Robin Murphy missing since April 9, 1995, remains at the center of a case that has never been solved. She was 17 when she vanished from a New York shopping center after meeting up with a friend.
For her sister, Jamie Murphy, the disappearance was immediate and personal: “I got the call. I was at work. And they said my sister never came home. And I got a gut feeling something was wrong. I felt something was off,” she said in a new interview with 20/20. More than 30 years later, family, friends and law enforcement are still left with the same unanswered question.
Jamie Murphy, ShopRite, and April 13
Four days after Robin disappeared, coworkers and friends organized a civilian search of the woods behind the ShopRite on April 13. Searchers found her work schedule and paystub, and her wallet and ID turned up near a dumpster behind the same shopping center.
Jamie Murphy said the discoveries sharpened the fear rather than easing it: “It was good to find something, but that was like a stab in the chest because now it's getting real,” she said. Those items placed Robin’s daily routine at the center of the search and showed how quickly the case shifted from a missing-person report to a wider investigation.
Howard Gombert in 1995
Carmel police interviewed Howard Gombert in 1995. He said he spent 10 minutes with Robin Murphy at the shopping center the night she went missing, then said she walked toward a fast food restaurant where her boyfriend worked and he returned to the laundromat. He denied knowing what happened to her.
The case later moved in a more troubling direction. In 2000, Howard Gombert was arrested and convicted for sexually assaulting his former girlfriend, then later convicted of sexual assault of a 7-year-old girl in Connecticut. He received four years in prison for the first case and 30 years total for the two crimes.
DNA and the underwear search
Police later searched Howard Gombert's residence and said they found a tan suitcase containing Ziploc bags of various women's underwear, along with troves of jewelry, ladies' handbags and purses. They submitted underwear for DNA testing, and one item was a conclusive match for Robin Murphy.
Jamie Murphy reacted to that discovery with a line that still hangs over the case: “I found out that they found my sister's underwear and that totally caught me off guard,” she said. Howard Gombert denied that the underwear was his or that he had gotten it from Robin Murphy, and he offered conflicting explanations over the years for other items police said they seized, including that they came from a thrift store.
ABC plans to air a new 20/20 episode, “Hiding Beneath The Surface: The Putnam County School Girls,” on Friday, Nov. 13, at 9 p.m. ET. The episode returns to a case that has stayed open in memory but closed on paper, with one question still carrying the weight of everything else: what happened to Robin Murphy after she was last seen at the shopping center on April 9, 1995?
