He beat us to her.
On Christmas Eve, neighbors of Susan’s on Benedict Canyon called the cops. Her three wirehaired terriers were barking incessantly around the ramshackle bungalow. When the cops arrived, they found the rear door open, and Susan’s body in a pool of blood with macabre dog paw prints in blood around the body. She’d been shot once in the back of the head with a nine-millimeter. No sign of forced entry. Nothing was stolen from the house. Nothing was amiss, except for, you know, a corpse on the floor. To some, the murder looked like an old-school mob hit, something like her father might’ve done back in the ’50s.
Before Clem told me the particulars, I knew Durst had done it.
Within six weeks of the press leak, he’d silenced her. Whatever she knew, it must have been explosive.
I was afraid to ask, “Where is Durst?”
“Unknown.”
“Get on a plane to L.A.,” I said. “Give them whatever they need.”
John O’Donnell and Joe Becerra flew to California that day.
THE FIRST TIME I spoke on the record about the Durst case was on January 6, 2000, two weeks after the murder of Susan Berman. I held a press conference. My battle gear didn’t change—a simple solid Armani suit and Manolo Blahniks. When I tried cases, I always wore a red suit for my opening statement. I wanted their attention. But for summation? Always black, to remind the jurors of the solemnity of the occasion. Press conferences were somewhere in the middle.
My battle dress was carefully considered and devised to create a certain effect. Authority. Impeccability. Gravity. My style was intended to project competence and confidence in my gestures, words, and actions.
When I spoke to reporters, I connected the dots between Kathie Durst’s disappearance and Susan Berman’s murder. The usual bashing about my being a well-dressed woman in the spotlight was not far behind.
As a woman in power, a younger and supposedly attractive woman, I wasn’t exactly the norm. There will always be questions leveled at those outside the norm, or anyone who pushes a new agenda. My agenda was to level the playing field, whether it was for victims of hate crimes, battered women, or child victims of Internet pedophiles. I was the first DA in the nation to nail a pedophile who flew from Washington State to kidnap a young girl in Mamaroneck. I used my bully pulpit to nab scumbags who hurt women and raped children. And I was pilloried for it.
People in public life have critics—especially women in power. Just by virtue of my doing my job, negative attention was focused on me. It didn’t bother me, except when that noise overwhelmed my goals. I focused on my purpose. My purpose was to find and catch Robert Durst. Sometimes, not everyone in the audience could get over the fact that I was on TV and could hear what I was actually saying. My attempt to link Durst to Berman’s murder was one of those times.
A ton of my media coverage was about my ton of media coverage. Just one example: In a 1998 article in New York magazine called “Pirro Mania,” the opening scene was about a press conference I was invited to by the police commissioner of New York for catching a serial rapist who’d attacked fifty-one women across the city and in Westchester. Instead of talking about the arrest or my office’s contribution to it, the writer, Kevin Gray, described my makeup, how short my skirt was, and my “gym-toned” thighs. How the heck did he know? Later that day, he tagged along to watch a lecture I gave about domestic violence, child abuse, and elder abuse. The reason I agreed to the article in the first place was to get that information to the public. Gray called my talk a “spiel,” and wrote, “Her gutsy voice peppers the room with images of penetration, penises, and vaginas.”
I was raising awareness about violent crimes against the most vulnerable members of society, and the reporter wrote about makeup, skirts, legs, and vaginas.
Writing me off as a grandstander was an easy narrative to sell to misogynists and morons. The voters in Westchester saw through the sexism. They elected me, reelected me, and reelected me again. They understood that I’d do whatever I had to do, even if it meant taking jabs from jerkoffs, to get the job done.
I wasn’t about to remain silent when I was pursuing a goal on behalf of a victim. The cacophony and the criticism didn’t matter. What mattered was leveling the playing field. The small minds around me were obsessed with other things. That was their issue, not mine.
Okay, rant over.
I started doing interviews about the case for papers and TV. I brought Becerra into my office to do 48 Hours with me to prevent him from going rogue again. I made sure to be vague, and said things like, “Berman knew Robert and Kathleen Durst. We believe she may have stayed in touch with Robert throughout Kathleen’s disappearance and afterward. We were interested in talking to her and were working toward making that happen. We were extremely disappointed when we heard what had happened to her.”
