“Boss, we’re looking to search Lake Truesdale in South Salem,” said Clem.
“Why?” I asked.
Steve filled me in on the background. They said a state trooper had received information from a low-level sex offender, something about a body being dumped in the lake years ago. The woman had gone missing in 1982.
“Who’s the informant?” I asked.
“Timothy Martin.”
“Who’s he? Is he one of our CIs [confidential informants]?”
They proceeded to tell me that we prosecuted and convicted Martin of public lewdness. Apparently, he got off on driving up to female pedestrians, calling them over to his car window, and exposing himself. I asked if he was trustworthy. Most informants are dirtbags to begin with. And it was always a question of whether this one was a believable dirtbag.
And what did he want? I assumed he was looking, like every other defendant, to get a reduced sentence in exchange for information.
In most counties, prosecution begins with an arrest and ends with a conviction. My policy in Westchester was to be proactive and more aggressive. We tried to debrief every defendant we arrested, giving him or her the opportunity to shed light on other crimes he or she might know about. If the tip led to an arrest, so much the better for the defendant. You’d be amazed what criminals would divulge when faced with jail time. And you’d be surprised how frequently defendants ratted each other out. Unless, of course, they were looking for three hots and a cot, which for many of them was better housing and food than what they already had.
I’d amassed a large discretionary prosecution fund by aggressively seizing property from drug dealers, car thieves, and the like. My hitting criminals in their pockets or taking their assets and selling them had afforded us both the opportunity and the ability to use additional resources to investigate crime. Money was not a problem. There was always money to use on cold cases.
“By the way, who’s the trooper?” I asked.
“Joey Becerra,” said Steve.
I knew him. I had hired Joe’s brother Pete Becerra as one of my criminal investigators. Pete was a class act—diligent and tireless, a good man with a gentle soul. His brother Joe was a bit flashier and had earned the nickname “Hollywood Joe” for always managing to get his mug in front of a TV camera. (Pete Becerra passed away at fifty-two from cancer in 2012. It was law enforcement’s loss.)
In 1999, I had no idea that Joe Becerra would end up being both an asset to the case and a huge thorn in our side. But back then, I knew him as the brother of one of my investigators for whom I had the utmost respect.
“What do we know?” I asked.
Apparently, Timothy Martin’s brother Alan used to be married to a woman named Janet Fiske, a housekeeper at the South Salem home. Janet told Alan, who subsequently told Tim, that the man who lived in the cottage murdered his wife and got rid of the body in the lake or buried it in the woods surrounding the property. Of course, it was hearsay. But some cases start like that. You don’t expect criminals to confess to their crimes on national TV, do you?
Bender said, “The wife, Kathleen Durst, has been missing since ’82.”
“Tell me more.”
“The husband, Robert Durst, didn’t report his wife missing for five days. And, by the way, the Dursts own half of New York City.” Totally casual.
“Durst? I don’t know that name.” I would learn soon enough that the Durst Organization built Times Square and was a third-generation Manhattan real-estate dynasty.
Wealthy family? Missing wife? Husband didn’t report her missing for five days? The bells started clanging in my head. There were always urgent messages on my desk, at least two phone lines on hold, meetings scheduled all day, and Ro, standing at the door to tell me about a previously scheduled appointment. My job was nonstop, 24/7, a million miles a minute. We prosecuted thirty-five thousand to forty thousand cases a year. My attention was always divided, at times schizophrenic. But there was something about this case that made me ignore all the other pressing demands and zero in.
I said, “How old was Kathleen?”
Steve said, “Twenty-nine, a fourth-year medical school student. She was supposed to graduate a few months after she disappeared.”
“She was in medical school? In 1982?”
Back in ’82, I was a few years out of law school, one of the few women in my class. Although it doesn’t seem that long ago, in the mid-seventies, it was highly unusual for women to go to medical or law school. Like me, Kathleen must have been a strong, determined woman. She wouldn’t stick it out in medical school for four years, fighting the way I know she must have, only to run off within sight of her graduation. Something sinister had happened to her.
