Oct. 14, 2026
Chapter 3 | Full Tilt Bozo
Apple Podcasts 
Spotify 
Castro 
RSS Feed Other suspects are revealed.
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.
Listeners can hear new episodes ad-free by subscribing to Lava for Good+ on Apple Podcasts.
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. As a kid from Waco, Texas, who busted Broncos in his teens, Ralph Jones had an appetite for danger. He joined the service young and crushed their aptitude tests, then shouldered his way into the Navy, where he became a demolitions diver. In the early aughts, he retired from the service and set up in the northern exurb of New York City.
00:00:49
Speaker 2: About that time is when all my injuries from the service of all the helicopter jumps and all the other stuff I put my body through came home to rest. And I was like, what am I going to do? And And a friend of mine, it was like, you know, you'd make a great surveillance guy.
00:01:05
Speaker 1: Living in Putnam County, not far from the town of Carmel, he hung a shingle as a private detective.
00:01:13
Speaker 2: And then it evolved from doing surveillances to actually tracking down witnesses. And I had an act for getting the people.
00:01:20
Speaker 1: To talk to me. One day, he got a call from a town councilman.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: Would Ralph be willing to look at an unsolved case? Putnam Valley is a very small town. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knew my background. So this guy goes, I put together this whole file on the Robin Murphy case. Maybe you can get somewhere with it, because I can't get anywhere with it.
00:01:45
Speaker 1: And I was like, sure. He looked through the box of documents but didn't get far. The case required an all-points dig, and no one was willing to expense that. So he handed the box back and got on to paying work. But he never forgot Robin, or who saw her last.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: I find it interesting that the last person she was seen with is Howard Gombert, but nothing ever came of that.
00:02:11
Speaker 1: And then, in the nutty way life happens to Ralph, the case came back to him a decade later. He was hired by Anthony DePippo to help him fight his false murder conviction, when a familiar name popped up.
00:02:26
Speaker 2: And then, lo and behold, here we go, 2013, and Gombert's name come back up. But I was like, oh, shit, this is something I want to do. In particular, there was a detail that Ralph couldn't shake. Gombert tried to commit suicide. Yes, six days after Robin disappeared, Gombert tried to kill himself. Ralph saw that act as a tacit admission. An admission that, A, Gombert killed her, And B, the walls were closing in on him.
00:03:01
Speaker 1: It freaked him out that he was going to get caught.
00:03:04
Speaker 3: And so that's why he attempted a suicide attempt. Because he knew. He was like, I'm going to get caught.
00:03:19
Speaker 4: Do you hear my madman? my fears. Sorrow's depths are endless. This valley of tears. I'm Paul Solitarov, and this.
00:03:56
Speaker 1: Is season two of The Devil's Quarry.
00:04:08
Speaker 5: Do you mind introducing yourself to me?
00:04:11
Speaker 6: Hi, I'm Jay Murphy. I'm Robin's brother.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: Jay Murphy is a thick-set, affable man with a pair of the saddest eyes you'll ever see. At 52, he's the oldest of Robin's siblings and still stoops a bit under the weight of her laws, which he's carried for 30 years. Life's hardships are never distributed fairly, but Jay's portion seems especially fraught. As he explained to her reporter, Kathleen Horan, he lost a chunk of his life to grief. It took his years of calling the Murphys to set this meeting with Jay And even now, he seems uneasy about it. On a gorgeous day this past September, he sat down with Kathleen in Brooklyn. He recently learned something that brought him forward. Howard Gomber will walk out of prison just after New Year's.
00:05:15
Speaker 6: I had no idea that Howard was getting out soon. So it was a big surprise, you know, and it opened a lot of wounds again, too.
00:05:26
Speaker 1: Yes, Gombert will leave prison years early, getting time off for good behavior. As Jay sat with Kathleen in the sunny apartment, he thought back on his history with Gombert. Before Robin vanished, he'd seen him only in passing at the laundromat in Carmel.
00:05:46
Speaker 6: Me and my mother went there, and her friend used to come in like, oh, he's cute. Like, little do you know, right?
00:05:53
Speaker 1: But Gombert hadn't popped on his radar yet. Not till after his sister vanished and Jay took part in the search for her. He flashed back to the worst night of his life, April 10th, 1995. By that point, Robin had been missing 24 hours, and all her friends were gathered at the Murphy house.
00:06:15
Speaker 6: So everyone's there and she's not.
00:06:18
Speaker 1: They'd assembled there in the hopes that she'd magically show up. After all, they had a show to go to. The Ramones were playing Poughkeepsie that night, but Robin never walked through that door.
00:06:30
Speaker 6: You don't just blow up a concert when you're a kid. I suspected foul play right away because why would she not come home to go to a concert? And all her friends were there at the house, so where else is she going to be?
00:06:43
Speaker 1: A few days later, he helped the Carmel cops do a grid search behind the shopper. He was there when they found his sister's keychain, he says, which is when Gombert's name first came up. The cop he was with recognized the name immediately.
00:06:57
Speaker 6: I said, Howard, he said, in the laundromat.
00:07:00
Speaker 1: He said, Gompert?
00:07:01
Speaker 6: He said, bad news, let's go.
00:07:03
Speaker 1: At that point, says Jay, he and the cop went to the laundromat. There they found Gompert, who immediately raised their suspicions.
00:07:12
Speaker 6: We went over there and we spoke to him. And he was whining about his girlfriend and fight, and she scratched him, and he's showing us. And he lifted up his shirt, white T-shirt, and showed us a couple of scratches.
00:07:23
Speaker 7: He said, see, she.
00:07:24
Speaker 6: She fought with me. She attacked me. And we found that kind of strange. What did the scratches look like? Like claws. Yeah.
00:07:35
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:07:38
Speaker 6: I got that picture in my head right now, yeah. Just his whole act he was putting on. You know, like, poor me, you know? Yeah, yeah, with a big crybaby face and all my scratches.
00:07:52
Speaker 1: Strangely, there's no mention of those scratches in the case file, which makes us wonder what else isn't in that file. But we checked with Anne-Marie about her so-called fight with Gombert. She texted back fast to call bullshit. Did I mention Howard's a pathological liar, she wrote? I broke up with him March 15th, so no. If that was after Robin disappeared, those scratches would not have been for me. Years later, Ralph Jones said he heard about scratches from a different cop in Putnam. Ralph, you recall, was Anthony DePippo's investigator into Gombert.
