July 8, 2026
Chapter 6 | The Snake
Anthony sends investigators to learn more about Howard Gombert. The women they speak with illuminate a signature crime.
Award-winning investigative journalist and longtime Rolling Stone Magazine contributor Paul Solotaroff hosts the next entry in the acclaimed Bone Valley anthology: Bone Valley Season 5 | The Devil's Quarry.
Click HERE to read more about this story from Paul Solotaroff in Rolling Stone Magazine.
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Bone Valley Season 5: The Devil’s Quarry is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Rolling Stone Films and Signal Co. No1.
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00:00:00
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. By the time Anthony's second trial finally started, he gathered reams of proof pointing away from his guilt and pointing instead to Howard Gombered as Josette's possible killer. A last proof compiled in prison is a far far thing from proof presented at trial. To simply get a hearing, as a herculean climb for someone serving life without parole, you must first persuade a judge to grant your motion. If you somehow get that hearing, you must then convince the judge to let in new relevant facts, not just the ones presented at your previous trial. And as Anthony had learned in Putnam County, the judges there seemed deeply disinterested in new facts. But to convey how strong his new proof was, we'll need to return our attention to the devil. When last we left Gombert, he pulled up stakes and moved across state lines to Connecticut. His father, Howard Senior, owned a ramshackle house in the working class hamlet of New Fairfield. Gombert did not get along with his father, a burly, beer guzzling ex marine. We spoke to three of Gombert's victims who spent time in that house. They told us that Gombert and his father fought like sailors. They literally sucker punch each other in front of guests. At some point in his boyhood, Howard either ran away or was kicked out by his dad, said those women. By the age of fifteen, he was living in the woods, sleeping in a tent in the dead of winter. He knew every square inch of those woods, the woman told us, and fed himself on what he stole. Were killed. So when he returned to Connecticut ninety five as a man in his early thirties, he went right back to those woods in New Fairfield. There he hit out and prowled for fresh prey. It didn't take him long to find it.
00:02:30
Speaker 2: My madmss laughter, My fears, sorrows, deaths are endless valley idea.
00:03:04
Speaker 1: This is the devil's quarry. Just months before she met the man of her nightmares, Jane Gunderman was on top of the world. A nurse on the fast track to hospital administration. She ran a visiting nurse service in Connecticut. She was slender, and striking and addicted to style, from fashion to sex and the city. But then she had a catastrophic accident at work and her life and career came crashing down. Her upper spine was damaged and the surgery made things worse. She went out on long term sickly and got hooked on her own pain meds, confined to her bed, and she was broken, alone and dealing with bowel disease.
00:03:56
Speaker 3: That's where all this starts.
00:04:00
Speaker 1: Because that's when a guy started coming around doing odd jobs for the owner of her flat.
00:04:06
Speaker 3: That's how I met Howard.
00:04:10
Speaker 1: What Howard looked like in those things.
00:04:13
Speaker 3: Oh, he was funny. He had a good sense of humor. Believe it or not. There was times that he could be very entertaining. He was good looking. He was not an ugly man. When I first met him. He wore all black all the time, and he wore black cowboy boots, and he wore black jeans, and he always had a wife Beaters T shirt on with a black vest or a black jean jacket or a regular jean jacket, and he always flipped the collar up, which I thought was hilarious.
00:04:45
Speaker 1: Soon he was over there all the time.
00:04:47
Speaker 3: He used to bring the cigarettes. He used to bring the coffee. You know. He checked on me every day, and he was fun. He was like my best friend. I had no one around when I was recuperating. He used to come in every day to see if I was okay. No one had done nuts with my surgeries.
00:05:08
Speaker 1: There where health was touch and go. She'd make an effort for him. The tomb would pop out for meal sometime, or just take a spin on his motorcycle.
00:05:17
Speaker 3: You start out in a relationship. Everything's funky dory, everything's beautiful. They love you, everything's great. You're falling in love, you're doing things together. All of a sudden, something will change, something happens at work, whatever. They take it out on you, the honeymoon faces. They're buying new gifts. Then they start with the little verbal insults and you're not good enough, or if you don't want to give me a blowjob, say I'll go get it from a whore, you know, little things that would make you feel very icky, you know, like just not nice. And then you start to feel, I don't know what's going to happen with this guy who's little on stable.
00:06:01
Speaker 1: Gomberts started forcing sex on Jane and then started taking swings at her.
00:06:07
Speaker 3: When you're with an abusive person, you are thinking about staying alive. Every day. You're thinking about how is he going to be when I come home? Am I going to have to be on my defenses and am I going to have to be guarded all day? Or is he going to beat me up because of something that happened at work and not because of what I've done? Or is he going to take something I say, or something I cooked wrong or make coffee wrong or whatever. They just come home and that's it. They're just in a mood and they take it out on you. One thing that clued me in when he was starting, his eyes would get black as coal. There was no anything inside those eyes, nothing, they turned black. It was weird. It scared the hell out of me. The one thing I would look at was his eyes if trouble was a bruin.
00:07:06
Speaker 1: At some point, Jane broke up with Gombert then discovered she was pregnant. She broke the news to him in the art of her father's house.
00:07:15
Speaker 3: I mean, when I told him I was pregnant, he didn't want to hear it. He just got angry and he threw me on the ground and that's when he started, I don't want another baby, and he tried to kick it out of me. I was screaming nine one one.
00:07:41
Speaker 1: The cop showed up and took Gombert away. Jane went to a women's shelter and stayed there briefly, but she was mortally afraid to be alone, so she bounced around a bit, staying with friends. One of those friends was a woman named Kathy. While staying with Kathy, Jane grew fond of Kathy's kid. Of the three, her darling was Sarah, a feisty but adorable seven year old.
00:08:07
Speaker 3: I always thought of Sarah as my firstborn. I really did. Yep, that's how much she meant to me.
00:08:15
Speaker 1: Before her own daughter arrived, Jane found a cottage to rent. She furnished in the mode of Stevie Nick's so fabrics and pressed flowers, scarves tied around lamb shades.
00:08:27
Speaker 3: I loved that house that I poured my heart into that place. Also, outside, I did a lot of gardening, and I made all kinds of I had a beautiful old stump that had the cracks in it, and with the wood and the dirt, I even planted flowers in there, and they grew like crazy.
00:08:47
Speaker 1: Sarah, Jane's favorite, remembers visiting her there.
00:08:51
Speaker 3: I always smelled like lavender.
00:08:52
Speaker 4: I remember walking in and you smelled lavender everywhere, but in a good way, not like an overwhelming smell. It was refreshing. It was bright with natural light, and it was so insane that there was such light in her home and such darkness.
00:09:14
Speaker 2: Came with it.
00:09:18
Speaker 1: Towards the end of Jane's pregnancy, Gumbert slithered back to her.
00:09:23
Speaker 3: It was absolutely the abuse cycle, through and through. I never let Howard move into my house in New Milford until after Dana was born. He tried to come in the wintertime, and I kicked him back to his parents and said, I didn't ask you to come here. I don't want you here.
00:09:45
Speaker 1: Still, he put his best foot forward. He helped her furnish and paint the baby's room, and seemed genuinely thrilled about Jane's due date.
00:09:55
Speaker 3: When Dana was born that day, he cried his eyes out when he saw her, and he goes, oh, you're beautiful. It's just like your mama, and he just was enthralled with her. I was so amazed that this man who had been such an asshole about everything and beating on girls and all this stuff and beating on me, that he was so enthralled with his daughter, I mean, like in love with her instantly.
00:10:20
Speaker 1: Jane recalls that summer being brutally hot and being knocked on her back posteheart him. Her friend Kathy would comby to lift her spirits and sometimes brought her daughter Sarah to entertain the baby. Once scorching Saturday morning, when Jane was stuck in bed, Howard offered to take Sarah swimming first. However, she needed a bathing suit.
00:10:44
Speaker 4: I believe we went to a kmart maybe, and he bought me a fucking bikini. Excuse my language, but he bought me a seven year old It was like a leopard or cheetah print bikini to wear.
