All they’d ever wanted was the truth. They wanted closure. All Gilberte did through her distortions was add to their great pain and anguish.
Ellen looked to blame herself. How could she not have seen this? She’d seen these papers before, the letter and the time line. But Gilberte told her they meant nothing. Just put them away and never let anyone see them, she said.
Am I really that stupid? thought Ellen. That naive?
She’d believed Gilberte was her friend. She’d believed Gilberte was Kathie’s friend.
In the end, Ellen realized Gilberte was a friend to no one.
Ellen slowly put the papers back into the box, closed it, wiped her eyes, and opened the door.
She gave the box to the bank manager and walked out to her car. She wanted to drive straight to Hamden, to Gilberte’s home, and confront her. But when she reached the Merritt Parkway, Ellen decided to stay on Route 57 and drive home.
She wouldn’t confront Gilberte. What for? Ellen realized it wouldn’t make any difference. Gilberte would deny it, just like she denied everything else.
When Ellen arrived home she went to her bedroom, pulled the covers over her head, and cried.
29
It had been at least a year since Joe Becerra last spoke with Mike Struk. The two detectives, one retired, had spent a combined three and a half years investigating the Kathie Durst case.
Both men were haunted by Bobby Durst, both believed that Bobby should have been indicted and tried for the alleged murder of Kathie Durst long ago. Both were frustrated that their hard work had yet to pay off.
Becerra had Struk’s old log book, which he’d borrowed when he and Struk first spoke sixteen months earlier. Struk wanted it back, and sent word through a reporter.
Their phone conversation lasted roughly twenty minutes, Becerra telling Struk what he could about the progress of the case, the frustrations he’d encountered, and the upcoming trial of Bobby Durst in Texas.
Both men took a measure of satisfaction from the recent news about Gilberte Najamy.
Struk had remained silent and out of sight after the ABC Vanished program aired during the summer, denying all requests for interviews. He knew Gilberte had poisoned him; the reputation of the onetime tough detective who had his picture in the New York Times for solving the Murder at the Met case had been sullied by a woman with a gift for gab and an ability to manipulate people. She was a one-woman cult of personality who’d received her comeuppance, thought Struk.
But, as was his way, he didn’t waste any time, or conversation, on Gilberte. Struk wanted to know about the case, where it was going, if anywhere.
“Any clue who that guy Black was?” said Struk.
“No. It’s still a mystery,” said Becerra. “But it seems Bob Durst’s life was a mystery. Maybe their true relationship will come out in court. I don’t know. I can tell you this: I doubt that I’ll be there to see it.”
Becerra hadn’t spoken with Jeanine Pirro since January, and he didn’t expect to be sent to the trial, which was set for June. The Westchester DA was still apparently upset over the Vanity Fair story.
Struk joked that Becerra should expect a transfer to Buffalo in the coming weeks.
“Don’t even say that in jest,” said Becerra, who’d incurred Pirro’s wrath yet again in April when he was interviewed for a five-part series on the Durst case aired by Channel 12.
When reporter Brian Conybeare interviewed Pirro for his series, she casually asked who else he had spoken with. Conybeare mentioned Becerra’s name, and Pirro’s eyes turned red with anger. She immediately instructed one of her subordinates to call Becerra’s boss, and demanded that he discipline Becerra.
Becerra’s comments, included in the series when it was aired in April, were simple, to the point, and offered little insight into the case.
His bosses listened to Pirro but denied her request.
Becerra was watching his back. There were too many instances of Westchester County–based police officers who’d been forced to find new addresses because they crossed Jeanine Pirro.
Becerra didn’t want to become one of them.
“I’m just doing my thing,” he said. “If we get any new information, I’ll write it up and send it to her office.”
Becerra said he was hopeful that a break would come during the summer, when Gabrielle Colquitt planned a major renovation of the South Salem house.
Construction crews were going to open the walls and Becerra had been invited to come and watch; he was particularly eager to see behind the wall that held the cupboard with the dried mud on it.
