Over the years Brown developed a number of talents in the Pine Barrens, including the recovery of long-buried bodies.
During his long stays there, Brown sometimes came across a depression in the ground, which signaled the sandy earth had once been disturbed, probably with a shovel.
His fame, and ability to detect gravesites, went far beyond New Jersey. Police departments throughout the country would call, asking for his help in finding missing bodies.
So it made sense to Gilberte to call Brown following a conversation with her old friend Eleanor Schwank.
Eleanor was working as a nurse in Matagorda, Texas, a one-restaurant town on the Texas coast southwest of Galveston. A Texas secret, Matagorda was known by only a few for its great fishing and beautiful beaches.
Schwank put up with the burning-hot weather and never-ending mosquito onslaught for the peace and quiet of Matagorda. She had a small cabin next to a winding river that filtered into the ocean. It was a great fishing spot and a place she hoped to one day rent out to earn a few extra dollars.
After hearing about Tom Brown, Gilberte called Eleanor to see if perhaps she would agree to chip in to pay Brown to search for Kathie’s remains.
It was a long shot, but Eleanor agreed, as did Ellen Strauss. But after Gilberte met with Brown in his house and he agreed to undertake the search, telling him the story of her lost friend who everyone believed was buried somewhere in the Pine Barrens, she didn’t call Eleanor or Ellen to let them know.
Instead she made another call.
Brown had explained that given the fact that Bobby had been in Ship Bottom and across the bridge in Manahawkin, there were a few old, long-forgotten trails nearby that Bobby might have been able to drive through. And it was possible that if Kathie’s remains were buried there, they could be found. Brown said he would put together a group of his students to help in the search, and they could do it sometime in April, after he returned from a training session in Florida.
Gilberte was absolutely delighted, and instead of calling her friends to share the news, she promptly called Jeanine Pirro.
After explaining where she had been and who she had talked to, Gilberte handed the phone to Brown, who said that yes, he could possibly find someone who had been buried twenty years earlier.
“I doubt he’d go far into the Pine Barrens,” said Brown.
Pirro told Brown that Bobby was probably driving a maroon Mercedes at the time. Considering its low clearance from the ground, the burial possibilities were narrowed even more.
Pirro agreed to an April search, but asked Brown not to tell the press or the Ocean County police. Confidentiality was a top priority.
Brown gave the phone back to Gilberte, who said her good-byes to Pirro. The two women agreed to meet the next week, when Gilberte would finally tell Pirro her story.
Since the start of his investigation two years earlier, Joe Becerra had collected written depositions from nearly all of Kathie’s old friends, except for Gilberte. She always had excuses, even for people like Ellen Strauss, who asked why it was taking so long. Gilberte said she didn’t like what she had written, it was far too long, or that there were things she had forgotten about but needed to include. With Becerra now out of the picture, Gilberte felt comfortable that her deposition wouldn’t be needed. Instead, she’d tell her story directly to Pirro.
After leaving Brown, Gilberte floated back to Connecticut, convinced that she would be the heroine of the story if Brown could find Kathie’s remains. It would make her version of things complete. Best friend keeps long-held promise.
Pirro hung up with Gilberte convinced that she would raise her stock immeasurably if Brown was somehow able to locate the last resting place of Kathie Durst.
It would be the press conference of all press conferences.
Joe Becerra knew nothing about Tom Brown or the planned search. Pirro stopped talking to him after the Vanity Fair story was published. He was still working on the Durst case, but any relevant information was written up and sent to Pirro’s office.
There were no face-to-face meetings, no phone calls. Becerra was cut off.
—
The constant hum from the traffic crossing the causeway in the distance sounded like a large beehive from the concrete pier where Bobbi Sue Bacha stood looking down into the waters of Galveston Bay.
It was 7 A.M. on Friday, February 7, and Bobbi Sue was scoping the pier and inlet where Morris Black’s remains had been found bobbing in the water. The tide on this morning and the next was expected to be the lowest of the month, so low you could see the rocks and boulders on the bottom of the bay. It was the perfect time to search for and possibly locate Morris Black’s head.
Bobbi Sue was investigating the Black case on her own time, helping his family back in Boston. One of the sisters, Gladys, had even filed a wrongful-death suit against Bobby.
Bobbi Sue was fascinated by the case. Although she was initially frustrated with her inability to find out more about Morris and Bobby Durst, the frustration spurred her to work even harder.
It took several months, including interviews with Morris’s siblings, but Bobbi Sue eventually learned more about Morris Black.
And what she discovered was both frightening and sickening.
His parents had suffered from apparent mental problems, forcing them to place their six children in foster homes. One of his brothers was later placed in a mental institution in Boston. Some of the children, including Morris, eventually returned home. But home was hell, with charges against the father of sexual abuse, abuse in which Morris had participated. Some of the siblings hadn’t spoken to Morris in decades and were not the least bit disappointed upon hearing the news that he was dead.
Morris left home for the Merchant Marine when he was eighteen, following his older brother Harry. He returned in the early 1950s, but there was no trace of him until 1972, when he bought a building near Boston Harbor with a woman named Lorraine Black, who was apparently his wife. They had no children anyone could remember, and no one knew what became of Lorraine.