00:10:59
Speaker 1: Then they drove over to Squadt's Pond, a popular spot near his dad's house a new Fairfield.
00:11:06
Speaker 4: We parked on like a side of the street, and then we were going down a normal trail, like a dirt trail. But then he cut off into the woods and it was just like I was like, where are we going? And he goes, don't worry, I know the way okay, and then all of a sudden, he brought me to a perfectly cut out circle of trees. It looked like someone made it that way, like it was almost like he'd been there before and that's where everything took place and he knew where to stop. Now, it looks like it reminds me of like a where you would do a sacrifice. I hate to say it, but it's it's really what I felt like.
00:11:53
Speaker 1: So it was like prepared ground.
00:11:55
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, wow, had been mixed. He asked me to remove the bottoms of my pants and he proceeded to satomize me.
00:12:13
Speaker 1: Then Gombra took his shirt off and shoved it in Sarah's mouth.
00:12:18
Speaker 4: Because I had screamed and he threatened me.
00:12:22
Speaker 1: Then Gombra climbed on top of her and produced a Polari camera.
00:12:28
Speaker 4: When he first started, he was like touching me and taking pictures of down there. That's what the pictures were of, and it made it that much worse when he showed them to.
00:12:42
Speaker 1: Me, and it was more than one picture.
00:12:45
Speaker 4: It was multiple, it definitely, because he did it like a deck of cards. When he showed them to me, there was probably like four or five, I would say, but I did watch him set them on fire, and I was so confus used as to why he showed them to me, Like why did you need to do that.
00:13:10
Speaker 1: At some point, two men walked past them in the woods. They stopped to ask if something was wrong, but Gombert told them no, they were perfectly fine. And when they left, you raped seven year old Sarah.
00:13:25
Speaker 4: In the moment, it felt like it was going on forever. I didn't think I was going to live. I was terrified.
00:13:35
Speaker 1: Do you remember him saying anything, either during or.
00:13:39
Speaker 4: After this to you that if I screamed, I was going to die? That was very much how he was going to make you die. No, he just told me that my family was never going to see me again. And I listened and I did stay quiet, And then afterwards we carried on like it was a normal day.
00:14:11
Speaker 3: Ah.
00:14:12
Speaker 4: I got down to the rocks and he was like, we'll jump off the rocks, and I remember swimming out in the water and just looking out at all the happy people and thinking I didn't want to be there.
00:14:38
Speaker 1: For months, Sarah's stonewalled what have happened to her? And anytime she even thought about telling her mom, Gombert's threat rang out in her ears, but nor could she will herself to forget, because suddenly Jane and Gombert was sleeping over at her house. He'd sit and drink coffee with Sarah's mom in the morning and take her two brothers fishing on weekends.
00:15:01
Speaker 4: And then when him and Jane came to my house, because he had also brought a box of gifts to me that I don't know if my mom went through them or what, but there was weird stuff in there, like woman zingerie and high heel.
00:15:17
Speaker 1: Gombert was so brazen that he attacked Sarah in her living room while her mom was making dinner in the kitchen, and then he got up and walked away from her as if it was just another day around the house. Somehow, Jane suspected none of this. She had severe postpartum after the baby, as well as bowel flare ups that kept her in bed. Worse, Gombert was coming unhinged. He got in the hold of her lumsum from workmen's comp that was blowing through it buying narcotics, his poison of choice. Cracked cocaine unleashed the beast in him. He'd come home hell ben for sex or violence, or often enough both at once, like Sarah felt cornered. And then one weekend in February of two thousand or hell broke loose in that cottage. Gombert held Jane and the baby hostage in their own home, raped and beat Jane for three days straight, and threatened to killer. Finally, he named her in such an intimate way that it can't be spelled out here. All while their baby was desperately ill, spiking a very high fever.
00:16:29
Speaker 3: So please let's take her to the doctor.
00:16:32
Speaker 1: But Gombert wouldn't let them leave the house, and the baby's fever worsened. Jane's only hope Gombert had a court date that Tuesday. If he missed it, they'd send the marshals to arrest him.
00:16:46
Speaker 3: And I remember thinking they'll take him that day. Jane just hang in there, just hanging there, just hanging there. Finally Tuesday came and Gombert left for court. He wasn't out of the driveway two second and I was on that phone and I was like, I'm coming, Can you please see me this morning? It was the nurse and I burst out crying. It was like the damn broke And I told her and I said, can you please have the police come here, and she said why And I said, you'll want to call the police when you see me, is what I said to her.
00:17:26
Speaker 1: At the er, they treated her baby immediately. She had double pneumonia, said the doctor, and would have died or suffered brain damage had Jane not called. When she did, the cops were summoned to the hospital. They took Jane stateon, photographed her wounds and bruises, and collected the DNA on her garments, and then they swarmed the cottage to arrest Gombert. The custom as he tried to slither off on his belly.
00:17:56
Speaker 3: He was literally on the ground like a snake, trying to get away from them. I said, perfect just I couldn't believe it, and I laughed. I said, well, he is a snake, and they all just were like, yeah, you're right there.
00:18:15
Speaker 1: That day, February twenty ninth, two thousand, was momentous for many reasons. For one, it took Gombert off of the streets and almost surely saved two lives, Jane's and the babies. For another, it compelled the Connecticut cops to do with the Putnam cops refused to build a criminal case against Gombert. When the cops searched the cottage, they found a trove of stolen goods hidden in the ceiling of Jane's garage, because that was Gombert's other nasty habit. He was a lifelong thief and burglar. Among those stolen goods were cameras and camquarders. He'd secretly been filming Jane and others for years. And then Jane pointed to a suitcase he squirreled away. When they opened it, they found his collection of prize trophies, nine pairs of worn but on wash panties. Each was carefully wrapped and sealed in airtight plastic baggies. The Connecticut cops booked him for raping Jane. Months later, while Gumbert was in jail awaiting trial, Sarah, who was eight then, was on a school bus going home and tortured by a memory that wouldn't die.
00:19:40
Speaker 4: I didn't know if I did something wrong. I didn't, you know, heck, but I think at that point I felt safe enough because he couldn't hurt us anymore.
00:19:51
Speaker 1: On the bus, she was chatting with an older friend when suddenly it came pouring out.
00:19:57
Speaker 4: It was like I needed to tell someone, but I didn't know how to explain it because the words that I used were not adult words at all.
00:20:05
Speaker 3: It was.
00:20:07
Speaker 4: I explained it as his hot dog. So there were things that I was still little trying to describe to my best friend what happened to me, And she knew because she was maybe like four years older than me, like she needed to tell someone.
00:20:22
Speaker 1: That friend got off the bus and marched Sarah straight home. There she pulled Sarah's mom aside and told her what Sarah had just told her. The cops were summoned. Sarah told them what Gombert had done to her. They promptly arrested Gombert in prison, and she harshed him with the rape of a minor, and so the jury got to hear her story in full. They gave Howard John Gombert Junior the maximum of thirty years in the Connecticut prison. Afterwards, Sarah grew up angry and alone, pushing away family and friends. When she graduated high school, she ran off and joined the army, but there she was assaulted by a fellow soldier and forced to take early discharge. For years, she struggled to get her bearings, hearing from drugs to detox.
00:21:37
Speaker 4: I didn't understand until I was an adult how much it like chemically like in my brain, chemically changed me, changed what I thought about love, what I thought love was supposed to be.
00:21:51
Speaker 3: It changed a lot for me.
00:21:53
Speaker 4: And it was almost like he killed a version of me that I can never get back.
00:22:04
Speaker 1: But then midway through her twenties, Sarah's luck turned. She found a trauma specialist at the VA and worked with her for years. She emerged from those sessions smarter and stronger, and soon found her life's passion working with animals. She opened a dog grooming business and eventually bought herself a house, and somewhere in the thick of that, in twenty eleven, she got a visit from a private eye. He was working for Anthony. To Pippo, he said, and taking a long hard look at Howard Gombert studying his most specific criminal mo and his history is a violent rapist of children.