“Maybe we’ll find something. It’s worth a shot,” he said.
But he realized it could be a last shot, and the only hope after that was that Bobby Durst himself would tell the world what had happened to his long-lost wife.
“We worked this case, and worked it hard, you and I. Given all of the identities Bobby was using, I’d love to see Pirro refer this to the FBI,” said Becerra. “But that won’t happen. She hates the feds for what they did to her husband.”
“So around and around we go. Nothing but a complete waste of time,” said Struk.
There was one bit of information Struk had heard and asked Becerra to confirm.
The 1982 phone records from the house in South Salem had been retrieved by the state police and revealed that Bobby made a phone call after returning from south Jersey on Tuesday, February 2, 1982.
The call was to Susan Berman.
“And she’s dead, so anything she had to offer is dead with her, which is real convenient for him,” said Struk.
Becerra could hear a tint of sarcasm in Struk’s voice. Struk’s guard was back up.
“So you think we’re done?” said Becerra.
“Remember what I asked you when you first came to my house? I said, ‘Whaddaya got?’ ”
“And I laid it out,” said Becerra.
“And you may have enough, like I thought I did twenty years ago, to bring him to trial. But this Pirro, she’s interested in other things, like being governor. And she’s not going to piss off the Dursts. They’re worth what? A billion or two? So I’m going to tell you again what I told you when we first met,” said Struk. “You have what I had, and right now that’s nothing.”
—
Inside the Galveston County prison, behind a double-paned Plexiglas window, Robert Durst was leaning forward, trying to talk into and hear from a small hole. It was early March, and he had a visitor, Sareb Kaufman, the son of the man Susan Berman had dated in the late 1980s. He’d flown in from Los Angeles to talk about Bobby’s best friend, Susan.
Sareb had considered Susan his mother, and was still grieving over her death. With Bobby locked away behind bars awaiting trial, he’d decided to pay him a visit . . . just to clear the air.
Sareb knew Susan had considered Bobby one of her closest friends and that Bobby felt likewise. Sareb had always liked Bobby, who he considered kind and sensitive. It was Bobby whom Susan had trusted more than anyone else in her life, and Sareb found the stories linking Bobby to Susan’s death disturbing.
As Sareb settled in across the window, he saw that Bobby wore a powder-blue prison outfit—pants and smock—and had grown a full head of hair. Gone was that bald, bizarre image seen on TV and in newspapers across the country when Bobby was captured in Pennsylvania.
During his five weeks in custody in Galveston, Bobby had been considered an ideal inmate. He was respectful of the guards, and spent most of his time in the prison library, preparing for his defense.
Until this day, aside from his attorneys, he’d accepted few visitors.
As Bobby and Sareb talked over the conversations coming from other parts of the room, Bobby repeated over and over that he did not, and could not, kill his oldest, dearest friend.
“How could I kill Susan, you know
I could never do anything like that,” said Bobby. “How could I kill anyone?”
30
The short man in the green county jail jumpsuit and sandals looked rather harmless as he stood before State District Judge Susan Criss. The sheriff’s deputies on hand were of the opinion that Bobby, judging by his small size, would be hard-pressed to kill much of anything.
Needless to say they became more attentive to their prisoner when he changed his plea from not guilty to not guilty by reason of self-defense and accident.
Bobby finally admitted he killed Morris Black, but wouldn’t say why. His attorney, Dick DeGuerin of Houston, promised a full explanation at the trial, which had been postponed from its June 2002 trial date and rescheduled for September 9, 2002.
DeGuerin was considered one of the finest criminal defense attorneys in Texas and was handpicked by Michael Kennedy in New York. While acknowledging his client killed Morris Black, DeGuerin said Bobby couldn’t locate Black’s missing head.
“Everyone is looking for the head, your honor. The police are looking, we are looking, and I believe a third party is looking,” DeGuerin told Criss.
