A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst

by Matt Birkbeck

  “I’m glad you came,” she said, smiling, holding out her hand. “Did you have any trouble finding the house?”

  “No, we just followed the cars. That’s a long line down the block.”

  “Yeah, there’s a lot of people here. I do this every once in a while. There are a lot of nice people here, some lawyers, some doctors. The bar is over there,” she said, pointing toward the kitchen.

  Ellen walked Struk and Rocco over to the bar, where they opened a couple of Heinekens and smiled as Ellen introduced them to some of her friends, who asked the two detectives about the status of the Kathie Durst case.

  Struk told them what he could, that they were still searching but were somewhat frustrated. There’d been no sign of Kathie for nearly three months.

  The night was supposed to be official business, but Struk found he was enjoying himself. He felt at ease, lost in the loud music and good humor. And Ellen was right: there were plenty of beautiful and available women walking by, smiling and sometimes stopping to chat. Word quickly traveled through the house that two New York City detectives were in attendance. Struk was popular, if only for a few hours. The night passed quickly, and Rocco decided to join about a dozen other inebriated people who were sleeping on the floor. Struk thought it best to leave, and gave one of Ellen’s female guests a ride home.

  —

  Chips was on Columbus Avenue and West Sixty-ninth Street, directly across from WABC-TV’s studios. The restaurant and bar served as a hangout for the reporters and anchors from the station, which aired on Channel 7 in New York, and was also a friendly watering hole for some detectives from the Twentieth Precinct, including Mike Struk and Lieutenant Robert Gibbons.

  It was early on a Monday night, and the two men decided to meet for a drink, a bite to eat, and a talk about the Durst case. Something was bothering Struk, only he wanted to hash it out outside the precinct, and Gibbons agreed to meet.

  As they sat at the bar, they could easily hear the laughter coming from the back of the restaurant from some of WABC’s newspeople, who had gathered after wrapping up the 6 P.M. news.

  One of them, a producer, recognized Struk and walked over to say hello and ask about the Durst case. Struk could only say that he was still investigating. He introduced the producer to Gibbons and ordered another beer.

  After the producer rejoined his group, Struk leaned over toward Gibbons, his elbow on the bar and left hand on his forehead.

  “Here’s what’s bothering me, in a nutshell. This guy is loaded, right? Has a ton of money. Everybody knows who his father is, and if they didn’t know before, they know now. My question is: Where is this guy? Where is Seymour Durst? You and I and some of the other guys have been humping on this case, but other than the first week, I don’t see any pressure on us to find this lady. My question to you is, and I want you, as a friend, to tell me: Are we wasting our time here?”

  “What you’re asking me is, are we chasing our tails?”

  “You know what I’m saying,” said Struk.

  “No one has pulled me aside and said to lay off. That’s never happened to me, period. Do I think it’s weird there hasn’t been more pressure coming down to find her? Yeah, maybe,” said Gibbons.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” said Struk. “You’d think Nicastro—fuck, you’d think the commissioner— would be on our asses about this. But they’re not. I haven’t heard anything about Nicastro since the first week. Have you?”

  “No. I give the captain updates, and word travels downtown.”

  “And what about the old man—Seymour? Where the fuck has he been? If that was my daughter or daughter-in-law, I’d be doing everything I could to find her. But this guy hasn’t done shit. He even tossed the McCormack family out of his house.”

  “And what does that tell you?”

  “It tells me they know what happened to her. And it’s not good. Jesus, I’ve got people telling me that Kathie was threatening the family. That she had tax returns and stock transfers and information on the Dursts they wouldn’t want anyone to know about.”

  “So you think the family had her bumped off?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. I think Bobby Durst has a bad temper and he hit her one too many times. He’s tossing all of her stuff out. He wants nothing to do with her. Not even a memory. He’s not acting like a bereaved husband, right? Actually, I think he’s got a couple of screws loose. But I don’t know where to go with this, and if I’m at the end of the line, then we’re done. Finished. She’s gone, forever.”