00:22:45
Speaker 4: He told me about Anthony and Andy, and I couldn't not help knowing that something that happened so bad to me also affected so many other people. Yes, yes, and in such a different way, Like Andy and Anthony went through something horrible that was awful for them, and I could only think like, Okay, well this was really bad both things, but helping them is good. So there had to be a silver lining for me, and they were the silver lining. The reason to rehash it was they don't deserve that.
00:23:29
Speaker 1: And so Sarah added her story to the one that Rachel told, and then three more women came forward and added theirs. Stacked together, those women told him metas story, the story of a man who for almost twenty years had committed unspeakable crimes, taken together his reign of terror race Three very salient questions. First, why did There's Putnam cops give a whole past to Gombert, whom they knew to be a predator of children? Second, was one of as many crimes, the rape and murder of Josette Right? And finally, how much more Gombert proof would it take to get a Putnam judge to free Anthony? To Pippo, one of Anthony's investigators was a man named lou Morgan. Lewis tall and dapper, who drives a top end Mercedes and can read you from across the room. He was an essential player in profiling Howard Gombert.
00:24:35
Speaker 5: Well, Anthony had a lot of information on potential other victims, so we went after them.
00:24:44
Speaker 1: Blue started piecing together Gombert's m when he first heard Rachel's story, the elaborate rope knots he tied, the ritual degradations, the panties he used to.
00:24:56
Speaker 5: Gagger Gombert had raped her and her mother.
00:25:01
Speaker 1: Lou knew there had to be other girls out there, girls Gombert attacked before Rachel the last. Where sex crimes are concerned, especially against minors, it can be punishingly hard to track down victims. Their names are redacted in transcripts and newsclips, and the core transcripts are often sealed. But Lou Margan ducked deep into Gombert's past and came up with the name of his first victim.
00:25:32
Speaker 5: And that's when we found out about a girl named Caruso.
00:25:37
Speaker 1: That'd be Colleen Carusoe. She was eleven or twelve when she first met Gombert. He was fifteen or sixteen then and living in that tent in the woods. In fact, the first time she met him, he stepped out of those woods and smiled and said hi to her. She was flattered by an older boy's attention.
00:25:57
Speaker 3: It was exciting to me.
00:26:00
Speaker 6: Used to have these things on a string, nunchucks, whatever they are.
00:26:05
Speaker 3: He always used to like I remember, always just a swing was yeah, yeah.
00:26:10
Speaker 6: And I think what it was is he was trying to be the top guy, as you will.
00:26:16
Speaker 1: Lou found Colleen in twenty fourteen and told her why he was asking about Gombert. He listed off Gombert's victims to her and named Jo said is another likely victim. Colleen listened in horror, then told him her story about being bound and repeatedly raped in the woods beginning at age twelve by Gombert. At fourteen, she turned him into the cops. She said. He was convicted of assault and sent to prison, but wrote her constantly from his cell. He Warndeder. He he had people watching her movements and threatened to kill her when he got out.
00:26:54
Speaker 6: I think I was his first prey to kind of start the realm of what he was trying to do. But I thank God all the time, I mean for an abundant amount of reasons, not only this, just every day that I was spared, and I mean because I think what he was doing was practicing.
00:27:20
Speaker 1: So now Anthony and his team had six of Gombert's victims, Five of them were willing to testify in court, and two Rachel and her mother were prepared to tell a jury about Gombert's pursuit of Josette. The sixth woman was Gombert's ex girlfriend, Anne Marie. She was a girl of sixteen when he wooed her, then had a daughter, Buyer, and Marie told Putnam cops that Gombert had raped and beat her for years. In early ninety five, she charged him with rape three months after Josette went missing. She also told those cops about Gombert and Josette is offering her the babysitting job and giving her a ride in a little red and black car. With all those witnesses and proof of Gombert's m o, Anthony had a strong case for acquittal. But I'll remind you again this is Putnam County, the same place a jury sentenced to Anthony to life without a shred of physical evidence or a credible witness, And so once more he'd have to go wrestle the bear persuade a Putnam judge to let all the facts speak, and not just the facts those Putnam tops contrived. In the spring of twelve, Anthony and his lawyers were in a courtroom in Karmel, New York. The occasion was a pre trial hearing the way the evidence his team had spent years collecting, but before the judge ruled, he wanted to hear from a key witness. That witness was Howard Gombert. Gombert was hauled in from Cheshire Correctional where he was serving decades for sexually assaulting Sarah.
00:29:28
Speaker 7: They bring Howard Gombert in from Connecticut. He looked very white, like he ain't seen the yard, a vampire. His hair is like parted very close, so real tight to his head. He has this ponytail maybe three feet long, with these rubber bands going all the way down. And I don't know, it looks like a headache. It looks like he's walking around with just a worst headache. But I mean, I don't really care how it feels. He's wearing this orange jumps and he's got this this big wooden cross.
00:30:04
Speaker 1: The transcripts of the hearings run for more than a thousand pages. Gombert's testimony begins on where else, page six six six. Gombert pled the fifth on the stand, and not once or twice, but over and over and over, refusing to answer a single question. Still watching him on the stand, bolstered Anthony's sense that his motion would prevail. Surely no judge could look at Gomber then ignore the mountain of evidence against him. After the hearing, Anthony returned to the Putnam jail, as did Gombert before his return to Connecticut prison. They were putting separate vehicles, of course, but both pulled into the jail house garage at the same time.
00:30:59
Speaker 7: I screamed at on that day. I know all the guards heard it, because I don't think I've ever yelled that loud at anybody. I was in a cop car and he was in the sheriff's truck, so he was higher up and I was lower. I'm like, you're a fucking pedophile, your fucking piece of shit, and I was just kind of like just going randomly with the worst words I could say. And he was handcuffed, but he picked his handcuffs up and he gave me the two fingers and went dumb like, you motherfucker, I'm gonna fucking get you one day, you fucking cox suck a piece of shit, betaphile, And he took his handcuffs and he raised two middle fingers at me, and he kind of laughed.
00:31:41
Speaker 1: Those pre trial hearings went on for a month, in part because there was so much proof to weigh. But in the end, that judge, named Barry war had bart Anthony for presenting his Gombert facts a trial. He blocks Santoro's notes about Gombert's confession, dismissing them as hearsay, and asked for Gombert's victims. He deemed their testimony prejudicial. Why because the crimes against them were too close in nature to the crimes against Josette. They'd be, his words, a distraction for the jury. And so when one fell swoop, all those years of work went puff, Anthony's jury would not be hearing of the crimes against Rachel and Sarah, or against the other victims Anthony's investigators had turned up. Those women had relived their suffering for nothing. When the trial got under way, Anthony's lawyers did what little they could. They put on proof that the Putnam cops were corrupt, that coerced and bullied witness after witness to lie. They pointed to a lack of any evidence that a rape murder happened in that van, and they tore into the states one direct eyewitness, the deeply flawed observer Denise.
00:33:05
Speaker 7: Rose, regardless of how much we impeached her, and we did a great job. She told the jury I killed the girl, and so.
00:33:15
Speaker 1: With the rest of his life hanging in the balance, Anthony decided to take the stand.
00:33:21
Speaker 7: At that point, I was just throwing piss and wind. I was pissed, and everybody said, I testified horrible at that second trial because I was so angry.
00:33:29
Speaker 1: I was so beaten down. Under cross examination, he denied any involvement in Joseph's murder, but he was easily provoked by the prosecutor and came off sounding bitter, vengeful. I did so.
00:33:44
Speaker 7: Bad on a testimony that I even had people in my corner like what the hell.
00:33:51
Speaker 1: By the time he left the dais the verdict felt academic.
00:33:56
Speaker 7: I was found guilty. Happiness and a pause on the prosecution side, sobs and weeping behind.
00:34:04
Speaker 1: Me, and so off He went to Downstate again, then sent North to a pin up top. But several months after a second conviction, he got a call from this guy, Lou Morrigan. Another girl had reached it with her story, and this one was a dead match for what had happened to Josette. Did Anthony have it in him to hear that story and to try one last time to clear his name.
00:34:38
Speaker 7: Lou got this call from this young woman who claims that she was a babysitter for Howard Gombert.
