John O’Donnell asked the dean himself about the famous call with Kathie. Are you sure you spoke to Kathie Durst? Could it have been another woman pretending to be Kathie? Did students often call in sick? The dean was “wishy-washy,” and gave ambiguous answers like, “Well, I don’t really know,” and, “Well, I never thought about it.” John and Eddie conducted numerous interviews with the dean and could not pin him down about whether he remembered receiving a call.
After one such interview, as Eddie and John walked back to their car in the parking lot, Eddie asked, “Hey, John. What do they call you if you graduate first in your class at medical school?”
John said, “I don’t know. Doctor?”
Eddie said, “And what do they call you if you graduated last in your class at medical school?”
Without missing a beat, John said, “Dean!”
The man was evasive or dim . . . or maybe he was just wise to keep his mouth shut? He was the dean at Albert Einstein Medical School. Donations were coming in at all levels. Was he hoping for some Durst money to flow his way?
Did the Durst family send any checks to Albert Einstein in the 1980s?
• Kathie went to the Jacobi Medical Center after one savage beating. Ro announced that Steve Bender and Clem needed to see me about Kathie Durst. I waved them in and said, “What? Talk to me.”
Clem said, “He put her in the hospital.”
“Motherfucker!”
We already knew about the balcony incident, that she’d jumped from her own balcony to her neighbors’ on Riverside Drive to escape Robert’s rage. Gilberte told me that Kathie often called her in the middle of the night after Robert beat her. Kathie, like so many battered women, refused to go to the hospital—she was embarrassed. The feeling must have been compounded because she was a medical student.
As chilling as those accounts of abuse were, there was no medical documentation.
But a hospital visit was proof. There was a paper trail.
In early January, a week before she vanished, Kathie went to Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx with bruises on her face. She told the doctors that her husband beat her. The hospital didn’t contact police at the time, which infuriated me. I trained ER nurses for what to look for in domestic violence cases and how to question women who came in with injuries. It had to be done gently. Battered women were often too ashamed to admit that their husbands or boyfriends had assaulted them, or they feared a reprisal. But if a woman had the courage to come in and say, “I was beaten by my husband,” the nurses and doctors were supposed to offer her referral and support services.
Why go to the ER that time, having avoided hospitals before? Did her lawyer, Dale Ragus, tell Kathie it was time for her to document her abuse to get a divorce?
This was a point of law that Marjory Fields and I would eventually rewrite. Back then, it wasn’t sufficient grounds for divorce if a husband beat his wife only once. He had to repeatedly beat her and she had to have proof.
Was Kathie wisely setting up her ducks and getting his abuse on the record? Was she now memorializing the beatings so as to gather enough evidence to get a decent settlement to start her life anew?
The more important question is, why didn’t Durst just divorce her? Why did he have to kill her? Our information was that Durst had turned down Kathie’s attempt at a divorce settlement just three days before she disappeared. Did he kill her so he wouldn’t have to give her money? Why was he so cheap? He was part of, and heir to, an organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The law at the time contributed to Kathie’s end. The law favored the batterers. Women’s rights, if they were even considered, were secondary.
• Durst went on a field trip to destroy evidence. One of the first things we did was a dump on the Durst Organization’s telephone records at and around the time of Kathie’s disappearance. The second day after her disappearance, collect calls were made to the Durst Organization from Ship Bottom, New Jersey. When my investigators went to speak with the secretary at the Durst Organization in 2000, she indicated the only person who made collect phone calls that were accepted: Robert Durst.
And yet, in 2015, Robert claimed in The Jinx that he knew of other people who went to Long Beach Island in New Jersey who had a home there and were making collect calls around that time. Our investigation uncovered no such information.
Struk knew about the calls and even took a day at the beach to look into them. But that was it. No follow-up. No interviews. He let it drop.
The collect calls were placed two days after Kathie went missing, three days before Robert alerted the NYPD. We identified the location of those calls, a Laundromat. What did Robert need to have cleaned so desperately that he stopped at a coin-op Laundromat at the shore in February? Could he be washing whatever he might’ve used to transport body parts in the trunk? Was it seat covers, blankets?
