Full Transcript for Chapter 6 | The Warrant

2 of The Devil's Quarry. Almost six years after Robin Murphy disappeared, Detective Brian Kors made a breakthrough in her case. Jane Gunderman showed him a cheap tan suitcase stashed in her cottage basement. Inside it were 12 pairs of girls' and women's underwear, each of them sealed in Ziploc baggies. Kars sent a lot of them out for DNA testing. One of them was consistent with a control sample taken from Robin's cutoffs. Kars concluded it was a match. That link was Dr. Frankenstein's lightning bolt. It jolted a dead case back to life. Kars called the Murphys in straight away. He wanted to tell them the news before he told the press. Sure enough, the local papers ran headlines once they got word. By then, Karst had essentially started afresh. Talked to anyone he could who'd been connected to Robin, except for the psychics and civilian detectives. He spoke to Robin's dear friend, James Blaisdell. 00:05:09 Speaker 5: He presented himself as a new, young, hip type of detective. He goes, look, I understand what it was like in the 90s. I'm not looking for spookies or... or ghosts and goblins. I'm not looking for anything like that. I just want to find out from you, from your own words, what happened. 00:05:36 Speaker 1: And Kars spoke to anyone who could tell him about Gombert, including most of the people you've heard from in this series. One of those people was Gombert's long-suffering ex, the young woman we're calling Anne-Marie. Kars kept coming back to her about written statements she made. One in particular stood out to him, dated eight months after Robin disappeared. It had to do with physical evidence tied to Robin. Our reporter Kathleen Horan reads from Anne-Marie Swarn's statement. 00:06:09 Speaker 6: On the Thursday that Robin's personal belongings were found behind ShopRite, a large plastic bag with my personal belongings was put by my father's Jeep in the front yard. My mother took the items out of the bag. and put some things away. I didn't help her. I was kind of upset that Howard had apparently been to my house. 00:06:30 Speaker 1: Yes, on the same day Robin's friends found her things behind ShopRite, Gombert left a bag with Anne Marie's folks. In that bag of clothes was something that belonged to Robin, but Anne Marie didn't see it right away. She was so sickened by even the thought of Gombert that she didn't go through that stuff for a month. 00:06:51 Speaker 7: I just remember getting that, opening it up, and seeing the mace and going, that's not mine. 00:06:58 Speaker 1: She thought back to an evening she'd spent with Robin. 00:07:02 Speaker 7: I remember one of the times that she was at the house, I believe she found that mace. So I knew that looked like the one she had found. 00:07:12 Speaker 1: Several months before she vanished, Robin was at the flat Anne-Marie shared with Gombert. Robin showed them a can of Maysheet found in the ShopRite parking lot. It had a distinctive white cap, says Anne-Marie. 00:07:27 Speaker 6: Did you

think to bring it to police right away? 00:07:29 Speaker 7: I think I brought it up to them because it wasn't mine. I don't know if it was hers, but it wasn't mine. 00:07:38 Speaker 1: It was another piece of evidence that, for Karst at least, connected Gombert to Robin Murphy. 00:07:44 Speaker 7: Detective Karst and I had phone conversations before. 00:07:48 Speaker 2: For numerous years. 00:07:49 Speaker 7: And I think he really wanted to try and find out what was happening. 00:07:53 Speaker 1: But Karst needed more than a can of mace to take a run at Gombert, something that definitively belonged to Robin. Gombert Sr., as you've heard, had a small, filthy cottage in New Fairfield, Connecticut, just 14 miles east of Carmel, New York. 00:08:11 Speaker 2: This was a summer home. That had never been converted. 00:08:14 Speaker 3: There was no septic system, and there would be sewage in the yard, and it smelled terrible. 00:08:20 Speaker 1: That's Barry, the neighbor who wanted to install a fence for his dog. The problem was the two Gomberts living next door. 00:08:28 Speaker 3: The houses were 20 feet apart, and there was a fence in between. 00:08:34 Speaker 2: My property was like an L-shape. 00:08:36 Speaker 3: Like three parts of a square, and then his property was like nested into that fourth square. So I kind of surrounded him on two sides. 