Sept. 30, 2026
Chapter 1 | Remember Me
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RSS Feed When teenager Robin Murphy goes missing, her friends and co-workers organize a search.
If you have any information related to the cases covered in this series, please call us at:
888-257-7694.
New episodes are available every Wednesday.
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The Devil’s Quarry II is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:00:00
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. It's two weeks after Halloween 1997. Snows blowing sideways and swirls and stabs, stinging the eyes of the cops and firemen gathered around Nichols Pond. That's a dark squib of water in Putnam County, New York, curtained by a stand of woods.
00:00:46
Speaker 2: If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But no one will find it.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: The onlookers stamp their feet for warmth as five men in dive suits take turns wading in. The pond hasn't frozen yet, but has the sharpness of slush as divers slide beneath the surface. Several arm lengths from the cop stand a mother and father, eyeing the ripples intently. It was a supernatural vision that launched this search.
00:01:21
Speaker 2: I remember seeing a skull in the pond. The skull was smiling and the skeleton's hands were outstretched, palms facing outward. It scared me.
00:01:36
Speaker 1: That's Penny Osborne. She was sure the skull belonged to a girl. A girl named Robin Murphy. Robin had gone missing more than two years prior. Now, long after her trail's gone cold. The cops and Robin's parents are hanging their hopes on the divers at the bottom of that pond. Well, that and Penny's paranormal prowess.
00:02:11
Speaker 3: I'm very agnostic when it comes to things like spaceships and God.
00:02:17
Speaker 1: I look more for evidence. That's Anthony DePippo, our protagonist from season one. As a man who taught himself the law in prison, Anthony's all about facts. But six years ago, when someone slipped him Robin's case file, he caught a chill on the back of his neck.
00:02:36
Speaker 3: I feel like, you know, like when I get spooked, it's authentic.
00:02:43
Speaker 1: He was sitting in the study of his penthouse apartment, which he'd purchased with a chunk of the $ 12 million payout. for his wrongful conviction in the murder of 12-year-old Josette Wright. Now, Anthony's a big man, 6'5, and 300 pounds easy. But while reading through that scene, he heard a loud bang behind him and catapulted out of his chair.
00:03:07
Speaker 3: And the picture had fell over, and it got a dent in it, and I got spooked.
00:03:15
Speaker 1: In his parlor, he saw a scene from a paranormal flick. His favorite painting had dropped off the wall and been gashed by a selfie stick. It was a portrait of Anthony and his hero, Hulk Hogan. That stick had opened a gouge over the Hulkster's eye. If ghosts are phantoms with unfinished business, Robin Murphy had just dropped her card off.
00:03:40
Speaker 3: I'm bugging out. This is really kind of scary. And I didn't look at it anymore that night.
00:03:48
Speaker 1: I first met Anthony six years ago, around the time he got hold of Robin's file. My deep dive feature in Rolling Stone helped to quit his best friend Andy Krivak, who'd also been falsely convicted of Josette's murder. Anthony's false conviction for her murder was the pinch point of his life. But then a second girl vanished in the span of six months in the sleepy little town of Carmel, New York. No, Anthony knew that the job wasn't done. Josette's killer was still out there. And the man who disappeared Robin as well. In Anthony's mind, the same man was responsible for both girls. The devil of Putnam County. And so last year, he asked me to return with my shovel. He handed me a copy of Robin's case file. I shared it with my team. We divvied up its 3,000 pages and promptly went to work. In the episodes that follow, we'll train her floodlights on a phantom.
00:04:54
Speaker 2: I don't think she realized how dangerous this situation was.
00:04:57
Speaker 1: On every move by those Carmel cops.
00:05:00
Speaker 4: They didn't really take the whole thing seriously, I don't think.
00:05:04
Speaker 1: They actually thought they were going to get a confession out of him. On every lead they followed.
00:05:10
Speaker 4: And that's exactly what made us all think he had something to do with it. You want to see a real ghost?
00:05:18
Speaker 2: Hell yeah.
00:05:20
Speaker 4: Why?
00:05:21
Speaker 1: Because the devil's in those details. And we'll find him there.
00:05:31
Speaker 5: Do you hear my madness?
00:05:40
Speaker 1: Laughter hides my fears.
00:05:47
Speaker 4: Sorrow's depths are endless. This valley.
00:05:59
Speaker 5: Appears. I'm Paul Solitarov, and this is Season 2 of The Devil's Quarry. she was my best friend tina scorza was raised in putnam county her best friend robin murphy was not.
00:06:40
Speaker 6: She moved to carmel um our freshman year of high school and you know she would like go to school and like doc martin's and fishnet stockings and you know cut off jean short in the middle of.
00:06:53
Speaker 1: Winter Tina and Robin rode the school bus together. Straight away, the two girls hit it off. Robin hipped Tina to her favorite bands, The Clash, The Pixies, The Ramones. She might have been exotic for small town Carmel, New York, but Robin would have fit right in in hipster Brooklyn.
00:07:15
Speaker 6: She was nothing like any of my other friends, you know? So, but we hung out like a lot together, like a ton.
00:07:24
Speaker 1: It was Tina who introduced Robin to James Blaisdell. James was another recent arrival in Carmel, having moved there from California. Within days of meeting Robin, James developed a crush on her.
