Chapter 5 | Old Snapshots – Bone Valley

This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. And now the true impact story. It's the fourth week of March 1948, and a manhunt is underway.

It takes a crime like this a long time to hatch. There were three generations.

Back of this crime.

John Corey, a dangerous felon, is on the run. There's a price on his head of $ 400. $ 300 from a true crime radio show and $ 100 from a state prison warden. The tabloids of Connecticut are ablaze with the story. Corey had just been released from a long-bidden prison for robbing a jeweler as a gunpoint. He no sooner got out than he paid a call on his wife, Louise, from whom he'd been estranged for years. Now, Louise was no one's angel. She'd been charged with crimes herself, including kidnap and sex trafficking. But she seemed to have turned things around while Corey was gone. She'd settled down with a man in Danbury and was raising a daughter, a bouncy two-year-old named Sharon. Corey knocked on her door and asked

her out for a drive. Louise and her little girl got in his car. An hour later, he pulled over on a quiet lane in Canaan and shot Louise twice in the head. Twelve hours passed before someone found her on the ground, where Corey had left her to die. Corey's loaded. 38 was discovered at the scene, but Louise's two-year-old was missing. Cops found her a day later, abandoned in a car some 20 miles east of the crime scene.

She'd witnessed the murder from the back seat. That little girl, Sharon, would grow up to have her own kids. Her firstborn boy was born in 1963. Sharon named him after his father, Howard Gomber Jr. Do you hear my madness? Laughter hides my fears. Sorrows depths are endless. I'm Paul Solitarov, and this is Season 2 of The Devil's Quarry. After years of conjuring with the mayhem he's caused, I find myself grappling with a baseline question. Who is Howard Gombert? And who or what contrived to make him what he is?

A menace to the girls and women who've crossed his path. my team and I went many miles to find out what we could. We began with Gombert's boyhood in search of clues. We talked to the folks who knew him as a child in Florida and to those who met him as a teen in Connecticut. Each of them gave us a piece of this story, if not a unified theory on his nature. Howard spent much of his preteen youth in Florida. We're told he adored his mother, Sharon, who scratched out a living as a bartender. By all accounts, Sharon was a firecracker. Pretty and feisty, resourceful as all get-out.

She raised Howard and his three siblings mostly on her own. When she split with Howard's father in Connecticut in the mid-60s, she headed south with Howard and his younger sister. There she met and married roughly half a dozen men. The exact number proved hard to pin down. We don't know much about those men or what they had in common, but several of them at least had a violent streak.

Their target when it wasn't Sharon was her oldest, Howard. We heard from several sources, including Gombert's lawyer, that he was severely abused. Not just spanked or slapped, but grown man beatdowns of young Howard. Indeed, at a sentencing for sexual assault in 2002, Gombert's court-appointed counsel said that as a boy, he was, quote, forced to eat dead ants, unquote, by one of his mother's partners. Things got so bad for Gombert that in his middle teens, he left Florida to join his dad in Connecticut. At age 15 or 16, accounts vary, he moved into Gombert Sr. 's tiny cottage in New Fairfield. When he arrived, Gombert was painfully thin.

and carried a juvie criminal record, or so we're told. But if he thought he'd find refuge in his father's house, teenage Howard was sorely mistaken. Soon after he landed, Gombert met a girl named Colleen Caruso. She was an 11-year-old who lived not far from Gombert's dad. Her house, in fact, straddled the line between New York and Connecticut. One day Colleen was hanging with her grade school friends when Gomber came traipsing down the road. Gomber was dressed in black with his jacket collar popped and a Marlboro dangling from his mouth. Colleen was flattered by the older boy's attention.

He was cute. I found him to be attractive.

He quickly attached himself to her circle of friends, which the other girls found disturbing.

They were kind of like standoffish, if you will. They really didn't want him around and whatever. And I think, actually, from me being around him is how I lost my friends, I think.