00:08:32
Speaker 3: Gombert had scratches all over his back.
00:08:36
Speaker 1: Ralph has a theory of how Gombert came by those scratches.
00:08:40
Speaker 3: It happened right there at that strip mall on the hillside. If you look at the hillside, there's a tent there. There's brambles everywhere. The woods, we know he's a woodsman. He's very familiar with the woods. I think it's simple. He snuffed a rat down the hillside. They had a struggle. There's brambles everywhere. And he just carried the body down.
00:09:07
Speaker 1: Why is Ralph so sure that Gombert killed Robin? Because of his suicide bin on his father's lawn days after Robin went missing. That attempt, which rendered Gombert parapsychotic, constituted a confession, or so Ralph thinks. To put that in legal terms, it's consciousness of guilt. Meanwhile, back in Carmel, the cops came after Jay Murphy, of all people. Asked him ugly questions about Gombert.
00:09:38
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm not stupid, so I picked up on it right away. And I was like, what are you getting at? And they told me. They thought that I had put them in the coma. So they were like questioning me about it in an indirect way until I realized what was going on. I said, what are you talking about here?
00:09:55
Speaker 1: Those cops, he says, accused him of hurting Gombert on account of robbing. But Gombert himself set them straight the next day when they interviewed him in the hospital.
00:10:06
Speaker 6: And then he woke up and admitted, oh, yeah, you know, I took some pills and fell out because I was distraught about my girlfriend. So it had nothing to do with me.
00:10:19
Speaker 1: In truth, Gombert had been spinning out well before Robin vanished. Anne-Marie, his battered girlfriend of three years, had just charged him with rape and sodomy. She'd run to a shelter with her three-year-old daughter, then hit him with a restraining order. In his letters to her that followed, and there were lots of letters, long ones, he openly threatened to kill himself. Hell, in one of those letters, he attached his last will. and directions on what to do with his few possessions. As mentioned above, the cops questioned Gombert after his suicide bit. Carmel detectives Randy Tompkins and Walter Galbraith tried to pin down his story. They found him more or less lucid by then, willing to speak on the record. He told them again that he'd seen Robin just before she vanished, saying they'd talked for ten minutes in his car. Then he said she went walking toward Burger King while he drove off to fetch his dirty laundry. But his story left an hour unaccounted for. Actually, closer to 90 minutes per his own timeline. The cops asked him if he'd take a polygraph test. He said, yeah, he probably would. But the very next day, he lawyered up and stopped speaking to the cops altogether. Instead, he talked to the media. From his hospital bed, he told the New York Times about his chat with Robin, saying, quote, I thought you could talk to my girlfriend for me, unquote. Then he whined to a Putnam paper about missing his toddler daughter, describing the girl as, quote, my whole world, unquote. By contrast, the cops told the media next to nothing. Two Carmel girls had been snatched in six months, Josette Wright and Robin Murphy. But all the cops would tell the papers was that Robin's disappearance was suspicious. Quote, We have nothing that leads us to foul play or that leads us away from foul play. It's certainly not your ordinary runaway. End quote. Really? No sign of foul play? Like, say, Robin's personal effects scattered on the hill behind Shop, right? The piece added, Quote, The police have questioned Mr.
00:12:42
Speaker 3: Gombert.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: But he is not considered a suspect, end quote. And so, just like that, Gombert stopped speaking to the cops. All it took to run them off was one little note from his legal aid lawyer. Instead, they took a run at other people. People close to Robin. A couple of Carmel teens to start with. One in particular piqued their interest. The Carmel cops had a list of Robin's friends. The first kid under their lens was her boyfriend, Matt Esposito. This hit vicious to her Nancy Spungen. Now, if you're going by the data, at least, it's the boyfriend that's often the killer. Matt and Robin had an intense teen romance. You could even call it obsessive. Their mutual friend James certainly thought of it as such.
00:13:58
Speaker 7: I was trying to keep them together because whenever they were apart, this is going to sound really selfish, they were annoying. They talked more about each other when they were apart than they ever did when they were seeing each other.
00:14:16
Speaker 1: They worked across the parking lot from one another, and each would visit the other at work. Matt was on a shift at Burger King the night that Robin vanished. That shift was supposed to start at 4 p.m., But when she dropped by to see him, then he wasn't there. His former coworker, Sharon, picks up the story from there.
00:14:38
Speaker 5: Robin had walked from her apartment and come in to see Matt. She came in and she asked the manager at the time where Matt was. And he goes, that's a good question. He's late. So Robin went out to the vestibule, called Matt, must have gotten him up. And he quickly rushed down and ended up coming to work, but he was only 15 minutes late.
00:15:02
Speaker 1: Tardy though he was, Matt worked until midnight and didn't wander off for a shift break. In the weeks that followed, he cooperated with the cops. It confirmed his alibi for the night Robin vanished. But within hours of her going missing, Matt plunged into a hole. If you'd called him and missed him back then, you'd have heard this message on his machine. Quote, I'm drowning right now. Leave me a message and I'll get back to you when I resurface. End quote. Now, Matt was a bright kid with a barbed sense of humor. But that wasn't him being clever. We spoke to his close friend, Kevin Gloyd. Kevin was one of the dozen or so teens who joined the ShopRite search. He said Matt was struggling badly that summer.
00:15:55
Speaker 8: When Robin disappeared, he got high, cut his arms open with razor blades. His father found him in a puddle of blood in the driveway. I think either in his mind it was a suicide attempt or he was just crying for help. I'm not sure which.
00:16:13
Speaker 1: Matt was bereft after Robin vanished. The friend James remembers Matt wearing long sleeves that summer to cover up the fact that he was cutting himself and shooting up.
00:16:28
Speaker 7: I didn't realize that at the time, Robin was keeping Matt from his then just beginning heroin addiction. When she disappeared, he no longer had that lifeline. And he went full tilt bozo.
00:16:44
Speaker 1: Into the stuff. Months later, Matt's dad moved the family to Vermont. Matt would battle addiction for the rest of his life and pass away young in 2013. After they cleared Matt, the cops turned to a second teen, Mark Stein, Matt's buddy and Burger King colleague. He was the short, blonde kid who came knocking on James' window the morning after Robin went missing. James told us that Robin didn't care for Mark. In fact, she called him a moocher and a weirdo. James didn't care for Mark either.