00:07:39
Speaker 4: She looked like an introvert, but she acted more like an extrovert because she was always getting things going and she was always energetic. Now picture me. I am dressed up like a little banker. on casual Friday with just like a polo shirt, some khaki pants. And we started talking and realizing that we had more and more in common, you know, making fun of movies, just driving around, listening to music. We both were aspiring to be writers of some sort. We loved reading books. So we had a lot of stuff bouncing off of each other, which really drew me to her.
00:08:24
Speaker 1: It's not hard to suss out Robin's influences. She was an avid reader of Anne Rice novels and had plans to become a writer herself. But Carmel high school bored her stiff, and after a short stint in Wackett, she dropped out for good at 16. Now, practically every kid in Carmel bitched about being bored, but Robin actually did something about it. She got a full-time job at ShopRite and started saving for a car. and make plans to get as far from Putnam as she could once she'd banked enough cash.
00:09:00
Speaker 7: I was in charge of all the cashiers, making sure everything runs smooth.
00:09:06
Speaker 1: Julie Sacara was the customer service manager at that shop right in Carmel. Before shifts, Robin would don the store smock and pin her name tag over the logo. But her freak flag stood out nonetheless.
00:09:20
Speaker 7: She was always in black, always. Everything was black, black, black, black, black. But she was a nice girl, you know. She never called in sick. Her tray was always good. She was never short.
00:09:34
Speaker 1: Julie saw something rare in Robin, the spark of leadership. She offered her a big promotion.
00:09:40
Speaker 7: I was thinking about putting you in pharmacy.
00:09:43
Speaker 2: What do you think about that?
00:09:45
Speaker 7: She just said, oh, I'd love to do that.
00:09:47
Speaker 4: I said, are you sure? And she said, yes.
00:09:51
Speaker 1: All these years later, Julie, who's now in her 60s, recalls their last chat clearly.
00:09:57
Speaker 7: That day when she got off of work. as being the cashier, she went over to the pharmacist and said, Hi, my name is Robin, and I'm going to start working with you next week.
00:10:12
Speaker 1: And with that, Robin released herself to a karma weekend. It was a cold, windy Friday, and the night promised rain. But it's safe to assume she walked out on a cloud. And then Monday rolled around, and Robin never showed for work. Nor did she call in sick or late. But for that afternoon, April 10th, 1995, she was officially listed as a missing person by the Carmel Police Department. On the night before she vanished, Saturday, April 8th, 1995, Robin Murphy was hanging with James Blaisdell.
00:11:00
Speaker 4: We were watching the BBC's production of Whose Line Is It Anyway? And we were laughing at that. And she was mentioning that tomorrow, can she come over here, meaning my house? And I said, well, we can. But it's going to have to be sometime after 7 or so because I'm going out to dinner.
00:11:23
Speaker 1: The next night, James went out with his family. When he got home, there was a voicemail waiting for him.
00:11:31
Speaker 4: And there was a message from Robin on my answering machine asking for me to please pick up. And she will try again later.
00:11:42
Speaker 1: But there was something in Robin's voice that sounded off. She was frightened. Even frantic.
00:11:50
Speaker 4: She didn't sound well put together. She sounded like she was in desperate need to talk to somebody. It sounded hurried. Fearful.
00:12:03
Speaker 1: It's been more than 30 years now, but that tape is still burnt into his brain.
00:12:09
Speaker 4: James? Are you awake? I need to talk to you. James, are you there?
00:12:18
Speaker 1: He couldn't have known it then, but.
00:12:23
Speaker 4: That was the last time I heard her voice.
00:12:34
Speaker 1: The next morning, James was sound asleep when something woke him with a jolt.
00:12:39
Speaker 4: I was in my house, and I was lying in my bed. And the next thing I know, I've got people banging on my window. And I look out the window, and it's Matt and Mark. And then they're saying, is Robin here? And I'm like, no.
00:13:03
Speaker 1: Matt Esposito was Robin's boyfriend. An imposing kid, he dyed his long hair purple, painted his fingernails black, and rocked a floor-length duster. The other kid, Mark Stein, was small but intense. Both of them worked at the Shoprite Plaza, pulling late shifts at Burger King. James told them about his botched plans with Robin the night before.
00:13:28
Speaker 4: And they said that they saw her car in the Shoprite parking lot, but she's not in it. Her bag isn't in it. You know, There's nothing taped to it, like saying it broke down or anything. And she wasn't at her house.
00:13:50
Speaker 1: James quickly threw some clothes on and jumped in Matt's car. The three of them went off in search of Robin.
00:13:57
Speaker 4: We're driving around the parking lot. We're looking to see if we can see anything, or maybe she dropped her bag. Then we're driving around the neighborhood, seeing if we can find anything. Then... We are trying to periodically get a hold of Tina or anybody else we can think of. And at one point, Mark mentioned that there is a trail behind the shop right. And he says he'll go back there and see if he sees anything.
00:14:35
Speaker 1: Matt and James waited in the car for him.
00:14:38
Speaker 4: I think he wanted to just go by himself because he said he knew the area better.
00:14:45
Speaker 1: Mark ducked around the shop right and up the hill behind it.
00:14:49
Speaker 4: And he came back, you know, maybe 15, 20 minutes later.