But Colleen was in the throes of her first ever crush. Gombert seemed so much cooler than the boys on her block, with his Peter Frampton shag and his cowboy boots and his ready access to weed. Sometimes he'd sneak her into his house at night, which was how she met his father. Howard Sr. was a burly ex-Marine with a bad temper.

He was a machinist who liked to work on old cars and spend his time tinkering in the garage. But he wasn't the only adult in that house. There was also Howard's grandmother, Alice.

His grandmother was the boss, not his father.

She could put the fear in you, like, you know, his grandmother was a very tough person.

She used to hit him a lot, so....

Alice had competition when it came to slugging Howard. His dad was a heavy drinker with a mean right hook.

I witnessed him slapping him a lot of times, yeah. When he'd knock him down, he'd knock him down. Like he'd knock him to the ground.

Many times Alice would lock him out of the house. Gombert spent countless cold nights sleeping rough in the woods and backed up onto their yard. In the dead of winter, Colleen worried about him freezing to death in his flimsy tent.

He knew, like, he could survive in the woods like a survivalist. So what life he came from obviously couldn't have been good.

Soon enough, she became his lifeline. She'd steal food from her house and bring it to him. Things like canned soup and beans that he'd heat up on a camp stove. a warm blanket that she filled from her attic. He'd repay her first with cigarettes and beer, and then as things progressed, with weed and pills. Weeks after they met, he started forcing sex on her, which, given her age, constituted statutory rape every time it happened. And then when Gombert had earned her trust, he asked her for a little help with a project.

This was broad daylight. Raw daylight.

I was supposed to wait outside and monitor if anybody was coming home.

Gombert, she says, broke into people's houses while she stood watch outside. And what would come out of these houses?

A lot of times he had food, believe it or not.

He would go into people's fridges.

Yes.

Food, jewelry.

Food and jewelry. Things he could stuff into a bag. Those we'll hear later on. He stole other things as well, items of a far more intimate nature. Colleen felt bullied by Gombert, but powerless to break away. He had already estranged her from her friends and forced her to have sex with another boy while Gombert stood and watched. To say nothing of the times Gombert bound her hands before he raped her in his tent. Eventually, she says her mom saw bruises on her wrists and called the New Fairfield cops to They arrested Gombert, but charged him with burglary, not rape, for reasons Colleen doesn't understand. Gombert's criminal record shows that he was in and out for several years.

During which span, he made a friend in jail named Jeff.

I was in for a burglary. I was living on the street. I couldn't get a job. I didn't have a home. Nobody would hire me. So I had to eat, you know, plain and simple. That's why I committed some crimes.

Recently, our reporter Kathleen Horan met up with Joe near Putnam. They sat at a crowded park and ride on Route 52. For muscle, Kathleen had brought her chihuahua, Rufus, who may be tiny, but has the underbite of death. The years, meanwhile, have left their mark on Joe. In his fifties, he looks like the Marlboro Man, if the Marlboro Man smoked something stronger than cigarettes. Joe still counts himself a supporter of Gombert's, though they haven't seen each other in three decades.

We had no choice because it was a two-man block. It was just me and him. So either you just sit there and stare at the wall all day or you talk to the guy you're put with. We would ask, what are you in for? And he'd say, I don't know, just that.

And what are you in for? With little else to do, they chatted about their lives. and relived the rush they both got from breaking and entering the homes of neighbors and strangers.

It is an adrenaline rush, especially when the people are home. Kind of, you know, like having ice cream on top of your cake. A little more exciting, a little more fun.

Have you done that when people are home?

Yes, I did. At some point, Gombert moved to a different jail, but the two friends kept in touch.

He got away with a lot. So did I. But once I was finally able to get some work in the housing, I stopped that stuff. But even though, I'll admit it was fun.

After they got out of jail, the two found legal work. Joe says he hooked Gombert up with a construction gig, then taught him how to read a tape measure. Soon the two were roommates at a party house down the street from Howard's dad. There, Joe bought the groceries and Gomber cooked. Sometimes they went fishing in the lakes around Putnam.

