A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst

by Matt Birkbeck

  “They ignored it. They said they didn’t think it was anything,” said Liz.

  “They said that?” said Becerra.

  “Yeah. They weren’t interested.”

  Becerra followed Liz’s story, writing furiously in his pad. This was something new and unexpected.

  “What else?” he said.

  “There were the fingerprints.”

  Liz said she took the two detectives to a closet in the dining room. Above the closet was a removable panel, and Liz said she showed the detectives fingerprints that were visible on the edges. One of the detectives took a chair, climbed up, and pushed the panel in, looking inside. He didn’t see anything.

  “That was it. They left and I never saw the police again. They didn’t seem interested in talking to me or checking out the fingerprints or the blood,” said Liz.

  “If they did, what would you have told them?” said Becerra.

  “That Bobby was weird, really weird. A couple of months after Kathie disappeared I found pictures and letters in the garbage. About a dozen of them. All these women, giving Bobby their bust size and telling him in writing what they’d do to him if he ever called. Real kinky stuff. He put an ad in the paper. A personal ad. Maybe the Village Voice, I don’t know, but that’s what they were responding to. He always scared me. When he placed a singles ad in the paper only weeks after Kathie disappeared, seeing that scared me even more.”

  —

  The entrance to the Garden State Parkway began at the northern edge of New Jersey at the New York border, and Joe Becerra came off the Tappan Zee Bridge thankful he now had to drive only a few miles over the New Jersey state line to the Paramus exit, then follow the written directions to Mike Struk’s house.

  Struk was perhaps the most surprised of all when he received a call a week earlier from Becerra, who introduced himself, complimented Struk on his thorough investigation, and asked for a sit-down. Struk was clearly amazed, and pleased, that the case still had life, that someone would actually pick it up some eighteen years later. Then he remembered his conversation years earlier with Roger Hayes, and his prediction that one day someone would step forward. What Struk hadn’t figured on was that the guy stepping forward would be another cop. Still, Struk was hesitant to meet with Becerra. Like the McCormack family, he carried old wounds.

  He retired from the NYPD in 1985, leaving the job he once loved on the first second of the first minute of the first day of his twentieth year—just enough to earn his pension.

  He had remarried and was now father to two more children. At fifty-five, he was still thin, though the pencil mustache was gone. He had a head full of short, gray hair. He thought he was a little old to be starting over again, kids and all. But he enjoyed his life with his new family in New Jersey, playing house dad, working as a private investigator, and serving as a technical consultant for the television show Law & Order.

  His old friend David Black, who’d authored Struk’s book on the Met Murder, was one of the original screenwriters for the show and had brought Struk in as a consultant. The work was good and kept Struk busy, though there were days his mind would wander back to Manhattan, the Two-0, and the Durst case. He’d never show it, of course. He was still a tough guy. But the wounds were deep, still fresh as the day that Bobby Durst walked into his squad room. Resolving the case would certainly have meant a promotion, and maybe even prolonged his career with the NYPD. But like the Met Murder case, there had been no promotion, and Struk couldn’t wait to file his retirement papers.

  He now lived on a quiet, dead-end suburban street in a small, bi-level house surrounded by much larger, two-story center-hall Colonials, chauffeuring his two young children to their basketball and baseball games. He led Becerra downstairs to a family room. The two men sat on matching black leather sofas while Struk’s two white Lhasa apsos jumped onto Becerra’s lap.

  “C’mon, get outta here,” said Struk, waving his hand at the dogs.

  Becerra, the dog lover, held them on his thighs, and petted them behind their ears, the smooth strokes quieting the dogs.

  “So,” said Struk, getting right to the point. “Whaddaya got?”

  Becerra told him that he’d read the file, several times, and was developing a theory, a premise based on the possibility that Kathie Durst had never made it into Manhattan.

  “So you’re buying into what the friends were saying, especially that one nut, what was her name? Gilberte. You’re thinking that maybe they were right?”

  “I’m thinking that Bobby Durst lied about the whole thing, that he ran into New York to report her missing to keep your investigation there. I’m thinking he’s an extremely shrewd guy who thought this out and didn’t want any attention placed on the house in South Salem.”

  “You read the file,” said Struk. “You know our witnesses said they saw her in Manhattan before she vanished.”

  “Mike,” said Becerra, leaning forward, the dogs still on his lap. “I found Eddie Lopez.”

  Struk thought for a second before it came to him. “Lopez? The elevator guy?”

  “Yeah. He says now he doesn’t remember if he really saw Kathie Durst that night or that other guy who came later. The mystery man. He said he could have been mistaken.”

  Struk fell back into his sofa.

  “He said that? Fucking guy. We even put him through hypnosis. I sat there for that whole bullshit session. I even told my lou it was garbage. But the brass wanted it. He repeated everything he told me the first time I interviewed him.”

  Struk clasped his hands together and rested his palms on his head, elbows out.

  “What about the other employees?” he said.

  Becerra said they were reinterviewed, and all said that Lopez had a drinking problem.

  “They said it was normal for him to disappear for a few hours. They figure he was off drinking Scotch somewhere and lied about taking Kathie to her apartment to keep his job.”

