My mother, Esther, was hysterical. She thought I was turning my back on the most prestigious job I could ever hope to have. I understood where she was coming from. Mom was so proud of me as a judge. The title alone was the ultimate symbol of her daughter’s success. Taking those robes off was, to her, like throwing away the American Dream. But Mom also knew me well. She knew law enforcement was in my blood. I wasn’t done with it yet, not by a long shot.
I was ready for step two: run for DA. Because of the respect I had for Carl Vergari, I waited for him to retire before seeking the office. In 1993, I was elected the first female district attorney in county history. I’d come a long way from the Appeals Bureau.
I was forty-two years old, I knew I had the best job in the world, and I felt like I was just getting started. I’ll never forget the morning after I was elected DA. I jumped out of bed, dancing, singing, “I’m the DA! Oh, my God!”
My real indoctrination began at midnight on January 1, 1994, with a brutal, barbaric assault on a beautiful young mother, Anne Scripps Douglas, heiress to a publishing fortune. A chronically battered wife, she was hammered in her bed by her husband, Scott Douglas. Their three-year-old daughter told the police, “Daddy gave Mommy so many boo-boos.” Soon after the attack, Douglas’s BMW was found abandoned on the Tappan Zee Bridge. He might’ve jumped, or fled with an accomplice. During the national manhunt to catch him, my office was the command center. I had multiple agencies working in concert and directed the investigation. I wasn’t on the job more than three or four days and I remember one of my investigators saying to me at the time, “You’re going to love this job.”
“I love it already,” I said. “Now get back to work.” We were all energized, working together doing what we loved.
Anne lingered for five days before she died of her injuries. Three months later, after hundreds of leads, Douglas’s decomposed body was found in the Bronx on the bank of the Hudson River. A suicide. Eerily, his wristwatch had stopped at midnight. Sadly, I couldn’t settle that score. I didn’t get to prosecute him. I’m sure he’s being punished as we speak.
Being the DA was the best job in the world. Day in, day out, for twelve years and three terms, I leveled the playing field. I spoke (loudly) for the vulnerable and voiceless. I fought for the victims who went through hell because some dirtbag made a decision to brutalize them.
That was the easy part of the job. The hard part was the continuing annoyance of misogyny in law enforcement. I was the boss in the big office, and the alphas in polyester suits were still mumbling under their breath, “Do I fucking believe I’m working for a woman?”
New title, new job, same old resentment.
I TELL YOU ALL this simply to give you an idea of what it was like in 1999 when I first heard the name Durst. By then, I’d gained a national reputation fighting for domestic violence victims for over twenty years. But this case really got under my skin. Most domestic violence homicides include a body. But Kathie was never found and wasn’t even given the dignity of a burial. Her family was left never knowing where she was.
Was there ever a woman who’d been silenced as definitively as Kathie Durst? She’d been wiped off the face of the earth like a gnat. Her husband and his influential family didn’t lift a finger to find her. The NYPD blew it off, as if Kathie were expendable and not worth searching for. When I read her case file, I saw the telltale signs of domestic violence I’d trained so many others to recognize and report.
Kathie Durst was a battered woman. She disappeared without a trace, and no one suspected the husband? How was it even possible?
The informant, Timothy Martin, recalled that, eighteen years earlier, his sister-in-law Janet told him about a murder in a lakeside cottage in South Salem. It was a thin hook to reopen a case on. But I couldn’t ignore my gut.
John O’Donnell, rugged, tall, athletic, and in-your-face, was my first choice to investigate this case. He’d been with me from the beginning. And it was a pretty wild beginning. The same day—January 1, 1994—that I took my oath of office, John O’Donnell was the investigator who responded to the “jumper” at the Tappan Zee Bridge, aka Scott Douglas. I’d trust John with my life, and knew he’d do a brilliant job on the Durst case.
