:20
Speaker 5: All the women there are going through the same things.
00:18:23
Speaker 1: Gombert responded by dyeing his hair black, leaving dead flowers on the windshield of her car, and stalking her at her job at Sears.
00:18:33
Speaker 7: I was fully involved in not taking the same routes home each night and just trying to live my life without being followed.
00:18:46
Speaker 1: She renewed her order of protection. She moved to a different shelter after he tracked her to the first one.
00:18:54
Speaker 5: You know, he did follow me to four different places and threatened me with a knife and told me not to scream.
00:19:02
Speaker 1: According to the case file, he didn't just threaten. He carjacked her in public. She was stuck in traffic in Danbury, Connecticut when he ran up to her window, put that knife to her throat, and told her to shove over. She screamed so loud that the drivers behind her blared their horns. Gomber dropped the knife and fled. She drove straight to the cops and told them everything. And still she couldn't escape him. He barraged her with pleading letters. All were multiple pages, saying the same thing over and over. The apologies and self-pity. Then the demand that she come back. This went on for weeks and didn't stop there. He kept coming to the mall where she worked.
00:19:51
Speaker 7: I had been contacted by security a couple of times because they knew what was going on and they would be like, hey, he's here, just staying in the back.
00:19:59
Speaker 5: So they were very protective of me, thankfully. And then.
00:20:08
Speaker 7: the back sort of back hallways of the mall we would use to get to the food court. And you're walking down the back hallway and you're reading, you know, stuff all over the walls.
00:20:21
Speaker 5: And I'm looking at it and I'm reading it. And then I'm like, holy shit.
00:20:29
Speaker 2: Yep.
00:20:30
Speaker 7: He left me fricking letters on the walls of the fricking mall.
00:20:35
Speaker 1: Here's an excerpt from one of them, as read by our colleague Rob.
00:20:40
Speaker 4: I must have hurt you much more than I'll ever know to have you hate me this badly. I'll never be able to express to you just how sorry I am for hurting you like I did. The guilt of hurting you like I did still keeps me awake and brings tears to my eyes. By hurting you as much as I totally regret it, there is nothing I can do now about it except respect your wishes and and stay away in hopes that one day you will at least give me a chance to explain.
00:21:09
Speaker 7: I took pictures and reported it as another incident because I did have a restraining order at that point.
00:21:20
Speaker 1: At the end of the day, though, she was just a kid of 19 with a toddler nowhere to turn. And then out of nowhere, the letters and stalking stopped. No explanation, no final letter from Gombert. He just went dark one day. Meanwhile, she learned a troubling fact. Gomber was pursuing a friendship with Robin Murphy. He called her house off and saying he was desperate to be in touch with Anne-Marie. He begged Robin to talk to him at the laundromat, then go mediate with Anne-Marie on his behalf.
00:21:55
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, I was in the middle of that, even though I wasn't there.
00:21:59
Speaker 1: Having quit her job at ShopRite, she hadn't seen Robin in weeks. her at home to try and warn.
00:22:05
Speaker 7: Her when i left him i did reach out to her um when i lived in a woman's shelter for a period of time but i just told her to be careful around him.
00:22:19
Speaker 6: If you could have talked to her on the phone if you could have reached her when you called her that time what would you have told her.
00:22:26
Speaker 7: That he's probably not what he appears to be um That he was unstable.
00:22:36
Speaker 5: And that you should probably keep your distance.
00:22:41
Speaker 1: Three days after Gompert pulled a knife on Anne-Marie, Robin Murphy vanished forever. Anne-Marie would spend years replaying that message in her head, agonized that she hadn't done more to warn her. Five years ago, I reached out to Gombert in prison. I was winding down nine months of reporting and needed to speak to him for comment. Over the course of two phone calls, we talked for a half hour. Both calls ended with angry hang-ups. You heard one of them at the end of season one. They're all telling the same story about you.
00:23:34
Speaker 5: Your M.O.