Whoever I was speaking to would inevitably ask, “Is there a connection between Susan Berman’s death and Kathie Durst’s disappearance?”
“We’re not ruling it in and we’re not ruling it out,” I said.
I was very careful not to say that Durst was a suspect. I had no power to do so. It was up to the Los Angeles DA to make that call. At no point did I ever—ever—say that Robert Durst was a suspect in either case, or that I was going to indict him for Kathie’s murder, or that we had any evidence linking the two crimes, or any knowledge of the LAPD’s investigation that could lead to an arrest. Didn’t happen.
Why hit that point so hard? Bear with me. It becomes important later on, when the story gets to Galveston, Texas.
IN EARLY 2001, THE media were going crazy about Durst. They couldn’t get enough of it—wealthy husband, missing wife, dead friend with mob links shot execution style. Outlets invited anyone and everyone tangentially connected to the case or the principals on television. A lot of people used Susan Berman’s murder to get their fifteen minutes of fame.
One of them was a woman named Ellen Strauss, a lawyer and, she claimed, a dear old friend of Kathie’s from college.
Strauss carved her niche as the self-appointed chief critic of how I, the Westchester DA, had mangled the investigation. She told any journalist who’d listen that if I’d only done my job and rushed to interview Susan Berman when she told me to, Susan would be alive today. Strauss started using the phrase, “What was she waiting for? Godot?”
After Durst’s Galveston acquittal in 2003, she told Phil Reisman of the Journal News: “Here’s my feelings about Jeanine. You can write it all down because I don’t care if you quote me. Jeanine is a shameless self-promoter. She’s been blowing smoke for two years . . . she put the whole series of events in motion.”
Strauss claims that she and Kathie were friends at Western Connecticut State College in Danbury. As she would tell the Houston Chronicle after The Jinx aired, they shared “that feeling you have when you meet someone. We both had the same values. I wanted to set up a storefront legal firm and save the world. She wanted to be a doctor and take care of children.”
It might be true that they went to the same college, and that they had altruistic visions of their futures. The rest of Strauss’s claim appears to be complete hogwash.
This past spring, I went to Yale–New Haven Hospital to speak with Gilberte Najamy. She wasn’t doing so well and was struggling with infections and liver and heart disease. Sadly, she did, in fact, die of her illnesses on July 26, 2015. My conversation with her on May 15, 2015, was her last recorded statement on the Kathleen Durst case. On her deathbed—and she knew she was severely ill, with nothing to lose and no reason to hold back—she discussed her final thoughts, including her feelings about Ellen Strauss.
According to Gilberte, who met Kathie in a college chemistry class, Kathie and Strauss never met each other at Western Connecticut. Not once. “Ellen Strauss did not know Kathie when she was alive,” Gilberte said emphatically.
Gilberte told me that it was she herself who originally introduced Kathie to Ellen Strauss over the phone. “Ellen had one telephon
e conversation with Kathie at my request in 1981. Kathie wanted legal advice. I said, ‘Well, you can talk to my friend Ellen and see what this divorce is going to involve.’ ” Strauss had just graduated from the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire, and was in no position to give expert legal advice to anyone, let alone a desperate battered woman going up against a wealthy family with unlimited resources. But Gilberte was just trying to help. So she arrranged the call.
I was stunned. Strauss latched on to the Durst case from the beginning, and has described her twenty-year accumulation of documents and reports about it as her “life’s work,” inspired by her close, intimate friendship with Kathie. And now Gilberte was telling me, on her deathbed, that Ellen and Kathie’s entire personal interaction was exactly one phone conversation? That the self-described close friendship did not exist? That Strauss’s “life’s work” was based on an epic lie?
Just to be clear, I asked Gilberte again, “Ellen said that she was a friend of Kathie’s from college. That’s not true?”
“Ellen Strauss did not know her in college,” she confirmed. “They spoke only once, over the phone when I introduced them. They never met in person.”