00:14:56
Speaker 1: But Mark said he saw no sign of Robin up there. He got back in the car and they took off again, driving around Carmel with their eyes peeled. By now it was after lunch and no one had notified the authorities, so Robin's friend Tina phoned the cops. The Carmel PD logged her call at 3.30 on April 10th, then drove to Shoprite Plaza to ask around. They spoke to Matt and James and to Robin's colleagues at Shoprite. They pegged her disappearance to 7.15 the night before, when she'd stepped out of her sedan at Shoprite Plaza and began walking toward Burger King. Alas, Robin never made it the hundred steps there. Questioned by the cops, Mac described Robin as depressed. But he also told them she didn't drink or take drugs. She would never just run off. To the contrary, she was living for a concert the following night. They were going to Poughkeepsie to see her favorite band. Which band, asked a cop, who then wrote down the answer. His note reads... a group called Ramones. Then cops called the airline desks to see if she'd flown to Phoenix. That was where she'd lived more or less happily until her family moved to Carmel two years prior. The cops also called her bank. Robin hadn't touched a dime of her small savings. But their suspicion that Robin had run off persisted. Mark Stein told the cops that just before she vanished, Robin gave a book of her intimate writings to James, her poems, lyrics, and stories. So the cops went to James's house to ask about the notebook and about Robin's mindset of late.
00:16:48
Speaker 4: Everyone was trying to.
00:16:50
Speaker 8: Be positive that she was going to come back, that they were going to find something, that something was going to be done. I did have pretty much the same conversation, though, with the police when they took everything. They asked, do you think she would be the type of person that would kill herself? And she actually was not. She was way too positive of a person to do that sort of thing.
00:17:22
Speaker 1: Finally, the cops went to Robin's house. They got permission to search her room. Maybe they thought they'd find proof there that she'd been planning to take off or do something much darker still. What they saw there were posters of the band she loved. Nothing bloody or black metal, just a standard mix of pissed-off grunge and goth, circa Nirvana and typo negative. But one look at those and the cops wrote down, and I quote, concern with death and suicide and other forms of suffering. Then there was the packet of letters they found. One of them was from her boyfriend, Matt. who might have signed his name in blood. James recalled one morbid conversation when he was hanging with Matt and Robin.
00:18:11
Speaker 4: So at one point, they were also into the whole romance of vampirism and stuff like that, and they tried to convince me they tasted each other's blood, and then they saw that that was making me ill, and they said, no, we didn't actually do that.
00:18:30
Speaker 1: The couple had declared their love with matching padlock pendants. They took to calling each other Sid and Nancy after the Sex Pistols bassist and his siren, Nancy Spungen. They even put a goth band together. They proudly named a generation unborn and wrote shoegay songs about love beyond the pale. Here's a sample lyric from a song called Slink. I remember being born and that's the day I died. I remember how things were and how you felt inside. The cops asked her mom, Judy, if Robin was into devil stuff. Judy said that Robin was reading books by Anne Rice and had seen a vampire movie several times. But James told our reporter, Kathleen Horan, that Robin was just ahead of the curve.
00:19:24
Speaker 4: She would have loved Twilight. She was into the romanticism of Anne Rice. And she liked these spooky teen romance novels. I think one was called Remember Me, where it was about a girl that was killed, and as a ghost, she had to try and solve her murder. Oh my God, James. She definitely kept trying to get us to read the book, and I didn't read the book until after the whole thing happened, and I basically was crying all the way through it.
00:20:01
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, days had passed since Robin vanished. And as far as her mom could tell, the cops didn't view this as a crime. They didn't launch an all-points search for her or implore the public for tips. Instead, they told the paper she was a, quote, missing person, unquote.
00:20:20
Speaker 4: I think also because she was a goth kid, they kind of figured that, you know, maybe, you know, there was, you know, maybe she was just like a runaway off doing God knows whatever they thought goth kids did. They didn't really take the whole thing seriously, I don't think.
00:20:39
Speaker 1: But the people who knew her, her friends, her co-workers, were panicked, rightly outraged. And so four days after Robin vanished, her store manager, Julie, put a search party together. On the evening of April 13th, a bunch of kids showed up at ShopRite to show those Carmel cops how to do their job. It was just before dusk, four days after Robin vanished. A ragtag group of teens gathered in the fire lane out behind ShopRite. In back of that alley was a densely wooded hill. It had trails kids would hike to go drink or smoke weed. There were plenty of places to disappear in that treeline. Kevin Gloit was one of Robin's friends who joined the search. He was a quiet teen who kept himself to himself, but was fiercely loyal to Robin. In the spring of 26, our reporter Kathleen tracked Kevin down in Putnam. At 50, he still flaunts his rock signifiers, the earrings and goatee, the angry slipknot hoodie.
00:22:05
Speaker 4: Should we head there now? Sure, why not?
00:22:07
Speaker 2: Are you okay with that?
00:22:08
Speaker 4: I know it's... That's fine with me.
00:22:11
Speaker 1: They met in the parking lot of that plaza. The alley behind Shopperite's still there, but the hill has been cleared and landscaped. There's a condo development now on the other side of the dumpsters, not the thicket of trails the searchers canvassed.
00:22:25
Speaker 4: Should we go this way? Or I'll follow? Walk around the front of the store, trust me.
00:22:30
Speaker 7: Okay.
00:22:31
Speaker 2: I feel you know your way.
00:22:33
Speaker 6: Right now we see like landscaping almost with like rocks.
