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The Disappearance of Gabrielle Mueller · Dead Serious

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Dead Serious, a true crime podcast.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Ames Murray.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast contains mature themes.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Your discretion is advised.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: On the last Sunday evening of her life, Gabrielle Mueller was sitting in a diner on Route 571 in Toms River, New Jersey, watching her kids play the tabletop trivia game.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was Sunday, April 1st, 2001.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Her ex-husband Jody was across from her.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: He had brought the children for the custody handoff, which they did regularly over dinner because that is the kind of divorced couple they were.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've never actually seen this kind of divorced couple, but they're the kind who still ate together, who still took trips to Atlantic City together, the kind where she had taken him out to breakfast after the final divorce hearing.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Jody had to leave for work.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Sometime after that, something happened at that table.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Her children, who were nine and eight at the time, have never been able to say exactly what it was.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Only that, whatever it was, it visibly upset their mother.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: That night she gave them good news.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: They were moving into a new home.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Gabrielle and the kids went back to her apartment on Main Street.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Around eight o'clock, she told them that she was going out to the store.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: The plan, as they remembered it, was a stop for liquor and a stop at McDonald's for McFlurries.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: She did not come back.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Two days later, two men from the Lakewood Industrial Park went out for a walk on their lunch break and found her body in a patch of woods about 20 feet off Salem Road.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: The McFlurries never arrived.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Neither did the new home.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Today's case is about 31-year-old Gabrielle Mueller of Tom Surver, New Jersey.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is a 25-year-old cold case.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Gabrielle was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but she did not stay there.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: As a young girl, she moved with her parents to Alaska.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was in Alaska that her mother met the man who became Gabby's stepfather, John Prozuki.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: And in the summer of 1976, the newly blended family loaded into a VW bus and drove across the continent together.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Her stepfather described that trip years later as one of the best stretches of their lives.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: The Alkin Highway out of Alaska was still dirt road in places.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: They had a songbook and would sing their way across the United States.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's really all we have of Gabrielle as a child.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: A dirt highway out of Alaska, a BW bus, the blended family learning how to come together, and everybody singing.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: After two years in New York, the family landed in New Jersey, where Gabrielle's stepfather took a job with the State Department of Environmental Protection.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: When her mother and stepfather later moved to Pennsylvania, Gabrielle stayed behind in New Jersey, living with a friend so she could finish high school, which tells you something.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, at 17-ish years old, she chose to stay and make sure she finished school.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: After a brief stint demonstrating hair products, she got work as a server at a restaurant on Route 22 in Bridgewater.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that is where she met a young chef named Jody.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: They started work at the same restaurant on the exact same day.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Shortly afterward, it was Gabrielle's birthday and they started dating that day.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: They married, they had Jessica, and they had Justin.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: By the time the family was living in Tom's River, the marriage was not working.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Gabrielle had become friendly and then more than friendly with the neighbor.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: In 1994, the year after Justin was born, she and Jodie split.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: But here is the part that is genuinely unusual.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I say that as someone who's been there.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is not the norm.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: They stayed legally married for a while for the health insurance.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Gabrielle had the kids most of the time.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Jody took them on weekends and coached their soccer teams.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: He described it as being more like they were still friends.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: When they finally did divorce, Gabrielle took her ex-husband out to breakfast after the final proceeding.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: They still met socially.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: They still sometimes went to Atlantic City together.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Most people cannot pull that off.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the ones who can are usually doing it because they decided the kids were more important than anything they felt about each other.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Also professionally, Gabrielle was building something.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: By 1999, she was working as a secretary with the State Department of Environmental Protection in Tom's River, the same agency her stepfather had worked for.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: She also worked part-time for an ambulance service, one that covered the Lakewood Industrial Park.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: She wanted to be a helicopter medic.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then there is this other thread running through the last years of Gabrielle's life, the one-time neighbor, the one she had dated off and on.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: According to Gabrielle's family, that relationship was violent.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Her stepfather told the Asbury Park press in 2020 that she had been abused and she had been raised not to put up with that kind of treatment.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: He described Gabrielle obtaining a protective order against the boyfriend and then going back and dropping the charges.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Jody remembered a time when he saw her with a black eye.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: And the kids noticed things because kids always notice things.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Sometime before she was killed, Justin remembers a man leaving his mother a voicemail threatening to pick him and Jessica up from the Cherry Lane Child Care and Learning Center, the after-school place where they waited for their mom.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: That message frightened Gabrielle enough that she warned her children not to go with anyone but her if someone came for them.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Justin made a point in 2020 about that technology of it.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, caller ID was not a given back then.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Shockingly, there was a time when you actually had no idea who was calling you.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: But today, a phone now identifies everyone who calls you and will happily tell you the weather while it does it.