  “Why didn’t they tell me that before?”

  “They were scared. I’m told this was a big deal back then, in all the papers. No one wanted to talk. And no one wanted to lose their job.”

  “Damn,” said Struk. “I got to tell you, Joe, do you know how hard we humped that case? We focused everything on the city based on what Lopez told us and the other witnesses. Did you talk to them, too?”

  Becerra took his hands off the dogs, reached for his notebook inside his jacket, and flipped several pages.

  “The dean at the school, Cooperman, he said he was never sure if the woman who called in sick that day was really Kathie Durst. And the other doorman, the guy who thought he saw her get into a cab, he’s now saying he doesn’t remember ever seeing Kathie Durst that morning.”

  “So we were chasing our fucking tails,” said Struk, shaking his head. “So what are you going to do next?”

  Becerra told Struk of his plan to search the South Salem home, the property around it, and the lake.

  “I’ll bring in forensics. Hopefully we’ll come up with something,” said Becerra. “I spoke with one of the Dursts’ old cleaning ladies, a Liz Jones. She told me a story about some blood in the kitchen, on a dishwasher, a week after Kathie disappeared.”

  “I don’t remember that,” said Struk.

  “She said two detectives knocked on the door and she let them in. They took a look around. She claims she showed them the blood, but they ignored it. It was the day the story broke in the papers.”

  Struk paused as if in deep thought. “I was up there that day, talking to the neighbors. There were four of us, me and a partner and two investigators with the state police. We walked around the outside of the Durst house, saw the broken window on the door from Gilberte. But we never went in. Do you think four seasoned detectives would walk into a house like that without a warrant?”

  “I’m just telling you what she told me,” said Becerra. />
  “If that’s true, then why didn’t she come forward back then?”

  “Like I said, I’m just telling her story. Maybe she has an ax to grind. I don’t know. She wasn’t particularly friendly with Bobby Durst. She also said she showed the two detectives fingerprints on a panel above a closet. They looked inside, but didn’t find anything.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Never heard that before,” said Struk.

  Becerra could see that Struk was clearly shaken with some of the new details in the case, especially the information about Eddie Lopez. He’d hung his entire investigation on Lopez’s sighting of Kathie Durst. And Becerra didn’t know what to make of Struk’s denial about the blood in the house. He was right, thought Becerra, experienced detectives wouldn’t have gone into the home. But Jones was believable.

  Struk quickly regrouped, and rattled off some names, like Jim McCormack and Gilberte Najamy, asking Becerra if he’d spoken with them or anyone else.

  “All of them,” said Becerra, “including Najamy. She didn’t think too highly of you.”

  “She was a pain in the ass,” said Struk, who clearly remembered Gilberte, the novice detective who broke into the South Salem home and picked through Bobby’s garbage. The woman with a hundred theories.

  “I didn’t know what her problem was back then, but there was more to her than I cared to find out. She was totally out of control. I think she was a caterer or something.”

  “She’s working as a counselor at a women’s shelter and living with her girlfriend in Connecticut.”

  “Girlfriend? She’s a dyke?” said Struk.

  “Looks that way.”

  “Now that I remember, someone said she may have been into women. I never figured out why someone as pretty as Kathie Durst would hang out with a Gilberte Najamy,” said Struk.

  “You don’t think she and Gilberte . . . ?” said Becerra.

  “No. Kathie was into men. That prick of a husband she had ignored her, so she took up with a bunch of different guys. Never in a million years would she hook up with someone like Gilberte, even if she were gay.”

  A young voice called down to remind Struk that he was late for a basketball practice, and Struk looked at his watch.

  “Three o’clock. Time to go. Duty calls.”

  The two men rose from the couches and shook hands. Struk then reached over and took a brown notebook off the top of his television set and gave it to Becerra.

  It was his personal notebook, and it included detailed thoughts and notes about the Durst case, all written during Struk’s investigation.

  “Listen, if you need me for anything, call,” said Struk. “Right now all I can say is you have what I had, and that’s nothing. I would search that house upstate. See what you come up with. Maybe you’ll pull an O.J. and find your bloody glove.”

  Both men laughed at the obvious reference.

  “Remember,” said Becerra. “He got off.”

  14

  The dried mud on the outer edges of the old cupboard was rock hard and reddish in color, yet stood out like a shining beacon.

  The cupboard was square, roughly two feet on all sides, and was inserted into the wall in the dining room. It had once been pulled out from the wall for some unknown reason, then put back in, the person pulling it out apparently leaving their partial handprints on the edges. Behind the wall was a space that opened wide at knee level. The only way to search inside the wall was to tear it down.

  As forensic specialists gazed at what appeared to be partial handprints, once hidden in darkness and long forgotten, one of them told Becerra the reddish color appeared to be blood that was mixed in with the mud.

  It was the first clue they had found in the home, and Becerra hoped there would be more.

  Gabrielle Colquitt had given Becerra permission to search every last crevice in her pretty little home, and with the arrival of spring, he didn’t waste any time. He brought in the special units, including divers to search the murky waters of Lake Truesdale, where they waded through the water in grids, marking off sections of the lake. The lake bottom was soft, the divers’ feet sinking into the mud like quicksand.