00:22:37
Speaker 4: With the stones and everything, yeah, no. There was more of an open path, more of a wooded area here. It sounds like maybe it was really Woodsy. Is that right? Pretty much.
00:22:54
Speaker 7: We just got frustrated, a bunch of us, because it felt like nobody's doing anything. They were just treating her like a runaway.
00:23:00
Speaker 4: I knew she didn't run away.
00:23:02
Speaker 1: That's Julie, Robin's old manager, talking. All these years later, she still works at ShopRite and is still piping mad at the cops.
00:23:12
Speaker 7: I just asked, you guys want to search around the back for Robin? And a bunch of us all met at ShopRite after work.
00:23:20
Speaker 4: How did word get out that there was going to be a search for Robin?
00:23:24
Speaker 7: Just word of mouth. I told a friend, the friend told a friend, another friend told a friend.
00:23:32
Speaker 4: ShopRite did that search because the police were not doing anything. All they did was ask us if we knew where she was.
00:23:46
Speaker 1: Imagine being up in a twin-prop beach craft, a couple hundred feet above that hill. It's seconds before dusk on a soft spring evening, the sun dissolving like a snow cone behind you. Fifteen teens the size of Tic Tacs trudge the green wedge below you. Over there, you'd tell them, pointing with your toe at the strange brown blob behind a thicket. But from that height, no one can hear you down there.
00:24:15
Speaker 7: There was a bunch of us. Like, I'd say five people went to the left, five people went to the middle, five people went to the right, and we just, like, spread out.
00:24:30
Speaker 1: Half of them covered the woods behind Shopperite. The others fanned out into the brush to their right. None of them knew how to do a grid search or find anything bigger than a joint beneath their car seat. But for Robin, they'd have combed those woods till midnight, then started again at first light.
00:24:49
Speaker 4: It's dark, and we're going up the trail with some flashlights.
00:24:55
Speaker 7: And we just started searching around.
00:24:58
Speaker 1: Faith was another young shopwright worker who joined the search for Robin.
00:25:03
Speaker 4: I remember a water tower. I remember flashlights.
00:25:06
Speaker 6: And I do remember them saying that we need to just call her name.
00:25:09
Speaker 7: And we did, like you see on TV when they're looking for a lost kid, which was like a little eerie and creepy.
00:25:16
Speaker 1: On that night in 95, those kids still nursed hopes that Robin was up there somewhere. Maybe she'd fallen and hurt herself. Either way, they weren't coming down until they cased each inch of that hill open.
00:25:35
Speaker 7: And then it was like, oh, I found something over here. I found something over here.
00:25:42
Speaker 4: They knew it was her purse because when they looked inside it, they found a check stub for the shop, right? Like, sitting right in some, like, you know, some bushes or something.
00:25:56
Speaker 7: It was scary.
00:25:56
Speaker 2: It was frightening.
00:25:58
Speaker 7: Something definitely happened to her.
00:26:02
Speaker 1: Hearing the commotion, the other searchers ran over. They gathered around the findings, gawking.
00:26:08
Speaker 4: Once we got the purse, I immediately just started crying.
00:26:16
Speaker 1: It seemed to hit them all at the same moment.
00:26:19
Speaker 4: I kept telling myself that she's going to turn up. She's going to turn up. She's going to turn up. And then they found that, and I'm like, she's not going to turn up. And it immediately felt real. I knew that's when we weren't going.
00:26:33
Speaker 1: To see her.
00:26:38
Speaker 4: And then Tina said, we have to let her parents know what we found.
00:26:45
Speaker 9: So we went to the pay phone, and she started to talk to them, but then she got choked up. And she gave her dad the basic before she got choked up and handed me the phone.
00:27:04
Speaker 1: James told Robin's dad, Brian, the rest of it.
00:27:08
Speaker 4: We found her purse. Her check stub was in it. We don't have anything else, but that's what they found. And he just said, thank you.
00:27:25
Speaker 1: One of them called the cops to report what they found. The others guarded the scene until detectives arrived. They just found evidence suggesting that their friend had come to harm, stuff the cops should have found three days prior. But now it was late, and most of them had to leave, to punch in for a shift at Burger King, or go home and try and study for a French test. When the cops showed up, they bagged Robin's items, then walked the trail themselves behind Shopperate. Near the top, they found a structure the searchers had missed. a lean-to built from branches and a tarp. On the ground, cops found a paste of belonging to Robin and a copy of her schedule at ShopRite. They also recovered a pair of handwritten letters, both of them addressed to Robin Murphy. The following day, the cops retraced their steps, but this time brought six detectives. One of them found Robin's pocketbook and keys 50 feet into the tree line. Another dived the dumpster behind that strip mall, and fished her wallet out of the trench. Quote, it wasn't in any kind of bag, he wrote, but appeared to have just been thrown in. Unquote. It was only then that the cops ran criminal background checks on people in Robin's circle. Her friends and family all came up clean. But one name rang fire bells in two states. The same man implicated but never indicted in the murder of Josette Wright. The same man who drove the dark sedan that Robin Murphy stepped out of on April 9th and was never seen or heard from again thereafter. The name of that man? Howard John Gombert Jr. Yes, according to police records, and to Gombert himself, he was the last person ever to see Robin Murphy again.
00:29:39
Speaker 4: Thank you.