00:34:46
Speaker 1: Her name was Amy Farranda, and she too had grown up in Carmel.
00:34:51
Speaker 7: Like we weren't super close, but we smoke pot. I did a city trip with Amy. I would see her at Raves.
00:34:59
Speaker 1: As a teen. Amy was strikingly pretty, a tall, willowy blonde with a bit of a wild streak. Now, as she spoke to Lew on the phone, she was a nurse in her middle thirties. She'd been following the news of Anthony's retrial on TV, but paralyzed by shame, she'd waited till after the verdict to come forward.
00:35:20
Speaker 5: She wasn't bubblee, you know, she wasn't enthusiastic. It sounded like she was embarrassed to tell me.
00:35:27
Speaker 1: But she insisted on telling him anyway.
00:35:30
Speaker 5: I believe I was raped by Howard Gombert. I said, well, how did you know that? She said, well, I know him.
00:35:36
Speaker 1: Amy said she was seventeen when she babysat Gombert's daughter the toddlery shared with Anne Marie. This was the summer of nineteen ninety four, two months before Josette went missing. Gombert was always prying into Amy's love life, she said, hawking her to talk about boys. Once, she let it slip to him that she sometimes snuck out to meet her boyfriend by the lake at two am.
00:36:03
Speaker 5: How would live nearby, so it was easy for him to stake her out and follow her.
00:36:09
Speaker 1: One night, after telling Gombert her secret, Amy snook out of the house to meet her boyfriend, but on route there she was set upon by a man with a knife. Her attacker wore a mask, but Amy spotted some telltale features. He had a cleft chin and dark blonde scruff on his face. She told Lou what she didn't tell the police, that those features belonged to Howard Gombert.
00:36:36
Speaker 5: We were going to meet like the next week, and then I kept on calling her and she never answered.
00:36:43
Speaker 7: She came forward and then she was like talking about suicide. And then two weeks later we lost her.
00:36:56
Speaker 5: Oh I felt so bad because I had a chance to. I should have dropped everything. The day she called me went down. I got a statement from her. It was terrible.
00:37:09
Speaker 1: Anthony was gutted, actually worse than gutted. He felt personally cursed by God. But just when he thought he couldn't go on, couldn't bear to raise his hopes and see them dashed again. The death of Amy Farranda lit a charge. It was unbearable to him that Gombert had destroyed these lives, had so afflicted these girls that at least two of them were dead. Now Anthony had to keep fighting for himself and for them, and so on Anthony's instructions, his investigators kept digging. They found Amy's grieving sister and took a statement from her. She told them what Amy had told her in the days before her death, that her spirit had been ruined by that brutal rape, and that she'd never been able to push past it. In the eyes of the law. That effidated mattered. It served as Amy's dying declaration. Glowing Anthony and his lawyer is to obtain her case file.
00:38:12
Speaker 7: So in that file I got, Oh my god, I got the sworn statement from Amy farrand the two pages, no lines in the middle, really tiny writing. So that's a lot of statement. And it gave us the signature m A of the crime scene what I believe to be the signature m a of Howard Gombert, of what he's done to other people.
00:38:37
Speaker 1: The details in that statement crystallized everything for Anthony. There was so much there that sounded familiar.
00:38:45
Speaker 5: All of a sudden, someone came up from behind her and put his hand over her mouth, and he had a knife, and he said, don't scream or I'll kill you.
00:38:58
Speaker 7: He gets Amy her hands tied behind her back with this clothesline type rope. He's using it as a leash. He's pushing her into people's backyards. He forces her to perform a sex act and then takes her underwear and puts it in her mouth. Then bra was tied around her face. Amy's bra finishes doing the stuff, and he taps the knife against her head. He says, if you say anything, remember this is waiting for you.
00:39:38
Speaker 1: Those elements Aymy described in her rape all but match the ones in Josette's case.
00:39:45
Speaker 7: It was very similar, very early similar to the mannerism in which Joe's atte right was found. Because you have the rope, you have the panty gag, you have this knife. These are all the same instrumentalities that were found.
00:40:00
Speaker 1: It bears saying that Josette and Amy looked alike, tall, blue eyed, young and blonde, and the details of their rapes were too distinctive and alike to be coincidence to Anthony.
00:40:13
Speaker 7: Identical rape victims, similar hair, similar eyes, similar height. And another big thing is that Amy was Howard Gombert's babysitter at that time this happened. She quit and that was sort of Amy quit the rape after the rape, but it was sort of contemporaneous with when he started to entice Josette with the babysitter position, because now he lost his babysitter.
00:40:47
Speaker 1: The night Amy was raped and reported it to the cops July thirty first, nineteen ninety four, sixty four days before Josette went missing.
00:41:02
Speaker 7: Now you have the signature of Howard Gombert.
00:41:05
Speaker 3: I mean, I would.
00:41:06
Speaker 7: Say like fourth graders could get it, maybe third, possibly second.
00:41:16
Speaker 1: After he raped her, Amy's attacker let her go. She ran back home, grabbed the keys to her mother's car, then drove to the nearest precinct.
00:41:26
Speaker 5: She drove to the Kent police station and informed them, and then the police took her to the hospital to do her a rape examination.
00:41:38
Speaker 1: The detective who took her statement was the aptly named Kevin Doushkoff. He bagged and tagged the seamen stained clothing she'd been wearing during the attack. In the file with Amy's statement to police, Anthony found paperwork for tests they run on her clothing. Multiple samples should positive for seamen. Now Anthony needed the samples themselves to have his investigators run the DNA and compare it to Howard Gombert's. But when his team sought the results from Amy's rape kit and clothing, the ken p d flatley refused. Amy's rape was an open case, they claimed, though the case file showed they never really worked it in the first place. So Anthony's guy sued the KENPD and won. But when they drove up to collect that evidence from the cops, they were told it had been thrown out. The rape Kitnamy seaman stained clothing, all of it had been tossed in nineteen ninety nine. Anthony wasn't gutted, he was furious. Everywhere he looked, every rock he turned over seemed to yield fresh proof that the cops were shielding Gombert. First the Sheriff's detectives, now the KENPD. What on earth did Gombert have on all of them? And how many girls were raped and or killed after Amy reported her rape to Detective douche.
00:43:06
Speaker 7: Cough, that's another evil and then that allowed. If they had solved Amy, they would have put handcuffs on the man. They would and if they had handcuffs on him in September ninety four, when the district attorney learned about the.
00:43:23
Speaker 1: Rape kit, he would have been in jail. Yes, doctor would likely have been in jail in October of ninety four when Josette Wright went missing. In the weeks and months after a second trial ended, Anthony went off a cliff emotionally. He'd reached that point where even the strongest stopped pushing and begin working at their terms of surrender. But someone else, his stepdad, was furious for him, and he refused to give up. Larry had a buddy who was a criminal lawyer. He asked him for the name of the best criminal attorney in New York. That friend connected him to a guy named Mark Baker. Baker was a post conviction legend in New York, a lawyer who'd walked multiple men out of prison after they'd been sentenced to life. Baker agreed to take Anthony's case and to bring aboard the best trial lawyer he knew a hail married magician named Mark ac Niffolo.
00:44:32
Speaker 5: So people says, well, what's your like? Who do you market to? I'm like I marked to people who were fucked, Like if you're fucked, I'm your man.