Ship Bottom is a little town on Long Beach Island, bordering the Atlantic Ocean, mere miles from the Pine Barrens, a million-acre forested national reserve across seven counties, composing 22 percent of the entire state’s land area. It’s the largest expanse of forest between Virginia and Massachusetts, and has long been, according to legend and common knowledge among anyone who’s ever lived in New Jersey, the mob’s number one all-time favorite choice place to dump a body. (In May 2001, when Robert Durst was living in Galveston, wearing a wig and pretending to be the mute Dorothy Ciner, HBO aired an episode of The Sopranos called “The Pine Barrens” that featured a scene of two gangsters forcing a man to dig his own grave before they shot him there.)
In 1982, Robert had every reason to be familiar with the Pine Barrens, Ship Bottom, and the workings of the New Jersey mob. His main job for the Durst Organization in the seventies and eighties was to collect rent money from the wiseguys who ran the porn stores and XXX theaters in Times Square. The Dursts made their fortune there. When Ed Koch became mayor in 1978, one of his goals was to redevelop Times Square and remove the blight of drugs, porn, and prostitution from the crossroads of the world. Koch’s plan was to bring in office space, legitimate retail, theaters, and restaurants, and to shut down the sleazy hotels and porn theaters. At the same time, he created an Arson Strike Force in City Hall because so many New York City landlords were abandoning buildings because of high taxes, some even torching them to collect insurance money.
Seymour Durst fought the redevelopment plan from the start, and even sued the city to stop it. He lost. And Times Square went from porn city to Disney World, a vast improvement over addicts with needles in their arms and hookers on every corner.
So Robert collected rent from those bottom-feeders, pornographers, and mobsters. Given those connections, what might he have learned?
How to kill.
How to chop up a body.
And where to dispose of the body.
Who could help us in that regard? Ironically, I had given Gilberte my private number in the event she ever needed to speak with me. She mentioned that she’d spoken with a man named Tom Brown Jr. I’d heard of Brown. He was a legendary wilderness tracker, an expert in the science and art of finding people, and he taught classes on it. He even had a bowie knife named after him. I picked up the phone and called Tom. Could he meet with members of my office?
I sent John O’Donnell and Mike Occicone, another of my criminal investigators—a good guy, quiet and low-key, who doesn’t run off at the mouth and knows how to be a cop—to talk to Tom. They showed him a copy of the dig/shovel to-do list. It made perfect sense to him. He confirmed that Long Beach Island was the burial ground for many crime victims. They discussed the fact that Robert, on behalf of the Durst Organization, had worked in Times Square in the early eighties.
Development was going crazy on the Jersey Shore at the time. Speculation was rampant in a twenty- to thirty-mile area around Atlantic City. The state of New Jersey actually built a bridge, referred to as the Bridge to Nowhere, at the end of Town Road, Route 9. It was intended to go over to an island where expensive homes could
be built. The Town Road was ultimately never connected, but every speculator and real-estate developer—including the Dursts—believed that was the next big thing.
So maybe the dig/shovel list—including the words “town dump” and “bridge”—that Struk said meant nothing, meant something. John would spend upward of a week with Tom in the area, poking around, looking for a burial site. Tom told John about how he searched for a body by sticking a length of bamboo into a depression in the ground and sniffing it to determine what might be buried beneath. Nothing turned up.
• Durst was openly unfaithful—with Mia Farrow’s sister. It’s fascinating that Kathie was thought to have run away with another man whose composite sketch was distributed by the New York City Police Department in 1982 when the truth is it was Robert Durst who was sleeping around. His affair with Prudence Farrow, Mia’s sister, was well known at the time. She’d been the inspiration for the Beatles song “Dear Prudence.” John Lennon wrote the song when Prudence accompanied the Beatles to India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968. As the story went, Prudence became so obsessed with the Maharishi, she would fall deep into meditation and refuse to come out of her little hut. Hence, “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?”
