For their part, those in the media who had dealt with Gilberte were enraged. Many were seasoned journalists, but Gilberte had flown under their radar. They had trusted her, but now they felt manipulated, used.
For all they knew, Gilberte’s entire story wasn’t true, and nothing she said could be believed.
—
The morning after she received the letter about the arrests, with the New York papers revealing Gilberte’s history, Bobbi Sue was back at the pier, accompanied by a dozen investigators, mostly kids out of college or high school, several reporters, and a single Galveston police officer, Gary Jones, who looked on as an observer.
A dive team was also in place, and they focused on the end of the pier, which stretched out into the bay. The young investigators donned waterproof pants and jumped into the cold water. They began their search, walking in grids marked off around the pier, along the shoreline, and the rock jetty.
The search took about two hours. A production team from Court TV was there, filming the search for a special program they planned to air on the Durst case.
The search was thorough, but after three hours they had failed to find the head. Bobbi Sue reasoned that if it was here, then either it had been tossed farther out into the water or some large fish had gotten hold of it.
Officer Jones waited patiently for the search to end, and frowned when told about the wigs that had been sighted the day before on the path by the old causeway.
“Can’t be anything,” he huffed. “You know hookers go back there.”
But Bobbi Sue was going back anyway. She was in her zone, and no one was going to stop her.
Jeff led the three-car caravan to the wigs. One was red and lying on the road. It appeared to be short in length. The other one, dirty blond and shoulder length, was in the grass. Both were faded, like they had been there for a while, at least several months. Some ladies’ clothing was also found in the brush. It was nondescript, a pink dress and button-down shirt. They also found mascara, eyeliner, and red lipstick, all new and unused.
Jones shrugged his shoulders and called in the crime scene investigators. The wigs, clothing, and mascara were now evidence to be tested.
A patrol car arrived with two uniformed officers. They slipped on rubber gloves, then photographed and tagged the items. Bobbi Sue looked around the high grass and weeds that grew alongside the road and railroad tracks as she slowly made her way along the old causeway, ending up over the bay. She looked down at the water, studying the current. She then looked out toward the pier and rock jetty in the distance to her right.
Lucas saw her standing there, alone, deep in thought, and walked up to her.
“He was here,” said Bobbi Sue.
“Who was here?” said Lucas.
“Durst. He was here. This is where he dumped the body. Not over there on the pier, but over here, off the causeway.”
Lucas listened as his wife explained her theory.
“See, he didn’t dump the body over there. He came by that afternoon asking the neighbors if anyone was out at night, but he thought it was too dangerous, that he’d get caught. So he found this place and threw the bags over the bridge into the channel. The current goes toward the pier, and the body and bags went in different directions. See, the bags filled with the body parts turned immediately toward the shoreline, as they should have,” said Bobbi Sue. “The torso was heavier, so it took longer to turn to shore. I’m telling you. This is the spot. This is where the body was thrown in the water.”
To Lucas, this theory sounded more than plausible. How else to explain how the torso ended up near the rock jetty and the garbage bags on the other side of the concrete pier and down the shoreline?
The police had it all wrong, Bobbi Sue said. This had to be the spot.
“What do we do next?” said Lucas.
Bobbi Sue didn’t hesitate.
“We come back. We schedule another hunt. The head is down there,” she said, pointing beneath the old causeway. “I know it’s down there.”
After the police tagged their new evidence, placing each item in a brown paper bag, Bobbi Sue returned to her office in Webster. Lucas tried to dissuade her from moving forward with another hunt, saying it would cost $1,000 and reminding Bobbi Sue that the Galveston police, not a private investigation firm, should be out there combing the waters.
But Bobbi Sue didn’t want to hear it. Something was bothering her. Not finding Morris Black’s head was a disappointment, to be sure. But she now realized she had spent the entire morning looking in the wrong place.
Something else was bothering Bobbi Sue, too, a feeling that came over her as she stood on the old causeway looking out over the water.
Someone doesn’t just kill, coolly dismember a body, then casually search for a place to dispose of the remains she thought. Especially not someone with Bobby Durst’s pedigree.
So she closed her office door, turned on her computer, settled into her chair, and began searching various databases, typing in the name Robert Durst and all the other names associated with it, along with the different Social Security numbers.
For Bobbi Sue, it was time to get to the bottom of it all.
27
The early-morning sun bounced off the dark glass covering the six-story building that housed Blue Moon’s offices in Webster. Bobbi Sue knew it was morning only because Lucas came in with a cup of tea and bag of doughnuts.
She had worked through the weekend, alternating between several different search databases on her computer and cross-referencing the name Robert Durst.
By the time Lucas walked into the offices that morning, Bobbi Sue was exhausted, and excited.
Laid out on her large, cherry-wood desk was the evidence of a trail of stolen identities, some going back at least twenty years. They crossed through a host of states, including Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Virginia, and California.
There were dozens of names, identities Bobby used to rent or buy late-model cars, or obtain credit cards, or use as aliases in paying utility bills or for rental properties.