  Becerra didn’t hold out much hope that the lake would turn out to be the last resting place for Kathie Durst. She had disappeared in late January, a time when the surface was usually frozen solid.

  And like the lake, the property around the house had been frozen and digging a grave would have been all but impossible. But he brought in the cadaver dogs anyway to remove any lingering doubt that Kathie’s remains were buried somewhere near the house.

  Becerra thought he knew where Kathie Durst was. He just wanted to be sure.

  Over the course of the spring and summer, Becerra quietly visited Hoyt Street more than half a dozen times. The forensics team examined the mud prints and searched downstairs in the crawl space, delicately digging through the loose dirt, a painstaking search that lasted more than six hours.

  Each visit was a stealth mission. When the lake was dredged, nosy neighbors were told the police in the water were conducting an exercise. And when the house was searched, investigators used unmarked vans and plainclothes.

  Becerra would come back to the house yet again and examine the living-room floor. Colquitt had told the investigator months earlier, during their first meeting, that when she bought the home in 1994 from David and Carmen Garceau, they had told her of the mysterious holes.

  Becerra eventually found the Garceaus, who repeated their story to him.

  Robert Durst had agreed to sell the house to them in February 1990, but only on the condition that they lease it back to him for three months.

  Bobby had never given a reason why. The Garceaus were barred from entering the house until the last day of May.

  It was an odd arrangement, said David. Even odder was the condition of the house, which was in a shambles. It hadn’t been cleaned in years.

  The Garceaus intended to refurbish the house, which included replacing the dirty and stained carpeting on the main floor. When they removed the old carpeting, they found three holes in the wooden subflooring that were patched with plywood.

  The living room, said David, was above the crawl space.

  And there was more. When they agreed to buy the house, they saw but one piece of furniture, a cot, which was downstairs next to the entrance to the crawl space. Bobby had been sleeping on the cot; the Garceaus couldn’t figure out why. The crawl space was so small a person had to crawl on his belly to get in. The floor of the crawl space was made up of loose dirt. The couple used it as a wine cellar.

  The Garceaus said they knew nothing about Kathie Durst or her disappearance until told by neighbors bearing newspaper clippings. Like many other people, they mistakenly believed that the police had long ago searched the house.

  Becerra looked on as Colquitt’s furniture was moved and the carpet lifted, and he could see, right there in the center of the floor, three pieces of plywood that obviously didn’t belong. The plywood was lifted, and the holes turned out to be old heating vents.

  The forensic team turned its attention to the kitchen, particularly the dishwasher, which to Becerra’s surprise was the same dishwasher the Dursts had used when they owned the home. Luminol was sprayed on the dishwasher and floor, and Becerra waited for the old blood to glow.

  —

  The chatter that filled Jeanine Pirro’s conference room quieted for just a second as Pirro poked her head in to say hello but left quickly. The district attorney wouldn’t take part in the meeting called by Joe Becerra on Wednesday, November 8, 2000.

  It was nearly a year since he began his investigation and Becerra was sitting around the large conference table along with other representatives from the state police, John Anderson from the New York City police, John O’Donnell from Pirro’s office, two assistant district attorneys,
and several guests, including Mike Struk, Gilberte Najamy, Jim McCormack, Kathy Traystman, and Ellen Strauss.

  Struk was invited by Becerra, a specific request to share his expertise on the case. Struk didn’t recognize Gilberte Najamy, whom he remembered as thin, with wild, dark hair. She had since filled out and was now a large woman with short, manageable hair. She wore old clothing and no jewelry. Struk did recognize Ellen Strauss, who to his eyes looked much the same as she had twenty years earlier. Ellen had aged well, and looked every inch the woman he remembered.

  All were gathered to discuss the Durst case, which Becerra was still trying to sell to Pirro and her people, who made it clear they were not ready to go to a grand jury to seek an indictment with purely circumstantial evidence.

  As people drifted into the room, it became clear that this was the first time in nearly twenty years that some of them had seen one another, and there were plenty of hugs and kisses among Gilberte, Ellen, Kathy, and Jim McCormack.

  There was an underlying feeling of excitement in the room, a sense of hope that, after all this time, the McCormack family, along with Kathie’s friends, would finally find closure and her killer would be brought to justice. They all looked to Becerra and thanked him for his efforts. Everyone believed they were on the verge of taking a major step forward, particularly Becerra, who thought bringing his evidence before a grand jury seemed more plausible than ever, considering the verdict that had been handed down in a similar case just two weeks earlier.

  Dr. Robert Bierenbaum, forty-five, was a New York surgeon who had been convicted of killing his wife, Gail, who disappeared in 1985. Her body was never found, but prosecutors presented enough compelling circumstantial evidence to persuade a jury that she had indeed been murdered. Her husband, it was determined, strangled and dismembered her and took her remains to an airstrip in New Jersey. A pilot, Bierenbaum loaded his wife’s body, which was packed inside a duffel bag, inside a Cessna and dumped her over the Atlantic Ocean.