00:17:27
Speaker 7: I didn't really like hanging out with Mark because he was an asshole.
00:17:31
Speaker 1: Mark, according to James, made ugly cracks about girls, including cracks about Robin that pissed Matt off. And then, says James, Mark crossed the line with him. They would park one day in front of a grocery store with Matt when.
00:17:46
Speaker 7: Mark made a sly comment about, you know, your girlfriend's tit belongs to me. We started fighting back and forth, at which point he immediately.
00:18:00
Speaker 1: Started choking me. A gentle kid by nature, James retaliated, grabbing Mark around the neck.
00:18:08
Speaker 7: He kind of narrowed his eyes at me, and he just started this wide... Starting as a closed mouth grin, but then there were teeth. And I said, let go. He said, you let go first. Matt told us to stop. And then he even opened up the back seat to try and pull Mark away. And then he stopped and I stopped. And Mark and I didn't really hang out too much after that.
00:18:43
Speaker 1: James never forgot that sick grin of Mark's. Nor did he forget something else Mark had done. He recalled the three boys went looking for Robin, driving around Carmel and James' car. At some point, Mark suggested they check out the path behind Shopperite. But when they got to the strip mall, Mark told them to hang back. He'd go up alone and look around. He returned in 15 minutes, having seen no sign of her. But just three days later, the search party kids found multiple items belonging to Robin. And did so in the dark, no less. How, James wonders, had Mark not seen those things?
00:19:26
Speaker 7: And it was in broad daylight, yeah. And that's exactly what made us all think he had something to do with it.
00:19:36
Speaker 1: According to the case file, the cops went to Mark's house next. They spoke to his dad, who said he'd kicked Mark out.
00:19:44
Speaker 7: Why?
00:19:45
Speaker 1: Because Mark had assaulted his disabled mom. The dad took an order of protection against his son, meaning Mark couldn't be in the house without his dad present. For several weeks, he said Mark had been sleeping rough, overnighting in lean-tos in the woods. Sharon worked with Mark at the Burger King then. She remembers hearing that he was homeless when Robin disappeared and that the manager of the store took pity on him.
00:20:17
Speaker 5: She didn't want him sleeping out in the elements because it still wasn't warm. It was, you know, end of March, beginning of April. So she let him sleep. We had a shed that we stored like extra tables, refrigerators in. So she let him sleep in there at night.
00:20:30
Speaker 1: The cops spoke to Mark's co-workers about the night Robin vanished. That Sunday, Mark was to work the late shift with Matt. The manager of that shift was a kid named Jeremy.
00:20:42
Speaker 9: The next day, speaking to the cops, I brought up, hey, the other two guys were late. And that kind of bothered me that, you know, Mark was four hours late. That's not very common for him. Like, he was four hours late, so I didn't want him to work. I wanted to, like, send him home. But at some point, I changed my mind and said, you have to come in because I don't have anybody else.
00:21:04
Speaker 1: Police check Mark's time card. It said he'd punched in at 6.18 p.m., making him two hours late, not four. He worked till the restaurant closed after midnight. But his co-workers noticed a troubling thing. On at least one of his breaks, Mark huddled with Gombert near the drive-thru window. They were seen out there whispering and laughing.
00:21:29
Speaker 7: By the next day, he said that, you know, she's dead. I don't know why everybody's fussing, she's dead, man. And he made sure to not say that around Matt, but he did say it around me and Kevin. And we all gave him this stare that just made him shut up for a little while.
00:21:54
Speaker 1: Mark also called his girlfriend at the time, a young woman we're calling Diane.
00:22:00
Speaker 10: He was actually one of the people to call me and say, hey, Robin disappeared. Nobody knows where she is. And at the time, it was only a day or two after she had disappeared, and they were getting ready to do search parties. And he had made the statement to me about, well, I don't think she's ever coming back.
00:22:23
Speaker 1: As the days went by, rumors flew around Burger King. There was a story in the papers about a body found the next town over. A couple of the teenage staffers thought it might be Robin, but Sharon, who worked there, described Mark's response.
00:22:39
Speaker 5: He said, there's no way. There's no way. It's not her.
00:22:41
Speaker 3: No way.
00:22:42
Speaker 7: No way.
00:22:42
Speaker 4: It's not her.
00:22:45
Speaker 5: Mark was definitely, after Robin had disappeared, he definitely was troubled. He took it harder than the rest of us.
00:22:53
Speaker 1: Diane, Mark's then-girlfriend, confirmed his strange behavior.
00:22:59
Speaker 10: I definitely started paying more attention to some of those red flags that were kind of popping up.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: So much so that she broke up with him while she was away at college.
00:23:10
Speaker 10: I was back from one of the breaks and he did come into the diner and I was very uncomfortable with it. Like he did kind of start yelling because he wanted to be able to talk to me and I didn't want to talk to him. And even I had friends that were kind of Like, dude, she doesn't want to talk to you.
00:23:29
Speaker 3: Just back off.
00:23:31
Speaker 1: From then on, she was afraid of Mark. She actively avoided him when she was home from school and steered clear of the places she might see him.
00:23:41
Speaker 10: And at the time, I even used to keep a note under my mattress that said, God forbid anything happens to me, please look at Mark as a possible person involved.
00:24:01
Speaker 1: Mark's friends and co-workers were freaked out by him, too. They wondered what he and Gomber whispered about when Gomber came by that night. And why had Mark found nothing behind Shoprite when Robin's things were scattered near the path? Meanwhile, the cops kept searching the woods behind Shoprite. Sharon watched them through the Burger King window.
00:24:26
Speaker 5: There was police searches everywhere. Constantly detectives coming in, interviewing all of us, seeing what we saw, if any of us saw anything.
00:24:34
Speaker 1: And then one day, Sharon made a discovery of her own.
00:24:39
Speaker 5: I had to go into the shed for a party to get a spare table out. And I found a notebook, and it had pages ripped out. And it had, like, lists of suspects. And it had Howard, Matt, and Mark listed on it. And this was in the shed.
00:24:57
Speaker 1: That's right. In the shed where Mark slept, there was a list of suspects. But there was another piece of evidence that Sharon found.
00:25:07
Speaker 5: And there was a blue blanket, and I saw long black hair on it.
00:25:13
Speaker 1: Who did she know with long black hair? None other than Robin Murphy.