There was Robert Jezowski of New York, whose name Bobbi Sue found in October and determined that Bobby had been using since the early 1980s. There was another name, James Fleischman of Belmont, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. Fleischman was married and had several grown children. He worked for a company that made large generators, had never lived anywhere but the Buffalo area, and said he never heard of a man named Robert Durst. Yet there it was, Fleischman’s name and Social Security number underneath Bobby’s Auto Track. Bobby had used Fleischman’s Social Security number to obtain a New York driver’s license, which expired in April 1998.
As Bobbi Sue went down the list, she read off the other names to Lucas.
“Look at all these names and identities. He took James Klosty, someone he went to high school with in the 1950s, and used his name to get an American Express card. There’s a James Cordes, an old photographer he knew,” said Bobbi Sue. “Douglas Duncan, Robert Kitts, Lance Davis, Susan Bert, Jim Turss, Robert Klein, Martin Ryan. He even used the Social Security number of his dead wife, Kathie Durst, in 2000 to rent an apartment in California. And look at these addresses. South Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Massachusetts. They’re all over the place.”
Bobbi Sue reached down to the papers on her desk and pulled up the file for the name Martin Ryan.
“This guy was from Albany and once worked pumping gas. I called up there and found out that Ryan bounced around from minimum-wage job to minimum-wage job. He was always scrounging for money and lived in some hotel. The address was 18 North Allen Street. I read through Ryan’s report, and here, I found somebody else who lived at the same address. A guy named Robert Ryan. They’re not related. Robert Ryan now lives in Pennsylvania,” said Bobbi Sue. “That address, 18 North Allen Street, was some old house. A man
sion with fifteen separate rooms the owner rented to transients, people with nowhere else to go.”
Bobbi Sue reached over her desk and picked up another file.
“Martin Ryan also had a girlfriend. Her name was Diane. So I took a shot and pulled up an Auto Track for Diane Winne, the name Durst used when he posed as a woman in New Orleans. Look at this,” she said, pointing to the list of addresses in Winne’s file. They were all in Albany. One of them, 99 South Pearl Street, was also listed on Martin Ryan’s Auto Track.
“They lived there before moving to the Allen Street address. The gas-station guy said they lived together. That’s where they met Durst, at Allen Street, at this hotel, this mansion, this place for people who are one paycheck removed from being out on the street.”
“Okay, so what are you saying, that Durst killed these people and took their names?” said Lucas.
Bobbi Sue paused for a moment. She was a veritable volcano of information, spewing out everything she’d learned over the long weekend. She knew it was difficult to comprehend, to understand in one shot.
“No. I think they’re still alive, but he took their identities. He used Winne in New Orleans. Martin Ryan has another address listing, in South Carolina. Durst was in different cities, staying in places where he knew he could find people no one cared about. He was here, in Galveston, over at the Jesse Tree, a place that serves who? The down-and-out, right? And he’s up in Albany, staying in some house with people who come and go all the time. Don’t you see how perfect this is? If he was a killer, someone with a thirst for blood, what better way to do it than riding around in old cars, using other people’s identities, and preying on transients and the homeless? These are people no one would give a damn about if they disappeared. And if the police were on his trail, what trail are they on, a man named Martin Ryan or a woman named Diane Winne?”
Lucas nodded in agreement. It was a good plan. A devious plan. It still didn’t make much sense, a man of Durst’s wealth and means spending his time driving throughout the country, assuming other peoples’ identities, and living among the poor and homeless.
“And there’s no doubt he carved up Morris Black, right?” said Lucas.
“Durst killed him, but he screwed up. He thought the body parts would sink into the ocean. Imagine if he’d been successful? We wouldn’t be sitting here talking about this. No one cared about Black. Who’s gonna call the cops and report him missing, the landlord? No. It would be logical to think that Black just took off. That’s the beauty of this whole scheme.”
Lucas was taken back by the simplicity of it all. But as he looked at Bobbi Sue’s desk, and all the paperwork, it was clear that she had just scraped the surface. They needed help, and they needed it in a big way.
“Are you going to tell the Galveston police or the district attorney?” he said.
Bobbi Sue leaned back into her chair. The urgency in her voice dissipated to a level tone.
“No, they won’t be able to track this down. I don’t even think they’re interested. They have a murder and they think they have enough to convict. But this is bigger than one murder. I think we have something here that is too big for any of us to understand,” said Bobbi Sue. “Morris Black was dismembered by someone who knew what he was doing. You can’t cut somebody up like that without having done it before. Cody Cazalas said that, didn’t he? Now go back twenty years. They never found his wife, Kathie Durst. The district attorney there, the one who can’t stop talking, she said publicly she believed his wife was dismembered. Think about it. There’s no telling how long Durst could have been doing this.”
Bobbi Sue pushed herself up from the chair and looked out the window. The morning rush to the NASA buildings just a few miles away was filling the local roads.
She took a sip of tea, which was now cold.
