Dr. Robert Bierenbaum had a second motive to murder his wife – she was threatening to expose him and his cardiologist father as Medicaid scammers, a witness told jurors yesterday.
Prosecutors had already told jurors Gail Katz Bierenbaum was cheating on her husband, threatening to leave him and to ruin his medical career by exposing a letter in which his shrink warned he might kill her.
On the second day of testimony in the prominent plastic surgeon’s murder trial in Manhattan Supreme Court, psychologist Leigh McCullough took the stand to describe how Gail feared her violent husband.
She even showed him bruises on her neck she claimed he inflicted by choking her in 1983, two years before her disappearance, McCullough testified.
But Gail was plotting her revenge, said McCullough, who was helping her earn a Ph.D. in psychology by supervising her in a research project at Beth Israel Hospital.
“She told me that his father, and maybe him, were involved in a Medicaid fraud, and that she was going to reveal this,” McCullough remembered.
Given Gail’s previous complaints of violence, “I was horrified,” he said, adding that he warned her: “You’re in danger. Don’t do that. Don’t threaten him.”
Under grilling by defense lawyers, McCullough admitted he had no way of knowing if her accusations had any truth to them.
Prosecutors accuse Bierenbaum of strangling his 29-year-old wife in their East 85th Street apartment, dumping her body – which has never been found – into the Atlantic from his plane, then reporting her missing back in 1985.
Bierenbaum’s father, Marvin, also took the stand yesterday, denying he had anything to do with Medicaid because he was working at the time as a consultant to the Manhattan office of the Social Security disability program.
But Manhattan prosecutors added the Medicaid allegations to their list of murder motives.
Bierenbaum’s father, who lives in West Orange, N.J., was called by prosecutors to testify against his son as a hostile witness.
In a scratchy, quavering voice, he repeatedly denied asking his son about Gail’s disappearance or knowing any details about the couple’s violent disputes.
The father’s testimony appeared at odds with pretrial testimony by Manhattan psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone, who said the father hired him to treat Bierenbaum out of concern for the alleged 1983 choking incident.
Bierenbaum, who has since remarried, moved to North Dakota and fathered a baby girl, faces a possible life prison sentence if convicted.
Testimony resumes tomorrow.