00:25:18
Speaker 5: Mark had short, blonde hair at the time. It was enough to say, you know what? I'm not going.
00:25:24
Speaker 7: To keep quiet.
00:25:27
Speaker 1: Detective Galbraith raced over to the store and brought a forensics cop with him. They took those things into evidence, including the notebook Sharon found. It was partially burned and had pages torn out. We don't know if the hair was sent for testing.
00:25:44
Speaker 5: I was standing there showing what I found in the shed, and they automatically looked at each other and they said, do you want to stay? because they went to go lift up the coolers. I think the detectives were thinking that her body was in one of those empty coolers, but it wasn't.
00:26:03
Speaker 1: But when Detective Galbraith got back to the station, there was a message waiting for him. A lawyer named Joel Stein had called. He identified himself as a relative of Mark's and his criminal attorney. He forbade the cops from speaking to Mark unless he was there as counsel.
00:26:22
Speaker 7: We heard that Mark... was not cooperating with the police because he had a lawyer. The police, they said that they're looking at Gompert when we would ask about it. And then we would ask about Mark, and then they said that, you know, he's, as they put it, he's lawyered up, so we have to go through the lawyer. But they wouldn't say anything more than that.
00:26:54
Speaker 1: We did reach out to Mark Stein for comment. Our reporter Kathleen met him on the porch of his father's house.
00:27:01
Speaker 7: Hi.
00:27:02
Speaker 5: Sorry to bother you.
00:27:03
Speaker 9: I was hoping Mark was here.
00:27:05
Speaker 5: My name's Kathleen.
00:27:07
Speaker 1: In the middle of the day, he looked disheveled, as if she'd roused him from a nap. As Kathleen asked him questions, Mark stared past her shoulder. He seemed to be there and not there. Finally, he muttered one word No. Before he went back inside. According to the UN, about 60% of female victims are murdered by their partner or family member. And so it wasn't a great surprise when the Carmel cops turned to Robin's family. They enlisted a pair of FBI agents to run their criminal backgrounds. They learned that their dad, Brian, had some priors in his past, but nothing involving sex or violence. Then those feds flew out to Arizona, where the Murphys lived before Carmel. Among the people they talked to was Robin's best friend out there, her middle school classmate, Fatima.
00:28:28
Speaker 11: She didn't seem like she had to be the one that had like the coolest clothes and the lip gloss because it seemed like she knew who she was or at least who she wanted to be. There was something very special about her. There was a spark in her.
00:28:45
Speaker 1: The two girls spent a lot of time at each other's houses, swapping poems they'd written in secret. and watching Xena, the warrior princess, on TV. But Robin also griped to Fatima about missing days of school, because she had to stay home to watch her preschool brother. Fatima told the feds that Robin was resentful of her folks for making her their unpaid sitter. Robin chafed at her childcare burden and talked to Fatima about running away. But 30 years later, Fatima says Robin's resentment was typical teenage stuff.
00:29:20
Speaker 11: I remember telling the detective at the time, no, there's absolutely no way that she would just up and disappear because she loved her family. She loved her family way too much to do that. Not the robber that I knew.
00:29:36
Speaker 1: Next, the feds spoke to the Murphys' ex-landlord. He claimed he'd evicted the family for letting their dog poop on the carpets and their toddler smear feces on the walls. The feds called Child Protective Services there, but found no records on the Murphys. And in fairness to the Murphys, no one backed up the landlord's account. We asked Jay Murphy what he recalls of the cops' probe into his family.
00:30:05
Speaker 6: They were fishing, yeah. They want to go after somebody who's not going to fight back. And that's what they were doing.
00:30:13
Speaker 1: Carmel, detectives started calling the Murphys daily, asking them to come in for a sit-down. Brian, Robin's dad, blew up at them. He wanted a different department to take the case.
00:30:25
Speaker 6: I think that they were getting angry because they weren't getting anywhere. And we wanted them to give over the case to the sheriffs, give it to the state police. They wouldn't do it. Nope, nope, nope.
00:30:35
Speaker 1: The Murphys thought the cops were spinning their wheels, kicking dirt in their direction. Those cops, for instance, investigated the family's name change. Before moving to Carmel, they changed their surname from Napolitano to Murphy to honor Brian's Irish heritage.
00:30:54
Speaker 6: Oh, you changed your name. Gee, maybe because it was his stepfather's name, so he changed it.
00:30:59
Speaker 1: Jay says the cops approached him while he was putting up missing posters for Robin.
00:31:03
Speaker 6: They said, oh, you know, your father got busted for pot in 1969. Like, so? Like, are you kidding me? Don't you have nothing better to do with your time? I think they were getting mad because we were getting their nerve because we were calling them idiots. So they were getting a little retaliatory.
00:31:23
Speaker 1: Like the rest of the Murphys, Jay was incensed by the cops' inaction on Gombert. Soon, the family stopped talking to the cops. Judy referred to them as Barney and Andy, the hick country cops from the Andy Griffith show. She ordered her kids to say she wasn't home when they called, and she pasted a homemade sticker on the back of her car. It read, There's no justice in Carmel. Just ask Robin. In the months that followed, Robin's case turned ice cold. The cops in Carmel had failed her completely, but her mom refused to give up. Robin's friend James recalls Judy coming to see him at his after-school job.
00:32:11
Speaker 7: Every now and then, her mom would show up when I was working at the Rite Aid. Even if there was another line open and they were free, she would make sure to wait in my line. And she would say things like, You know, they still haven't found her.
00:32:29
Speaker 6: Do you know anything?
00:32:32
Speaker 1: James would tell Judy anything he'd heard. Alas, it was very little, and Judy hungered for more. She began reaching out to mediums and psychics to see if they could help.
00:32:44
Speaker 7: Around her anniversary every year, people would say that they heard something or they saw something. or this crystal gave a vibration near a lake, or this psychic would come out and start leading an investigation somewhere.
00:33:02
Speaker 1: It was, it was hell. And then one of those people, a self-described paranormal investigator, told Judy where she thought Robin might be found.
00:33:18
Speaker 12: Her mother came to me for a reading. I can only tell you what comes to, you know, my eyesight, what I'm thinking and what I'm saying. And everybody's thinking the same thing. She's in the quarry. She's in the quarry. ¶ ¶.
