Dateline NBC: "Sex, Lies and Murder" (NBC News, originally aired April 9, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, June 30) at 9 p.m. I watched a Dateline NBC show called “Sex, Lies and Murder,” which turned out to be a rerun of an episode originally aired on April 9, 2021 about a suburban couple named Bob and Jane Bashara, who lived in the exclusive upper-class town of Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan (so exclusive it’s even incorporated separately from Grosse Pointe, without the “Park”). Jane Bashara mysteriously disappeared on January 24, 2012, and her black Mercedes SUV was discovered by police in the seedy East Detroit neighborhood, mostly Black and a known area to buy drugs. The Detroit police officer found Jane’s body in the back seat of the car and her purse, opened and with its contents spilling out, in the front passenger seat. Officers noticed that the dirt on the driver’s side of the car had been disturbed (in a place as far north – and as cold during the winter – as Detroit, cars generally acquire patinas of dirt and dried mud) while the dirt on the passenger’s side was undamaged. Bob Bashara was a large man (his nickname among his friends was “Big Bob”) who made his living as a landlord and real-estate developer; his wife Jane was a marketing executive with a Detroit-based company called KEMA Services. The two had had two children who were both grown and had moved out of the house before Jane’s death, and by all accounts they were a happily married couple for 30 years.

Only Bob Bashara had a secret life that involved BDSM – a term that troubled and perplexed a lot of the people interviewed for this show. (It means "bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.") He had set up a permanent S/M dungeon in the basement of a bar called the Hard Luck Lounge, whose owner, Mike Moyannis, rented space in a building Bob owned and ran the club as an above-ground bar while running the downstairs dungeon and catering to the local straight Leather community. Bob was having an extended S/M affair with a woman named Rachel Rene Gillett, whom he’d met through an S/M Web site and told he was single when he wasn’t. At first Bob told Rachel he was a widower; later he admitted his wife was alive but insisted they were getting a divorce; and apparently she gave him a hard-and-fast deadline: get yourself free of Jane or I’m out of your life. One woman interviewed by Dateline was an S/M sub who called herself “Lynn” and said she’d answered an online ad from Bob – she was a submissive and looking for a dominant – only when she showed up at the Hard Luck Lounge’s basement, there was another woman there (Rachel) and she really hadn’t wanted a three-way. The promos for this show made it seem kinkier than it really was; it was actually just a pretty standard eternal-triangle story with a husband, a wife and another woman who was demanding he get rid of the wife by whatever means by a particular deadline. According to the show, Bob had even gone into escrow on another Grosse Pointe Park home to live in with Rachel once he got rid of Jane, and in order to get rid of Jane he hired a mentally challenged handyman named Joe Gentz to kill her.

Bob offered Gentz $2,000 and an old beat-up Cadillac for the hit, though Gentz eventually talked him up to $8,000 plus the car. They did the killing together in the Basharas’ garage, after Bob held a gun to Gentz’s head and told him either Jane dies or you do. Gentz, who like Bob was a large man, strangled Jane and finished her off with a foot to her neck (how George Floyd!), though it wasn’t clear from the Dateline show whether Gentz or Bob himself applied the coup de grâce. Since Jane’s body was actually found within the Detroit city limits, the lead investigator on it was Detroit police detective Mike Narduzzi, who’d never handled a murder case before (though given that he was on the force in Detroit, that seems a bit hard to believe). Eventually he worked with Grosse Pointe Park police, including three people identified only as “Captain Loch,” “Sgt. Gnatek” and “Olsen” who took part in Bob’s interrogation, and FBI special agent Christopher J. Hess. The law enforcement officials built up a strong circumstantial case against Bob but there was no forensic evidence linking him to the crime. The Wayne County, Michigan (where Detroit, Grosse Pointe and Grosse Pointe Park are all located) district attorney’s office offered a plea bargain to Gentz, allowing him to plead to a lesser charge in return for testimony against Bob. Meanwhile, Bob sounded out another friend, Steve Tibaudo, a furniture and appliance store owner who had frequently sold Bob appliances for his rental units, to see if he could get money to a hit man in the jail where Gentz was being held so the one witness against him would be put out of the way permanently. Tibaudo agreed to wear a wire for the FBI and entrap Bob, recording him making an offer for the hit, though the FBI hid the wire cunningly enough Bob’s crude attempt to search Tibaudo didn’t find it.