00:44:57
Speaker 1: The Devil's Quarry is a production of Lava for Good in association with Rolling Stone Films and Signal Company Number One. I'm your creator and host Paul Soltaroff. Executive producers are Jason Flomm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardis and Gilbert King from Rolling Stone Films. Our executive producers are Alexander Dale and Sean Woods. Our producers are Garakornhaber, Hannah Beale, Jackie Pawley, Austin Smith and Kathleen Horn. Our editors Joel Lovell, fact checking by Lucy Croning, our sound designers Brit Spangler, and our engineer is Austin Smith. Additional reporting by Kathleen Horrant. Original music arranged and produced by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio had a marketing and operations Jeff Kleiber, publicist Nathaniel Baruch, art director Andrew Nelson. Social media manager Sarah Gibbons. Legal review provided by Claris Law and Gibson Dunn. Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is performed by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio, Vocals by Rob Reddy of California. Corns written by Leo Schofield and Kevin Harrick at the Florida Department of Corrections Hardy Correctional Facility,
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. By the time Anthony's second trial finally started, he gathered reams of proof pointing away from his guilt and pointing instead to Howard Gombered as Josette's possible killer. A last proof compiled in prison is a far far thing from proof presented at trial. To simply get a hearing, as a herculean climb for someone serving life without parole, you must first persuade a judge to grant your motion. If you somehow get that hearing, you must then convince the judge to let in new relevant facts, not just the ones presented at your previous trial. And as Anthony had learned in Putnam County, the judges there seemed deeply disinterested in new facts. But to convey how strong his new proof was, we'll need to return our attention to the devil. When last we left Gombert, he pulled up stakes and moved across state lines to Connecticut. His father, Howard Senior, owned a ramshackle house in the working class hamlet of New Fairfield. Gombert did not get along with his father, a burly, beer guzzling ex marine. We spoke to three of Gombert's victims who spent time in that house. They told us that Gombert and his father fought like sailors. They literally sucker punch each other in front of guests. At some point in his boyhood, Howard either ran away or was kicked out by his dad, said those women. By the age of fifteen, he was living in the woods, sleeping in a tent in the dead of winter. He knew every square inch of those woods, the woman told us, and fed himself on what he stole. Were killed. So when he returned to Connecticut ninety five as a man in his early thirties, he went right back to those woods in New Fairfield. There he hit out and prowled for fresh prey. It didn't take him long to find it.
00:02:30
Speaker 2: My madmss laughter, My fears, sorrows, deaths are endless valley idea.
00:03:04
Speaker 1: This is the devil's quarry. Just months before she met the man of her nightmares, Jane Gunderman was on top of the world. A nurse on the fast track to hospital administration. She ran a visiting nurse service in Connecticut. She was slender, and striking and addicted to style, from fashion to sex and the city. But then she had a catastrophic accident at work and her life and career came crashing down. Her upper spine was damaged and the surgery made things worse. She went out on long term sickly and got hooked on her own pain meds, confined to her bed, and she was broken, alone and dealing with bowel disease.
00:03:56
Speaker 3: That's where all this starts.
00:04:00
Speaker 1: Because that's when a guy started coming around doing odd jobs for the owner of her flat.
00:04:06
Speaker 3: That's how I met Howard.
00:04:10
Speaker 1: What Howard looked like in those things.
00:04:13
Speaker 3: Oh, he was funny. He had a good sense of humor. Believe it or not. There was times that he could be very entertaining. He was good looking. He was not an ugly man. When I first met him. He wore all black all the time, and he wore black cowboy boots, and he wore black jeans, and he always had a wife Beaters T shirt on with a black vest or a black jean jacket or a regular jean jacket, and he always flipped the collar up, which I thought was hilarious.
00:04:45
Speaker 1: Soon he was over there all the time.
00:04:47
Speaker 3: He used to bring the cigarettes. He used to bring the coffee. You know. He checked on me every day, and he was fun. He was like my best friend. I had no one around when I was recuperating. He used to come in every day to see if I was okay. No one had done nuts with my surgeries.
00:05:08
Speaker 1: There where health was touch and go. She'd make an effort for him. The tomb would pop out for meal sometime, or just take a spin on his motorcycle.
00:05:17
Speaker 3: You start out in a relationship. Everything's funky dory, everything's beautiful. They love you, everything's great. You're falling in love, you're doing things together. All of a sudden, something will change, something happens at work, whatever. They take it out on you, the honeymoon faces. They're buying new gifts. Then they start with the little verbal insults and you're not good enough, or if you don't want to give me a blowjob, say I'll go get it from a whore, you know, little things that would make you feel very icky, you know, like just not nice. And then you start to feel, I don't know what's going to happen with this guy who's little on stable.
00:06:01
Speaker 1: Gomberts started forcing sex on Jane and then started taking swings at her.
00:06:07
Speaker 3: When you're with an abusive person, you are thinking about staying alive. Every day. You're thinking about how is he going to be when I come home? Am I going to have to be on my defenses and am I going to have to be guarded all day? Or is he going to beat me up because of something that happened at work and not because of what I've done? Or is he going to take something I say, or something I cooked wrong or make coffee wrong or whatever. They just come home and that's it. They're just in a mood and they take it out on you. One thing that clued me in when he was starting, his eyes would get black as coal. There was no anything inside those eyes, nothing, they turned black. It was weird. It scared the hell out of me. The one thing I would look at was his eyes if trouble was a bruin.
00:07:06
Speaker 1: At some point, Jane broke up with Gombert then discovered she was pregnant. She broke the news to him in the art of her father's house.
00:07:15
Speaker 3: I mean, when I told him I was pregnant, he didn't want to hear it. He just got angry and he threw me on the ground and that's when he started, I don't want another baby, and he tried to kick it out of me. I was screaming nine one one.
00:07:41
Speaker 1: The cop showed up and took Gombert away. Jane went to a women's shelter and stayed there briefly, but she was mortally afraid to be alone, so she bounced around a bit, staying with friends. One of those friends was a woman named Kathy. While staying with Kathy, Jane grew fond of Kathy's kid. Of the three, her darling was Sarah, a feisty but adorable seven year old.
00:08:07
Speaker 3: I always thought of Sarah as my firstborn. I really did. Yep, that's how much she meant to me.
00:08:15
Speaker 1: Before her own daughter arrived, Jane found a cottage to rent. She furnished in the mode of Stevie Nick's so fabrics and pressed flowers, scarves tied around lamb shades.
00:08:27
Speaker 3: I loved that house that I poured my heart into that place. Also, outside, I did a lot of gardening, and I made all kinds of I had a beautiful old stump that had the cracks in it, and with the wood and the dirt, I even planted flowers in there, and they grew like crazy.
00:08:47
Speaker 1: Sarah, Jane's favorite, remembers visiting her there.
00:08:51
Speaker 3: I always smelled like lavender.
00:08:52
Speaker 4: I remember walking in and you smelled lavender everywhere, but in a good way, not like an overwhelming smell. It was refreshing. It was bright with natural light, and it was so insane that there was such light in her home and such darkness.
00:09:14
Speaker 2: Came with it.
00:09:18
Speaker 1: Towards the end of Jane's pregnancy, Gumbert slithered back to her.
00:09:23
Speaker 3: It was absolutely the abuse cycle, through and through. I never let Howard move into my house in New Milford until after Dana was born. He tried to come in the wintertime, and I kicked him back to his parents and said, I didn't ask you to come here. I don't want you here.
00:09:45
Speaker 1: Still, he put his best foot forward. He helped her furnish and paint the baby's room, and seemed genuinely thrilled about Jane's due date.
00:09:55
Speaker 3: When Dana was born that day, he cried his eyes out when he saw her, and he goes, oh, you're beautiful. It's just like your mama, and he just was enthralled with her. I was so amazed that this man who had been such an asshole about everything and beating on girls and all this stuff and beating on me, that he was so enthralled with his daughter, I mean, like in love with her instantly.
00:10:20
Speaker 1: Jane recalls that summer being brutally hot and being knocked on her back posteheart him. Her friend Kathy would comby to lift her spirits and sometimes brought her daughter Sarah to entertain the baby. Once scorching Saturday morning, when Jane was stuck in bed, Howard offered to take Sarah swimming first. However, she needed a bathing suit.
00:10:44
Speaker 4: I believe we went to a kmart maybe, and he bought me a fucking bikini. Excuse my language, but he bought me a seven year old It was like a leopard or cheetah print bikini to wear.
00:10:59
Speaker 1: Then they drove over to Squadt's Pond, a popular spot near his dad's house a new Fairfield.