00:23:35
Speaker 2: Never varies.
00:23:36
Speaker 1: Several months later, though, I got a letter from Gombert. Though addressed to me, it included a copy of a second letter. one he'd sent to an ex-girlfriend in 2017. In the body of that letter, he wrote hundreds of words about Robin. Recently, I re-read both of those letters, scanning them for clues about his relationship with Robin and any breadcrumbs about the night she went missing. The first thing Gombert writes about is how he relied on Robin's support during his breakup with Anne-Marie. My colleague Rob reads some excerpts from those letters.
00:24:13
Speaker 4: Now let's talk a little about Robin. I was going through pure hell with Anne-Marie. Robin was there for me. Robin always did her best to make me laugh and smile. I did tell her that I didn't always treat Anne-Marie well either. In fact, I could be a complete asshole at times. Her answer to that was that she knew that she had eyes.
00:24:35
Speaker 1: Then he writes his account of the night Robin went missing.
00:24:39
Speaker 4: The last time that I saw her, it was outside the laundromat. Well, we talked for about five to 15 minutes or so. She had to go see her boyfriend and then make a phone call. Then she was going to come back and try to talk to Anne Marie for me. The only thing that I never told the police is what that phone call she was going to make was about. The call was to some guy that she was supposed to get some weed from for me and her.
00:25:04
Speaker 1: As I read that, it struck me that Gombert was doing what he does, pointing the finger at anyone but himself. and casting suspicion on an unnamed third party, a mysterious weed dealer in Carmel. His inference couldn't have been more obvious. The weed dealer had snatched Robin, not him. But here's the problem with Gombert's implication. Robin Murphy didn't smoke weed. We talked to everyone we could find who knew her as a teen. And to a man and woman, they all said the same thing. Robin Murphy was no pothead. So no, Robin didn't call a drug dealer from Burger King. But back to Gombert's letter and his version of the facts.
00:25:47
Speaker 4: It was raining on and off that night. When she left to walk over to Burger King where her boyfriend worked, I stood there and watched her until she was around 60, 80 feet from Burger King. Then went inside and started cleaning the laundromat. A little bit later, 10, 20 minutes, I realized that I had forgotten to bring my dirty laundry with me. as I usually did at least once a week. So I went home real quick and grabbed it, came straight back, and put it into the wash.
00:26:15
Speaker 1: That's the April 9th timeline, according to Gombert. But even by his telling, there's a significant hole, a span of about an hour in which no one saw him.
00:26:25
Speaker 5: By that time, it was raining again.
00:26:28
Speaker 4: I cleaned up some, collected all the trash, did what I could with customers still there. It was pouring when I ran out to put the trash into the dumpster. And I was soaked by the time I got back into the laundromat.
00:26:43
Speaker 1: Now here's what we do know about the day Robin vanished. It's pulled entirely from police records and witnesses. The afternoon of Palm Sunday, April 9th, 1995, Gombrich called Robin's house and left a message for her. We don't know what it said, but we do know this. That evening, she grabbed the keys and blew out of the house in a hurry. She didn't even bother to put on makeup, which for Robin was unheard of. Peeling out in her mom's wagon, she swung past the cemetery and made the short drive to Shoprite Plaza. Next, per Robin's case file, she pulled into the lot and parked by Burger King. There she ran into Gombert. The cops asked Gombert what happened next. He said that Robin got into his car and they drove the 60 or so yards to the laundromat. There he said they spent about 15 minutes chatting in his parked car. That chat, he said, was all about Aunt Marie and his hopes that Robin could help him win her back. At that point, said Gombert, Robin got out of the car and started back to Burger King on foot. The time was 7.30 and she needed to use their payphone. That was the last time he saw her, said Gombert. But Robin never made it to Burger King. Contrary to what Gombert told police, however, Multiple witnesses placed Robin in the laundromat that evening. One of them says Robin made a phone call from the payphone there. And we know her friend James missed a call from her around the same time. Jeremy, you'll recall, managed the Burger King that night. He remembers seeing Gombert in the drive-thru lane. By then, it was after 9 p.m.