They used to have the little seven-ounce beers, they called them ponies. You would get an eight-pack of ponies, put it in a bucket and let it sink down in the water so it would stay cold, and just basically sit on the shore, you know, and cast out.

Joe stayed at that house for about a year, but says the only neighbor he ever met was Gombert's dad. As tight as he was with Joe, Howard never discussed his family. But Joe had eyes, and they told him plenty.

His dad was pretty tough on him. That I do remember. Like I said, his father liked to pick on him.

How would he do that?

Like, what do you remember seeing?

Just comments.

Like a derogatory comment about what he had done. Or, you know, why didn't you do it better? Or like, what's the matter with you?

You stupid?

So like along those lines, it was in a sarcastic manner too, because unfortunately, you know, I laughed at the, you know, a lot of the comments that his dad made, because it was funny. He'd have a smile on his face and laugh about it. And, you know, sometimes like, you know, throw me a wink. So I don't think he was really too mean spirited, but Even if it's not, that could have an effect on a child growing up.

It was Fitzgerald who famously said that intelligence is, quote, the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time and still function, end quote. If he's right, then the same is true of emotional intelligence, meaning it's possible to mourn Howard Gombert's boyhood while deploring who he became in manhood. To do anything else is to ignore the facts.

Howard Gombert had no shot as a child. Just look at the men in his life. The abusers his mother kept marrying, then fleeing. The father he ran to for nurture and safety, but who beat and mocked him instead. Does that excuse what Gombert's done? No, it surely doesn't. But it does help explain his contempt for women, if not his depravity. And it goes a long way to explaining his need for control, as someone who'd been bullied since birth. It also sheds light on Gombert's weapon of choice. No, not his knife, his charm. Because when you grow to be about 5'7, 150 pounds, you don't get what you want or need by force. You get it by deceit.

by convincing the fellas that you're a good hang and convincing women that you're playful and sexy. We know, for instance, that Gombert is able to land jobs despite his criminal record. And we know he had no trouble finding new women. And so it was in 1987 when Gombert found a job at a laundromat in Brewster and a young woman with a pretty daughter. The name of that daughter will be familiar to last season's listeners. It was Rachel R., who was eight, she says, when Gombert began raping her.

The End.

Eddie C. was a teenager in Brewster, New York, in the late 1980s. He was a tall blonde boy with a first-class mullet and a cocksure swagger to match. One day, a friend told him about a new kid in town, a girl by the name of Denise Lanza, who always had a camera draped around her neck. The first time Eddie saw her, she was tearing around on her BMX bike.

She came down the hill and I saw fireworks there. I fell in love. I was a little kid and I fell in love.

Very soon, the two were an item. Though Eddie C. wasn't the kind you could just tie down. Over the summer, they invited Kathleen to their house to talk. Denise, who's still an avid photographer, spread a deck of her old snapshots on her table. Laughing, Eddie pointed to one in particular, a group of pretty girls with big hair.

If I wasn't going out with that one, I was going out with that one. If I wasn't going out with that one, I was going out with that one. But I always loved that one.

Over the years, the two of them dated a string of other people. But something always brought them back together. Decades later, they're a couple again.

I've had the same phone number for over 20 years.

And the reason why I kept the same phone number was so that he could always get a.

Hold of me.

The two of them passed photos to Kathleen while marveling at the passage of years. But those pictures weren't the reason for Kathleen's visit. It takes a certain kind of courage to confront the past, to admit mistakes and reckon with remorse. Eddie and Denise had been wrestling with memories, memories stirred by season one of our series. They'd listened to it intently, and something shifted in them. Suddenly, the things they'd seen back then looked very different in hindsight.

Where we originally all started was the Bruce Laundromat.

What do you mean it all started there?

That's like where I met Howard and all that.

By laundromat, Eddie means the one in Brewster, not the laundromat next to shop right seven years later. And he got to know Gombert while hanging around there, though he was barely a teen when Gombert was 25. Soon they were drinking buddies, despite the gap in ages. They did odd jobs together and fished the lakes that dotted Putnam.