His sisters Gladys and Beatrice never heard of her.
The building was taken by the city of Boston in 1976 after a bank foreclosed on Morris. In 1980 he scraped up enough money, $6,500, to buy another building in the Boston area, a three-story tenement at 10 Hannon Street.
Bobbi Sue tracked down an old tenant, Carrie Williams, who was now living in South Carolina. An elderly woman, Williams described Black as the landlord from hell.
He refused to pay for any repairs, opting to do them all himself to save money. He once sued the TV cable company because a technician put a small hole in a wall while wiring an apartment. He personally picked up the rent every month, money orders or cash, and spent his time limping along the streets wearing a red knit hat, even during the summer. The limp was the result of an injury suffered when he was a child.
Morris had no phone, no car, and never any visitors, said Williams. He was a testy, mean, nasty, and difficult man who would argue with anyone and everyone. He often expressed a profound hatred for women.
He had one quality, though, that Bobbi Sue found interesting: he was fearless.
A shopkeeper around the corner from 10 Hannon Street described an occasion when Morris learned that one of his tenants was dealing drugs. When the shopkeeper suggested that he call the police, Morris said no, he’d handle it himself. He went into the building, grabbed the suspected dealer by the neck, and tossed him out onto the street, along with his clothes and personal items, screaming and yelling throughout the “eviction.”
The dealer was never seen again.
There were times during the early 1980s when Black would disappear. He landed in New York in late 1981, renting space in a barbershop in the lobby of a midtown office building and working as a watch repairman. Bobbi Sue thought it was odd that Morris would be in New York around the tim
e that Kathie Durst disappeared.
Morris returned to Boston in late 1982 and tried working as a watch repairman in that city, along with other assorted jobs. Bobbi Sue wondered if he had traveled to Boston every month to collect the rent checks during his stay in New York.
By 1987, his $6,500 investment on Hannon Street was worth $137,500, and Morris decided to sell the building and take off for warmer climates in the South. He bounced around a variety of harbor towns, including Charleston (South Carolina), Long Beach (Mississippi), and Galena Park (Texas).
He arrived in Galveston shortly before Bobby Durst.
The profile Bobbi Sue created contained much more information on Morris, and gave her a clear indication he had been a troubled, and dangerous, individual. But she knew the file was far from complete, and she tested every search engine she knew of to find more information, but there was none. He was still an enigma, a man who, for some still-unknown reason, hung around the homeless and down-and-out of society during the last year of his life.
Something was missing, and it grated on Bobbi Sue to no end. Durst wouldn’t have killed Morris just because he was an annoying old man, would he? She was aware of the story that came out of the Jesse Tree, that Ted Hanley believed Durst was the wealthy man Morris knew who could provide a loan for a new building.
Another thought occurred to Bobbi Sue. She learned from New York reporters about the itinerary Bobby allegedly wrote in 1982. There was a name, Marshall Bradde, that Bobby wrote down and supposedly met on Monday, February 1, the day after his wife disappeared.
The reporters were familiar with the names of most of Bobby’s friends, but none had ever heard of a Marshall Bradde. Bobbi Sue searched for the name but came up empty. She wondered, could Bobby have possibly written “Marshall Bradde” as a pseudonym for Morris Black? They had the same initials, M.B. If so, did Morris help Bobby dispose of Kathie’s body? It was just a theory, a wild shot in the dark. But this was a case full of theories, since there was little history on the mysterious Morris.
Even more grating to Bobbi Sue was that Morris’s head was still missing, believed to be at the bottom of Galveston Bay.
The Galveston district attorney, Mike Guarino, appeared to be confident that the evidence in hand would be more than enough to convict Bobby of murder, even without the head.
Bobbi Sue wasn’t so sure.
To make it a slam dunk, Bobbi Sue decided that prosecutors needed the head, and if they weren’t going to search for it, she would.
Along with her husband, Lucas, and Jeff Moore, Blue Moon’s chief investigator, she walked the pier in the morning sun preparing for their search the next day.
Even “Daddy”—Bobbi Sue’s ex-cop father—came along for the ride, and as soon as he got out of Lucas’s Dodge Durango, he walked out toward the water and then headed back inland, following the coastline.
“Daddy, where you going?” said Bobbi Sue.
Her father didn’t reply.
“I can’t stop that man,” she mumbled.
As they looked out over the water, they knew that the police had theorized that Black’s torso had washed up between the pier and a rock jetty, the garbage bags filled with body parts on the other side of the pier. The police said Bobby had probably come by late at night, probably around 2 A.M., and dumped everything somewhere near the rock jetty. They arrived at that theory after discovering through interviews with neighbors that Bobby was in the neighborhood earlier that day, asking people if anyone fished these waters at night, or if the police were ever in the area.
This theory may have worked for the police, but it didn’t wash with Bobbi Sue. Dropping Morris’s body near the rock jetty made little sense. Bobbi Sue wondered out loud how anyone could walk along the jagged rocks carrying such heavy weights. She believed it was far more feasible for someone to toss the torso and garbage bags off the end of the flat concrete pier, expecting everything to float out toward the shipping lanes, where it would sink and never be found.