  “What about the phone records?”

  “Still waiting.”

  “And Bobby won’t talk to you?”

  “I’ve been trying. He’s not returning my calls.”

  “Why don’t you try him again. Maybe it’s time to get him in for a polygraph. See if he’ll cooperate. Aside from that, we’ll wait for the phone records and see what we get from that.”

  The two men sipped their drinks and ordered dinner.

  —

  The following morning Struk left another message with Bobby Durst, asking him to return the call. An hour later, his phone rang.

  “Detective Struk,” he answered.

  “Hey, Mikey,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “How ya doing!”

  Struk didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Nick, Attorney Nick Scoppetta. I’ve been retained by Robert Durst to represent him. I know you’ve been trying to contact him in regards to his wife. I’d appreciate it if all calls concerning Mr. Durst now go through me. Okay, Mikey?”

  Struk recognized Scoppetta’s name but couldn’t quite place it. The call took him by surprise, and Scoppetta’s “Hey, Mikey” greeting didn’t earn him any points.

  “Well, yeah, I’ve been trying to contact him. There are a couple of things I’d like to discuss with him,” said Struk.

  “Are you going to arrest Mr. Durst?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just want to talk to him.”

  “Well, I’m advising Mr. Durst not to talk to anyone at this point. He really wants to help you, but he’s very busy and there’s nothing more that he can add than what he’s already told you.”

  “Would Mr. Durst be willing to sit down for a polygraph test?”

  “Absolutely not. He’s done nothing that would warrant him to be embarrassed like that,” said Scoppetta. “But we do have something you would be interested in. Drinking glasses with what appears to be a powdery residue on the side. We think it’s cocaine. The glasses belonged to Mrs. Durst. We’d be happy to give them to you. Perhaps you could run them through for prints? Mr. Durst has said all along that he believes his wife may have gotten in trouble with drug dealers. That sound good, Mikey? And should something else come up relevant to this case, feel free to call me, okay, Mikey?”

  Struk could hear the click on the other end of the line, and he slammed his phone down onto the receiver. At the moment he didn’t know what he was more upset about, the fact that Bobby hired an attorney or being called Mikey.

  He got up and walked over to Gibbons’s office.

  “Bobby’s lawyered up,” said Struk. “He’s got some guy, Nick Scoppetta, representing him.”

  “Scoppetta?” said Gibbons. “He’s a player. A criminal attorney. Bobby’s bringing out the first team.”

  Gibbons knew all about Scoppetta, a New York City insider, a member of Mayor John Lindsay’s administration in the 1960s, a former deputy mayor and city investigations commissioner who knew just about everyone within city government, and everyone knew him.

  “He says there’s no way Bobby will talk to us, and no way he’ll sit down for a polygraph. Does that shut us down?” said Struk, knowing there was no chance he’d be talking to Bobby Durst anytime soon.

  “For now, until we get the phone records,” said Gibbons.r />
  Bobby had dropped the bomb. All Struk could do was sigh.

  “Damn,” he said.

  A month later, as promised, Nick Scoppetta produced two glasses containing what appeared to be a white, powdery residue. As a matter of routine, Struk had the glasses examined, and the residue tested positive for cocaine, though there were no identifiable fingerprints.

  Struk was back working other cases. A murder here, a burglary there. There’d be occasional calls from Kathie’s friends, particularly Ellen Strauss, seeking updates, but there was nothing to say and nothing to report. The only leads that trickled in were false sightings or crazed psychics claiming they’d seen Kathie’s body buried under a tree, or under the Meadowlands parking lot in New Jersey, next to Jimmy Hoffa.

  In early June, the New York Post reported the Bobby Durst affair with Prudence Farrow. Bobby was even quoted in the story, saying that Kathie was doing badly in life, flunking medical school and having a problem with drugs, particularly cocaine. He said Kathie came home the Sunday night of her disappearance from Gilberte Najamy’s home in a foul mood, and he blamed Gilberte.