It’s a matter of how much racial and gender progress we’ve made in this country that the judge, Vonda Evans; the lead prosecutor, Kym L. Worthy; and Bob’s principal defense attorney, Lillian Diallo, were all Black women. Diallo argued basically that rather than being put on trial for the murder of his wife, the prosecution was putting him on trial for his BDSM lifestyle (Judge Evans insisted that she’d never heard of BDSM until she presided over this trial, which seems very hard to believe that a person experienced enough to make it through both college and law school could have been so naïve or sheltered that she’d never heard of sadomasochism), and there’s certainly some truth to that. The prosecution’s strategy was to depict Bob Bashara as an awful person because of his sexual kinks and suggest that because he was an S/M dom, he was capable of killing his wife in cold blood to get together with another woman – or two, since it turned out he had another “other woman” besides Rachel, Janet Lehman, who testified against him in the trial. Despite a strong closing statement by Diallo that pointed out there was no physical or eyewitness evidence linking Bob Bashara to the killing of his wife – the one witness who could have provided such evidence, Joe Gentz, had backed out of testifying at the last moment – the jury found Bob guilty after three days of deliberation. There was a further surprise a year later, when Joe Gentz filed an affidavit from jail stating that he had killed Jane Bashara alone and Bob had had nothing to do with it – only in a hearing before Judge Evans he reversed his story again and said he had killed Jane at Bob’s direction and in Bob’s presence in their garage. Judge Evans refused Bob’s request for a new trial. In August 2016, Bob Bashara died at age 62 in a hospital after having been taken there from prison, where he’d been serving the mandatory life sentence for a first-degree murder conviction under Michigan law.

Neither the Dateline episode nor the Wikipedia page on Bob Bashara mentions the actual cause of death, but it emerges as a pretty ordinary sordid tale of a man who wanted to get rid of his wife permanently (though as Diallo pointed in her closing argument, he’d already been through one divorce so he presumably knew how to get rid of an inconvenient wife without killing her) to be with one or more “other women,” and though it was spiced with a little S/M kinkiness it was mostly just a pretty banal tale and not at all the wild ride through the sexual underground I was expecting – though it was unusual, to say the least, to hear that Bob and his S/M friends had had “key parties,” in which people put their car keys into a bowl and paired off with whoever’s key they had drawn. Supposedly Bob had invited his wife to one of these, and she had begged off – though Jane’s family insisted that she had had no idea of Bob’s extra-relational activities and wouldn’t have stood for them if she had. I had heard of “key parties” before only from Michael Leigh’s 1964 book The Velvet Underground, a cheap paperback whose only distinction was that Lou Reed read it and got the name of his famous band from it. I got that book in 1974 from a used bookstore in San Rafael and remembered that in addition to being mostly about the straight sexual underground, it had a chapter mentioning the Queer communities and included quotes from the Gay male magazine One and the Lesbian magazine The Ladder, as well as a preposterous manifesto from a group (or possibly one lone nutcase posing as an organization) called “The Homosexuals of the World” demanding an end to procreative heterosexuality, forcing everyone who wanted to have sex to be Gay or Lesbian, and keeping the human race going through a Brave New World-style system of mass production of offspring. Years later Lou Reed recalled a concert in which a woman came up to him backstage after the show and said, “My dad just died.” Reed said the usual consoling things people say when they approach you telling you that someone in their life whom you didn’t know had just died, and she said, “He wrote that book” – she was Michael Leigh’s daughter.