00:29:45
Speaker 1: 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 Kathleen Horn. 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 Studios. 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.
00:31:39
Speaker 9: Thank you.
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. It's two weeks after Halloween 1997. Snows blowing sideways and swirls and stabs, stinging the eyes of the cops and firemen gathered around Nichols Pond. That's a dark squib of water in Putnam County, New York, curtained by a stand of woods.
00:00:46
Speaker 2: If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But no one will find it.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: The onlookers stamp their feet for warmth as five men in dive suits take turns wading in. The pond hasn't frozen yet, but has the sharpness of slush as divers slide beneath the surface. Several arm lengths from the cop stand a mother and father, eyeing the ripples intently. It was a supernatural vision that launched this search.
00:01:21
Speaker 2: I remember seeing a skull in the pond. The skull was smiling and the skeleton's hands were outstretched, palms facing outward. It scared me.
00:01:36
Speaker 1: That's Penny Osborne. She was sure the skull belonged to a girl. A girl named Robin Murphy. Robin had gone missing more than two years prior. Now, long after her trail's gone cold. The cops and Robin's parents are hanging their hopes on the divers at the bottom of that pond. Well, that and Penny's paranormal prowess.
00:02:11
Speaker 3: I'm very agnostic when it comes to things like spaceships and God.
00:02:17
Speaker 1: I look more for evidence. That's Anthony DePippo, our protagonist from season one. As a man who taught himself the law in prison, Anthony's all about facts. But six years ago, when someone slipped him Robin's case file, he caught a chill on the back of his neck.
00:02:36
Speaker 3: I feel like, you know, like when I get spooked, it's authentic.
00:02:43
Speaker 1: He was sitting in the study of his penthouse apartment, which he'd purchased with a chunk of the $ 12 million payout. for his wrongful conviction in the murder of 12-year-old Josette Wright. Now, Anthony's a big man, 6'5, and 300 pounds easy. But while reading through that scene, he heard a loud bang behind him and catapulted out of his chair.
00:03:07
Speaker 3: And the picture had fell over, and it got a dent in it, and I got spooked.
00:03:15
Speaker 1: In his parlor, he saw a scene from a paranormal flick. His favorite painting had dropped off the wall and been gashed by a selfie stick. It was a portrait of Anthony and his hero, Hulk Hogan. That stick had opened a gouge over the Hulkster's eye. If ghosts are phantoms with unfinished business, Robin Murphy had just dropped her card off.
00:03:40
Speaker 3: I'm bugging out. This is really kind of scary. And I didn't look at it anymore that night.
00:03:48
Speaker 1: I first met Anthony six years ago, around the time he got hold of Robin's file. My deep dive feature in Rolling Stone helped to quit his best friend Andy Krivak, who'd also been falsely convicted of Josette's murder. Anthony's false conviction for her murder was the pinch point of his life. But then a second girl vanished in the span of six months in the sleepy little town of Carmel, New York. No, Anthony knew that the job wasn't done. Josette's killer was still out there. And the man who disappeared Robin as well. In Anthony's mind, the same man was responsible for both girls. The devil of Putnam County. And so last year, he asked me to return with my shovel. He handed me a copy of Robin's case file. I shared it with my team. We divvied up its 3,000 pages and promptly went to work. In the episodes that follow, we'll train her floodlights on a phantom.
00:04:54
Speaker 2: I don't think she realized how dangerous this situation was.
00:04:57
Speaker 1: On every move by those Carmel cops.
00:05:00
Speaker 4: They didn't really take the whole thing seriously, I don't think.
00:05:04
Speaker 1: They actually thought they were going to get a confession out of him. On every lead they followed.
00:05:10
Speaker 4: And that's exactly what made us all think he had something to do with it. You want to see a real ghost?
00:05:18
Speaker 2: Hell yeah.
00:05:20
Speaker 4: Why?
00:05:21
Speaker 1: Because the devil's in those details. And we'll find him there.
00:05:31
Speaker 5: Do you hear my madness?
00:05:40
Speaker 1: Laughter hides my fears.
00:05:47
Speaker 4: Sorrow's depths are endless. This valley.
00:05:59
Speaker 5: Appears. I'm Paul Solitarov, and this is Season 2 of The Devil's Quarry. she was my best friend tina scorza was raised in putnam county her best friend robin murphy was not.
00:06:40
Speaker 6: She moved to carmel um our freshman year of high school and you know she would like go to school and like doc martin's and fishnet stockings and you know cut off jean short in the middle of.
00:06:53
Speaker 1: Winter Tina and Robin rode the school bus together. Straight away, the two girls hit it off. Robin hipped Tina to her favorite bands, The Clash, The Pixies, The Ramones. She might have been exotic for small town Carmel, New York, but Robin would have fit right in in hipster Brooklyn.
00:07:15
Speaker 6: She was nothing like any of my other friends, you know? So, but we hung out like a lot together, like a ton.
00:07:24
Speaker 1: It was Tina who introduced Robin to James Blaisdell. James was another recent arrival in Carmel, having moved there from California. Within days of meeting Robin, James developed a crush on her.