  “She’d come home from Gilberte’s yelling and screaming and giving me a tough time over lawyers and why I do this and why I do that. It was a tirade,” Bobby told the Post. “Gilberte Najamy from the very beginning has been trying to get us to break up. For whatever reason, she never liked me.”

  Bobby also admitted publicly that Kathie was using cocaine and wondered if her drug use was the reason for her disappearance.

  “All I want to know is that she’s someplace and she’s all right,” said Bobby. “I’m not trying to drag her back.”

  The Post story quoted anonymous officials saying they didn’t know if Kathie was murdered or had run away and assumed a new identity. Struk had no idea where they’d gotten that information, but he was amused that Bobby would talk to the Post but not to the New York police. For a man who had nothing to hide, he wasn’t saying much.

  The day the Post story was published, Kathie’s sister Mary Hughes parked herself in front of Bobby’s apartment, waiting with reporters for Bobby to emerge. He did, late in the morning, with his dog, Igor, and Mary called out to him, asking why he and the Durst family were ignoring Kathie’s family.

  Mary called Struk later that day. She had been crying.

  “I told him, ‘I know you killed her!’ But he just looked at me as if he didn’t even know me and said, ‘I have nothing to say to you.’ That’s it. He’s married to my sister for nine years and that’s all he can say? Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “Mary,” said Struk, “I don’t know what to say. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

  12

  Central Park was awash in color, and Mike Struk was enjoying the view. He always liked the autumn months, the cool weather a welcome relief from the stifling, humid summer heat that turned the Twentieth Precinct into a super-oven.

  Summer passed by quickly for Struk, who took a respite from the frustrations of the Durst case and spent some much-needed vacation time with his children. He even found himself a girlfriend.

  As he stood on the corner of Central Park West and West Eighty-sixth Street, having returned from a court appearance to testify in a burglary case, he took deep, full breaths, inhaling the cool, fall air. He felt pretty good. Better than he had in months, with the the Durst case and all its problems placed somewhere in the back of his mind.

  The case was cold; frozen was more like it. The last newspaper story had appeared in June. Even the calls from the psychics were few and far between.

  Struk took one last deep breath then walked west toward Columbus Avenue.

  When he returned to the precinct, he saw Gibbons in his office, focused on paperwork laid out on his desk.

  “Whatcha got there?” said Struk.

  Gibbons looked up, his expression a mixture of seriousness and excitement. “We got the phone records.”

  There they were, Bobby’s phone records, subpoenaed months ago by Roger Hayes and finally delivered courtesy of New York Telephone.

  Struk pulled a chair up to Gibbons’s desk.

  “Look,” said Gibbons, who’d spent the last hour studying the records, pointing to a listing of calls made to Bobby’s office on Tuesday afternoon, February 2. “Collect calls, all of them, from Ship Bottom, New Jersey. It’s down the coast, on Long Beach Island. Just north of Atlantic City. That’s our boy, isn’t it? Isn’t that his MO, making collect calls?”

  “You bet,” said Struk. “That cheap fuck wouldn’t put a dime in a pay phone if someone gave it to him. Look at this.”

  There were dozens of collect calls to Bobby’s office, but only on that one day did any calls originate from Ship Bottom.

  “Where did he say he was that day?” said Gibbons.

  “In Connecticut, on business,” said Struk.

  Struk ran over to his desk, pulled out his Durst file, and removed a copy of Bobby’s itinerary, the one Bobby had tossed into the garbage and Gilberte Najamy found.

  “Here, look. He wrote down that he arrived in South Salem at two A.M. that Tuesday morning and left at seven A.M. It doesn’t say where he went, but he drove back to Manhattan at eight that night,” said Struk.

  “What’s that say?” said Gibbons, pointing to a single word scribbled between the “7 A.M. leave home” and “8 garage.”

  “It says ‘drive,’” said Struk. “The little fucker wasn’t in Connecticut. He went to Jersey.”