It should not be a surprise that Robert Durst, with his pedigree and fortune (even if he was too cheap to spend it), would be mingling with the likes of Mia Farrow’s sister. We do know that he spent a lot of time at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side watering hole of the literati and glitterati. He and Susan Berman went there. They partied at Studio 54, along with Liza Minnelli and Halston. It’s safe to assume Prudence was in the mix as well. During the disco era, everyone had a ball. Everyone did coke (except me). And plenty of people worshiped something, if not the Maharishi.
I sent O’Donnell to find Prudence Farrow. He didn’t locate her, but he did take a trip to Connecticut to talk to her sister, Mia Farrow.
O’Donnell knew before he got to Mia that the affair between Robert and Prudence was hot and heavy. “Like dogs,” he’d later report to someone, not me. “They were wrapped around each other like dogs, man.”
Normally, as DA, I was spared such details, but who knew if they might add to a profile of Durst?
O’Donnell and Murphy interviewed Mia Farrow in her home in northwestern Connecticut. “You know, boss,” O’Donnell told me before he left, “I’m not all that impressed or enamored by famous people, and I kind of dread having to talk to Mia Farrow.”
“Oh, get over it,” I told him. But of course, I loved him for that.
When he returned, I was not surprised by what he reported.
“Got there and I could not have been more wrong, boss,” he told me. “She was the most delightful and forthcoming and decent human being I think I have ever spoken to involving a homicide.”
He went on to tell me that he was greeted at the door by one of her adopted children. “And she had adopted children of all different sizes, shapes, and ethnicities. Every child was articulate, gracious, and well behaved. Mia lived in an old, renovated farmhouse. It was very simple, but beautiful, tranquil,” he told me. “I walked in, and the first thing I noticed over a mantel was the triangular fold of the American flag. She had a brother or some relative who was killed in Vietnam. Also, she had a picture of someone in full Marine dress blues, and I said to her, ‘Who is that, if I may ask?’ And she said, ‘That’s my father, a Marine colonel.’ I figured she was just artsy-craftsy, you know, Hollywood . . .”
As sweet as all this was, I wanted to throttle him.
“What did she know about the affair?!”
“Okay, well, boss, Mia really didn’t like Bobby. Really, from the get-go.”
“Why?”
“Well, she said to me, ‘I know narcissistic men.’ And I’m thinking, she’s talking about Woody Allen and she’s talking about Frank Sinatra. And she goes, ‘I know narcissistic men and this is a narcissistic man.’ ”
“Interesting. What else did she say?”
“She said, ‘I did not like him at all. He was not good for my sister.’ Long story short, she constantly tried to discourage Prudence from seeing Bobby but it didn’t work.” He added that she said she’d help in any way she could, but had no direct knowledge of Kathie.
Kathie herself knew of Robert’s affairs, specifically when she found Polaroid pictures of her medicine cabinet and dresser. Robert later admitted to her that he took the pictures so he could bring women into the apartment and make it appear that he was single by removing items that ostensibly belonged to Kathie and then put everything back in its place.
• Durst had a vicious temper. One night, Kathie’s crew was clubbing with a photographer named Peter Schwartz. It was a big group and they had to split up in cabs to go back to the Dursts’ for a nightcap. Kathie and Peter took a taxi alone together. Back at the apartment, Kathie and Peter were hanging out in a group with Gilberte and Kathy Traystman, among others. Robert came home, and out of nowhere, started assaulting Peter, kicking him in the face, breaking his cheekbone and jaw. Peter went to the hospital. Gilberte told me she called him the day after and asked what happened. He said he couldn’t talk about it because Robert Durst made him promise to keep it quiet. Of course, some money was exchanged.
It all added up to a massive sense of entitlement. Robert did whatever he wanted, wherever. Kicking some guy in the face. Cheating on his wife. Killing his wife. It was all the same to him. Just one more thing to get away with.