I also tapped Eddie Murphy. I brought Eddie into the DA’s office because he had a reputation as one of the best homicide detectives in New York City. I had to go to Albany to get a special waiver for him, since he was eyeing retirement, so that he could get a pension and also get paid by me. I didn’t like the idea of double-dipping but I needed to have a deep bench for homicides. Eddie had a low-key old-cop mentality. He could beat the streets and he could read people. He had no ego, was laid-back and smart as hell. He also had a rockin’ mustache that he still wears today.
The New York State Police dive team performed a grid search of Lake Truesdale in November 1999, working in eight-hour shifts. They found nothing. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised. John O’Donnell searched for a meteorological report of the conditions on January 31, 1982, the night Kathie disappeared. Lake Truesdale would have been frozen solid. But it was possible the murderer could have carved a hole in the ice or stored the body until a thaw to dump later. It was worth a shot.
When that didn’t pan out, the next step was to do a search of the cottage itself. Kathie’s husband, Robert Durst, sold the house back in 1990, eight years after the disappearance, to Carmen and David Garceau. They’d later sold it to Gabrielle Colquitt, the owner at the time. She gave us permission to go in and search.
The Garceaus told us that when they bought the place from Durst it was in shambles, with holes in the living room floor that were covered with plywood. Had Robert cut out blood spots on the floor and done a slapdash job of repairing it? They also told us that there was a crawl space with an unhinged door on the cottage’s lower level that opened up to the lake. During the last months before the sale of the house was final, the Garceaus said that Robert slept in a cot outside that creepy crawl space.
Weird, yes. Suspicious? Absolutely. We went in with cadaver dogs on loan to us from Rockland County because the state police’s canine team was on another case. It would have been unusual to discover blood or tissue after all those years, but we couldn’t leave any stone unturned. If the body had been stored in the crawl space, we found no evidence of it.
My team went back to the box to reinvestigate every aspect of the case that the NYPD punted back in ’82.
One thing was painfully clear: There was no proof about Kathie’s movements in South Salem (where she lived), Katonah (where she allegedly caught a train), or Manhattan (where she also lived and was reportedly last seen) on the night she disappeared. Her husband, Robert, supplied the entire story, and backed it up with dubious-at-best witnesses.
No one with the NYPD or New York State Police searched the cottage in South Salem at the time. Nobody checked Durst’s car. There was no crime-scene preservation. There was nothing. The woman vanished, and nobody looked in the couple’s home? To this day, I can’t believe nobody thought to search the house of the man who said his marriage was in trouble and didn’t bother to report his wife missing for five days.
The whole thing stank like the inside of that earthen, musty crawl space.
I knew he did it. I knew it from day one. I just had to connect the dots.
ON FEBRUARY 5, 1982 Robert Durst walked into the Twentieth Precinct on West Eighty-Second Street. The precinct spans an area from Harlem in the north and east to Columbia University to the west and Riverside Drive to the south and west.
Desk Sergeant Michael Struk took Durst’s statement. Robert made sure Struk knew who he was dealing with by actually bringing with him an article from an old issue of New York magazine called “The Men Who Own New York” by Nicholas Pileggi. The article featured his father, Seymour Durst, prominently. That New York magazine article really got Struk’s attention. The second line of the missing-persons report was that the “subject is the daughter-in-law of real-estate executive Seymour
Durst.”
After the hierarchy was established, Robert told Struk a story about his wife.
On the night of January 31, Kathie went to a party at her friend Gilberte Najamy’s house. She returned home. She and Robert ate dinner and drank a bottle of wine at their cottage. The couple had an argument, and she decided to go back to their Riverside Drive apartment in Manhattan. Robert drove her to the Katonah station to catch the 9:17 p.m. train to the city. He drove back to South Salem and had a glass of wine at his neighbor William Mayer’s house. He returned home and called Kathie around eleven. That was the last time they spoke.
He told Struk that Kathie was a heavy drinker, a drug user, unfaithful, and that she was in therapy. As to why he waited so long to report her missing, Durst said he assumed she was busy at medical school and had been sleeping over there. When he got a call from the school asking where she was, he came right in to the precinct.