Me and Howard used to paint the apartments. You know, I was friends with him. Drinking, getting high, fishing. We had boats all over the fucking place. If we didn't have a boat in our reservoir, we had a fucking pair of fucking locks and we stole it.

Denise knew him, too.

He was as cool as a cucumber. He was laid back, you know?

I was around a lot of other things than she was that she never took part in.

What's the other side that you saw?

I saw him violent. I saw him smack Rachel's mother in the face, backhanded her right in the laundromat. Backhanded her, pow! Like, almost knocked her fucking head off.

At the time, Gombert was living with Rachel and her mom.

It didn't matter to me, you know? I was like, oh, oh well. Now I was young. I didn't, you know? Now, forget about it.

Rachel R. is mentioned with Gombert's preteen victim, beginning when she was eight. It took years for Rachel to even hint at Denise and Eddie what Gombert was doing to her. But despite having seen Gombert slug Rachel's mom, Eddie thought Rachel was making it up.

Rachel's trying to, you know, start some shit or, you know, whatever, just get Howard out of there. We didn't understand really what was going on.

Eddie was just a kid himself back then, and it's hard to know now whether he couldn't picture such things or if he simply trusted his good-time buddy, Gombert.

I was friends with Howard and I liked Howard. So Howard couldn't do something like that. Howard's not touching her. I thought Rachel was making it up. I thought, okay, so you did something wrong. He smacked you around a little bit. Shut up and behave, you know, like that kind of thinking. You know, I didn't understand that he was doing this to that poor girl.

Denise didn't see what Eddie saw, but is grappling with her own regrets. She lived around the corner from Rachel and her mom. And though Rachel was years younger than Denise and her friends, she'd let her tag along with them.

You could see her bedroom from my kitchen window. So you could hear everything, like if they were yelling or whatever, you could hear that. And you could tell the difference whether he was mad when he came in that door or if he was chill.

One day, Denise came home and found Rachel sitting in her house. terrified and seeking protection from Gombert.

And Rachel was in my living room crying, and my mother was holding her.

Denise pauses for a moment to gather herself.

I didn't know what was going on, so I had said, what's going on?

What happened?

Denise thinks that Rachel came looking for her after a violent encounter with Gombert, but found her mom instead. The next thing she knew, someone else was at their door.

Well, her mother came down to my mother's house and said, OK, you know, you have to come home now. And she was begging my mom, please don't let me go back there.

Please don't.

Can I stay here?

Can I stay here? My mother was like, of course, you know.

Denise says Rachel's mom wanted her to come home. She said if she returned without her daughter, it would, quote, piss Gombert off even more, unquote.

And my mom put her behind her and said, no.

She's not going.

Rachel's mom went home without her daughter that afternoon.

And.

I just remember her and my mom, just my mom hugging her.

Every time I think about the stuff that he.

Did to her and the stuff that she told me.

That I failed her as my friend.

And I wonder why nobody called the cops.

Rachel only stayed with Denise for a little while, then bit her lip and went home. In the meantime, Eddie saw a lot of Gombert. Too much for his own good, in fact.

The partying, the drinking, you know, numerous girls in the shed. Numerous, numerous girls in the shed. All hours of the night.

That shed he's referring to comes up a lot when you read about Gombert's past. He'd rented it with a friend, ostensibly as a place to work on motorcycles. But that wasn't all they did there.

There was a non-stop party in there. Non-stop.

The Shed had two rooms, Eddie told us. The front room was for fixing and housing bikes. The back room, not so much. There was a sofa and a dartboard and a boombox for music.

I didn't put two and two together until years and years and years and years later.

Years later, after Rachel reported Gombert to the cops, Eddie stopped by the Shed, he says. There he saw a new girl hanging with Gombert.

Tell me what you saw.

I just went in there to, I most likely went in there to get drugs. And I knocked on the shed, and no one answered the front door, so I opened the front door, walked in the back because I heard the radio on, and she was sitting right on the couch.

Eddie didn't recognize her at the time. That would come later, when he saw her picture in the paper. and her face on missing posters around Carmel.