00:07:39
Speaker 4: She looked like an introvert, but she acted more like an extrovert because she was always getting things going and she was always energetic. Now picture me. I am dressed up like a little banker. on casual Friday with just like a polo shirt, some khaki pants. And we started talking and realizing that we had more and more in common, you know, making fun of movies, just driving around, listening to music. We both were aspiring to be writers of some sort. We loved reading books. So we had a lot of stuff bouncing off of each other, which really drew me to her.
00:08:24
Speaker 1: It's not hard to suss out Robin's influences. She was an avid reader of Anne Rice novels and had plans to become a writer herself. But Carmel high school bored her stiff, and after a short stint in Wackett, she dropped out for good at 16. Now, practically every kid in Carmel bitched about being bored, but Robin actually did something about it. She got a full-time job at ShopRite and started saving for a car. and make plans to get as far from Putnam as she could once she'd banked enough cash.
00:09:00
Speaker 7: I was in charge of all the cashiers, making sure everything runs smooth.
00:09:06
Speaker 1: Julie Sacara was the customer service manager at that shop right in Carmel. Before shifts, Robin would don the store smock and pin her name tag over the logo. But her freak flag stood out nonetheless.
00:09:20
Speaker 7: She was always in black, always. Everything was black, black, black, black, black. But she was a nice girl, you know. She never called in sick. Her tray was always good. She was never short.
00:09:34
Speaker 1: Julie saw something rare in Robin, the spark of leadership. She offered her a big promotion.
00:09:40
Speaker 7: I was thinking about putting you in pharmacy.
00:09:43
Speaker 2: What do you think about that?
00:09:45
Speaker 7: She just said, oh, I'd love to do that.
00:09:47
Speaker 4: I said, are you sure? And she said, yes.
00:09:51
Speaker 1: All these years later, Julie, who's now in her 60s, recalls their last chat clearly.
00:09:57
Speaker 7: That day when she got off of work. as being the cashier, she went over to the pharmacist and said, Hi, my name is Robin, and I'm going to start working with you next week.
00:10:12
Speaker 1: And with that, Robin released herself to a karma weekend. It was a cold, windy Friday, and the night promised rain. But it's safe to assume she walked out on a cloud. And then Monday rolled around, and Robin never showed for work. Nor did she call in sick or late. But for that afternoon, April 10th, 1995, she was officially listed as a missing person by the Carmel Police Department. On the night before she vanished, Saturday, April 8th, 1995, Robin Murphy was hanging with James Blaisdell.
00:11:00
Speaker 4: We were watching the BBC's production of Whose Line Is It Anyway? And we were laughing at that. And she was mentioning that tomorrow, can she come over here, meaning my house? And I said, well, we can. But it's going to have to be sometime after 7 or so because I'm going out to dinner.
00:11:23
Speaker 1: The next night, James went out with his family. When he got home, there was a voicemail waiting for him.
00:11:31
Speaker 4: And there was a message from Robin on my answering machine asking for me to please pick up. And she will try again later.
00:11:42
Speaker 1: But there was something in Robin's voice that sounded off. She was frightened. Even frantic.
00:11:50
Speaker 4: She didn't sound well put together. She sounded like she was in desperate need to talk to somebody. It sounded hurried. Fearful.
00:12:03
Speaker 1: It's been more than 30 years now, but that tape is still burnt into his brain.
00:12:09
Speaker 4: James? Are you awake? I need to talk to you. James, are you there?
00:12:18
Speaker 1: He couldn't have known it then, but.
00:12:23
Speaker 4: That was the last time I heard her voice.
00:12:34
Speaker 1: The next morning, James was sound asleep when something woke him with a jolt.
00:12:39
Speaker 4: I was in my house, and I was lying in my bed. And the next thing I know, I've got people banging on my window. And I look out the window, and it's Matt and Mark. And then they're saying, is Robin here? And I'm like, no.
00:13:03
Speaker 1: Matt Esposito was Robin's boyfriend. An imposing kid, he dyed his long hair purple, painted his fingernails black, and rocked a floor-length duster. The other kid, Mark Stein, was small but intense. Both of them worked at the Shoprite Plaza, pulling late shifts at Burger King. James told them about his botched plans with Robin the night before.
00:13:28
Speaker 4: And they said that they saw her car in the Shoprite parking lot, but she's not in it. Her bag isn't in it. You know, There's nothing taped to it, like saying it broke down or anything. And she wasn't at her house.
00:13:50
Speaker 1: James quickly threw some clothes on and jumped in Matt's car. The three of them went off in search of Robin.
00:13:57
Speaker 4: We're driving around the parking lot. We're looking to see if we can see anything, or maybe she dropped her bag. Then we're driving around the neighborhood, seeing if we can find anything. Then... We are trying to periodically get a hold of Tina or anybody else we can think of. And at one point, Mark mentioned that there is a trail behind the shop right. And he says he'll go back there and see if he sees anything.
00:14:35
Speaker 1: Matt and James waited in the car for him.
00:14:38
Speaker 4: I think he wanted to just go by himself because he said he knew the area better.
00:14:45
Speaker 1: Mark ducked around the shop right and up the hill behind it.
00:14:49
Speaker 4: And he came back, you know, maybe 15, 20 minutes later.