The third party was Bobbi Sue Bacha.
Prior to the late March hearing another magazine story, this one in GQ, produced yet another bizarre theory: That Bobby was cross-dressing and frequenting gay clubs. The GQ story produced a source, a black dancer named “Frankie” who said he met Bobby Durst at the Kon Tiki, a Galveston gay bar.
The story suggested that Bobby was picking up men and taking them back to his apartment at 2213 Avenue K for sex, and he enlisted “Frankie” to help him.
Bobby was using another name, Roberta Klein, and, according to the story, allegedly admitted to “Frankie” that he had “blown away folks.”
Bobbi Sue Bacha didn’t waste any time searching for “Frankie.” Instead she found another man, a cross-dresser who claimed to be the only black drag queen at the Kon Tiki. He’d been dancing there for fifteen years and never heard of or saw anyone resembling Bobby’s appearance at the Kon Tiki. He was also incensed that someone may have been passing himself along as the black drag queen from the Kon Tiki.
Bobbie Sue determined that the story was a hoax.
After Bobby changed his plea, DeGuerin made a point of criticizing Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose never-ending public statements concerning the Durst case, said DeGuerin, had pushed Bobby to the brink, forcing him to take the drastic actions he did.
Pirro offered little comment. After learning about Gilberte Najamy’s criminal record she canceled the face-to-face meeting and the April search of the Pine Barrens, with Pirro telling Tom Brown she’d get back to him over the summer.
Before the hearing ended, Bobby was taken into the judge’s chambers and allowed to change into a business suit. When he emerged, a motion was made for Criss to extend the gag order. It already included the Galveston police, attorneys, and local media, and DeGuerin wanted another name added to the list: Bobbi Sue Bacha.
Criss agreed, and included Bobbi Sue, who also happened to be Criss’s cousin.
Several days after the hearing, the autopsy report by Dr. Charles Harvey on Morris Black was finally released. The details were gruesome. The amputated areas around the torso, including the arms, legs and head, were all “sharply incised skin edges with occasional short, sharply incised, parallel satellite incisions. The muscle tissue also appear to be sharply incised and are without significant fragmentation.”
The report revealed other new, startling information.
Black had been severely beaten before he died and his lungs were filled with blood and his torso heavily bruised. As he drew his last breaths, Black sucked blood into his lungs and he suffered a heart attack.
The cause of death: Homicide by unknown means.
When Cody Cazalas read the report, especially the part about the “sharply incised skin edges,” he realized that his initial instincts after seeing Black’s remains were correct. And now that Bobby admitted he killed and dismembered Black, Cazalas could only sit back and wonder how Bobby learned such a delicate craft.
—
The hope that filled the McCormack family when they first heard from Joe Becerra two years earlier was now replaced by a bitter and overwhelming frustration.
Bobby was in jail in Galveston, Texas, but he wasn’t there for their little sister Kathie.
He finally admitted to a murder, to killing and dismembering someone, but not the person the McCormacks cared about.
Despite that admission about Black, and the suspicious death of Susan Berman, it appeared Westchester County authorities were no closer to bringing closure to the McCormack family.
And that was odd in itself, thought Jim, since Kathie Durst was still listed as a missing person with the NYPD, and the investigation was still, technically, an NYPD case.
Since first receiving the call from Joe Becerra, McCormack did what he didn’t want to do: He became overwhelmed and obsessed with the case. His home-base sports merchandising business began to suffer and, even worse, right before Christmas 2001, his sister Mary stopped talking to him following a bitter argument.
Mary became enraged when it was suggested that she and her husband were living in a Durst-owned building. Jim had no idea that it was Gilberte Najamy who was privately telling the media that Mary had long ago made some kind of deal with Bobby. So when Jim received a call from a reporter with that information, he asked Mary about it. She exploded, cutting ties with her brother and his family.
This wasn’t the outcome Jim expected.
He believed after all this time that Bobby would have to answer for Kathie, and the McCormack family would be made whole again.