00:28:29
Speaker 12: He just drove his car around the building and stopped at the window, did not order food, just stopped directly at the window. And I opened up the window and asked, you know, what's up? And he says, hey, is Robin in there? And I, you know, look over into the dining room, don't see her in her spot. And I said, no, she's not there. He says, you know, she stood me up. She was supposed to meet me.
00:28:51
Speaker 1: Hours later, says Jeremy, Gomber drove through again, asking once more if Robin was there. That's when he huddled outside with Mark Stein. Mark's the kid who worked there with Matt. He was seen that night whispering and laughing with Gombert out by the Burger King dumpsters.
00:29:12
Speaker 12: Standing close by so he can see like around the corner for when I'm coming so he can kind of dart back into work. So he's probably standing there and Howard's sitting in the car still. So he's like talking through the window and it It just felt odd to me. It seemed like he was, you know, trying to tell me that, you know, say that, oh, I never saw her.
00:29:34
Speaker 1: Did it feel like he was establishing an alibi?
00:29:37
Speaker 12: Right away, that's, it felt, and then very next day, that's what I was telling people.
00:29:42
Speaker 1: Sharon, who worked that night at Burger King, thought that was plenty weird, too.
00:29:47
Speaker 11: Why is he coming in saying Robin stood him up? Where is she? But then he's telling the detective he saw her. So that was the first thing we thought was suspicious.
00:30:03
Speaker 1: Days later, Jeremy's co-workers searched the hill behind Shoprite. There they found Robin's personal things scattered in the brush. But her so-called friend Gombert wasn't part of that search. It was then that the cops went looking for Gombert again. They made their way to his last known address, the house of his old friend Willie McCracken. McCracken had let him flop there in the weeks before Robin vanished. McCracken confirmed that on the night she went missing... Gombert came back there around 9 p.m. Then said McCracken he headed out again, which left an hour of Gombert's movements unaccounted for. Next, Willie told the cops that Gombert had left town, sold his furniture, cleared out in a rush. Why'd he leave, asked the cops. Willie told them about a conversation he'd had with Gombert, in which Gombert said the cops had found a shirt behind Shopperite. Bloody shirt belonging to Robin Murphy. There's no mention of a bloody shirt in the case file, because no clothes were found in any of the searches. Only Gombert raised that detail while speaking to Willie. Oh, and one last thing Willie told the cops. He said Gombert told him he was sick of being blamed for, quote, everything bad that happens in this town, unquote, and that he was going back to his father's house in Connecticut. A day later, Gomber was found on the lawn of his father's house. He'd opened a box of sleeping pills and downed a handful of them. Soon he was parapsychotic, incoherent, and soaked in his own urine. And close to death.
00:31:46
Speaker 2: The End.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: The Devil's Quarry is a production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company No. 1. I'm your creator and host, Paul Solitarov. Executive producers are Jason Flom, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardus, and Gilbert King. Our senior producer is Hannah Beal. Our producers are Jackie Pauley, Austin Smith, and Kathleen Horne. Our field reporter is Kathleen Horne. Our editor is Matthew Nelson. Production support from Cara Kornhaber. Fact-checking by Peter Bresnan. Our sound designer is Britt Spangler. And our engineer is Austin Smith. Original music arranged and produced by Alexis Quadrato at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Head of production, Matthew Nelson. Head of marketing and operations, Jeff Clyburn. Publicist, Nathaniel Baruch. Art Director, Andrew Nelson. Social Media Manager, Sarah Gibbons. Legal Review provided by Gibson Dunn. And our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is performed by Alexis Quadrato at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Vocals by Rob Reddy of California Corns. Written by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick at the Florida Department of Corrections Hardy Correctional Facility. If you have any information to share about the events covered in this series, please call 1-888-257-7694.