00:33:50
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 Horne. Our field reporter 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 Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick at the Florida Department of Corrections If you have any information to share about the events covered in this series, please call 1-888-257-7694.
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. As a kid from Waco, Texas, who busted Broncos in his teens, Ralph Jones had an appetite for danger. He joined the service young and crushed their aptitude tests, then shouldered his way into the Navy, where he became a demolitions diver. In the early aughts, he retired from the service and set up in the northern exurb of New York City.
00:00:49
Speaker 2: About that time is when all my injuries from the service of all the helicopter jumps and all the other stuff I put my body through came home to rest. And I was like, what am I going to do? And And a friend of mine, it was like, you know, you'd make a great surveillance guy.
00:01:05
Speaker 1: Living in Putnam County, not far from the town of Carmel, he hung a shingle as a private detective.
00:01:13
Speaker 2: And then it evolved from doing surveillances to actually tracking down witnesses. And I had an act for getting the people.
00:01:20
Speaker 1: To talk to me. One day, he got a call from a town councilman.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: Would Ralph be willing to look at an unsolved case? Putnam Valley is a very small town. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knew my background. So this guy goes, I put together this whole file on the Robin Murphy case. Maybe you can get somewhere with it, because I can't get anywhere with it.
00:01:45
Speaker 1: And I was like, sure. He looked through the box of documents but didn't get far. The case required an all-points dig, and no one was willing to expense that. So he handed the box back and got on to paying work. But he never forgot Robin, or who saw her last.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: I find it interesting that the last person she was seen with is Howard Gombert, but nothing ever came of that.
00:02:11
Speaker 1: And then, in the nutty way life happens to Ralph, the case came back to him a decade later. He was hired by Anthony DePippo to help him fight his false murder conviction, when a familiar name popped up.
00:02:26
Speaker 2: And then, lo and behold, here we go, 2013, and Gombert's name come back up. But I was like, oh, shit, this is something I want to do. In particular, there was a detail that Ralph couldn't shake. Gombert tried to commit suicide. Yes, six days after Robin disappeared, Gombert tried to kill himself. Ralph saw that act as a tacit admission. An admission that, A, Gombert killed her, And B, the walls were closing in on him.
00:03:01
Speaker 1: It freaked him out that he was going to get caught.
00:03:04
Speaker 3: And so that's why he attempted a suicide attempt. Because he knew. He was like, I'm going to get caught.
00:03:19
Speaker 4: Do you hear my madman? my fears. Sorrow's depths are endless. This valley of tears. I'm Paul Solitarov, and this.
00:03:56
Speaker 1: Is season two of The Devil's Quarry.
00:04:08
Speaker 5: Do you mind introducing yourself to me?
00:04:11
Speaker 6: Hi, I'm Jay Murphy. I'm Robin's brother.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: Jay Murphy is a thick-set, affable man with a pair of the saddest eyes you'll ever see. At 52, he's the oldest of Robin's siblings and still stoops a bit under the weight of her laws, which he's carried for 30 years. Life's hardships are never distributed fairly, but Jay's portion seems especially fraught. As he explained to her reporter, Kathleen Horan, he lost a chunk of his life to grief. It took his years of calling the Murphys to set this meeting with Jay And even now, he seems uneasy about it. On a gorgeous day this past September, he sat down with Kathleen in Brooklyn. He recently learned something that brought him forward. Howard Gomber will walk out of prison just after New Year's.
00:05:15
Speaker 6: I had no idea that Howard was getting out soon. So it was a big surprise, you know, and it opened a lot of wounds again, too.
00:05:26
Speaker 1: Yes, Gombert will leave prison years early, getting time off for good behavior. As Jay sat with Kathleen in the sunny apartment, he thought back on his history with Gombert. Before Robin vanished, he'd seen him only in passing at the laundromat in Carmel.
00:05:46
Speaker 6: Me and my mother went there, and her friend used to come in like, oh, he's cute. Like, little do you know, right?
00:05:53
Speaker 1: But Gombert hadn't popped on his radar yet. Not till after his sister vanished and Jay took part in the search for her. He flashed back to the worst night of his life, April 10th, 1995. By that point, Robin had been missing 24 hours, and all her friends were gathered at the Murphy house.
00:06:15
Speaker 6: So everyone's there and she's not.
00:06:18
Speaker 1: They'd assembled there in the hopes that she'd magically show up. After all, they had a show to go to. The Ramones were playing Poughkeepsie that night, but Robin never walked through that door.
00:06:30
Speaker 6: You don't just blow up a concert when you're a kid. I suspected foul play right away because why would she not come home to go to a concert? And all her friends were there at the house, so where else is she going to be?
00:06:43
Speaker 1: A few days later, he helped the Carmel cops do a grid search behind the shopper. He was there when they found his sister's keychain, he says, which is when Gombert's name first came up. The cop he was with recognized the name immediately.
00:06:57
Speaker 6: I said, Howard, he said, in the laundromat.
00:07:00
Speaker 1: He said, Gompert?
00:07:01
Speaker 6: He said, bad news, let's go.
00:07:03
Speaker 1: At that point, says Jay, he and the cop went to the laundromat. There they found Gompert, who immediately raised their suspicions.
00:07:12
Speaker 6: We went over there and we spoke to him. And he was whining about his girlfriend and fight, and she scratched him, and he's showing us. And he lifted up his shirt, white T-shirt, and showed us a couple of scratches.
00:07:23
Speaker 7: He said, see, she.
00:07:24
Speaker 6: She fought with me. She attacked me. And we found that kind of strange. What did the scratches look like? Like claws. Yeah.
00:07:35
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:07:38
Speaker 6: I got that picture in my head right now, yeah. Just his whole act he was putting on. You know, like, poor me, you know? Yeah, yeah, with a big crybaby face and all my scratches.
00:07:52
Speaker 1: Strangely, there's no mention of those scratches in the case file, which makes us wonder what else isn't in that file. But we checked with Anne-Marie about her so-called fight with Gombert. She texted back fast to call bullshit. Did I mention Howard's a pathological liar, she wrote? I broke up with him March 15th, so no. If that was after Robin disappeared, those scratches would not have been for me. Years later, Ralph Jones said he heard about scratches from a different cop in Putnam. Ralph, you recall, was Anthony DePippo's investigator into Gombert.
00:08:32
Speaker 3: Gombert had scratches all over his back.