00:08:45 Speaker 1: All Barry wanted was a tidy lawn and yard. But the Gomberts kept dumping their trash on his lot, which extended to the woods behind it. 00:08:54 Speaker 3: They had a garage that there wasn't a square inch of space. It was filled with junk and car parts and dirty old engines and You know, when he decided he didn't want something, he just kind of chucked it in the woods. 00:09:08 Speaker 1: Detective Kars was curious about that garage and any other cranny that might hide proof of Gombert's crimes. His curiosity had been piqued by another of Gombert's exes, Jim Gunderman. 00:09:23 Speaker 8: His dad's attic at his dad's house. And that's the only thing I can tell you is where that would be where stuff is. 00:09:31 Speaker 1: Jane said that the attic was Gombert's hidey-hole, the place he stashed the stuff he wanted no one to see. After talking to Jane, Kors did a bit of recon. He drove by Gombert's house with a Connecticut cop to take photos of the exterior and to track Gombert's seniors' comings and goings. But to actually search the house, he'd need a warrant, which wasn't as simple as it sounds. He'd have to apply for an out-of-state warrant in a six-year-old cold case to boot. He sweated each detail in his application to a judge. There's several drafts of it in the file. Kars rewrote his findings to make his best pitch for the evidence he hoped to find. While we wait on that judge's decision, let's talk about no-body murders. Those are, of course, killings in which no corpse is ever found, which was the sort of case Detective Kars was pursuing. Not a missing girl or pissed-off runaway

case. No, a girl who'd been snatched and killed that rainy night in April, Palm Sunday of 1995. No-body murders are devilishly tricky to bring to trial. With no remains, it's hard to prove that someone's even dead. But a body isn't the only thing that can prove a person has died. Instead, the prosecution can rely on evidence that shows they're no longer alive. As in, no phone calls, no sightings, no activity in their accounts. Legally speaking, they have ceased to live their life. And though no body cases don't often get to trial, When they do, they're successful more often than not. In fact, according to FBI specialists, when prosecutors try no-body killings, they win convictions 86% of the time. That's what Kars was trying to build, a winnable no-body case. After reviewing the warrant application, the judge cleared the way for him. Kars got his warrant to search the Gombert house on grounds. On April 25th, 2001, two Carmel detectives went warrant in hand into Howard's father's house. Gombert Sr. 's mom had died by that point, and Gombert Jr. was in jail awaiting trial for the crime of raping seven-year-old Sarah Lindley. But his dad still lived in the house. On that day, the cops found no one home, so they went in through an unlocked window. Jane Gunderman described the place to us. 00:12:41 Speaker 8: You walk in, there's the kitchen, here's the living room. You walk to the little hall, and there's a bedroom that's a twin-size bed and a full-size in the other bedroom and the bath right in the middle. 00:12:54 Speaker 2: That's it. 00:12:55 Speaker 8: That's the extent of the house. 00:12:57 Speaker 1: Now, in those days, cops didn't wear body cams or capture searches on video. But from photos the detectives took that day, we can see some of what they saw Climbing in through the kitchen window, they swerved past heaps of clutter on the counters. Bags of trash hung from drawer handles or heaped up on the floor, as if someone had started to clean the place, then dropped dead from exertion. In the hall, they threaded through hip-deep junk. Big bags of cat litter and busted car parts. There was so much rubbish underfoot they could barely see the front door. In the smaller room, old desktops took up most of the space. One source told us that Gombert Sr. was an avid consumer of porn. There were stacks of VHS tapes on the shelves. One of those tapes was labeled, Finally, but its contents aren't detailed in the case file. 00:13:57 Speaker 8: If you saw this place, you would be like, oh my God, oh my God. 00:14:01 Speaker 3: He had all these AM radios in the kitchen reporting police information. 00:14:06 Speaker 2: And it was very noisy. To me, it was just another world. 00:14:10 Speaker 8: It gave me the heebie-jeebies. 00:14:14 Speaker 2: It was very dirty. 00:14:16 Speaker 8: I had to clean it up my way so I could cook, at least, because there wasn't even cooking room with everything around. 