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody has ever been publicly charged in Gabrielle's death.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: The man in these stories has never been publicly named as a suspect by any prosecutor.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: What I have described to you is a documented pattern in a woman's life put on the record by her own family and her ex-husband in a newspaper under their real names.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: What that pattern is is context.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: It is not a conclusion.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Investigators in 2001 said they were pursuing several leads and would not comment on a motive.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: And to my knowledge, they have never publicly stated a theory about who killed her.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I am not going to pretend the pattern is not there.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: A protective order that got dropped, a black eye, a voicemail about her children.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the three things that domestic violence advocates will tell you are the loudest signals there are.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And she was strangled, which is the method most associated with that specific kind of danger.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: So Sunday, April 1st, here is the last day assembled from the 2001 reporting and from what her children told her reporter 19 years later.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: The day before she disappeared, Saturday, Gabrielle went to Atlantic City.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Jodi believed she had gone with the one-time neighbor.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Sunday evening, the family met for dinner.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Jody brought Jessica and Justin to the Primetime Cafe, a Route 571 restaurant in what was then Dover Township, now Tom's River.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: The place is gone now.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: They regularly ate together there when they exchanged custody of the kids.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: The restaurant's manager, Thomas Paul, later told the Asbury Park Press that Gabrielle was an occasional customer and called her a really nice girl.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Jody and Gabrielle sat together while the kids played trivia.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: Then Jody had to leave for work.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Sometime after he left, something happened that visibly upset Gabrielle.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Her children were there, but they they didn't know what it was, but they sensed something.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that, in my opinion, is the single most important unresolved fact in this entire case.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: A phone call, a person walking in, something said, something happened in a public restaurant in front of witnesses roughly two hours before Gabrielle Mueller disappeared.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: And 25 years later, nobody has publicly explained it.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: We have no idea what happened.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: That restaurant had staff, it had customers, it had a manager who was talking to reporters within 72 hours.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: After dinner, Gabrielle and the kids went home.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: She lived at the Toms River apartments in the 800 block of Main Street.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: She had told the kids that night they would be moving into a new home.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Around 8 o'clock, Gabrielle told her kids she was going to a store.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: What her children remembered is that the errand was a liquor store and then a McDonald's run for McFlurry's.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Her kids watching her go is the last confirmed sighting of Gabrielle Mueller alive.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: She was driving a 1994 Toyota Corolla, four-door sedan, blue-green in color.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Monday, she did not return.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: On Monday, Jodie Mueller filed a missing person's report with Dover Police.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Quick note on that name because it could be confusing if you keep digging.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: In 2001, Tom Server was Dover Township.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: The name changed later.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: So articles say Dover Township, woman, Dover Township Police.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then when you get to 2016, it's everything is the same Times Rover.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it's same place, same departments, just they had a name switch.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: So on Monday, police in Ocean County have a missing 31-year-old mother of two and a missing blue-green Corolla.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Come Tuesday around noon, so this is April 3rd, two workers from the Lakewood Industrial Park went out on a lunch break walk.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: They found Gabrielle's body in a patch of woods about 20 feet off Salem Road, roughly 400 yards east of New Hampshire Avenue.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: She was fully clothed and it was about noontime.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Lakewood police were first on the scene and notified the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office Major Crimes Unit.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: An autopsy was conducted by Dr.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hydro Park, the county's consulting pathologist on homicides.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: The finding asphyxia caused by strangulation, homicide.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then the detail that shapes everything that follows.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Authorities said there was no indication she was killed there.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: They believed she was slain elsewhere and then left in the woods.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the thing about the location, Gabrielle's body was found near a first aid and rescue building where she had once worked part-time.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: The ambulance service that covered the industrial park, the job she took while dreaming of being a helicopter medic.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: She was left in the woods near the place she went to do the work that she loved.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Law enforcement has said that it's unlikely to have anything to do with her killing.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Coincidence.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Wednesday, April 4th, Gabrielle's Corolla turned up in a vacant lot on East 4th Street in Lake, about four miles from where her body was found.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: A passerby recognized it from the description that had been circulating and called it in.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: The lot was one where local residents frequently parked cars they were selling.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was also, according to the 2001 reporting, considered a high drug use area.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And authorities went out of their way to say they were not saying that her death was drug related whatsoever.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Whoever left that car left it there in that place where a car sitting for days would not be strange in a neighborhood with a reputation.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that apparently was the point.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: William J.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Heisler, the then chief trial attorney for the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office, put it about as bluntly as a prosecutor ever puts anything.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: The car, he said, was probably left there to paint a picture for us, a false picture.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially, the person who killed Gabrielle Mueller did not panic.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: They staged it.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody killed a woman, moved her body to a wooded strip off Salem Road, then drove her car four miles to a vacant lot in a neighborhood chosen specifically so that investigators would look at that neighborhood and then walked away from it.