00:08:36
Speaker 1: Ralph has a theory of how Gombert came by those scratches.
00:08:40
Speaker 3: It happened right there at that strip mall on the hillside. If you look at the hillside, there's a tent there. There's brambles everywhere. The woods, we know he's a woodsman. He's very familiar with the woods. I think it's simple. He snuffed a rat down the hillside. They had a struggle. There's brambles everywhere. And he just carried the body down.
00:09:07
Speaker 1: Why is Ralph so sure that Gombert killed Robin? Because of his suicide bin on his father's lawn days after Robin went missing. That attempt, which rendered Gombert parapsychotic, constituted a confession, or so Ralph thinks. To put that in legal terms, it's consciousness of guilt. Meanwhile, back in Carmel, the cops came after Jay Murphy, of all people. Asked him ugly questions about Gombert.
00:09:38
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm not stupid, so I picked up on it right away. And I was like, what are you getting at? And they told me. They thought that I had put them in the coma. So they were like questioning me about it in an indirect way until I realized what was going on. I said, what are you talking about here?
00:09:55
Speaker 1: Those cops, he says, accused him of hurting Gombert on account of robbing. But Gombert himself set them straight the next day when they interviewed him in the hospital.
00:10:06
Speaker 6: And then he woke up and admitted, oh, yeah, you know, I took some pills and fell out because I was distraught about my girlfriend. So it had nothing to do with me.
00:10:19
Speaker 1: In truth, Gombert had been spinning out well before Robin vanished. Anne-Marie, his battered girlfriend of three years, had just charged him with rape and sodomy. She'd run to a shelter with her three-year-old daughter, then hit him with a restraining order. In his letters to her that followed, and there were lots of letters, long ones, he openly threatened to kill himself. Hell, in one of those letters, he attached his last will. and directions on what to do with his few possessions. As mentioned above, the cops questioned Gombert after his suicide bit. Carmel detectives Randy Tompkins and Walter Galbraith tried to pin down his story. They found him more or less lucid by then, willing to speak on the record. He told them again that he'd seen Robin just before she vanished, saying they'd talked for ten minutes in his car. Then he said she went walking toward Burger King while he drove off to fetch his dirty laundry. But his story left an hour unaccounted for. Actually, closer to 90 minutes per his own timeline. The cops asked him if he'd take a polygraph test. He said, yeah, he probably would. But the very next day, he lawyered up and stopped speaking to the cops altogether. Instead, he talked to the media. From his hospital bed, he told the New York Times about his chat with Robin, saying, quote, I thought you could talk to my girlfriend for me, unquote. Then he whined to a Putnam paper about missing his toddler daughter, describing the girl as, quote, my whole world, unquote. By contrast, the cops told the media next to nothing. Two Carmel girls had been snatched in six months, Josette Wright and Robin Murphy. But all the cops would tell the papers was that Robin's disappearance was suspicious. Quote, We have nothing that leads us to foul play or that leads us away from foul play. It's certainly not your ordinary runaway. End quote. Really? No sign of foul play? Like, say, Robin's personal effects scattered on the hill behind Shop, right? The piece added, Quote, The police have questioned Mr.
00:12:42
Speaker 3: Gombert.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: But he is not considered a suspect, end quote. And so, just like that, Gombert stopped speaking to the cops. All it took to run them off was one little note from his legal aid lawyer. Instead, they took a run at other people. People close to Robin. A couple of Carmel teens to start with. One in particular piqued their interest. The Carmel cops had a list of Robin's friends. The first kid under their lens was her boyfriend, Matt Esposito. This hit vicious to her Nancy Spungen. Now, if you're going by the data, at least, it's the boyfriend that's often the killer. Matt and Robin had an intense teen romance. You could even call it obsessive. Their mutual friend James certainly thought of it as such.
00:13:58
Speaker 7: I was trying to keep them together because whenever they were apart, this is going to sound really selfish, they were annoying. They talked more about each other when they were apart than they ever did when they were seeing each other.
00:14:16
Speaker 1: They worked across the parking lot from one another, and each would visit the other at work. Matt was on a shift at Burger King the night that Robin vanished. That shift was supposed to start at 4 p.m., But when she dropped by to see him, then he wasn't there. His former coworker, Sharon, picks up the story from there.
00:14:38
Speaker 5: Robin had walked from her apartment and come in to see Matt. She came in and she asked the manager at the time where Matt was. And he goes, that's a good question. He's late. So Robin went out to the vestibule, called Matt, must have gotten him up. And he quickly rushed down and ended up coming to work, but he was only 15 minutes late.
00:15:02
Speaker 1: Tardy though he was, Matt worked until midnight and didn't wander off for a shift break. In the weeks that followed, he cooperated with the cops. It confirmed his alibi for the night Robin vanished. But within hours of her going missing, Matt plunged into a hole. If you'd called him and missed him back then, you'd have heard this message on his machine. Quote, I'm drowning right now. Leave me a message and I'll get back to you when I resurface. End quote. Now, Matt was a bright kid with a barbed sense of humor. But that wasn't him being clever. We spoke to his close friend, Kevin Gloyd. Kevin was one of the dozen or so teens who joined the ShopRite search. He said Matt was struggling badly that summer.
00:15:55
Speaker 8: When Robin disappeared, he got high, cut his arms open with razor blades. His father found him in a puddle of blood in the driveway. I think either in his mind it was a suicide attempt or he was just crying for help. I'm not sure which.
00:16:13
Speaker 1: Matt was bereft after Robin vanished. The friend James remembers Matt wearing long sleeves that summer to cover up the fact that he was cutting himself and shooting up.
00:16:28
Speaker 7: I didn't realize that at the time, Robin was keeping Matt from his then just beginning heroin addiction. When she disappeared, he no longer had that lifeline. And he went full tilt bozo.
00:16:44
Speaker 1: Into the stuff. Months later, Matt's dad moved the family to Vermont. Matt would battle addiction for the rest of his life and pass away young in 2013. After they cleared Matt, the cops turned to a second teen, Mark Stein, Matt's buddy and Burger King colleague. He was the short, blonde kid who came knocking on James' window the morning after Robin went missing. James told us that Robin didn't care for Mark. In fact, she called him a moocher and a weirdo. James didn't care for Mark either.
00:17:27
Speaker 7: I didn't really like hanging out with Mark because he was an asshole.