00:14:28 Speaker 1: It also bears saying that in his letters to me and my team, Gombert brought up videotapes he had. And no, they weren't footage of birthday parties or joyous family events. It seems he'd rigged up camcorders around the house. Though to what end is known only to Gombert. 00:14:46 Speaker 6: He had said something about you at his father's house, and he had a camera installed. 00:14:51 Speaker 2: Is there any truth to. 00:14:52 Speaker 4: That, or. 00:14:54 Speaker 8: In the shower. 00:14:55 Speaker 7: Wait, what? 00:14:58 Speaker 8: It was a big recording thing. A video cam hanging from the light. 00:15:04 Speaker 1: Jane would see the red light blinking at her while she washed her hair. 00:15:08 Speaker 8: I know it was recording me, but what was I going to do? I had to take a shower. I said, well, if you guys are that desperate, here you go. 00:15:16 Speaker 1: We don't know if Jane was featured in any of the tapeses from that search. That's known only the Carmel detectives, who presumably viewed the footage. But there were other corners of the house to search. One in particular was the attic. It was only accessible from outdoors via a ladder to a second-story window. When the cops climbed up there, they saw stacks and stacks of boxes and duffel bags strewn across the floor. There in the mess was a manila folder that immediately caught their eye. It contained newspaper stories about Robin's disappearance. Gombert had clipped and saved them all. The Carmel cops bagged the items of interest and brought them back to the station. If those things were forensically tested, there's no word of it in Robin's file. That's not, however, the last word on searches and seizures. Some months later, Kars got an email out of the blue. It came from Barry, the Gombert's next-door neighbor. He'd found something discarded on the corner of his lot that the Gomberts used as their dump site. 00:16:28 Speaker 3: First thing I found was a woman's handbag that was totally deteriorated with undergarments in the handbag. You naturally were like, oh, somebody lost this. Let me go through and see if there's an ID and I can return it to them. Because there was like some bracelets and, but it was all in a state of filth and decay from being in the woods. 00:16:55 Speaker 2: That was the first handbag. 00:16:57 Speaker 3: The second handbag I found did have a person's identification in it. And that's when the alarm went off in my head that there was a problem. Like, wait a minute, two handbags and this creepy guy with a young girl next door. 00:17:14 Speaker 1: He's referring to the time he saw Gombert Jr. on a blanket with a much younger girl. It's possible, though not likely, that the girl was Anne-Marie. Given Gombert's obsession with teens and tweens... She could have been any number of girls. 00:17:29 Speaker 2: Over the course of time, that really bothered me. 00:17:34 Speaker 3: So I took the wallet out of the second hand bag I found and that one hadn't been there for as long as the other one. It seemed

like maybe it was in the debris in the brush for a year or two. I could still, there's driver's license cash in the wallet and I called the number on the driver's license and asked for the woman to say, hey, I found your purse. And a gentleman answered the phone who was her father, who didn't say much to me, but he said, I'll come over and get it. 00:18:12 Speaker 2: He came over, he introduced himself, he's very pensive with me. 00:18:17 Speaker 3: And he, after I talked to him a little bit and he realized I wasn't like part of this really sleazy gang of people I lived around. He said, my daughter got raped in that house. And he pointed to a house up the street, which was the Mullins house. 00:18:39 Speaker 1: Barry knew all too well about that house. Danny Mullen, a close friend of Gombert's, lived there. 00:18:46 Speaker 3: I went up there one time because my mailbox was adjacent to his. And like, the guy never got his mail. Again, it was overflowing. So I said, I'm going to use the mail to go up there and hand it off to him and say, hey, just thought you might want this. But when I went up there, there's nobody inside the house. The door was open. So I brought the mail in and put it on the table that was kind of near the door. 00:19:14 Speaker 2: And it was really disgusting in there. 00:19:17 Speaker 3: Like very little furniture, beer bottles, cigarette butts put out on the floor. 00:19:24 Speaker 2: I mean, pardon my English, it was a shithole. 