In the bustling, gritty New York City of the 1980s, Dr. Robert Bierenbaum and his wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum, seemed to have it all. He was a brilliant and accomplished surgeon and pilot; she was a bright, multilingual graduate student.

From their 12th-floor apartment on the affluent Upper East Side, they looked like the perfect couple. But behind the facade of success was a dark and volatile secret. Then, on July 7, 1985, after a loud argument was heard by neighbors, Gail vanished without a trace.

Robert’s story to police was straightforward: they had a fight, and Gail left their apartment to cool off in Central Park. He claimed he never saw her again. The family’s initial frantic search for Gail turned up nothing. But as the days turned into weeks, a much more sinister picture began to emerge, centered on the man who claimed to be a worried husband.

Gail’s friends and family knew that Robert’s perfection was an illusion. He was intensely controlling and prone to frightening outbursts of rage. Early in their relationship, he had attempted to drown Gail’s cat in a toilet out of jealousy. In 1983, he had choked her on their apartment balcony until she nearly lost consciousness.

Even a psychiatrist, who evaluated Robert as part of their therapy, felt compelled to write Gail a private letter, warning her that her husband was a dangerous man and that she should leave for her own safety. Tragically, Gail believed her love could change him and chose to stay.

As the initial investigation into her disappearance stalled, one detective, Andy Rosenzweig, couldn’t let go of a strange detail about Robert’s actions on the day Gail went missing. While Robert claimed he was home all day, the detective discovered something that contradicted his story completely. A logbook at a small airport in New Jersey showed that Robert had rented a Cessna plane that morning and flown for nearly two hours out over the Atlantic Ocean.

This discovery became the foundation of a chilling theory: that Robert had ended Gail’s life during their argument, placed her in a duffel bag, and disposed of her remains in the vast, unforgiving ocean. But with no body, no weapon, and no physical evidence, it was only a theory. The case went cold.

Robert Bierenbaum moved on. He left New York, started a successful plastic surgery practice in Las Vegas, remarried another doctor, and had a child in North Dakota. He had built a new life, seemingly leaving the ghost of his first wife behind.

But in New York, the case was never truly forgotten. In the late 1990s, with Detective Rosenzweig nearing retirement, the cold case was handed to two new investigators. They decided to pursue the case with a bold and rarely successful strategy: to bring Robert Bierenbaum to trial without a body.

In 2000, fifteen years after Gail vanished, the trial began. The prosecution meticulously built a circumstantial case, calling dozens of witnesses to testify about Robert’s history of abuse and controlling behavior. They presented the airport logbook as proof of his lie.

In a dramatic move, they even showed the jury a demonstration video, proving how a single pilot could easily dispose of a weighted bag from the cockpit of a small plane mid-flight.

The defense tried to paint Gail as an unstable woman who may have run away or met with foul play at the hands of another lover. But the jury was not convinced. They found Robert Bierenbaum guilty.

For two more decades, from prison, he maintained his innocence. Then, in a 2020 parole hearing, 35 years after the incident, he finally confessed. He admitted that he had choked Gail in a rage during their argument and had, just as investigators theorized all those years ago, taken her body on a final, one-way flight over the Atlantic Ocean. After decades of lies, the truth was finally brought to the surface.