00:17:31
Speaker 1: Mark, according to James, made ugly cracks about girls, including cracks about Robin that pissed Matt off. And then, says James, Mark crossed the line with him. They would park one day in front of a grocery store with Matt when.
00:17:46
Speaker 7: Mark made a sly comment about, you know, your girlfriend's tit belongs to me. We started fighting back and forth, at which point he immediately.
00:18:00
Speaker 1: Started choking me. A gentle kid by nature, James retaliated, grabbing Mark around the neck.
00:18:08
Speaker 7: He kind of narrowed his eyes at me, and he just started this wide... Starting as a closed mouth grin, but then there were teeth. And I said, let go. He said, you let go first. Matt told us to stop. And then he even opened up the back seat to try and pull Mark away. And then he stopped and I stopped. And Mark and I didn't really hang out too much after that.
00:18:43
Speaker 1: James never forgot that sick grin of Mark's. Nor did he forget something else Mark had done. He recalled the three boys went looking for Robin, driving around Carmel and James' car. At some point, Mark suggested they check out the path behind Shopperite. But when they got to the strip mall, Mark told them to hang back. He'd go up alone and look around. He returned in 15 minutes, having seen no sign of her. But just three days later, the search party kids found multiple items belonging to Robin. And did so in the dark, no less. How, James wonders, had Mark not seen those things?
00:19:26
Speaker 7: And it was in broad daylight, yeah. And that's exactly what made us all think he had something to do with it.
00:19:36
Speaker 1: According to the case file, the cops went to Mark's house next. They spoke to his dad, who said he'd kicked Mark out.
00:19:44
Speaker 7: Why?
00:19:45
Speaker 1: Because Mark had assaulted his disabled mom. The dad took an order of protection against his son, meaning Mark couldn't be in the house without his dad present. For several weeks, he said Mark had been sleeping rough, overnighting in lean-tos in the woods. Sharon worked with Mark at the Burger King then. She remembers hearing that he was homeless when Robin disappeared and that the manager of the store took pity on him.
00:20:17
Speaker 5: She didn't want him sleeping out in the elements because it still wasn't warm. It was, you know, end of March, beginning of April. So she let him sleep. We had a shed that we stored like extra tables, refrigerators in. So she let him sleep in there at night.
00:20:30
Speaker 1: The cops spoke to Mark's co-workers about the night Robin vanished. That Sunday, Mark was to work the late shift with Matt. The manager of that shift was a kid named Jeremy.
00:20:42
Speaker 9: The next day, speaking to the cops, I brought up, hey, the other two guys were late. And that kind of bothered me that, you know, Mark was four hours late. That's not very common for him. Like, he was four hours late, so I didn't want him to work. I wanted to, like, send him home. But at some point, I changed my mind and said, you have to come in because I don't have anybody else.
00:21:04
Speaker 1: Police check Mark's time card. It said he'd punched in at 6.18 p.m., making him two hours late, not four. He worked till the restaurant closed after midnight. But his co-workers noticed a troubling thing. On at least one of his breaks, Mark huddled with Gombert near the drive-thru window. They were seen out there whispering and laughing.
00:21:29
Speaker 7: By the next day, he said that, you know, she's dead. I don't know why everybody's fussing, she's dead, man. And he made sure to not say that around Matt, but he did say it around me and Kevin. And we all gave him this stare that just made him shut up for a little while.
00:21:54
Speaker 1: Mark also called his girlfriend at the time, a young woman we're calling Diane.
00:22:00
Speaker 10: He was actually one of the people to call me and say, hey, Robin disappeared. Nobody knows where she is. And at the time, it was only a day or two after she had disappeared, and they were getting ready to do search parties. And he had made the statement to me about, well, I don't think she's ever coming back.
00:22:23
Speaker 1: As the days went by, rumors flew around Burger King. There was a story in the papers about a body found the next town over. A couple of the teenage staffers thought it might be Robin, but Sharon, who worked there, described Mark's response.
00:22:39
Speaker 5: He said, there's no way. There's no way. It's not her.
00:22:41
Speaker 3: No way.
00:22:42
Speaker 7: No way.
00:22:42
Speaker 4: It's not her.
00:22:45
Speaker 5: Mark was definitely, after Robin had disappeared, he definitely was troubled. He took it harder than the rest of us.
00:22:53
Speaker 1: Diane, Mark's then-girlfriend, confirmed his strange behavior.
00:22:59
Speaker 10: I definitely started paying more attention to some of those red flags that were kind of popping up.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: So much so that she broke up with him while she was away at college.
00:23:10
Speaker 10: I was back from one of the breaks and he did come into the diner and I was very uncomfortable with it. Like he did kind of start yelling because he wanted to be able to talk to me and I didn't want to talk to him. And even I had friends that were kind of Like, dude, she doesn't want to talk to you.
00:23:29
Speaker 3: Just back off.
00:23:31
Speaker 1: From then on, she was afraid of Mark. She actively avoided him when she was home from school and steered clear of the places she might see him.
00:23:41
Speaker 10: And at the time, I even used to keep a note under my mattress that said, God forbid anything happens to me, please look at Mark as a possible person involved.
00:24:01
Speaker 1: Mark's friends and co-workers were freaked out by him, too. They wondered what he and Gomber whispered about when Gomber came by that night. And why had Mark found nothing behind Shoprite when Robin's things were scattered near the path? Meanwhile, the cops kept searching the woods behind Shoprite. Sharon watched them through the Burger King window.
00:24:26
Speaker 5: There was police searches everywhere. Constantly detectives coming in, interviewing all of us, seeing what we saw, if any of us saw anything.
00:24:34
Speaker 1: And then one day, Sharon made a discovery of her own.
00:24:39
Speaker 5: I had to go into the shed for a party to get a spare table out. And I found a notebook, and it had pages ripped out. And it had, like, lists of suspects. And it had Howard, Matt, and Mark listed on it. And this was in the shed.
00:24:57
Speaker 1: That's right. In the shed where Mark slept, there was a list of suspects. But there was another piece of evidence that Sharon found.
00:25:07
Speaker 5: And there was a blue blanket, and I saw long black hair on it.
00:25:13
Speaker 1: Who did she know with long black hair? None other than Robin Murphy.
00:25:18
Speaker 5: Mark had short, blonde hair at the time. It was enough to say, you know what? I'm not going.