00:19:27 Speaker 1: But back to the father of the girl who owned the purse. 00:19:31 Speaker 3: He said to me, point blank, the guy who raped her, his name was Howard. And he took the purse and he was broken up. And he thanked me and he got in the. 00:19:45 Speaker 2: Car and left. 00:19:47 Speaker 3: It shocks you when you think he's going to say, say, oh, thank you so much for returning this. And he tells that story. 00:19:54 Speaker 1: The purses, the warning from Montgomery Sr. about his son, the all-night parties and drugs at the house across the street. Barry started fearing for himself and his pets. He never left them home when he went to work. And then the winter after he bought the place, he saw footprints in the snow around it. Someone was clearly casing his house when he wasn't there. It was time for Barry to do his own dig into the neighbors. 00:20:23 Speaker 3: I wanted to see, like, what's going on here? And at the time, you know, there was no internet or anything. I went down and did the microfiche thing in the New Fairfield Library and the Danbury Library. 00:20:38 Speaker 1: Microfish for younger listeners is how archives used to be saved. 00:20:43 Speaker 3: I just wanted to understand because I was getting a really creepy feeling, not only from the Gombert's house, but from the people at the top of my street, the Mullins. 00:20:55 Speaker 1: As he scrolled through back issues of the local papers, he found Gombert Jr. 's name over and over. 00:21:02 Speaker 3: His name came up, I think, in the Danbury News Times about his girlfriend in a laundromat or something like that and somebody got in a laundromat complaining about him and that's when the bell went off and finally I put it all together and wrote that letter. 00:21:20 Speaker 1: That email landed in Kars' inbox in March of 2002. Kars drove to New Fairfield to talk to Barry about the purses and to see if he'd witnessed anything at the Gombert house that might help him solve his case. 00:21:34 Speaker 3: The police came and specifically asked me about Like the laundromat. And, you know, they were searching for a missing girl from the laundromat. And they, you know, all I could tell them was I found purses. 00:21:51 Speaker 1: Shortly thereafter, Barry put his house up for sale and left the town of New Fairfield for good. On the day his colleagues searched the Gombert house, Detective Karst was elsewhere, by design. And why wasn't Karst there? Because he was springing an ambush on someone else. That someone else being Howard Gombert Jr. It was Karst's intention to confront Gombert in prison, while the Carmel cops were tossing his father's house. To prep for that ambush, Karst would have first read the notes of a cop named Edward Grant... Grant, a lieutenant with the New York State Police, was the expert profiler who'd assessed Howard Gombert in the days after Robin vanished. The first line read, But Karst also called a profiler with the BAU, short for the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. We don't have Karst's notes from that chat, but we're confident they talked about strategy. because that's what profilers are really good at, teaching cops how to talk to predators like Gombert. 00:23:34 Speaker 9: He can be very charismatic. He can be likable and conversational, and he can come across as caring. 00:23:44 Speaker 1: That's Julia Cowley, a retired senior profiler with the FBI. She worked for the Bureau for 22 years and helped break one big case after another. Though she didn't work Robin's case, she was kind enough to wade through our Gombert file and give us her expert take on him. 00:24:02 Speaker 9: I'm not saying he's caring, but he can be. So that tells me he likely can read people well, and he's likely reading the interviewer pretty well. 00:24:14 Speaker 1: She helped us understand what Karst was up against in Gombert. 00:24:18 Speaker 9: What I saw as a main feature is control in the way people interpreted him and their interactions with him and his own writings. When I looked across the relationships that he had, you repeatedly see control, domination, difficulty tolerating rejection or defiance. 00:24:44 Speaker 1: She also told us how she'd have prepped Detective Karst before he sat with Gombert. 00:24:50 Speaker 9: Somebody like Gombert, clearly he's not just going to confess. So you want him to talk, and he does like to talk. So giving him that opportunity to demonstrate something that the interviewer doesn't know or he thinks that he doesn't know.