I loved being district attorney, leading the charge every day on the battlefield, where the fight between good and evil unfolds. We were the cavalry with the white hats, the angels at our sides, avenging the wrongs that one human inflicts upon another. Yes, I loved what I did. I loved being DA, settling scores, leveling the playing field for crime victims who never chose to be victims in the first place.
And I liked cold cases. They were even more challenging and mysterious because they were dated. I loved using DNA testing, the brand-new technology, to solve them. It was like the finger of God pointing down and saying, “You did it,” or for that matter, “You didn’t do it.” We had just cracked the first cold case in New York using DNA evidence and even received an award for it, with one of my top prosecutors, Barbara Egenhauser. The case was a 1979 Mount Vernon murder. While an infant girl slept in her crib, her mother was stabbed to death. The murder went unsolved for decades. And then, when DNA technology hit, we had evidence from that brutal slaying pulled from the property clerk’s office to have it tested for any match—hair, fiber, blood. A dried blood sample, miraculously viable despite the passage of time, was run through a DNA bank of samples of convicted criminals. Incredibly, there was a match. The murderer was already in prison. It was a classic “Fucking A!” moment, one of the most amazing I had experienced in law enforcement.
I was always a believer that the answer to solving most cases, and definitely cold cases, was already in the box. I would often say, “The guy’s in the box,” meaning the killer’s name was already in the investigation file somewhere. Sure enough, detectives had interviewed the murderer of the young mother in 1979. They couldn’t pin him to the crime then. Now? Thanks to DNA, he was busted. There was a great deal of interest in how such an old case could be solved now but not decades ago. So I held a press conference to announce the indictment, twenty years later. The baby who’d been deprived of her mother’s love for all those years was now a beautiful young woman who stood by my side at the podium. She, no doubt, never expected justice. But she got it.
I loved bringing justice to victims. I was convinced that we could tap into the DNA data bank and crack dozens, if not hundreds, of cold cases using this new forensic technology. It might even work on the cold case of the missing medical student that Clem and Steve brought to me that day.
I made the decision then and there, saying, “Do it. Search the lake. Keep me informed on this one.”
Despite what you might see on TV, reopening a cold case isn’t something that just happens. There has to be an assignment of personnel and resources beyond the continuing prioritization of incoming cases. Only the DA can impanel a grand jury and pull the trigger. There were plenty of pressing new cases that needed attention. To divert resources to a decades-old missing-persons case might not have interested everyone, but I didn’t hesitate on this one. I had that gut feeling. The case needed a second look.
I certainly had no inkling that my spontaneous “Do it” would put me at the forefront of a far bigger story, one that continues to this day.
I BROUGHT IN SOME of my best people to chart out the next steps. Senior investigator John O’Donnell (no relation to Rosie O’Donnell), Clem Patti, Steve Bender, and I gathered in a conference room to go through copies of the file collected from the NYPD.
Although the husband said he last saw Kathleen, nicknamed Kathie, at the train station in Katonah in Westchester, the investigation began and ended in Manhattan, where other witnesses say they saw her later that night.
During the meeting, a Pandora’s box was opened up for me. I saw photos of Kathie Durst for the first time. She was young, pretty, with long, wavy dark blond hair. Her clothes—peasant blouses and bell-bottom jeans—reminded me of my own swinging style back in law school. She was close to my age, and must have jumped countless hurdles, as I had, to pursue a degree in what was then thought of as a man’s profession. You could tell she was vivacious and had an easy smile. She came from a modest background, from a close working-class family, also like me. I read that she and her husband used to hang out at the same clubs in Manhattan I frequented, such as Xenon and Studio 54. For all I know, I might have boogied next to her on the dance floor. We even drove the same car, a red four-door 240D Mercedes diesel.
I couldn’t not feel a connection to this woman.