00:11:06
Speaker 4: We parked on like a side of the street, and then we were going down a normal trail, like a dirt trail. But then he cut off into the woods and it was just like I was like, where are we going? And he goes, don't worry, I know the way okay, and then all of a sudden, he brought me to a perfectly cut out circle of trees. It looked like someone made it that way, like it was almost like he'd been there before and that's where everything took place and he knew where to stop. Now, it looks like it reminds me of like a where you would do a sacrifice. I hate to say it, but it's it's really what I felt like.
00:11:53
Speaker 1: So it was like prepared ground.
00:11:55
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, wow, had been mixed. He asked me to remove the bottoms of my pants and he proceeded to satomize me.
00:12:13
Speaker 1: Then Gombra took his shirt off and shoved it in Sarah's mouth.
00:12:18
Speaker 4: Because I had screamed and he threatened me.
00:12:22
Speaker 1: Then Gombra climbed on top of her and produced a Polari camera.
00:12:28
Speaker 4: When he first started, he was like touching me and taking pictures of down there. That's what the pictures were of, and it made it that much worse when he showed them to.
00:12:42
Speaker 1: Me, and it was more than one picture.
00:12:45
Speaker 4: It was multiple, it definitely, because he did it like a deck of cards. When he showed them to me, there was probably like four or five, I would say, but I did watch him set them on fire, and I was so confus used as to why he showed them to me, Like why did you need to do that.
00:13:10
Speaker 1: At some point, two men walked past them in the woods. They stopped to ask if something was wrong, but Gombert told them no, they were perfectly fine. And when they left, you raped seven year old Sarah.
00:13:25
Speaker 4: In the moment, it felt like it was going on forever. I didn't think I was going to live. I was terrified.
00:13:35
Speaker 1: Do you remember him saying anything, either during or.
00:13:39
Speaker 4: After this to you that if I screamed, I was going to die? That was very much how he was going to make you die. No, he just told me that my family was never going to see me again. And I listened and I did stay quiet, And then afterwards we carried on like it was a normal day.
00:14:11
Speaker 3: Ah.
00:14:12
Speaker 4: I got down to the rocks and he was like, we'll jump off the rocks, and I remember swimming out in the water and just looking out at all the happy people and thinking I didn't want to be there.
00:14:38
Speaker 1: For months, Sarah's stonewalled what have happened to her? And anytime she even thought about telling her mom, Gombert's threat rang out in her ears, but nor could she will herself to forget, because suddenly Jane and Gombert was sleeping over at her house. He'd sit and drink coffee with Sarah's mom in the morning and take her two brothers fishing on weekends.
00:15:01
Speaker 4: And then when him and Jane came to my house, because he had also brought a box of gifts to me that I don't know if my mom went through them or what, but there was weird stuff in there, like woman zingerie and high heel.
00:15:17
Speaker 1: Gombert was so brazen that he attacked Sarah in her living room while her mom was making dinner in the kitchen, and then he got up and walked away from her as if it was just another day around the house. Somehow, Jane suspected none of this. She had severe postpartum after the baby, as well as bowel flare ups that kept her in bed. Worse, Gombert was coming unhinged. He got in the hold of her lumsum from workmen's comp that was blowing through it buying narcotics, his poison of choice. Cracked cocaine unleashed the beast in him. He'd come home hell ben for sex or violence, or often enough both at once, like Sarah felt cornered. And then one weekend in February of two thousand or hell broke loose in that cottage. Gombert held Jane and the baby hostage in their own home, raped and beat Jane for three days straight, and threatened to killer. Finally, he named her in such an intimate way that it can't be spelled out here. All while their baby was desperately ill, spiking a very high fever.
00:16:29
Speaker 3: So please let's take her to the doctor.
00:16:32
Speaker 1: But Gombert wouldn't let them leave the house, and the baby's fever worsened. Jane's only hope Gombert had a court date that Tuesday. If he missed it, they'd send the marshals to arrest him.
00:16:46
Speaker 3: And I remember thinking they'll take him that day. Jane just hang in there, just hanging there, just hanging there. Finally Tuesday came and Gombert left for court. He wasn't out of the driveway two second and I was on that phone and I was like, I'm coming, Can you please see me this morning? It was the nurse and I burst out crying. It was like the damn broke And I told her and I said, can you please have the police come here, and she said why And I said, you'll want to call the police when you see me, is what I said to her.
00:17:26
Speaker 1: At the er, they treated her baby immediately. She had double pneumonia, said the doctor, and would have died or suffered brain damage had Jane not called. When she did, the cops were summoned to the hospital. They took Jane stateon, photographed her wounds and bruises, and collected the DNA on her garments, and then they swarmed the cottage to arrest Gombert. The custom as he tried to slither off on his belly.
00:17:56
Speaker 3: He was literally on the ground like a snake, trying to get away from them. I said, perfect just I couldn't believe it, and I laughed. I said, well, he is a snake, and they all just were like, yeah, you're right there.
00:18:15
Speaker 1: That day, February twenty ninth, two thousand, was momentous for many reasons. For one, it took Gombert off of the streets and almost surely saved two lives, Jane's and the babies. For another, it compelled the Connecticut cops to do with the Putnam cops refused to build a criminal case against Gombert. When the cops searched the cottage, they found a trove of stolen goods hidden in the ceiling of Jane's garage, because that was Gombert's other nasty habit. He was a lifelong thief and burglar. Among those stolen goods were cameras and camquarders. He'd secretly been filming Jane and others for years. And then Jane pointed to a suitcase he squirreled away. When they opened it, they found his collection of prize trophies, nine pairs of worn but on wash panties. Each was carefully wrapped and sealed in airtight plastic baggies. The Connecticut cops booked him for raping Jane. Months later, while Gumbert was in jail awaiting trial, Sarah, who was eight then, was on a school bus going home and tortured by a memory that wouldn't die.
00:19:40
Speaker 4: I didn't know if I did something wrong. I didn't, you know, heck, but I think at that point I felt safe enough because he couldn't hurt us anymore.
00:19:51
Speaker 1: On the bus, she was chatting with an older friend when suddenly it came pouring out.
00:19:57
Speaker 4: It was like I needed to tell someone, but I didn't know how to explain it because the words that I used were not adult words at all.
00:20:05
Speaker 3: It was.
00:20:07
Speaker 4: I explained it as his hot dog. So there were things that I was still little trying to describe to my best friend what happened to me, And she knew because she was maybe like four years older than me, like she needed to tell someone.
00:20:22
Speaker 1: That friend got off the bus and marched Sarah straight home. There she pulled Sarah's mom aside and told her what Sarah had just told her. The cops were summoned. Sarah told them what Gombert had done to her. They promptly arrested Gombert in prison, and she harshed him with the rape of a minor, and so the jury got to hear her story in full. They gave Howard John Gombert Junior the maximum of thirty years in the Connecticut prison. Afterwards, Sarah grew up angry and alone, pushing away family and friends. When she graduated high school, she ran off and joined the army, but there she was assaulted by a fellow soldier and forced to take early discharge. For years, she struggled to get her bearings, hearing from drugs to detox.
00:21:37
Speaker 4: I didn't understand until I was an adult how much it like chemically like in my brain, chemically changed me, changed what I thought about love, what I thought love was supposed to be.
00:21:51
Speaker 3: It changed a lot for me.
00:21:53
Speaker 4: And it was almost like he killed a version of me that I can never get back.
00:22:04
Speaker 1: But then midway through her twenties, Sarah's luck turned. She found a trauma specialist at the VA and worked with her for years. She emerged from those sessions smarter and stronger, and soon found her life's passion working with animals. She opened a dog grooming business and eventually bought herself a house, and somewhere in the thick of that, in twenty eleven, she got a visit from a private eye. He was working for Anthony. To Pippo, he said, and taking a long hard look at Howard Gombert studying his most specific criminal mo and his history is a violent rapist of children.
00:22:45
Speaker 4: He told me about Anthony and Andy, and I couldn't not help knowing that something that happened so bad to me also affected so many other people. Yes, yes, and in such a different way, Like Andy and Anthony went through something horrible that was awful for them, and I could only think like, Okay, well this was really bad both things, but helping them is good. So there had to be a silver lining for me, and they were the silver lining. The reason to rehash it was they don't deserve that.