Yet Strauss had repeatedly claimed that Kathie told her, as she told others, “If anything happens to me, don’t let Bobby get away with it.”
Gilberte listened in on their one brief conversation. Kathie had been guarded, not divulging too many details about her marriage, just asking about how to initiate a divorce. But then, “after the disappearance,” said Gilberte, “Ellen became obsessed and was convinced that she was going to solve the case.”
Kathie’s brother, Jim, confirmed this. “Ellen Strauss was Kathie’s best friend after the fact. Her name didn’t come up until after Kathie disappeared. Ellen was not with Kathie and Gilberte the last night she went missing.”
One of Gilberte and Kathie’s friends from college triple-confirmed this. She said, “Kathie, Gilberte, and I were very close. As far as I know, Kathie never met Ellen Strauss in college or after.”
So was this great Ellen-Kathie friendship a figment of Ellen Strauss’s imagination?
The reams of information about the case she claimed to have personally collected over the years, in particular between 1982 and 2000? If it was so important, why didn’t she provide this information to the grieving McCormack family when something could have been done? Why not give it to the Dursts, who had the wherewithal to find Kathie? Why didn’t she give it to the Westchester DA in 1982? Where was it? Why did she wait eighteen years to criticize the one person who decided this was worth looking into?
“She took notes about what I told her,” said Gilberte. “I asked her to because if something happened to me, somebody needs to know. Ellen took down everything I said about what I’d found out. All of the information she’s been talking about is stuff I gave her.”
Strauss claimed to have been with Gilberte every step of the way, to have gone through Durst’s trash with her. To that point, Gilberte said, “Ellen has a problem with her memory. She clearly said to me that she had a career and she couldn’t risk getting caught, so she didn’t want to be involved in the actual evidence-gathering.”
Ellen Strauss is one of the wannabes in the Durst theater of the absurd.
She has told reporters that I could barely give the grieving family a minute of my time. As if she had any idea what it was like to run a highly successful prosecutor’s office with a staff of people who were determined to provide the energy, resources, and empathy that a case needed. I had my fact-finders in that room: Clem, Steve, John. They would be the ones to write the reports of the information and follow up on leads or inconsistencies.
At the time, when Strauss trashed me in the press, I ignored it. There was nothing to gain from paying heed to a self-important hanger-on like Ellen Strauss.
Since The Jinx aired, Strauss has been stretching her fifteen minutes, appearing on various TV shows, going on about her friendship with Kathie, and, shocker, trashing me. She’s still trotting out that “Godot” line.
It was lame back in 2000.
Ellen Strauss recently said on Nancy Grace, “I had phone conversations with the detectives, and they told me that they—the prosecutor’s office—didn’t want to cut any checks to fly out to California. They didn’t get interested in [Berman] until after she was dead. And Pirro went on television and she said to the general public, meaning me, we didn’t know how the police worked. They liked to work from the periphery and go inward. Well, I said, ‘Go right to Susan, do it now.’ ”
Really? You told me what to do? I wasn’t doing everything in my power to set up an interview with a key witness—clearing it with L.A., going after all her friends to get their stories, tracking her movements, researching her, all the detail and double-checking of an investigation on the highest level that this fraud knows nothing about—on a case I’d been working for over a year? Didn’t want to cut checks to fly to L.A.? We don’t cut checks for travel. She has no clue about what we do.
What had Ellen Strauss done to prevent Susan Berman’s murder?
She called Joe Becerra with Berman’s address in Beverly Hills.
Did this ditz think she could get information off the Internet that the DA’s office couldn’t? Did she think we didn’t know where Susan Berman lived?
Ellen Strauss got her name in the papers. If she weren’t talking about me, no one—no one—would give a crap what came out of her mouth.
A LOT OF PEOPLE wonder why Durst didn’t cut up Susan’s body, as he would later do to Morris Black, and had previously, presumably, done to his wife. One theory was that he refrained out of respect and because he genuinely loved her.
Love? If he loved her, he wouldn’t have shot her in the head.