“Let’s go back to his wife, Kathie. Do you really believe she was his first? He was beating her, right? And he even sent her to the hospital. When she went home that last night, from that party at her friend Gilberte’s house . . . something set him off, and she was gone,” said Bobbi Sue, who directed her attention to the papers piled on her desk.
“Look at all that. Do you think she knew she was married to a monster?”
The enormity of what Bobbi Sue was saying struck Lucas in the gut.
“So what’s next?” he said. “If he’s running around the country killing people like you say, there’s no way the Galveston police, or New York police, or anyone else can solve this. They need the FBI. Look at all this stuff on your desk. I bet there’s even more here that we can’t figure out.”
“There is more, and there’s no way you or I or anyone else other than the feds can track all his movements,” said Bobbi Sue. “But we can’t bring this to the FBI. The Galveston police have the case and they’re the ones who would have to bring in the feds. What we need is Morris Black’s head. If we can find that, I believe we’ll find he was shot to death, right in the head. The same way Susan Berman died. It was premeditated. And it was done for a reason.”
—
On February 25, 2002, three divers plunged into the choppy waters of Galveston Bay underneath the old causeway, searching for Morris Black’s head.
The waters weren’t as shallow as they were supposed to be, and the strong currents pulled the divers out toward the shipping lanes.
Bobbi Sue was going to call off the hunt when she saw some of her young investigators pull an object from the water. It was a piece of carpeting, about twelve feet long and two feet wide. It had been rolled up and placed in a clear plastic wrapping. They brought it to the shore and delicately rolled it out.
To their surprise, inside was blood and some kind of tissue embedded in the carpet.
“Look at that,” said Bobbi Sue, staring at the blood stains on one end of the carpet and the tissue that had meshed into the fabric.
“Is that brains?” she said, staring at the substance.
Bobbi Sue pulled out a kit and tested the carpet for human blood.
The test was positive.
Lucas suggested that the tissue or whatever it was on the carpet had remained intact because the carpet was rolled up, making it impossible for fish and other marine life to get to it.
“Okay, let’s tag this stuff and give it to the police,” said Bobbi Sue.
By the end of the morning her investigators had tagged and bagged more than one hundred pieces of evidence, which included still more clothing found down along the shoreline. She gave it all to the Galveston police.
On the drive back to Webster, Lucas was still perplexed as to why Blue Moon Investigations had to spend the resources and money to search the waters for Morris Black’s head, rather than the Galveston police.
But he said nothing. He knew his wife. She was working on instinct. And that meant it was time to get out of her way.
28
When the story about Gilberte’s film deal was reported in the pages of the New York Post, Eleanor Schwank and Ellen Strauss had let out a cry in unison: “Gilberte, how could you?”
Like Gilberte, the two women had given countless interviews, hoping any new story would lead to some new information on the case. They had never asked for any money, or sought to profit from the loss of their friend, knowing their position would be compromised in the event that Bobby was ever indicted. They knew Gilberte had taken the lead when it came to telling the Kathie Durst story to the world, and they didn’t mind when she appeared on numerous television programs, including The View on ABC, in which Gilberte told her story, at length, to Barbara Walters. Gilberte was even flown out to Seattle to appear on an afternoon talk show.
Gilberte had often said things that Ellen and Eleanor privately questioned, like the often-repeated statement that she was Kathie’s best friend.
Eleanor knew that wasn’t the case. Kathie had had a wide circle of friends. But Eleanor had
said nothing, not wanting to deter Gilberte from pressing ahead.
Following the revelation of the film deal, Gilberte had called both Eleanor and Ellen. She knew they’d be upset. She denied that she had signed a deal, saying she was offered the opportunity to sell her story but turned it down and never accepted any money.
“Do you think I would ever do that?” was her reply.
But soon after, confident she had soothed the ruffled feathers of her two friends, Gilberte had agreed to another television interview, this one with Brian Conybeare, a reporter for Channel 12 News in Westchester. When asked about the film deal, she had given an answer that was far more cryptic than the one she told her friends.
“Once the trial is over, you can never tell what could happen,” she said.
Gilberte had thought she managed to control any damage to her credibility, and had been confident Eleanor and Ellen would believe her story.
She thought otherwise when her criminal history was made public soon after. She shut down, refusing to take calls from reporters and didn’t answer her phone, at home or at work, from which she took a two-week leave of absence.
She spoke only to Eleanor, who was less inclined to dismiss Gilberte completely. She’d had no idea her longtime friend had been arrested six times, but Gilberte explained that she had fallen apart after Kathie died and never recovered.
Eleanor didn’t necessarily buy this explanation.
“We were all her friends, Gilberte. Her loss affected us all, but life goes on.”
“But you know how close I was to Kathie. You know what I went through,” said Gilberte.
“We were all close to Kathie,” said Eleanor. “That’s no excuse to lie to your friends.”
Gilberte said she hadn’t lied. Her past was her business, and the revelations about her criminal record were part of a conspiracy on the part of the Durst family to discredit her.
“You should have been up-front from the beginning,” said Eleanor. “Now it looks like you were hiding something. You really pissed a lot of people off, not just with that, but with that film deal.”
A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst Page 25