On February 6, Gilberte spoke to Struk. She gave him an earful about Kathie and Robert’s marriage. She told him that Kathie had retained a lawyer to get the divorce ball rolling, and that the couple often fought physically. Friends of Kathie’s had seen bruises. Kathie often called her in the middle of the night to say she was afraid of Robert and that he’d threatened her with a gun. Gilberte described her last conversation with Kathie, who’d said ominously, “If something happens to me, don’t let Bobby get away with it.”
Struk also spoke to Jim McCormack in those first days of his investigation. Jim had a ton to say about Durst as well, that Robert had once pulled Kathie out of a Christmas party by her hair in front of her family and that the marriage was over.
On February 8, Struk searched the couple’s apartment at 37 Riverside Drive, and found nothing.
Struk interviewed the late-shift doorman/elevator man at 37 Riverside Drive, Eddie Lopez, an employee of Durst’s building. Lopez claimed to have seen Kathie enter the building that night. Struk also said he spoke to the dean at Albert Einstein Medical School, who said Kathie had called his office to say she was sick and wasn’t coming to school on that Monday, February 1. When I read that bit in the file, I nearly threw the box across the room. I was furious.
Who calls the dean of a medical school to say she has sniffles and won’t be in?
And which dean do you call?
The dean of students?
The dean of admissions?
The dean of sniffles?
The dean of sick and hungover?
When I was in law school, I wouldn’t dream of calling the dean to say I had a runny nose. Hell, the dean wouldn’t even take a call from me. Why didn’t Struk question it?
Would the dean even recognize Kathie’s voice?
On February 9, 1982, Kathie’s photo was on the front page of the New York Post. Gilberte Najamy had given the story to the papers to goose action on her friend’s behalf. Jim McCormack called Struk and said that the druggie in the marriage was actually Robert, a huge pothead.
Struk did ask Robert where he’d been on the night in question and the days after. Michael Struk later told the New York Post, “Nobody really knows where the hell he was. I did take a subsequent statement in which he told me where he was every day. Some of those days were inconsistent with what we later found out. He stated that one of the days he was looking for real estate in Connecticut, and another day he took his dog to the vet. Some didn’t check out later on.”
Robert’s whereabouts were unknown or unconfirmed.
But Kathie’s whereabouts? Confirmed, because, as he told reporters, “The doorman saw her.” The residents of 37 Riverside Drive weren’t asked what they saw, if anything, until February 11, six days after she was reported missing, eleven days after she went missing.
In the first week after Robert walked into the precinct, all Struk had learned was that Robert and Kathie were clearly at war. According to Kathie’s family and friends, Robert was an abuser, a druggie, and a cheater. According to Robert, Kathie was a druggie, a drunk, and a cheater—and asking for trouble. Struk later told Marsha Kranes of the New York Post that Robert thought Kathie dressed too flashy for her own good. “ ‘I used to tell her she dressed too nicely,’ he said,” recounted Struk. “ ‘I told her she attracted too much attention. If someone was looking for someone who looked wealthy, it would be her. She wore diamond earrings everywhere, even to the hospital in the Bronx—not the safest place in the whole world,’ he said.” Not true, her family and friends insisted. Kathie was a hippie medical student, and wore casual clothes or scrubs. On the night she disappeared, she was in jeans and a down coat.
Struk would next talk to Kathie’s divorce lawyer, Dale Ragus, who joined the chorus and told him that Kathie lived in fear that Robert would try to kill her for scheming to get a big divorce settlement. He also spoke to Ruth Mayer, Kathie and Robert’s neighbor in Westchester, who told him that Robert once forced Kathie to get an abortion.
In The Jinx, Durst described that as the turning point in their marriage. Why was he so opposed to having children? He told Jarecki that he would be a jinx to his kids and a terrible father. How did he know in 1979 that he would be a jinx? Did he already know that he was evil?
Why didn’t Struk ask such questions of Robert in 1982? Didn’t the fact that a husband forced his wife to get an abortion bother him in the least?
