Free 'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of the Killer Spouse by Robi Ludwig, Matt Birkbeck

neighbors heard them arguing yet again, with Gail confessing to her extramarital affairs and demanding a divorce. The following day Robert made several calls to Gail’s friends and family, asking if they knew where she was. They all feared the worst.
    The police were called and Robert told them that he and his wife had argued and she left the apartment. He then attended a nephew’s birthday party in New Jersey, visited with a friend, and returned home later that night. But Robert left out one bit of crucial information, failing to tell investigators that he had rented an airplane from a New Jersey airport and he flew, alone, for two hours over the Atlantic Ocean.
    Gail never returned home, and police classified her disappearance as a missing persons case. Given her propensity toward drugs and extramarital flings, different theories developed concerning her whereabouts. Police also found an eyewitness who spotted Gail at a bagel shop around 3 P.M. , just after Robert said she left the apartment. But Gail’s family had their own theory, and they pointed the finger at Robert. Aside from what they knew about the intimate and violent details of their marriage, Robert further infuriated Gail’s family by coldly packing her personal items in trash bags. The family told police Gail didn’t just vanish into thin air. She had been murdered. The police gravitated toward the same theory, but with no body and no evidence, the case vanished just as Gail had.
    Robert moved to Las Vegas in 1989, remarried, and then moved to Minot, North Dakota, in 1995 with his second wife Janet and their infant daughter. More than a decade after Gail disappeared, a retiring prosecutor from the Manhattan district attorney’s office decided to take one last look at the cold case files, and he noticed that Robert was a pilot.
    He sent investigators to comb through logbooks at several New Jersey airports. It was at the Essex County airport that they found Robert took a two-hour flight, logged in on August 7,1985. But the logbook had been changed from the day of the original flight, July 7, 1985. Police learned that Robert had rented a Cessna 172, which does not have autopilot but can be flown for short periods without holding on to the steering wheel once cruising altitude is reached.
    Police quickly theorized that Robert had strangled Gail in their apartment, packed her body or body parts into his car, and driven to New Jersey, where he had taken off alone for two hours, during which time he had dumped Gail’s remains over the Atlantic Ocean.
    In December 1999, with no body and no physical evidence, Robert Bierenbaum was charged with the murder of his wife Gail. Nearly a year later, in the fall of 2000, armed only with circumstantial evidence, a jury convicted Robert of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison.
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    F OR the Bierenbaums, theirs was a marriage destined for violence.
    Gail was diagnosed by one therapist as having a condition called borderline personality disorder. Borderlines are notorious for having stormy relationships. First they love you, since you’re the “all good one and savior,” and then they hate you now that you’re “all bad and the devil.” Robert had been both to Gail.
    It’s not uncommon for people with this disorder to view themselves as bad and unworthy, which is why they often find themselves in abusive and dangerous relationships. They have no idea who they are and tend to feel misunderstood, mistreated, bored, and empty. These were common feelings for Gail. Borderlines’ relationships with family are also stormy and tend to shift from feelings of idealization, great admiration, and love to intense anger, dislike, and devaluation within moments, and sometimes for no real reason at all. Gail’s relationship with her family also fit this turbulent pattern. She had heated arguments with her parents prior to her marriage, but once she married, and her arguments and