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: That is three separate locations.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: That is transportation, disposal, and misdirection.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: That is somebody thinking about what it would look like.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And a person who is thinking about what it looks like, almost by definition, a person who is worried about being connected to her.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Strangers are not worried about being connected to you.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: That is the entire structural advantage of being a stranger.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now, there's no firm lead.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Within days of the murder, the official posture was this no firm lead.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: Not sure where she was killed, investigators pursuing several leads, no comment on motive.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: The participating agencies were the prosecutor's major crimes unit, Lakewood Police, Dover Police, and the Ocean County Sheriff's Criminal Investigations units.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: The children, Jessica, then nine, and Justin, then eight, went to live with their father.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then the machine that is supposed to close a case like this did not.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Fifteen years later, in April of 2016, the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office put out an anniversary appeal.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: The content of that appeal was functionally, no suspects, no significant clues.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Please call us.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: The Colt Case Unit said it would never stop seeking justice for Gabrielle and her loved ones.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: In 2020, the Asbury Park Press ran the retrospective that gave us most of the biography in this episode: the VW Bus, the songbook, the black eye, the voicemail, the trivia game.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: That is the place where her children and her stepfather and her ex-husband all spoke.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: And since then, as far as I can find, nothing.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: The genuine difficulty here is real.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: She was killed somewhere nobody has ever identified.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: Her body was outdoors for roughly two days.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: The car sat for four days in a lot where people came and went.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Every one of those is a real forensic problem, and no detective in 2001 conjured a solution out of a television writer's room.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: The DNA technology of 2001 was also not the technology of now.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: In 2001, you needed a decent sample and you needed your guy already sitting in a database.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Investigative genetic genealogy, the thing that has since closed cases older than this one, did not exist as a working technique until 2018.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: That is the fair part.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the other part.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: The state of New Jersey had in April 2001 a woman who worked for one of its own departments, strangled and staged with a documented protective order in her history.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: And 25 years later, the loudest public act on her behalf has been one anniversary press release and one newspaper retrospective.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: So 25 years afterward, this became a case that exists mainly in a Facebook group.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: What would actually move the case?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so one, the evidence inventory.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: The first question in any 2001 cold case is not who did it, it is what is still in the box.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: She was fully clothed and recovered within roughly 48 hours, which is comparatively favorable for biological evidence.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: If material was retained, it can be tested with methods that did not exist when it was collected.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Two, the car, the Corolla is the most underrated object.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: In this case, it was processed in 2001 with 2001 methods.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: If anything from that vehicle was preserved, it is a candidate for modern testing.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: And unlike the wooded scene, the car was an enclosed space that somebody drove four miles.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Three, the restaurant, something upset Gabrielle at the primetime cafe between roughly six and eight o'clock on Sunday, April 1st, 2001.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Staff were working, customers were eating.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Someone in Ocean County remembers that night and may not know they remember it.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: Four, the hours nobody has accounted for.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: She left home around 8 for a store.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: Two days later, she was found 400 yards east of New Hampshire Avenue in a township away.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing between those two points has ever been publicly established.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Did she ever reach the liquor store, the McDonald's?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody behind a counter in Tom Server saw her around 8:15 that Sunday, or they did not.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: Five, the person who has known for 25 years.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: In cold cases with this shape, the break is almost never a lap.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: It is a person who was told something in 2001 by a partner, a friend, a sibling, and who decided at the time that it was not theirs to carry.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have a call to action.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you have information about the murder of Gabrielle Mueller, contact the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office at 972-929-2027 or the Toms River Police Department at 732-349-0150.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to have a name, you don't need to have proof, you don't need to have a certainty, just a memory of a blue-green corolla in a lot on East 4th Street, or a Sunday night dinner at a diner on Route 571.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's worth a call.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: In the summer of 1976, a little girl from Phoenix rode across the continent in a BW bus with a brand new stepfather and a songbook on a highway that was still dirt in places.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: And everybody sang.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Twenty five years after that, she was a 31-year-old state employee in Toms River, New Jersey, with two kids, a part-time ambulance job, and a plan to fly Medivac someday.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: She had gotten out of a marriage without setting fire to it.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: She had told her children at night that they would be moving into a new home, and she went out to get McFlurries.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Jessica was nine, Justin was eight.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: They are in their 30s now, and they have spent their entire adult lives as the children of an unsolved cage, which is a sentence nobody handed down in any courtroom.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody staged that car, somebody chose that lot, somebody painted a picture, and somebody somewhere knows something.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: Whether they are in Ocean County or somewhere else, someone has known for 25 years.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's gonna be it for today's episode.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: As always, you can find me on socials at dead underscore serious pod, subscribe on YouTube, and wherever you stream your podcasts, please share the podcast.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it so much.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, stay sharp, stay safe, and stay serious.