  Gibbons and Struk agreed they needed to check the local property records for any Durst holdings in the Atlantic City area, including and surrounding Long Beach Island.

  Struk suddenly sat up in his chair, shocking himself with his brilliant thought.

  “The Pine Barrens.”

  “The what?”

  “The Pine Barrens. This is near the Pine Barrens.”

  The Pine Barrens were 1.1 million acres of sandy expanse and thick forests between Atlantic City and Philadelphia known chiefly as the last resting place for assorted mobsters; the fine, loose dirt was easy to dig up any time of the year, even in early February.

  “How would he know to go to the Pine Barrens?” said Gibbons. “Hit men and serial killers go to the Pine Barrens.”

  “Maybe he had help. I don’t know,” said Struk. “What I do know is I better get down there.”

  —

  The cold November wind slapped Struk’s face as he stood on the shore in Ship Bottom on Long Beach Island, watching the breaking waves of the Atlantic Ocean. He stood in the sand, looking like an overgrown seal in his black trench coat and black shoes.

  Struk was deep in thought. The instant he saw the Laundromat he made the connection. He tracked down the collect calls to Bobby’s office on February 2. They came from two pay phones. One here, on Long Beach Island Avenue near the beach, and one across the bridge on the mainland, in Manahawkin, which was right in front of a Laundromat.

  Struk remembered the coat. That expensive Burberry raincoat hanging on Bobby’s closet, the one he’d apparently washed and ruined.

  He washed it here, that Tuesday.

  As Struk stood on the beach, his eyes closed, seagulls circled high above him.

  He was convinced that Kathie Durst was down here. Somewhere. Bobby supposedly owned property in the area, and Struk was prepared to get a backhoe and dig through every inch of ground. But the Ocean County courthouse didn’t have any listings for property owned by a Robert Durst, or any Durst, for that matter.

  And Struk knew that searching the Pine Barrens was pointless. Finding a body in such an expanse would be like searching for a golf ball on the moon.

  On the drive back to Manhattan, up the Garden State Parkway, Struk decided it was time to pay a visit to Flo Jones, Bobby’s former secretary, who lived on 145th Street.

  Somehow, Jones had slipped through the
cracks. Struk had wanted to interview her in the early stages of the investigation, back in February. But it was decided it would be better to wait until after he locked Bobby into a story. The problem was, aside from the first two interviews, Bobby wasn’t talking, and Jones had been forgotten.

  She wasn’t pleased to see Struk at her door. But she let him in, and as she began to answer his questions, it was clear she had no love for Bobby, who she said had fired her in April, just a couple of months after Kathie disappeared.

  Jones told Struk that she was the recipient of Bobby’s collect calls and said he always called the office collect, which made it difficult to remember any specific day, like February 2, and know where Bobby might have been. Whenever he called in for messages, he never said where he was, unless he wanted her to know.

  And when Bobby was in the office, aside from business calls, he had an entourage of women who called him or came by the office on a regular basis. Jones remembered their names. Judy Licht, Julie Baumgold, Susan Berman, and Joanna Revson. There was also that Farrow woman, though Jones couldn’t remember her first name.

  “I did like his wife. I felt so bad for her,” said Jones.

  “Why was that?”

  “She told me he was beating her. I said what the hell you doing, get away from that man. He was my boss, but no woman has to take that. You know what I mean?”

  And Jones clearly remembered Bobby telling her, before he even reported Kathie’s disappearance to the police, that Kathie was gone.

  “He said, ‘You may as well know, Kathie is missing,’” said Jones. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said she was gone.”

  It was at this point that Jones told the detective that she had been fired, nearly three months later, in mid-April, and that Bobby had taken all her logbooks and office notes.

  “Why did he fire you?” asked Struk.

  “Damned if I know,” said Jones.

  —

  It was a week before Christmas, and Struk once again made his way downtown to Roger Hayes’s office, this time fighting through holiday traffic.