00:25:09 Speaker 1: Having interviewed Gombert several times, I can confirm he's a master at pressing your buttons. That's precisely what you can't let him do, says Cowley. Instead, you humble yourself before him and make him think he's the alpha in the room. 00:25:25 Speaker 9: I wouldn't argue with him because that just feeds his grievances and makes him mad. He clearly likes to explain things, correct people, correct the record, and prove people wrong. Give him that opportunity to do that. I would use that rather than try to fight him. 00:25:49 Speaker 1: The essential thing, she says, is to keep asking questions, even when you know he's lying to your face. 00:25:56 Speaker 9: His stories change. And you read through it and you're like, okay, that's not what he said earlier. But if he wants to say something that seems unbelievable or implausible, let him keep talking because there may be something there that, hmm, how would you know that? 00:26:13 Speaker 1: Alas, we don't have the transcript of Kars' sit-down with Gombert, but what we do have is his summary of what went down that day, in which it's clear that Kars got close to cracking Gombert. They sat together at that prison for an hour and a half. Kars told Gombert that his team was searching his dad's house even as they sat there, and that they were going over every square inch of that garage and that attic and the woods behind the house. Karst couldn't have known what the cops might find at the Gombert house, but he knew what they'd already found at Jane's place, a suitcase of underwear. Karst told Gombert that one of the pairs belonged to Robin Murphy. Karst wrote in his notes that Gombert was stunned to hear it. He told him he had no idea how Robin's underwear wound up in his suitcase. When Karst explained that DNA evidence connected the underwear to Robin, Gombert came undone. Karst wrote that Gombert seemed, quote, on the verge of tears, end quote, at various points in that visit. But while Gombert conceded that he was the last to see Robin alive, that was all he admitted. In his case notes, Karst wrote that Gombert's, quote, body language and behavior indicated he was being deceptive, end quote. But those evasions weren't admissible as evidence. And even if Gombert had copped to having Robin's underwear, It wouldn't have cinched the case. That evidence alone didn't suffice for an indictment. Not according to Julia, the ex-profiler. 00:27:53 Speaker 9: He has an excuse. I just stole them. I didn't kill her. This was harmless. I just, you know, took them. And that might not be enough for a prosecutor. 00:28:07 Speaker 1: Now, if you've ever watched Mindhunter or Silence of the Lambs, you've surely clocked the details of Gombert's panty collection. Because he didn't just toss them into a suitcase. He painstakingly wrapped and sealed each pair in separate airtight pouches. Our profiler, Julie, explained their significance. They helped Gombert not just to recall his victims, but to relive his crimes against them. 00:28:36 Speaker 9: I mean, it's troubling. You have a missing... He's in possession of her underwear. He's a violent sexual offender, you know, convicted. Many allegations as well made against him. So, I think he remains a prioritized suspect in my mind. So, whether it's enough to bring a no-body homicide case against him, that I don't know. 00:29:06 Speaker 1: But Karst was just getting started on Gombert and making excellent progress. The underwear and the can of mace, that folder of stories about Robin's disappearance, and Gombert's lack of an alibi when she vanished. All Karst needed was one more break, one last piece of proof that tied Gombert to Robin. 00:29:28 Speaker 9: Generally, when an offender kills somebody and the body's not found, they are putting that person likely in an area that is familiar to them. 00:29:39 Speaker 1: What if Karst could find her remains? He was bound and determined to do so. And there was one place in particular, a famously haunted body of water, that he planned a deep dive first. 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 Horn. Our field reporter is Kathleen Horn. 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 Californicorns. written by Leah 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. Huge thanks to Julia Cowley, who hosts the excellent podcast, The Consult, Real FBI Profilers. which covers crimes from the perspective of behavioral analysis. If you found her interview as interesting as we did, please check out her show.