The neighbors at Riverside Drive had a horrifying story as well. They told Struk that one night Kathie climbed from the balcony of her Manhattan apartment onto their balcony and banged on their window to be let in after Robert beat her.
As the NYPD’s investigation continued, there were “reports” in the media that the elevator man brought a well-dressed white male, thirty-five to thirty-eight years old and 185 pounds, five-eleven, with black hair, up to the Dursts’ apartment on the sixteenth floor half an hour after Kathie arrived. The police actually circulated a composite sketch of this man that contributed to the further trashing of the victim. It seemed they went to more trouble creating a sketch with a Durst employee than looking for the victim herself.
There were also “reports” that she was a drinker and a drug user. The press hooked into these classic blame-the-victim tactics. Just call her a drunken slut and, suddenly, no one cares what happens to her. Or, if something did happen to her, maybe she had it coming.
Is it a coincidence that the person trashing the victim, the doorman, was an employee of the Durst Organization? And is it a coincidence that a second building worker who told police he thought he saw Kathie outside the building the next morning also worked for the Durst Organization?
The narrative was created by employees of the Durst Organization and by Robert Durst. But no one spoke for Kathie.
I thought back to what I was doing when Kathie disappeared in 1982. All this went down while I was spearheading awareness programs about domestic violence. How was it possible that this investigation completely escaped my notice?
I’ll tell you how: Somehow, the history of Robert’s abuse never made it into the public narrative. Nor would the stories from Kathie’s friends about how terrified she was of him, that he’d cut her off and wouldn’t pay her bills when she tried to leave him, that she’d hired a divorce lawyer and was gathering papers to prove her husband’s worth to get what she felt was her fair share in a settlement.
Most disturbing: If the NYPD detectives had started at the inception of the crime, this case would have been in Westchester. As chief of the Domestic Violence Unit in 1982, I would have been the person who caught the case. Another reason I had to pursue it. I had to find her.
From what we could discern in the files, Struk bumbled around the case until April, when he received a call from famous criminal defense attorney Nicholas Scoppetta, who informed him that all communication with Durst would go through him. Robert had lawyered up. For all intents and purposes, the investigation slowed to a crawl after Struk spoke to Scoppetta.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in that conversation.
As far as I’
m concerned, Struk ended up as nothing more than an observer who spouted the Robert Durst line that Kathie must have just run off with another man and didn’t want to be found.
MEANWHILE, GILBERTE NAJAMY, KATHIE’S best friend, was running an amateur investigation of her own in 1982. As DA, I’ve met a lot of people purporting to be “Kathie’s best friend” over the years, but Gilberte stood out. Her relentless pursuit of justice knew no bounds. In fact, it almost destroyed her.
Her story of Kathie’s last day differed greatly from Robert’s account. As she told Struk repeatedly, on the afternoon of January 31, Gilberte was having a party for family and friends at her home in Connecticut. Kathie called her to say that she wanted to come, that Robert was in a mood and she needed to get away from him. Gilberte was delighted. She had been advising Kathie for months to leave her abusive husband, and had even helped her find a divorce lawyer. She’d have welcomed Kathie for the day or to move in permanently.
Kathie showed up at Gilberte’s place, a forty-five-minute drive from South Salem, in a hooded parka and knee-high boots, in her red Mercedes, in tears. Gilberte brought her inside, gave her a glass of wine. As the party progressed, according to Gilberte, Robert called nonstop. He was furious at Kathie about something and he wanted her home, now. Eventually, Kathie decided it was best to leave and deal with her husband.
Gilberte said good-bye to Kathie on the porch. Kathie’s last words to her were, “If anything happens to me, check it out. Bobby did it.”
Even Gilberte, a woman who hated Durst and hunted him for over thirty years, refers to him as “Bobby.” Most everyone calls him Bobby, including the press. I didn’t and still don’t. Not in a million years would I call him “Bobby.” He’s a serial murderer, not an innocent little kid riding his bike down the street. “Bobby” is a grown man, the epitome of cruelty and evil. Bobby, my ass.
He Killed Them All Page 6
