'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of the Killer Spouse (8 page)

She was living in an apartment with a male friend when she met Robert Bierenbaum. He was a budding doctor who piloted small planes in his spare time, spoke five languages, was a gourmet chef, and came from a well-to-do family from New Jersey. Robert was also a perfectionist, a young man who insisted on doing things his way.

Being that Gail was a twenty-three-year-old with low self-esteem, suicidal tendencies, and no direction in life, Robert seemed a perfect catch. Gail’s family eagerly approved, hoping the union would set her on a straight and narrow path to success and happiness. Gail initially claimed she was smitten with Robert, who romanced her with night flights over the Manhattan skyline. But in reality the marriage didn’t make much sense for Gail. She wasn’t in love with Robert and worse, she didn’t even find him attractive. Still, despite her reservations he was, after all, a doctor.

So they became a couple. At Robert’s insistence Gail quit her job and moved into his apartment. But it wasn’t long after they began cohabiting that troubling signs surfaced. Gail told her friends and family that Robert needed to be in control of every aspect of her life, from her weight to her hair. He also had a vicious temper and was irrational at times, leading to loud arguments, often over nothing of great consequence.

On one occasion, Gail claimed Robert attacked her after he unexpectedly returned home and caught her smoking a cigarette in their apartment. On another occasion Gail claimed he tried to drown her cat in the bathtub in a fit of jealousy. Both incidents were reported to police.

Dependent on her husband, Gail finished college, earning her B.A. and deciding to study for a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Her graduation coincided with yet another violent turn of events as the couple drifted even further apart, with Gail seeking out and participating in numerous extramarital affairs. In 1983, just two years into their marriage, the physical abuse and constant verbal threats of violence escalated to the point where Robert sought psychiatric help, hoping to erase, or at least come to grips with, his demons. During his sessions, which would later be revealed, Robert admitted to having violent thoughts and tendencies toward his wife.

Concerned that the threats were serious, one of the doctors (with Robert’s permission) exercised his Tarasoff duty, meaning that he warned Gail that she could be in serious danger. In his letter, the psychiatrist cited Robert’s “characterological abnormalities.” For her part, Gail briefly moved out of their apartment, but refused to sign the letter. Instead she returned to Robert and remained in the marriage as her husband was on his way to becoming a top-flight Manhattan surgeon.

But as soon as she returned the domestic violence resumed, and Gail’s family pleaded with her to leave Robert. A month before she disappeared, Gail confronted her husband, demanding a divorce and threatening as leverage to publicize the letter from the psychiatrist warning that she was in danger. The letter, she said, would expose him as being psychotic, which would ruin his career.

The day she disappeared, 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.

* * * * *

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 dissatisfaction were focused and projected onto her new husband, Robert, who had his own set of pathologies, it was a toxic mix.

There’s no doubt that Gail admired her husband’s intellect and goal-directedness. He embodied what she wanted to be. A part of her knew that if she chose Robert, she could be more like him professionally and strengthen her previously underdeveloped intellectual aspect. But even with this intellectual growth spurt, Gail couldn’t help but stick it to her husband. She seemed to enjoy letting him know how much he was failing her.

People with borderline personality disorder exhibit plenty of rage and often can’t stop themselves from discharging this rage onto the person who disappoints them. They have difficulty feeling soothed and okay with the world, and because of this they blame the person they are with since it seems to them that that person is the cause of their discomfort.

Robert became the unfortunate target of Gail’s chronic and persistent upset and inability to feel good about herself. But he was the wrong guy to target these feelings onto; Gail’s behavior enraged him, made him feel murderous and out of control. He had always been able to conquer the challenges that came his way. He could fly a plane, go to medical school, become a surgical resident, even cook and play the guitar. In his mind, there was very little he couldn’t do, except win his wife’s love and admiration. This, in turn, made him angry and resentful, and his anger toward Gail was becoming lethal.