00:23:29
Speaker 1: And so Sarah added her story to the one that Rachel told, and then three more women came forward and added theirs. Stacked together, those women told him metas story, the story of a man who for almost twenty years had committed unspeakable crimes, taken together his reign of terror race Three very salient questions. First, why did There's Putnam cops give a whole past to Gombert, whom they knew to be a predator of children? Second, was one of as many crimes, the rape and murder of Josette Right? And finally, how much more Gombert proof would it take to get a Putnam judge to free Anthony? To Pippo, one of Anthony's investigators was a man named lou Morgan. Lewis tall and dapper, who drives a top end Mercedes and can read you from across the room. He was an essential player in profiling Howard Gombert.
00:24:35
Speaker 5: Well, Anthony had a lot of information on potential other victims, so we went after them.
00:24:44
Speaker 1: Blue started piecing together Gombert's m when he first heard Rachel's story, the elaborate rope knots he tied, the ritual degradations, the panties he used to.
00:24:56
Speaker 5: Gagger Gombert had raped her and her mother.
00:25:01
Speaker 1: Lou knew there had to be other girls out there, girls Gombert attacked before Rachel the last. Where sex crimes are concerned, especially against minors, it can be punishingly hard to track down victims. Their names are redacted in transcripts and newsclips, and the core transcripts are often sealed. But Lou Margan ducked deep into Gombert's past and came up with the name of his first victim.
00:25:32
Speaker 5: And that's when we found out about a girl named Caruso.
00:25:37
Speaker 1: That'd be Colleen Carusoe. She was eleven or twelve when she first met Gombert. He was fifteen or sixteen then and living in that tent in the woods. In fact, the first time she met him, he stepped out of those woods and smiled and said hi to her. She was flattered by an older boy's attention.
00:25:57
Speaker 3: It was exciting to me.
00:26:00
Speaker 6: Used to have these things on a string, nunchucks, whatever they are.
00:26:05
Speaker 3: He always used to like I remember, always just a swing was yeah, yeah.
00:26:10
Speaker 6: And I think what it was is he was trying to be the top guy, as you will.
00:26:16
Speaker 1: Lou found Colleen in twenty fourteen and told her why he was asking about Gombert. He listed off Gombert's victims to her and named Jo said is another likely victim. Colleen listened in horror, then told him her story about being bound and repeatedly raped in the woods beginning at age twelve by Gombert. At fourteen, she turned him into the cops. She said. He was convicted of assault and sent to prison, but wrote her constantly from his cell. He Warndeder. He he had people watching her movements and threatened to kill her when he got out.
00:26:54
Speaker 6: I think I was his first prey to kind of start the realm of what he was trying to do. But I thank God all the time, I mean for an abundant amount of reasons, not only this, just every day that I was spared, and I mean because I think what he was doing was practicing.
00:27:20
Speaker 1: So now Anthony and his team had six of Gombert's victims, Five of them were willing to testify in court, and two Rachel and her mother were prepared to tell a jury about Gombert's pursuit of Josette. The sixth woman was Gombert's ex girlfriend, Anne Marie. She was a girl of sixteen when he wooed her, then had a daughter, Buyer, and Marie told Putnam cops that Gombert had raped and beat her for years. In early ninety five, she charged him with rape three months after Josette went missing. She also told those cops about Gombert and Josette is offering her the babysitting job and giving her a ride in a little red and black car. With all those witnesses and proof of Gombert's m o, Anthony had a strong case for acquittal. But I'll remind you again this is Putnam County, the same place a jury sentenced to Anthony to life without a shred of physical evidence or a credible witness, And so once more he'd have to go wrestle the bear persuade a Putnam judge to let all the facts speak, and not just the facts those Putnam tops contrived. In the spring of twelve, Anthony and his lawyers were in a courtroom in Karmel, New York. The occasion was a pre trial hearing the way the evidence his team had spent years collecting, but before the judge ruled, he wanted to hear from a key witness. That witness was Howard Gombert. Gombert was hauled in from Cheshire Correctional where he was serving decades for sexually assaulting Sarah.
00:29:28
Speaker 7: They bring Howard Gombert in from Connecticut. He looked very white, like he ain't seen the yard, a vampire. His hair is like parted very close, so real tight to his head. He has this ponytail maybe three feet long, with these rubber bands going all the way down. And I don't know, it looks like a headache. It looks like he's walking around with just a worst headache. But I mean, I don't really care how it feels. He's wearing this orange jumps and he's got this this big wooden cross.
00:30:04
Speaker 1: The transcripts of the hearings run for more than a thousand pages. Gombert's testimony begins on where else, page six six six. Gombert pled the fifth on the stand, and not once or twice, but over and over and over, refusing to answer a single question. Still watching him on the stand, bolstered Anthony's sense that his motion would prevail. Surely no judge could look at Gomber then ignore the mountain of evidence against him. After the hearing, Anthony returned to the Putnam jail, as did Gombert before his return to Connecticut prison. They were putting separate vehicles, of course, but both pulled into the jail house garage at the same time.
00:30:59
Speaker 7: I screamed at on that day. I know all the guards heard it, because I don't think I've ever yelled that loud at anybody. I was in a cop car and he was in the sheriff's truck, so he was higher up and I was lower. I'm like, you're a fucking pedophile, your fucking piece of shit, and I was just kind of like just going randomly with the worst words I could say. And he was handcuffed, but he picked his handcuffs up and he gave me the two fingers and went dumb like, you motherfucker, I'm gonna fucking get you one day, you fucking cox suck a piece of shit, betaphile, And he took his handcuffs and he raised two middle fingers at me, and he kind of laughed.
00:31:41
Speaker 1: Those pre trial hearings went on for a month, in part because there was so much proof to weigh. But in the end, that judge, named Barry war had bart Anthony for presenting his Gombert facts a trial. He blocks Santoro's notes about Gombert's confession, dismissing them as hearsay, and asked for Gombert's victims. He deemed their testimony prejudicial. Why because the crimes against them were too close in nature to the crimes against Josette. They'd be, his words, a distraction for the jury. And so when one fell swoop, all those years of work went puff, Anthony's jury would not be hearing of the crimes against Rachel and Sarah, or against the other victims Anthony's investigators had turned up. Those women had relived their suffering for nothing. When the trial got under way, Anthony's lawyers did what little they could. They put on proof that the Putnam cops were corrupt, that coerced and bullied witness after witness to lie. They pointed to a lack of any evidence that a rape murder happened in that van, and they tore into the states one direct eyewitness, the deeply flawed observer Denise.
00:33:05
Speaker 7: Rose, regardless of how much we impeached her, and we did a great job. She told the jury I killed the girl, and so.
00:33:15
Speaker 1: With the rest of his life hanging in the balance, Anthony decided to take the stand.
00:33:21
Speaker 7: At that point, I was just throwing piss and wind. I was pissed, and everybody said, I testified horrible at that second trial because I was so angry.
00:33:29
Speaker 1: I was so beaten down. Under cross examination, he denied any involvement in Joseph's murder, but he was easily provoked by the prosecutor and came off sounding bitter, vengeful. I did so.
00:33:44
Speaker 7: Bad on a testimony that I even had people in my corner like what the hell.
00:33:51
Speaker 1: By the time he left the dais the verdict felt academic.
00:33:56
Speaker 7: I was found guilty. Happiness and a pause on the prosecution side, sobs and weeping behind.
00:34:04
Speaker 1: Me, and so off He went to Downstate again, then sent North to a pin up top. But several months after a second conviction, he got a call from this guy, Lou Morrigan. Another girl had reached it with her story, and this one was a dead match for what had happened to Josette. Did Anthony have it in him to hear that story and to try one last time to clear his name.
00:34:38
Speaker 7: Lou got this call from this young woman who claims that she was a babysitter for Howard Gombert.
00:34:46
Speaker 1: Her name was Amy Farranda, and she too had grown up in Carmel.
00:34:51
Speaker 7: Like we weren't super close, but we smoke pot. I did a city trip with Amy. I would see her at Raves.