But it was not to be.
So all eyes turned to Texas.
—
On November 11, 2003, the Galveston courtroom of Judge Susan Criss filled quickly once word spread that the jury had reached a verdict. Across the nation, television networks and cable news channels interrupted their regular programming to bring the verdict live. Everyone, it seemed, from the San Francisco shopkeeper to the Wall Street investment banker, was interested in the fate of the cross-dressing heir who dismembered another man with a paring knife.
The trial of Robert Durst for the murder of Morris Black had finally begun in September 2003 after a long delay. While his attorneys, including Dick DeGuerin, Chip Lewis, and Michael Ramsey, fought with prosecutors over everything from evidence to admissible testimony, Bobby had remained inside a Galveston prison saddled with an unheard of $1 billion bail.
Publicly, Judge Criss cited Bobby’s wealth and his run from Texas authorities in 2001 as the reasons for the record bail. Privately, Criss wasn’t just scared of Bobby; she was terrified. She knew that the coroner and the police determined that whoever dismembered Black knew what he was doing. And since Bobby admitted to killing Black—and knowing Bobby wasn’t a surgeon—Criss, like others, wondered how Bobby had gained his surgical experience.
Intent on keeping him locked up, Criss set a bail even Bobby couldn’t pay, much to the outrage of his attorneys, who were among the best lawyers in Texas.
Smooth and charming, with a soft, calming voice and brilliant mind, DeGuerin had represented David Koresh when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI assaulted the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993. Michael Ramsey, who like DeGuerin was a Houston defense attorney, had another high-profile client—former Enron chief executive Ken Lay, who faced indictment for securities and bank fraud.
Chip Lewis was the youngest of the three. A former Houston prosecutor, Lewis was also dating a CBS News producer working on a Durst feature for the 48 Hours program.
Ironically the “Dream Team,” as the media called them, almost never made it to court. Following Bobby’s capture in Pennsylvania in 2001, word leaked that he had divorced his missing wif
e Kathie in 1990. No one knew about it, especially Kathie’s family. Even more surprising, Bobby had married again. Deborah Lee Charatan was a New York real estate broker who secretly married Bobby on January 11, 2001, in a private ceremony. It wasn’t lost on prosecutors that the marriage occurred after Bobby fled to Galveston and after Susan Berman was murdered, and that it was Charatan who posted Bobby’s $300,000 bail in 2001, which allowed him to flee Galveston.
Nevertheless, Charatan, known in real estate circles as tough and relentless with a taste for money and fine clothes, objected to hiring DeGuerin.
DeGuerin sought a psychiatric examination to potentially serve as a defense for the murder and Bobby’s bizarre behavior before and after Black died. But Charatan feared that if Bobby was determined to be incompetent he could lose control of his share of the Durst family trust. Bobby’s share was believed to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
Charatan made it clear there would not be any mental instability defense and brought in Ramsey to work on the case. As DeGuerin and Ramsey meandered through nearly two years of pre-trial hearings, the internal strife and friction between Bobby’s wife and his attorneys at times almost forced them to quit. On several occasions they were fired, and then rehired.
When the trial finally began on September 22, 2003, DeGuerin and Ramsey had survived and, with Lewis, were at Bobby’s side at the defense table. And over the course of the six-week-long trial, the jury saw the bloody evidence, including the grisly photos of Black’s body parts. But the star witness was Bobby himself.
He led a lonely, drug-induced life, he said, filled with self-doubt and habitual use of marijuana. His mother’s death affected him greatly and left a void that was never filled.
He fled to Galveston in November 2000 after learning he was once again a suspect in the disappearance of his first wife, Kathie. Fearing Jeanine Pirro’s investigation was politically motivated, Bobby said he arrived in Galveston disguised as a deaf-mute woman. His relationship with Black was good, said Bobby, and together they watched television and walked the streets of Galveston, fading in among the homeless and transients.
A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst Page 27