Here is a case where you have two major character pathologies somehow finding each other—Gail was a suicidal and self-destructive borderline personality, Robert was an angry and violent perfectionist who wanted complete control, and he thought with increased intensity about killing Gail, leading to an incident when he tried to strangle her. Despite the violence, and the warning from a psychiatrist that Gail was in danger, she remained in the relationship. On some level the dangerous aspect of Robert’s personality provided a macabre fascination for Gail. As uncomfortable as it was for her, it also made her feel excited and alive. Her anger toward her husband also gave her permission to have affairs with other men, argue with him, and do whatever else she wanted to do while married. What Gail didn’t realize was that Robert’s anger, and the subsequent violence, were his way of making himself whole.

Abusive husbands have an enormous need to feel good about themselves. When a man goes home to his wife he wants something to take place between the two of them that will help him to feel emotionally taken care of. The origins for this need lie in the mother/infant or young child relationship, with the mother serving as the central figure for this attachment style. The child has an enormous need to look into the eyes of his mother and see reflected back the messages “You make me happy” and “You are wonderful.” All children, especially during their earliest development, require acknowledgment from their parents. This helps a child to feel pride and take pleasure in his or her accomplishments. When children are deprived of these essential responses, and instead are subjected to criticism for their efforts, they become emotionally stunted and may lose their innate ability to feel competent and confident.

Consequently, when they become adults these deprived children are always looking to someone in the outside world to validate and recognize them. The problem is, no mother—or any other person, for that matter—can be the perfect mirror. In some cases, there is a temperamental mismatch between parent and child, so that the child feels misunderstood, unappreciated, and out of sync with his primary caregiver. When this happens a child can develop a gap in his sense of self-worth and doubt his own self-competence. He then turns desperately to the outside world for validation and even more than most people, becomes excessively sensitized to signals that hint that he is unneeded, unsuccessful, and unappreciated.

Men, like women, depend on their partner to reassure them of their self-worth. When a woman does not offer this support, if his expectations are too high or if he feels she is deliberately withholding it, many men feel lost. Some respond by proving their virility with violence and taking control. When a woman is married to an abusive and overly controlling man, she gets blamed for not providing this important feedback the way, in his mind, she promised. Such men develop a hypersensitivity to the possibility of humiliation. To defend against feeling this dysphoric state, many men engage in controlling behavior, such as emotional, verbal, or physical abuse, to eliminate the source of discomfort and regain a sense of well-being.

Robert was more dependent on Gail than she realized, and when his needs were not met, he could not tolerate his unpleasant emotional response. He knew his wife wanted to leave him and was having affairs with other men. He did not so much want to control his wife as to make her stop making him suffer and feel bad. He needed her to think well of him in order to think well of himself. His violence toward her was an attempt to regain his sense of self. Batterers, like Robert, often feel that they are exploding within or coming apart when they are threatened. In the moment that they abuse, they do not know how to defend themselves against feelings of being demonized or dehumanized. Such men also tend to feel that their spouse is intentionally making them feel this way. So, on the outside the violence and controlling battering behavior are always secondary to the primary goal of protecting oneself psychologically.

Both Gail and Robert were notorious for blaming each other for their internal emotional states. The reality was that neither of them had the capacity to deal with their own internal mental discomfort. They both pointed the finger at each other instead of taking responsibility for their own behavior and looking to themselves to deal with their negative feelings. Robert and Gail gave each other good reasons to believe the other was the primary cause of their problematic emotional and marital state.

But Gail stepped over the line when she threatened Robert’s professional existence. He had worked too long and too hard to have his career ended, especially by someone who brought on these murderous impulses with her infidelities and imperfections. He knew Gail wanted to leave him. But when she threatened to ruin his surgical career by publicizing the letter stating he was psychotic and violent, she had gone too far. Gail had embarked on an unconscious suicide mission. Just as she was on the brink of scholastic success and social independence, she pushed her husband way too far. Robert was enraged, and he was not going to let anyone or anything stop him from achieving a successful career.

Like many abusing and controlling men Robert felt his life being threatened and his internal experience, if he could describe it in words, would sound like this:
“What does she want from me? I can’t take it anymore. She’s unbearable and trying to make me feel like total garbage. She is going to ruin me, and she won’t stop until she destroys me. I’m going to explode and become completely annihilated.”

A surgeon has the power of life and death in his hands every day, and Robert was someone who, outside his home, was treated like a god and hero. But in someone like Robert, who has sociopathic tendencies and believes himself to be above the law, such godlike feelings can become lethal.