Chapter 3 | Full Tilt Bozo

Meanwhile, back in Carmel, the cops came after Jay Murphy, of all people, and asked him ugly questions about Gombert.

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 questioning me about it in an indirect way until I realized what was going on.

I said, what are you talking about here?

Those cops, he says, accused him of hurting Gombert on account of Robin.

But Gombert himself set them straight the next day when they interviewed him in the hospital.

And then...

He woke up in the advantage of, 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.

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 talk for 10 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.