00:14:56
Speaker 1: But Mark said he saw no sign of Robin up there. He got back in the car and they took off again, driving around Carmel with their eyes peeled. By now it was after lunch and no one had notified the authorities, so Robin's friend Tina phoned the cops. The Carmel PD logged her call at 3.30 on April 10th, then drove to Shoprite Plaza to ask around. They spoke to Matt and James and to Robin's colleagues at Shoprite. They pegged her disappearance to 7.15 the night before, when she'd stepped out of her sedan at Shoprite Plaza and began walking toward Burger King. Alas, Robin never made it the hundred steps there. Questioned by the cops, Mac described Robin as depressed. But he also told them she didn't drink or take drugs. She would never just run off. To the contrary, she was living for a concert the following night. They were going to Poughkeepsie to see her favorite band. Which band, asked a cop, who then wrote down the answer. His note reads... a group called Ramones. Then cops called the airline desks to see if she'd flown to Phoenix. That was where she'd lived more or less happily until her family moved to Carmel two years prior. The cops also called her bank. Robin hadn't touched a dime of her small savings. But their suspicion that Robin had run off persisted. Mark Stein told the cops that just before she vanished, Robin gave a book of her intimate writings to James, her poems, lyrics, and stories. So the cops went to James's house to ask about the notebook and about Robin's mindset of late.
00:16:48
Speaker 4: Everyone was trying to.
00:16:50
Speaker 8: Be positive that she was going to come back, that they were going to find something, that something was going to be done. I did have pretty much the same conversation, though, with the police when they took everything. They asked, do you think she would be the type of person that would kill herself? And she actually was not. She was way too positive of a person to do that sort of thing.
00:17:22
Speaker 1: Finally, the cops went to Robin's house. They got permission to search her room. Maybe they thought they'd find proof there that she'd been planning to take off or do something much darker still. What they saw there were posters of the band she loved. Nothing bloody or black metal, just a standard mix of pissed-off grunge and goth, circa Nirvana and typo negative. But one look at those and the cops wrote down, and I quote, concern with death and suicide and other forms of suffering. Then there was the packet of letters they found. One of them was from her boyfriend, Matt. who might have signed his name in blood. James recalled one morbid conversation when he was hanging with Matt and Robin.
00:18:11
Speaker 4: So at one point, they were also into the whole romance of vampirism and stuff like that, and they tried to convince me they tasted each other's blood, and then they saw that that was making me ill, and they said, no, we didn't actually do that.
00:18:30
Speaker 1: The couple had declared their love with matching padlock pendants. They took to calling each other Sid and Nancy after the Sex Pistols bassist and his siren, Nancy Spungen. They even put a goth band together. They proudly named a generation unborn and wrote shoegay songs about love beyond the pale. Here's a sample lyric from a song called Slink. I remember being born and that's the day I died. I remember how things were and how you felt inside. The cops asked her mom, Judy, if Robin was into devil stuff. Judy said that Robin was reading books by Anne Rice and had seen a vampire movie several times. But James told our reporter, Kathleen Horan, that Robin was just ahead of the curve.
00:19:24
Speaker 4: She would have loved Twilight. She was into the romanticism of Anne Rice. And she liked these spooky teen romance novels. I think one was called Remember Me, where it was about a girl that was killed, and as a ghost, she had to try and solve her murder. Oh my God, James. She definitely kept trying to get us to read the book, and I didn't read the book until after the whole thing happened, and I basically was crying all the way through it.
00:20:01
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, days had passed since Robin vanished. And as far as her mom could tell, the cops didn't view this as a crime. They didn't launch an all-points search for her or implore the public for tips. Instead, they told the paper she was a, quote, missing person, unquote.
00:20:20
Speaker 4: I think also because she was a goth kid, they kind of figured that, you know, maybe, you know, there was, you know, maybe she was just like a runaway off doing God knows whatever they thought goth kids did. They didn't really take the whole thing seriously, I don't think.
00:20:39
Speaker 1: But the people who knew her, her friends, her co-workers, were panicked, rightly outraged. And so four days after Robin vanished, her store manager, Julie, put a search party together. On the evening of April 13th, a bunch of kids showed up at ShopRite to show those Carmel cops how to do their job. It was just before dusk, four days after Robin vanished. A ragtag group of teens gathered in the fire lane out behind ShopRite. In back of that alley was a densely wooded hill. It had trails kids would hike to go drink or smoke weed. There were plenty of places to disappear in that treeline. Kevin Gloit was one of Robin's friends who joined the search. He was a quiet teen who kept himself to himself, but was fiercely loyal to Robin. In the spring of 26, our reporter Kathleen tracked Kevin down in Putnam. At 50, he still flaunts his rock signifiers, the earrings and goatee, the angry slipknot hoodie.
00:22:05
Speaker 4: Should we head there now? Sure, why not?
00:22:07
Speaker 2: Are you okay with that?
00:22:08
Speaker 4: I know it's... That's fine with me.
00:22:11
Speaker 1: They met in the parking lot of that plaza. The alley behind Shopperite's still there, but the hill has been cleared and landscaped. There's a condo development now on the other side of the dumpsters, not the thicket of trails the searchers canvassed.
00:22:25
Speaker 4: Should we go this way? Or I'll follow? Walk around the front of the store, trust me.
00:22:30
Speaker 7: Okay.
00:22:31
Speaker 2: I feel you know your way.
00:22:33
Speaker 6: Right now we see like landscaping almost with like rocks.
00:22:37
Speaker 4: With the stones and everything, yeah, no. There was more of an open path, more of a wooded area here. It sounds like maybe it was really Woodsy. Is that right? Pretty much.