• The Dursts treated the McCormacks like dirt. Robert’s disrespect to the McCormacks was palpable throughout his and Kathie’s marriage. Apparently, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
In the days after Kathie’s disappearance, none of the Dursts—Douglas and Thomas (Robert’s brothers), Wendy (the sister), and Seymour—had reached out to the McCormacks to offer their support or to say, “Hang in there.” Jim tried to rally the Dursts to help them find Kathie. On March 19, after calling the Durst offices repeatedly and being unable to get anyone on the phone, the McCormacks—Jim, his mother, Ann, and his sister Mary—were finally allowed an audience with Seymour at his home in Manhattan, almost three months after Kathie went missing. Jim hoped to get some financial backing from his in-laws to hire a private investigator and post a large reward for information. The McCormacks weren’t rich. Kathie had been married to Robert for nearly a decade. Surely that counted for something?
It was weird and awkward from the moment they arrived. Seymour brought them into a sitting room. He offered them nothing to drink or eat. They asked him questions, and Seymour gave monosyllabic replies. He wasn’t sympathetic, wasn’t empathic. He refused to help the McCormacks search for Kathie. This was a guy who had the world at his fingertips. He could have had the human decency to say, “I’ll hire the best investigators and we’ll find out the truth. We’ll search with dogs. We’ll set up a tip line.” There was so much that they could’ve done. But he wasn’t willing to do anything. He looked at his in-laws as if they were insignificant bugs. Jim said that Seymour seemed defensive, like, “Why are you bothering me? I’ve got nothing to do with this.”
Why would Seymour Durst be defensive about his missing daughter-in-law? Could it be that he already knew she wasn’t missing?
When Robert’s youngest brother, Thomas, in his early thirties at the time, walked into the room, he took one look at the McCormacks, and asked, “What’s going on?”
Not a hello or “I’m sorry for what you’re going through.”
Seymour said, “They’re trying to find out where Kathie is.”
Tom frowned and said, “This meeting is over.”
He opened the door and told the McCormacks to get out.
The abrupt dismissal was hostile, conspiratorial.
Was it any wonder that the McCormacks were angry? Jim was once quoted in the Northeast News, saying, “There were obvious discrepancies that [Struk] didn’t look into. My sister Mary would seem to come up with more leads in a week than they got the w
hole time.”
In 1983, Kathie’s mom, Ann McCormack, sued Robert Durst in Surrogate’s Court for half of Kathleen’s estate of fifty thousand dollars, presuming that she was dead for civil purposes. Ann was going to use the money to hire PIs to search for her daughter, now that the NYPD had moved on. Robert, the heir to a $600 million fortune at that time, went to court and fought his grieving, desperate mother-in-law for what, to him, was chump change. That alone was proof of one thing: Robert Durst was a cruel, cheap son of a bitch.
During the hearing, Kathie’s sister Mary brought to light even more suspicious evidence. On the night of Kathie’s disappearance, Durst originally claimed she was wearing a pair of diamond earrings, two gold chains, and her wedding band. Mary would later find each piece of jewelry in a pouch in her sister’s drawer.
For the hearing, the McCormacks and Kathie’s divorce lawyer, Dale Ragus, filed affidavits stating that Robert physically assaulted her and that she feared for her life.
Robert filed his own affidavit saying he never touched her and that her claims of abuse were leverage to get more of his money in a divorce settlement. He said, she said. The judge sided with Durst, allowing him to keep all of Kathie’s fifty thousand dollars.
• More lives were destroyed than Kathie’s. Because of the disappearance, Jim McCormack found himself in a situation he never could have predicted, making moral and ethical decisions no one should have to face. He told me in July 2015, “Kathie and Bob were on their honeymoon across America. For me, it was single days and lots of fun. I made my first cross-country trip that year, and met Kathie and Bob in Denver, Colorado, on their way back to the East Coast. Those were happy ‘in love’ days for the honeymooners.” Jim struggled to connect with his new brother-in-law. “[Bob had] a kind of a shyness. I hardly ever remember him laughing much. He was a hard-to-read personality,” he said on the ABC News show Vanished about Kathie’s disappearance.
He Killed Them All Page 8