00:25:24
Speaker 7: To keep quiet.
00:25:27
Speaker 1: Detective Galbraith raced over to the store and brought a forensics cop with him. They took those things into evidence, including the notebook Sharon found. It was partially burned and had pages torn out. We don't know if the hair was sent for testing.
00:25:44
Speaker 5: I was standing there showing what I found in the shed, and they automatically looked at each other and they said, do you want to stay? because they went to go lift up the coolers. I think the detectives were thinking that her body was in one of those empty coolers, but it wasn't.
00:26:03
Speaker 1: But when Detective Galbraith got back to the station, there was a message waiting for him. A lawyer named Joel Stein had called. He identified himself as a relative of Mark's and his criminal attorney. He forbade the cops from speaking to Mark unless he was there as counsel.
00:26:22
Speaker 7: We heard that Mark... was not cooperating with the police because he had a lawyer. The police, they said that they're looking at Gompert when we would ask about it. And then we would ask about Mark, and then they said that, you know, he's, as they put it, he's lawyered up, so we have to go through the lawyer. But they wouldn't say anything more than that.
00:26:54
Speaker 1: We did reach out to Mark Stein for comment. Our reporter Kathleen met him on the porch of his father's house.
00:27:01
Speaker 7: Hi.
00:27:02
Speaker 5: Sorry to bother you.
00:27:03
Speaker 9: I was hoping Mark was here.
00:27:05
Speaker 5: My name's Kathleen.
00:27:07
Speaker 1: In the middle of the day, he looked disheveled, as if she'd roused him from a nap. As Kathleen asked him questions, Mark stared past her shoulder. He seemed to be there and not there. Finally, he muttered one word No. Before he went back inside. According to the UN, about 60% of female victims are murdered by their partner or family member. And so it wasn't a great surprise when the Carmel cops turned to Robin's family. They enlisted a pair of FBI agents to run their criminal backgrounds. They learned that their dad, Brian, had some priors in his past, but nothing involving sex or violence. Then those feds flew out to Arizona, where the Murphys lived before Carmel. Among the people they talked to was Robin's best friend out there, her middle school classmate, Fatima.
00:28:28
Speaker 11: She didn't seem like she had to be the one that had like the coolest clothes and the lip gloss because it seemed like she knew who she was or at least who she wanted to be. There was something very special about her. There was a spark in her.
00:28:45
Speaker 1: The two girls spent a lot of time at each other's houses, swapping poems they'd written in secret. and watching Xena, the warrior princess, on TV. But Robin also griped to Fatima about missing days of school, because she had to stay home to watch her preschool brother. Fatima told the feds that Robin was resentful of her folks for making her their unpaid sitter. Robin chafed at her childcare burden and talked to Fatima about running away. But 30 years later, Fatima says Robin's resentment was typical teenage stuff.
00:29:20
Speaker 11: I remember telling the detective at the time, no, there's absolutely no way that she would just up and disappear because she loved her family. She loved her family way too much to do that. Not the robber that I knew.
00:29:36
Speaker 1: Next, the feds spoke to the Murphys' ex-landlord. He claimed he'd evicted the family for letting their dog poop on the carpets and their toddler smear feces on the walls. The feds called Child Protective Services there, but found no records on the Murphys. And in fairness to the Murphys, no one backed up the landlord's account. We asked Jay Murphy what he recalls of the cops' probe into his family.
00:30:05
Speaker 6: They were fishing, yeah. They want to go after somebody who's not going to fight back. And that's what they were doing.
00:30:13
Speaker 1: Carmel, detectives started calling the Murphys daily, asking them to come in for a sit-down. Brian, Robin's dad, blew up at them. He wanted a different department to take the case.
00:30:25
Speaker 6: I think that they were getting angry because they weren't getting anywhere. And we wanted them to give over the case to the sheriffs, give it to the state police. They wouldn't do it. Nope, nope, nope.
00:30:35
Speaker 1: The Murphys thought the cops were spinning their wheels, kicking dirt in their direction. Those cops, for instance, investigated the family's name change. Before moving to Carmel, they changed their surname from Napolitano to Murphy to honor Brian's Irish heritage.
00:30:54
Speaker 6: Oh, you changed your name. Gee, maybe because it was his stepfather's name, so he changed it.
00:30:59
Speaker 1: Jay says the cops approached him while he was putting up missing posters for Robin.
00:31:03
Speaker 6: They said, oh, you know, your father got busted for pot in 1969. Like, so? Like, are you kidding me? Don't you have nothing better to do with your time? I think they were getting mad because we were getting their nerve because we were calling them idiots. So they were getting a little retaliatory.
00:31:23
Speaker 1: Like the rest of the Murphys, Jay was incensed by the cops' inaction on Gombert. Soon, the family stopped talking to the cops. Judy referred to them as Barney and Andy, the hick country cops from the Andy Griffith show. She ordered her kids to say she wasn't home when they called, and she pasted a homemade sticker on the back of her car. It read, There's no justice in Carmel. Just ask Robin. In the months that followed, Robin's case turned ice cold. The cops in Carmel had failed her completely, but her mom refused to give up. Robin's friend James recalls Judy coming to see him at his after-school job.
00:32:11
Speaker 7: Every now and then, her mom would show up when I was working at the Rite Aid. Even if there was another line open and they were free, she would make sure to wait in my line. And she would say things like, You know, they still haven't found her.
00:32:29
Speaker 6: Do you know anything?
00:32:32
Speaker 1: James would tell Judy anything he'd heard. Alas, it was very little, and Judy hungered for more. She began reaching out to mediums and psychics to see if they could help.
00:32:44
Speaker 7: Around her anniversary every year, people would say that they heard something or they saw something. or this crystal gave a vibration near a lake, or this psychic would come out and start leading an investigation somewhere.
00:33:02
Speaker 1: It was, it was hell. And then one of those people, a self-described paranormal investigator, told Judy where she thought Robin might be found.
00:33:18
Speaker 12: Her mother came to me for a reading. I can only tell you what comes to, you know, my eyesight, what I'm thinking and what I'm saying. And everybody's thinking the same thing. She's in the quarry. She's in the quarry. ¶ ¶.
00:33:50
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 Horne. Our field reporter 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 Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick at the Florida Department of Corrections If you have any information to share about the events covered in this series, please call 1-888-257-7694.