More than 20 years ago, prosecutors used circumstantial evidence to convince jurors that plastic surgeon Robert Bierenbaum murdered his wife and threw her body into the Atlantic Ocean from his plane. He has finally admitted that they were right. According to court transcripts seen by ABC7, Bierenbaum confessed to the crime in a December 2020 parole board hearing. He said he strangled Gail Katz in 1985 because he was "immature" and he wanted her to stop yelling at him. "I went flying. I opened the door and then took her body out of the airplane over the ocean," he told the hearing.
Bierenbaum, who claimed Katz had stormed out of their New York City apartment after a fight, was sentenced to 20 years to life in 2000. Dan Bibb, one of the prosecutors involved, said he was amazed to hear that Bierenbaum had confessed. "I was stunned because I always thought that that day would never come, that he would own up, take responsibility for having killed his wife," Bibb tells ABC7. He says convicting Bierenbaum with no witnesses and no body was "the toughest trial that we'd ever had." He notes that in 1983, Gail Katz told police Bierenbaum had choked her into unconsciousness, but nothing was done at the time.
In the years after the crime, Bierenbaum remarried and started new medical practices in Las Vegas and North Dakota. He was indicted after chief investigator Det. Andy Rosenzweig, who was nearing retirement, took another look at the cold case, the New York Times reported in 2000. Contradictory statements Bierenbaum had made to several girlfriends, along with the finding that Bierenbaum had altered flight logs to make it seem that he hadn't flown his Cessna 172 on the day Katz disappeared, were enough to bring the case to trial. Prosecutors filmed a recreation to show how the doctor could have flown the plane while pushing his wife's body out. Bierenbaum is still behind bars, with another parole hearing scheduled for next month. (More murder stories.)
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