Instead, the tide pushed it all back to shore.
But as she gazed out over the water, Bobbi Sue wondered why the torso would have floated one way, toward the jetty, which was over to the right, and the garbage bags the other way, to the left, on the other side of the pier. Bobbi Sue knew how unpredictable these waters were. She’d practically lived in them as a child. But it didn’t seem possible that the currents had been going in separate directions.
Unable to solve the question about where the remains were tossed into the water, Bobbi Sue walked up and down the concrete pier, dressed to her ankles in black, bending over to look into the murky water, which was only a few feet deep. Dark objects of various sizes, which appeared to be rocks, could be seen. One particular object was small, about the size and shape of a human head. It appeared to be covered with green algae and had two white, stringy objects floating upward. They looked like they were coming from where the eyes would be.
“Think that’s a head?” said Jeff.
“I don’t know. It sure looks like something,” said Bobbi Sue, who sat down on the pier to take her shoes off and walk into the water to retrieve the object. She was stopped by Lucas, who reminded his wife that they had a planned search for the next day at a considerable cost.
“It’s right there. I can go in and get it,” she said.
The water was cold, and the object was in water that was four feet deep.
“No, let’s wait until tomorrow. Everything is planned for tomorrow,” said Lucas.
Bobbi Sue put her shoes on, and spent the next half hour studying the waters around the pier when she suddenly realized that her father was gone.
“Where’s Daddy?” she said, looking around the shoreline.
The last she’d seen of him he was walking down toward an electrical station about a quarter of a mile away, then continued along the shore, heading for the causeway.
Bobbi Sue, Lucas, and Jeff finished their presearch preparations and drove back to Harborside Drive, making a right and looking for a road or driveway to take them back toward the water. They found one, the old causeway that ran alongside the railroad tracks. Jeff jumped out and ran down the road while Bobbi Sue and Lucas waited in the Durango. Fifteen minutes later Lucas’s cell phone rang. It was Jeff saying he found Daddy.
Another ten minutes passed before everyone was back in the car, and Jeff had some news. He and Daddy had found a couple of old wigs, clothing, and makeup lying off the side of the road.
“Could be hookers,” said Lucas.
“Probably is. They go back there. But then again, I don’t know. Maybe worth checking out tomorrow,” said Jeff.
They returned to Blue Moon’s offices by 1 P.M. with Bobbi Sue still thinking about that “rock” in the water. Her thoughts were interrupted by a letter on her desk. It had a Connecticut postmark, and inside were Gilberte Najamy’s criminal records.
Of all the people Bobbi Sue had read about who were related to the Durst case, the one person who seemed to agitate her the most was Gilberte. During her numerous discussions with New York reporters, who called Bobbi Sue to pick her brain about the Morris Black murder, they all told her about Gilberte’s theatrics during the extradition hearing in Pennsylvania, how it was so painfully obvious that her tears were for the TV cameras, and how she would immediately say “I was Kathie’s best friend” when a reporter fresh to the case would ask who she was.
Bobbi Sue’s curiosity about Gilberte only grew stronger when she read about Gilberte’s pending film deal, which was reported in the New York papers. Gilberte had denied there was any deal, telling reporters she would never accept any money. But Bobbi Sue’s instincts took over after hearing from a reporter that Gilberte might have a criminal history. The New York State Police apparently knew about it but had remained mum. Bobbi Sue decided to look into Gilberte’s past, checking criminal records in New York and Connecticut.
She almost fell to the floor when she opened the letter and read that Gilberte had been arrested six times.
The first arrest had ocurred on St. Patrick’s Day, March, 17, 1987, in Danbury, Connecticut, for possession of cocaine, possession of drug paraphernalia, and the issuing of two bad checks.
The cocaine charge was a felony, and she was sentenced to eighteen months to three years in jail.
The records didn’t indicate how much actual time she spent in jail, though it appeared Gilberte was on the streets again by March 1988 when she was arrested again, this time for violating her probation. In November 1988 she was arrested yet again, this time in Waterbury, Connecticut, for possession of narcotics, a felony.
In May 1990 Gilberte was again arrested for possession of narcotics in Danbury, her third felony arrest. There was another arrest in January 1991 for stealing a car in Danbury. She was fined seventy-five dollars. The final arrest came in March 1991, when she was picked up again for possession of narcotics, her fourth felony drug conviction.
Gilberte was sent to prison, though it was unclear just how much time she served. By 1995, she had ended up in a halfway house.
“I knew it!” screamed Bobbi Sue. “I knew this woman wasn’t telling the truth. Her story was all bull. She’s capitalizing on the death of her supposed best friend. She has to go down!”
Bobbi Sue didn’t waste any time, calling in an assistant and giving her the rap sheet with instructions to call the Associated Press and New York Daily News with the information.
The story broke the next day in the New York papers, and Gilberte, the always-quotable source, first denied that she’d ever been arrested. When told her criminal record was now circulating around the country, she stopped talking to reporters. Calls to her home were met by an answering machine. Even reporters with whom she had developed working relationships were ignored.
A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst Page 24