She was just sitting there partying, listening to music. I think she was drinking a beer, if I'm not mistaken. I can see her face right now, plain as day, right now, just talking about it. But I know she was in there. For a fact, I know she was in there.

That girl he says he saw with Gombert, it was none other than Robin Murphy. And so went that evening at Denise and Eddie's house. Hour upon hour of reflection and regret and an undertow of guilt about the past.

I'm scared for the next girl. Yeah.

That's what I'm scared of.

The couple now view Gombert as a predator and a threat, given his pending release from prison in three months. What haunts them now is the thing that still haunts me. Why did so many people who knew what Gombert was up to say and do nothing at the time? His so-called friends. The Putnam cops who kept arresting Gombert. The assistant DAs who kept charging him. Why on earth did they let him out of their clutches to go and hunt again? Though a lot of people who knew Gombert back then profess shock and regret now about him, his old friend Joe still texts him at his word when he claims he's innocent. Of course, Joe still asked that we not use his last name because, you know, vouching for a convicted pedophile isn't great for business.

I've never known him to say anything about a young girl, to leer at him, make any kind of comment whatsoever. I would find it hard to still be friends with him if he is actually guilty of those young girls.

So specifically the young girls, like it's, it's like a bridge too far.

Yeah. As far as like, you know, the Robin thing, would I still be friends with him? It's hard to say, but I'm going to say probably because sometimes people kill, but sometimes there's, extenuating circumstances, I guess you could say. Was he high on drugs? Was there something else going on? Did it just snap in the moment? And if it was just a one-time thing? I can't say that I wouldn't be friends with him, but I try and be a forgiving person, so to speak. But if he was like, oh, she wouldn't give me anything, so I snapped her neck, I'm like, all right, dude, we're done.

Six months after Robin Murphy vanished, The bones of Josette Wright were found in the Carmel Woods. By then, Gombert had decamped to his dad's address in Connecticut, where once again, he was forced to live outdoors.

He was sleeping in a hut that he made in the driveway of his father's house because he was not allowed in his father's house when he was not home.

Jane Gunderman met Gombert in 1997. As last season's listeners will recall... By the fall of that year, she was sleeping in the hut beside him. Why does father lock him out of the house this time? Because, says Jane, Gombert stole from his dad. Just like he stole from his neighbors.

You know, like on your trucks, you have a cab. You can put it on and make it enclosed. Okay, take one of those. You know, you do your slats and you make your floor. And then you make a little wall and you attach the cap to it. And that's what I was living in with a little door and you had to crawl in. on my hands and knees to get in there.

It's where she fell pregnant with Gombert's youngest daughter.

I didn't know if I was excited, scared.

I think I was a little of everything. Scared, excited, and like, oh my God, you know, like flabbergasted that I was pregnant because I'm living in a hut and peeing in a bucket.

You know, like, oh my God.

Jane's relationship with Gombert was hair-trigger tense and chock-a-block with secrets. He flatly refused to talk about his past. She only picked up fragments here and there. She knew, for instance, that he still adored his mom, though she'd sent him north to live with his brutal father. Still, Jane knew enough to be of use to the Carmel cops. We found a copy of the questionnaire they gave her in 2001, seeking intel on Gombert's makeup. Jane said that Gombert had dropped out of school young, like seventh or eighth grade young. Why?

because he was, quote, always in trouble there. unquote, she wrote. About his religious affiliation, Jane wrote one word, satanic. How often did he consume alcohol, weed, or other drugs? Daily, Jane responded. What kind of partner was he? She wrote that he loved to, quote, be the boss, unquote. His way was, quote, the only way.

He made a comment to me, things start at home, Jane.

You know that, right? I said, what did that mean? And he goes, abuse. That stuff starts at home.

Did he see himself as someone who had been abused?

He never answered that question.

He did say that there was a lot of men in and out of his mother's life.

One night, she says Gomber was talking in his sleep, actually not talking so much as screaming.

Get off of me, get off of me, leave me alone, leave me alone. And it was scary, like it was a little person's voice. And I remember thinking to myself, this is weird.