There were three reasons Robert Durst didn’t dismember Susan Berman:
1. He wanted police to assume she’d been executed mob-style. Everyone knows that a shot to the back of the head is classic Vito Corleone MO.
2. Los Angeles wasn’t his milieu, so to speak. It wasn’t his home, his apartment, his private space, making it more difficult for him so he didn’t feel comfortable doing it.
3. He didn’t have time. As we eventually found out, he had to get to the San Francisco airport for a ten-o’clock flight to New York that night.
As soon as John and Joe arrived in L.A., John visited the crime scene. He said there was still coagulated blood and pieces of her gray matter on the floor. It was not wiped down. There was a possibility of collecting and interpreting forensic evidence. John connected with Detective Paul Coulter and other L.A. detectives, telling them about Durst and opening up a two-way flow of information. The LAPD was skeptical that the murder of Susan Berman was connected with a nineteen-year-old cold case about a missing person in Westchester. They were looking at a possible mob connection or at Berman’s on-again, off-again boyfriend/manager Nyle Brenner.
On January 11, 2001, Jonathan Bandler of the Journal News reported, “Los Angeles Police said yesterday that they were skeptical about whether the execution-style slaying of a writer there last month was connected to the 1982 disappearance of Kathleen Durst. Nevertheless, investigators from the Westchester DA’s office were in Los Angeles yesterday to see if it could stir up any new leads. . . . Los Angeles Police Detective Ron Phillips, a supervisor of the West Los Angeles Homicide Unit that is handling the Berman case, said Tuesday night that the cases were not connected. The Department spokesman reiterated that.”
My team certainly tried to convince them otherwise. One thing my team and the LAPD agreed on was that Susan must have known her killer. Forensics proved that she’d invited the Devil inside and trusted him enough to turn her back to him. John talked to a cop at the crime scene who told him that, assessing the trajectory of the entry wound and how she was struck, Susan had been bent over when she was shot. When they removed her body, there may have been a paper towel or a tissue underneath her with dog mess on it. This lends itself to th
e theory that she had bent over to clean up some dog poop when her executioner struck.
A major point of contention was whether Susan knew our case had been reopened. It had been in the New York Times! Robert was like a brother to her. Of course she knew. In The Jinx, her friend, the novelist Julie Smith, later confirmed it. She asked Susan about the article, and Susan told her back then, “I don’t want to talk about that. They’re out to get Bobby.”
Durst told Jarecki that he contacted Susan and that Susan said, “Bobby, this is terrible for you. I hate that you have to go through this.” Durst claimed Susan said the L.A. police contacted her and they wanted to talk to her about Kathie’s disappearance.
So Durst and Julie Smith both said Susan knew, but my office did not tell the L.A. police to talk to Susan about Kathie. We would not have had another agency do an interrogation in a case that we had meticulously and fastidiously studied for over a year. They wouldn’t know where to start on our case. As a courtesy, we notify another police agency when we are in their jurisdiction or are heading their way.
L.A. was contacted only for the purpose of locating Susan so that I could send out John O’Donnell and Joe Becerra to question her using the vast amount of information that they had garnered. L.A. did not know why we wanted to talk to her, which might explain why they thought New York’s case had nothing to do with theirs. So they concluded early on that it was probably a mob hit because of Susan’s father or that her manager killed her, neither of which feeds into the idea that she was killed because we were coming out to talk to her.
The headlines—from the New York Times, A WITNESS POLICE HOPE COULD SOLVE ’82 MYSTERY KILLED; from the Los Angeles Times, POLICE HOPED TO QUESTION WRITER WHO WAS KILLED; from the New York Post, SLAIN WRITER FACED QUIZ OVER MISSING WOMAN—were more in tune with what was happening and what was needed.
But the fact is, there was no stone left unturned in the investigation. Susan would have known the investigation would lead to her. Kim Lankford says she and Susan had a conversation about being interviewed by law enforcement. She told Jarecki that Susan was excited about a new project that would “blow the socks off” something big. Was she so desperate for money that she’d reveal what she knew about Kathie and betray her close old friend, a man who was like a brother to her?
He Killed Them All Page 11
