One Story I Wrote Haunted Me. So I Kept Chasing It Down

By Paul Solotaroff

Paul Solotaroff

Five years ago, I published a report in these pages titled “The Devil You Know.” It examined the wrongful convictions of two young men for the rape and murder of Josette Wright, a 12-year-old girl in Carmel, New York. In the fall of 1995, hunters stumbled on Josette’s bones in the woods near rural Carmel, an hour north of the Bronx. Those remains bore the marks of a skilled woodsman and ritual sadist. 

Josette’s body was found months after another girl in small-town Carmel had gone missing. Parents were rightly panicked, and fierce pressure was levied on the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office. But in a county with little violent crime, its investigators weren’t trained for the task. Two young men — Anthony DiPippo, then 18, and Andy Krivak, then 17, local nuisances with a handful of juvie busts for possession and public mischief — were framed for murder.

A notorious pedophile named Howard Gombert was 31 when Josette went missing — a drifter whose violent past was known to Putnam cops. He was handsome in a shaggy, windblown way, with an eye for fragile women and a seducer’s savoir-faire. Within weeks of meeting them, he’d be living under their roofs; the rapes and bindings would start soon after. But his real target seemed to be the girls in their care.

In the course of my reporting, I interviewed multiple women who’d accused Gombert of vicious rapes. Three were children when Gombert attacked them. One girl was 12 when he raped her in the woods. Another was seven when he took her behind the trees. The third girl told me he’d creep into her room after her mother fell asleep. He’d put his hand over her mouth, whisper threats in her ear, then violate her. She was eight when this started, maybe nine.

None of those women knew one other as kids. But their accounts echoed one other’s — and spelled out Gombert’s MO. He’d take them somewhere private, usually the woods, then overpower them and bind their hands. Before the rapes began, he’d cram their clothing into their mouths. By the time Josette’s bones were found, a fourth young woman emerged. She, too, accused Gombert of rapes that began when she was underage.

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Despite those sworn complaints; despite a key witness informing cops of a connection between Gombert and Josette; and despite their encounters with Gombert (he was a burglar who plied kids with drugs), the police never so much as interviewed him in the matter of Josette Wright.

After the second girl vanished, in the spring of 1995, Gombert left the county. For a year or two, he lived off the grid in Connecticut. There, he found his next pair of victims — including the eight-year-old mentioned above. He was arrested and convicted of sex crimes against both girls and eventually sentenced to 30 years.

Meanwhile, the teens framed for Josette’s murder spent some 45 years, combined, in maximum pens. DiPippo won full acquittal in the fall of 2016. Having taught himself law in the prison library, he’d hired private eyes to re-investigate his case. By the time of his third, and final, trial in Putnam, he’d filled binders of proof that pointed to Gombert as the killer.

After he was acquitted, DiPippo sued the cops who’d framed him — ex-detectives Pat Castaldo and William Quick. Putnam County dragged its heels in civil court, filing motion after motion in pretrial hearings, perhaps hoping Dipippo would settle cheaply. But then those detectives were deposed and trapped themselves in lies. Suddenly, the county was eager to cut a deal. It paid out $12 million to DiPippo in 2020, then $20 million to Krivak, who was acquitted in 2023.

But justice for those men wasn’t justice for all. The murder of Josette Wright — and the disappearance of the second Carmel girl, Robin Murphy — stand unsolved after 30-plus years. Meanwhile, Gombert is scheduled for release in roughly six months, with no probation or parole, no restriction on his movements. 

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Which is why, five years later, this story still haunts me. I keep hearing the voices of those brutalized girls who’d gone unheard by the cops and who, all these years later, still live in fear of the demon in the woods. From prison, Gombert had sussed out where they lived and sent them menacing letters. He wrote me, too. I have stacks of his correspondence, penned in the key of Charles Manson: a contralto of rage, shrieking self-pity, and threats.

So last spring, when word came of his pending release, I got a team of reporters together. In partnership with Rolling Stone Films, Lava for Good, and producers Signal Co. No. 1, we spent 15 months turning over the soil on Josette’s murder. We traveled to four states, interviewed dozens of new witnesses, and dug up crucial facts not available five years back. The results of those labors, Devil’s Quarry, debuts June 10 as Season Five of Bone Valley.

What we’ve encountered in our investigation reaches beyond Putnam County sheriff’s detectives, encompassing local police departments and the district attorney’s office. Officials seem to have given Gombert a pass, then covered their tracks. They dismissed the rape complaints of three victims in Carmel (and a fourth in Connecticut) before Josette went missing. They disappeared crucial evidence, including rape-kit results, that could have sent Gombert to prison. When we filed a records request on him, the clerk didn’t reply for months, then told us those records had been destroyed. 

If you add up the number of false convictions my colleagues and I have reversed over the years, it would stretch into the thousands. Lava for Good and Signal Co. No. 1’s pod series have helped free dozens of men, overturning or vacating wrongful convictions. They’ve moved three legislatures to reform how cops do their jobs. For my part, I published a Rolling Stone deep-dive that helped exonerate 41,000 drug defendants in Massachusetts, and another that helped spring Philly rapper Meek Mill from prison in 2018 — and triggered the indictment of cops who’d framed him. 

So in cases like these, our antennae pick up signals: static that tells us it’s entire departments, not a couple of bad apples, that have gone rogue. In the case of Putnam County, that tingle is a roar — our collective sense that the fraud there goes back decades. What law-enforcement community mislays every scrap it has on a suspect in the murder of at least one girl, and the disappearance of a second? And what leverage might that predator have had on the criminal justice system of Putnam County?

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