Were you with him when he had that nightmare?

Yeah, I was sleeping next to him. It woke me up.

Naturally, she knew more about his recent past. For instance, his abuse of the girls and women who came before her And how did Jane know that? Because Gombert never really let them go. He often drove to Carmel to surprise them with poppin' visits, or simply to spy on them. And yes, she knew about his past with Robin Murphy.

They were just friends when he was working at that laundromat. And that he was helping her with her boyfriend, which probably was interfering, but not helping her. if I know Howard, he was setting up the next target. He said he was the last person to see her alive. He goes, I should have known better than to say I was the last person, but I was being honest for once, he said. Something like that, real sheisty afterwards, you know?

But I knew what he meant. He meant was, I'm being honest because I didn't want it pinned on me.

Still, Jane was stunned when she saw Robin's photo in the papers.

It took my breath away when I looked at the picture because I had no idea what she looked like. And that day when I opened up that article, I almost threw up because I couldn't believe how much we looked alike.

It was just really a big.

Realization when I saw that picture.

Jane finally broke free of Gombert in the spring of 2000 by sending him off to prison. He was convicted of multiple felonies against her after a three-day siege of rapes and beatings. But that spring is significant for a second reason, because it brought the first big development in Robin's case, the appointment of a new lead cop. His name was Detective Brian Karst, and he had nothing in common with the stumblebums who'd worked the case before him.

The best detective there was Detective Karst from New York.

He was awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome man. Kars' decency and thoroughness endeared him to Jane.

I mean, he just has a way about him that makes you feel comfortable and able to talk about something that's very traumatic. And makes you feel comfortable and not your fault and not judgmental.

Jane told Kars what Howard had told her about Robin. That he and Robin had gotten so close that at one point she talked him out of killing himself. Alas, Jane didn't have the smoking gun proof that Karst was looking for. Or at least she thought she didn't. Several weeks later, the Connecticut cops did a search of Gombert's car.

They found astonishing amounts of stolen jewelry there. Women's pendants and earrings and rings and such. They found stolen cameras and camcorders and VHS tapes.

And.

They found boxes and boxes of girls' underwear in many sizes and styles. After the search, Jane decided a clean house, meaning purgent of every last trace of Howard Gomber. It was during that deep clean that she stumbled upon something.

I didn't even know it was in my house until after he left.

This was all afterwards. I had no clue.

That something in question had been stashed there by Gombert.

I was told I was never to look in it, so I didn't.

But it was after he left, I opened it up, and that's what I saw, and that's how I was like, I just opened up the bag, and I thought, no way.

Jane called the cops back to her place and took them down to the basement. My colleague Chris Neary reads Carr's memo of that visit.

While searching the basement, a reporting officer came across a tan suitcase containing a large quantity of women's undergarments, individually kept in plastic Ziploc baggies.

Yes, inside that tan suitcase, 12 pairs of women's underwear, each one of them lovingly sealed and stored in its own Ziploc bag. Carr sent those garments out for DNA testing. then went about getting something of Robin's that contained her DNA. But by that point, Robin had been missing for five years.

And the cops who'd worked her case had changed so often, her file should have come on a lazy Susan. So when Karst came by with his hat in his hand, the Murphy family blew him off. It took Karst a month of pleading to gain the family's consent. Eventually, Brian, the father, came down to the station. He'd brought Robin's compound and her cosmetics brush, and a pair of her cut-off denims. Karst sent those items for DNA testing to the New York State Police Lab, and then he waited, and the Murphy family waited. Finally, almost a year after Karst entered the frame, he got a report back from the Forensics Investigation Center. It found that the DNA from Robin's denim shorts was consistent with one of the pairs

of underwear in Gombert's collection. Karst noted that the probability of the underwear belonging to some other white girl was 1 in 2.4 billion. He concluded that it was a match. Bingo. Robin's case was officially on the boil now, and Howard Gombert was about to be on the grills. 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 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 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.

Thank you.

Chapter 5 | Old Snapshots

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