00:34:59
Speaker 1: As a teen. Amy was strikingly pretty, a tall, willowy blonde with a bit of a wild streak. Now, as she spoke to Lew on the phone, she was a nurse in her middle thirties. She'd been following the news of Anthony's retrial on TV, but paralyzed by shame, she'd waited till after the verdict to come forward.
00:35:20
Speaker 5: She wasn't bubblee, you know, she wasn't enthusiastic. It sounded like she was embarrassed to tell me.
00:35:27
Speaker 1: But she insisted on telling him anyway.
00:35:30
Speaker 5: I believe I was raped by Howard Gombert. I said, well, how did you know that? She said, well, I know him.
00:35:36
Speaker 1: Amy said she was seventeen when she babysat Gombert's daughter the toddlery shared with Anne Marie. This was the summer of nineteen ninety four, two months before Josette went missing. Gombert was always prying into Amy's love life, she said, hawking her to talk about boys. Once, she let it slip to him that she sometimes snuck out to meet her boyfriend by the lake at two am.
00:36:03
Speaker 5: How would live nearby, so it was easy for him to stake her out and follow her.
00:36:09
Speaker 1: One night, after telling Gombert her secret, Amy snook out of the house to meet her boyfriend, but on route there she was set upon by a man with a knife. Her attacker wore a mask, but Amy spotted some telltale features. He had a cleft chin and dark blonde scruff on his face. She told Lou what she didn't tell the police, that those features belonged to Howard Gombert.
00:36:36
Speaker 5: We were going to meet like the next week, and then I kept on calling her and she never answered.
00:36:43
Speaker 7: She came forward and then she was like talking about suicide. And then two weeks later we lost her.
00:36:56
Speaker 5: Oh I felt so bad because I had a chance to. I should have dropped everything. The day she called me went down. I got a statement from her. It was terrible.
00:37:09
Speaker 1: Anthony was gutted, actually worse than gutted. He felt personally cursed by God. But just when he thought he couldn't go on, couldn't bear to raise his hopes and see them dashed again. The death of Amy Farranda lit a charge. It was unbearable to him that Gombert had destroyed these lives, had so afflicted these girls that at least two of them were dead. Now Anthony had to keep fighting for himself and for them, and so on Anthony's instructions, his investigators kept digging. They found Amy's grieving sister and took a statement from her. She told them what Amy had told her in the days before her death, that her spirit had been ruined by that brutal rape, and that she'd never been able to push past it. In the eyes of the law. That effidated mattered. It served as Amy's dying declaration. Glowing Anthony and his lawyer is to obtain her case file.
00:38:12
Speaker 7: So in that file I got, Oh my god, I got the sworn statement from Amy farrand the two pages, no lines in the middle, really tiny writing. So that's a lot of statement. And it gave us the signature m A of the crime scene what I believe to be the signature m a of Howard Gombert, of what he's done to other people.
00:38:37
Speaker 1: The details in that statement crystallized everything for Anthony. There was so much there that sounded familiar.
00:38:45
Speaker 5: All of a sudden, someone came up from behind her and put his hand over her mouth, and he had a knife, and he said, don't scream or I'll kill you.
00:38:58
Speaker 7: He gets Amy her hands tied behind her back with this clothesline type rope. He's using it as a leash. He's pushing her into people's backyards. He forces her to perform a sex act and then takes her underwear and puts it in her mouth. Then bra was tied around her face. Amy's bra finishes doing the stuff, and he taps the knife against her head. He says, if you say anything, remember this is waiting for you.
00:39:38
Speaker 1: Those elements Aymy described in her rape all but match the ones in Josette's case.
00:39:45
Speaker 7: It was very similar, very early similar to the mannerism in which Joe's atte right was found. Because you have the rope, you have the panty gag, you have this knife. These are all the same instrumentalities that were found.
00:40:00
Speaker 1: It bears saying that Josette and Amy looked alike, tall, blue eyed, young and blonde, and the details of their rapes were too distinctive and alike to be coincidence to Anthony.
00:40:13
Speaker 7: Identical rape victims, similar hair, similar eyes, similar height. And another big thing is that Amy was Howard Gombert's babysitter at that time this happened. She quit and that was sort of Amy quit the rape after the rape, but it was sort of contemporaneous with when he started to entice Josette with the babysitter position, because now he lost his babysitter.
00:40:47
Speaker 1: The night Amy was raped and reported it to the cops July thirty first, nineteen ninety four, sixty four days before Josette went missing.
00:41:02
Speaker 7: Now you have the signature of Howard Gombert.
00:41:05
Speaker 3: I mean, I would.
00:41:06
Speaker 7: Say like fourth graders could get it, maybe third, possibly second.
00:41:16
Speaker 1: After he raped her, Amy's attacker let her go. She ran back home, grabbed the keys to her mother's car, then drove to the nearest precinct.
00:41:26
Speaker 5: She drove to the Kent police station and informed them, and then the police took her to the hospital to do her a rape examination.
00:41:38
Speaker 1: The detective who took her statement was the aptly named Kevin Doushkoff. He bagged and tagged the seamen stained clothing she'd been wearing during the attack. In the file with Amy's statement to police, Anthony found paperwork for tests they run on her clothing. Multiple samples should positive for seamen. Now Anthony needed the samples themselves to have his investigators run the DNA and compare it to Howard Gombert's. But when his team sought the results from Amy's rape kit and clothing, the ken p d flatley refused. Amy's rape was an open case, they claimed, though the case file showed they never really worked it in the first place. So Anthony's guy sued the KENPD and won. But when they drove up to collect that evidence from the cops, they were told it had been thrown out. The rape Kitnamy seaman stained clothing, all of it had been tossed in nineteen ninety nine. Anthony wasn't gutted, he was furious. Everywhere he looked, every rock he turned over seemed to yield fresh proof that the cops were shielding Gombert. First the Sheriff's detectives, now the KENPD. What on earth did Gombert have on all of them? And how many girls were raped and or killed after Amy reported her rape to Detective douche.
00:43:06
Speaker 7: Cough, that's another evil and then that allowed. If they had solved Amy, they would have put handcuffs on the man. They would and if they had handcuffs on him in September ninety four, when the district attorney learned about the.
00:43:23
Speaker 1: Rape kit, he would have been in jail. Yes, doctor would likely have been in jail in October of ninety four when Josette Wright went missing. In the weeks and months after a second trial ended, Anthony went off a cliff emotionally. He'd reached that point where even the strongest stopped pushing and begin working at their terms of surrender. But someone else, his stepdad, was furious for him, and he refused to give up. Larry had a buddy who was a criminal lawyer. He asked him for the name of the best criminal attorney in New York. That friend connected him to a guy named Mark Baker. Baker was a post conviction legend in New York, a lawyer who'd walked multiple men out of prison after they'd been sentenced to life. Baker agreed to take Anthony's case and to bring aboard the best trial lawyer he knew a hail married magician named Mark ac Niffolo.
00:44:32
Speaker 5: So people says, well, what's your like? Who do you market to? I'm like I marked to people who were fucked, Like if you're fucked, I'm your man.
00:44:57
Speaker 1: The Devil's Quarry is a production of Lava for Good in association with Rolling Stone Films and Signal Company Number One. I'm your creator and host Paul Soltaroff. Executive producers are Jason Flomm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardis and Gilbert King from Rolling Stone Films. Our executive producers are Alexander Dale and Sean Woods. Our producers are Garakornhaber, Hannah Beale, Jackie Pawley, Austin Smith and Kathleen Horn. Our editors Joel Lovell, fact checking by Lucy Croning, our sound designers Brit Spangler, and our engineer is Austin Smith. Additional reporting by Kathleen Horrant. Original music arranged and produced by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio had a marketing and operations Jeff Kleiber, publicist Nathaniel Baruch, art director Andrew Nelson. Social media manager Sarah Gibbons. Legal review provided by Claris Law and Gibson Dunn. Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is performed by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio, Vocals by Rob Reddy of California. Corns written by Leo Schofield and Kevin Harrick at the Florida Department of Corrections Hardy Correctional Facility,
