Manhattan jurors began deciding the fate of an accused wife-killing doctor yesterday – after hearing a chilling account of the pretty, young victim’s death.
“Think about the intimacy of strangulation – how close up you are to the person you are strangling,” prosecutor Daniel Bibb told jurors in closing arguments capping a sensational three-week murder trial.
Bibb then painted a word picture of plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Bierenbaum clutching the throat of his wife, Gail, in a jealous rage at their Upper East Side apartment back in 1985.
“Strangulation is up close and personal,” Bibb said.
“You watch as you literally squeeze the life out of another human being. Think about him looking at her as he squeezes the life out of her.”
Sitting at the defense table in Manhattan Supreme Court, Bierenbaum’s neck, face and bald spot began to flush red, and his hands fidgeted slightly.
Jurors began deliberating in the afternoon – with a tough task ahead as they continue today.
The murder that they must reconstruct is 15 years old. Making their task still more difficult is that all of the evidence is circumstantial – based mostly on two weeks of testimony by friends and lovers of Gail and Bierenbaum about his past violence, motive, opportunity and suspicious behavior after her disappearance.
Prosecutors say Bierenbaum strangled Gail because he was in a rage over her affairs with two other men – and in a fury over her threat to ruin his career with a psychiatrist’s letter that calls him dangerously violent.
Afterward, Bierenbaum tossed Gail’s lifeless, 107-pound body into the Atlantic from his plane, prosecutors say – then waited 30 hours before reporting her missing.
But there is no corpse, no fingerprints, no bloodstains, no DNA, no confession and no admission of guilt to support the prosecution’s theory.
“We know we can’t work on things like speculation,” defense lawyer David Lewis warned the jurors – asking them to acquit Bierenbaum as a matter of hard logic, even if “you may feel, listening to this, that he could have done it.”
Gail could have vanished for any number of reasons due to her “risky” lifestyle – including her buying and use of cocaine, and her having taken two, possibly three, boyfriends while married to Bierenbaum, Lewis said. Also, he said, her last known destination was Central Park.
“Who knows what might have happened in that park ‘B.G.’ – before Giuliani,” Lewis said.