He was convicted in October 2000 of having murdered his estranged wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum 15 years earlier in their Manhattan apartment on July 7, 1985.
Bierenbaum, a licensed pilot, took a two-hour flight in a Cessna 172 from Essex County, New Jersey, over the Atlantic Ocean on the day he murdered Gail.
(The torso actually belonged to Heidi Balch, the first victim of serial killer Joel Rifkin, as discovered by the podcast The Girlfriends.)
[5] It was the basis of the plot of the episode "The Good Doctor" in the first season of Law and Order: Criminal Intent and also one of the stories in the television show Dominick Dunne: Power, Privilege, & Justice on Court TV.
[11] At a parole hearing in December 2020, Bierenbaum confessed to strangling his wife and tossing her body out of an airplane while flying over the Atlantic Ocean.
[16] Lisa DePaulo profiled the Bierenbaum case in her story, "Intimations of Murder" published in the September 2000 issue of Vanity Fair magazine.