00:22:54
Speaker 7: We just got frustrated, a bunch of us, because it felt like nobody's doing anything. They were just treating her like a runaway.
00:23:00
Speaker 4: I knew she didn't run away.
00:23:02
Speaker 1: That's Julie, Robin's old manager, talking. All these years later, she still works at ShopRite and is still piping mad at the cops.
00:23:12
Speaker 7: I just asked, you guys want to search around the back for Robin? And a bunch of us all met at ShopRite after work.
00:23:20
Speaker 4: How did word get out that there was going to be a search for Robin?
00:23:24
Speaker 7: Just word of mouth. I told a friend, the friend told a friend, another friend told a friend.
00:23:32
Speaker 4: ShopRite did that search because the police were not doing anything. All they did was ask us if we knew where she was.
00:23:46
Speaker 1: Imagine being up in a twin-prop beach craft, a couple hundred feet above that hill. It's seconds before dusk on a soft spring evening, the sun dissolving like a snow cone behind you. Fifteen teens the size of Tic Tacs trudge the green wedge below you. Over there, you'd tell them, pointing with your toe at the strange brown blob behind a thicket. But from that height, no one can hear you down there.
00:24:15
Speaker 7: There was a bunch of us. Like, I'd say five people went to the left, five people went to the middle, five people went to the right, and we just, like, spread out.
00:24:30
Speaker 1: Half of them covered the woods behind Shopperite. The others fanned out into the brush to their right. None of them knew how to do a grid search or find anything bigger than a joint beneath their car seat. But for Robin, they'd have combed those woods till midnight, then started again at first light.
00:24:49
Speaker 4: It's dark, and we're going up the trail with some flashlights.
00:24:55
Speaker 7: And we just started searching around.
00:24:58
Speaker 1: Faith was another young shopwright worker who joined the search for Robin.
00:25:03
Speaker 4: I remember a water tower. I remember flashlights.
00:25:06
Speaker 6: And I do remember them saying that we need to just call her name.
00:25:09
Speaker 7: And we did, like you see on TV when they're looking for a lost kid, which was like a little eerie and creepy.
00:25:16
Speaker 1: On that night in 95, those kids still nursed hopes that Robin was up there somewhere. Maybe she'd fallen and hurt herself. Either way, they weren't coming down until they cased each inch of that hill open.
00:25:35
Speaker 7: And then it was like, oh, I found something over here. I found something over here.
00:25:42
Speaker 4: They knew it was her purse because when they looked inside it, they found a check stub for the shop, right? Like, sitting right in some, like, you know, some bushes or something.
00:25:56
Speaker 7: It was scary.
00:25:56
Speaker 2: It was frightening.
00:25:58
Speaker 7: Something definitely happened to her.
00:26:02
Speaker 1: Hearing the commotion, the other searchers ran over. They gathered around the findings, gawking.
00:26:08
Speaker 4: Once we got the purse, I immediately just started crying.
00:26:16
Speaker 1: It seemed to hit them all at the same moment.
00:26:19
Speaker 4: I kept telling myself that she's going to turn up. She's going to turn up. She's going to turn up. And then they found that, and I'm like, she's not going to turn up. And it immediately felt real. I knew that's when we weren't going.
00:26:33
Speaker 1: To see her.
00:26:38
Speaker 4: And then Tina said, we have to let her parents know what we found.
00:26:45
Speaker 9: So we went to the pay phone, and she started to talk to them, but then she got choked up. And she gave her dad the basic before she got choked up and handed me the phone.
00:27:04
Speaker 1: James told Robin's dad, Brian, the rest of it.
00:27:08
Speaker 4: We found her purse. Her check stub was in it. We don't have anything else, but that's what they found. And he just said, thank you.
00:27:25
Speaker 1: One of them called the cops to report what they found. The others guarded the scene until detectives arrived. They just found evidence suggesting that their friend had come to harm, stuff the cops should have found three days prior. But now it was late, and most of them had to leave, to punch in for a shift at Burger King, or go home and try and study for a French test. When the cops showed up, they bagged Robin's items, then walked the trail themselves behind Shopperate. Near the top, they found a structure the searchers had missed. a lean-to built from branches and a tarp. On the ground, cops found a paste of belonging to Robin and a copy of her schedule at ShopRite. They also recovered a pair of handwritten letters, both of them addressed to Robin Murphy. The following day, the cops retraced their steps, but this time brought six detectives. One of them found Robin's pocketbook and keys 50 feet into the tree line. Another dived the dumpster behind that strip mall, and fished her wallet out of the trench. Quote, it wasn't in any kind of bag, he wrote, but appeared to have just been thrown in. Unquote. It was only then that the cops ran criminal background checks on people in Robin's circle. Her friends and family all came up clean. But one name rang fire bells in two states. The same man implicated but never indicted in the murder of Josette Wright. The same man who drove the dark sedan that Robin Murphy stepped out of on April 9th and was never seen or heard from again thereafter. The name of that man? Howard John Gombert Jr. Yes, according to police records, and to Gombert himself, he was the last person ever to see Robin Murphy again.
00:29:39
Speaker 4: Thank you.
00:29:45
Speaker 1: 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 Kathleen Horn. 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 Studios. 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.
00:31:39
Speaker 9: Thank you.