Somewhere in the files, I’d find the name of the person responsible for whatever had happened to this bright, pretty young woman. I was as sure of that as I’d been of any cold case. Unlike most of the ones I’d investigated so far, though, I was stunned by how little we had to work with from the initial investigation. A murder investigation in my county would produce a full box, a stack of files as heavy and thick as a few phone books. The NYPD box on Kathie Durst was light, the file itself amazingly narrow.
In good time, my investigators would comb through every piece of evidence and pore over every police report and eyewitness statement. We’d become intimately familiar with every friend, relative, and contact of Kathie’s. We’d come across many names—elevator operators, doormen, housekeepers, a dean, a drug dealer, neighbors in Manhattan and South Salem—but only one name resonated with me. It jumped out at me and cropped up on nearly every page of the reports.
Robert Durst.
The husband. He supplied all the leads followed by the NYPD detective, one Michael Struk.
The Durst Organization was the employer of all the eyewitnesses who “saw” her in Manhattan the night she disappeared.
He said many unsavory things about his pretty young wife. I recognized it immediately and said to myself, Here we go again. The classic blame-the-victim. Blame the person who is not responsible for her demise.
He had also told the detective that their marriage had been on the rocks. Certainly none of the distraught-husband thing going on here.
Struk opened the investigation on February 5, 1982, pursued the case until April, and then dropped it in December. During those ten months, there had been no sign of Kathie. Not a peep or a call to her family and friends. Not a blip on phone records or credit cards.
Struk, along with his superiors, concluded that, apparently, she’d just run away, and that was that. Forget that all the earmarks were there. Marriage on the rocks, and the husband waits five days to report her missing? What were you doing during those five days? Show me how you tried to find her. And that front-page $100,000 reward? We later found out that that was a printing error and Durst pulled the reward back to $10,000 or $15,000, depending on where you saw it.
Ran away? I did not get a runaway vibe from what was in the box. It made no sense. Why would Kathie run away from everything she’d ever known and every person she’d ever loved? Not to mention that she was weeks away from becoming a medical doctor.
This woman didn’t disappear. She was disappeared.
I fished out a photo of the bride and groom and took a close look at Robert Durst, the wealthy, older husband, a man with power and influence, without a modicum of respect for the woman he married.
The seventies were a bad time to be female in New York. Abusive husbands, boyfriends, and fathers could pretty much do anything to their wives, girlfriends, and children. Domestic violence was a family matter. Child abuse was a social issue. They weren’t even considered crimes. A rich man with a smart lawyer could get away with a whole lot back then.
Wealthy, powerful husband.
Pretty younger wife with everything to live for.
He doesn’t report her missing for five days.
It was obvious to each of us in the conference room that day that something terrible had happened to Kathleen Durst in ’82.
The NYPD detective had kicked the case around the block, and then dumped it with a shrug and a whatever.
This missing medical student with the big smile and sad eyes deserved better.
I was going to give Kathleen Durst the investigation she deserved.
THREE |
| WHERE IS KATHIE DURST?
Until 1977, New York law prevented prosecutors from getting involved in cases of abuse between husbands and wives. A woman could be shot, stabbed, beaten, and brutalized, but if she didn’t die, even assuming she wanted to pursue it, the case was automatically sent to family court. The legislative intent of Article Eight of the Family Court Act was to keep the family unit together at all costs, even when a woman’s life was in jeopardy.
Really? So we should send a guy who’s beating the crap out of his wife to Family Court so they can mediate? How do you mediate between a batterer and his victim? Do you send him to counseling to teach him not to beat her up? He knows not to do it, and he does it anyway. My philosophy? Abusive husbands, boyfriends, fathers, and brothers should be arrested, convicted, and thrown in prison—not mediated, incarcerated.
When I became an assistant district attorney in Westchester County in 1975, it was outright blasphemy to say so, or to try to change the way “domestics” were handled. Usually, the cop would walk the husband around the block to cool off and tell the black-and-blue wife to go stay with her mom for the night.
Under my watch, in Westchester, that was going to change.
In 1978, after the law was changed in New York State, I started one of the first four Domestic Violence Units in the nation. The units were funded by the law-enforcement assistance administration of the Department of Justice. Of the initial four programs, mine was the most successful, in terms of arrests and convictions. By providing support, mental health services, and shelter, in addition to whatever she needed, a battered woman would continue with the prosecution.
One of the unit’s requirements was to train cops in how to properly respond to a domestic dispute. So I trained new cops at the rookie schools, showing them pictures of women whose faces had been beaten beyond recognition and of children scalded with boiling water, and I went into police stations.
The then DA, my boss, called a meeting of all forty-three police chiefs in my county to inform them they should be making arrests in domestic violence cases. He knew full well that a letter from an ADA, especially a female, wouldn’t draw a crowd. I was the only woman, as I would often be, in a room filled with cops all wrapped up in their gun belts.
I was about to get started when one of the police chiefs asked if I could get him a cup of coffee. These were tough guys—Dirty Harry types with sideburns, polyester suits, and big chips on their shoulders. If serving them coffee would keep women and children from being abused, so be it. Sooner or later, I knew I would have the upper hand, and now was not the time to fight about petty things.
I didn’t ask for universal acceptance. I asked, “Milk and sugar?” Sometimes, I got acceptance along with the coffee. Mostly, I got flak. Cops in the city, and all over the state, would see me and my unit colleagues coming and say, “Here comes the Tit Patrol.” Some called us the “Panty Brigade.” And I never hesitated to return the favor, calling them “dicks” whenever I could.
An issue that came up a lot back in those training sessions was the cops’ view that domestic violence was a lower-class problem. The thinking was pervasive because they saw more incidents in those areas. Why? There was more visibility in more crowded apartments—with more chance that the beatings could be heard. But we were about to find that women in upscale Bedford and Rye were beaten, too. It didn’t matt
er if the woman lived in a rent-controlled apartment in Yonkers or a mansion in Scarsdale. It mattered not his chosen trade, whether he was a bus driver, lawyer, teacher, garbage collector, doctor. There are no parameters, class or otherwise. What mattered was his desire for power and control. Abuse is abuse is abuse.
Our work was cut out for us. The whole concept was new. Socially, we had been reared to believe that whatever happens in the family behind closed doors is not the business of outsiders, especially police. Judges, more often than not, reflected the mores of society. Defense attorneys exploited loopholes in these new laws.
I worked closely with Marjory Fields, then the head of the South Brooklyn Legal Services Family Law Unit (she later became a family court judge). We were constantly reworking New York’s criminal procedure law and penal law. She had, and continues to have, an incredibly brilliant legal mind. She and I were like Mutt and Jeff, fighting everybody to get laws passed to increase punishment and to provide a framework for real prosecutions. We continued to work on orders of protection. Governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo appointed us to draft legislation for New York State to protect battered women. Later, Governor George Pataki would make me the chair of New York State’s Commission on Domestic Violence Fatality Review, also known as the Pirro Commission.
New York City in particular didn’t have a stellar record of protecting battered women, or women covered by orders of protection, for that matter. In fact, the NYPD was repeatedly sued to force them to protect those women and arrest their abusers. Before those suits, most cops wouldn’t take women’s claims that they feared for their lives seriously. They believed women to be untruthful, and that they provoked their abusers. When I would talk to NYPD cops about domestic violence, they’d fold their arms over their chests and just stare me down. Laws can be changed with a vote, but changing a culture of violence was harder.
Sadly, that culture of violence didn’t change soon enough to save Kathie Durst.
Another requirement of my unit was to train staffers in hospitals to identify domestic violence victims. We even went to medical centers to talk with doctors, nurses, social workers, anyone. It was not enough to just treat a woman who claimed to have accidentally broken her arm or hurt her stomach by falling down the stairs. Emergency room personnel had to be trained what to look for, what injuries indicated abuse, what injuries were consistent with accidents, when to call the cops, and when to offer social services to victims.
He Killed Them All Page 4
