But during the early morning hours of September 28, 2001, Bobby said that he walked into his apartment and found Black sitting on his sofa and watching television. Fearing something was amiss, Bobby said he sought out his .22-caliber handgun, but Black had it and pointed the weapon toward him. Bobby said they struggled, the gun went off and the bullet struck Black in the face. In a panic, and fearing no one would believe his story, Bobby said he dismembered Black’s body, put the body parts in garbage bags and drove to Galveston Bay where he dumped them.
Galveston district attorney Kurt Sistrunk and assistant district attorney Joel Bennett believed their case was iron tight. They were so sure the crime was premeditated, they filed only murder charges. Lesser charges, such as manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter, were only briefly considered.
It was a gift for the defense.
During the trial, Sistrunk allowed Bennett to carry the bulk of the prosecution, and he was not up to the task. Appearing at times amateurish and often unable to string clear sentences together, Bennett was no match for the “Dream Team,” who was polished and confident. They were so good, the bizarre story they presented to the jury—man shoots another man in self-defense and then panics and dismembers the victim—appeared to make sense.
And the jury bought it.
With a stunned national television audience looking on, Bobby was acquitted of murder. Across the country, tears flowed from Ellen Strauss in Connecticut, Jim and Sharon McCormack in New Jersey, and Eleanor Schwank, who had moved to Matagorda, Texas.
Bobby’s youngest brother, Tom, was so outraged he told the New York Post that Bobby was psychotic and would kill again.
Bobby was perhaps the most visibly stunned by the verdict, opening his mouth wide as if he had just received the most surprising news in his life. He hugged his attorneys and thanked them.
Bobby had dodged his own bullet—a lengthy prison sentence—and he was ready to spend what would amount to another two years in prison on lesser charges, including bond jumping and tampering with evidence—which included mutilating a corpse.
He remained in the Galveston jail until December 2004, when he was transferred to a federal prison in New Jersey to serve nine months for gun possession charges following a plea deal with authorities in Pennsylvania related to his capture there in 2001.
He was released from federal prison in July 2005 and moved to the Houston area. But he was arrested again in December 2005 for parole violations—which included visiting Galveston and a Houston-area shopping mall. It was at the mall where he bumped into Judge Criss.
In November 2006, Bobby’s parole ended, and he was free to resume his life.
DeGuerin said Bobby wanted a quiet, anonymous future, and he promised that the world would never again hear from Bobby Durst.
Finale
The smallish man inside the Barnes & Noble bookstore in midtown Manhattan remained anonymous to nearly everyone except a few who recognized him immediately. They were also mortified at the book he picked up to read.
It was 2009 and since his release from prison, Bobby had spent most of his time in Texas, California, and Florida. He had given up his share of the Durst trust in return for $64 million, and the settlement gave him plenty of money to live wherever he liked. Now he was back in his hometown but his return to New York was unsettling, particularly to his family.
Douglas Durst continued to serve as chairman of the Durst Organization and by 2009 he was readying a bid to develop the new Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan, which would finally replace the World Trade Center. The Durst Organization had remained a major force in New York real estate circles and under Douglas’s leadership had developed the new Bank of America tower—a billion-dollar, 1,200-foot tall skyscraper in midtown Manhattan.
But the New York power broker’s chief daily concern wasn’t business related—it was his older brother.
Since Bobby’s release from prison, Douglas and the Durst family remained terrified of him. They were convinced that Morris Black wasn’t Bobby’s only victim, having already had their theories about Kathie Durst, which were similar to those of Kathie’s family and friends. There were also very aware of two other separate investigations in California involving Bobby.
In 2003, investigators in the San Francisco Bay Area were looking into the disappearance of a pretty college student from North Carolina who was taking a summer class at the University of California at Berkeley in 1997. Kristen Modafferi had worked at a coffee shop in San Francisco, from where she left one June afternoon for her Oakland apartment but was never seen again.
Five years after her disappearance, investigators had few leads and perhaps one or two suspects. It was during the summer of 2003 that they heard about the Durst story from a reporter. Bobby had owned property in San Francisco and the investigators were intrigued. They quickly discovered that Bobby had eight different addresses in northern California from 1994 to 2002, stretching from the Bay Area up north to remote Trinidad, which was near Eureka. It was in Eureka where another young woman, sixteen-year-old Karen Mitchell, also disappeared in 1997.
While the information the investigators had connecting Bobby to the Modafferi disappearance was circumstantial at best, the evidence they developed that pointed to his possible involvement in the disappearance of Karen Mitchell was more than intriguing.
Mitchell was last seen leaving a mall and stepping into a car, a late model Ford Granada, with a much older man who matched Bobby’s description. The investigators contacted Jeanine Pirro’s office and requested access to her Durst case files but were denied. So they subpoenaed Bobby’s credit card records, which revealed that he was in Eureka the day Mitchell disappeared. He had flown in that morning and later that same day he sent a large Federal Express package from Eureka to another home he owned in San Francisco.
What really stunned investigators was the composite of the man who was said to be driving the car Mitchell stepped into when she was last seen. The drawing bore a striking, almost exact resemblance to Bobby—same age, height, hair, eyes, and, most startling, the same wide-rimmed eyeglasses. The witness who provided the composite was a young man who came to police weeks after Mitchell disappeared. Police originally thought he was Mitchell’s abductor before learning he was one of Bobby’s neighbors in Trinidad. They knew each other, and after the young man provided the composite, police said he had the appearance of someone who relieved himself of a great and terrible secret. He then fled to Idaho.
The investigators from the San Francisco area believed that the dead-on composite along with Bobby’s presence in Eureka the day Mitchell vanished were enough to bring him in for questioning. But the Mitchell case belonged to the small Eureka Police Department and the detective there had another suspect, a serial killer named William Ford.
Ford later admitted to killing four women in the Eureka area but steadfastly maintained he didn’t have anything to do with the Mitchell disappearance. Despite their best efforts, the Bay Area investigators couldn’t convince the Eureka police to question Bobby, even after learning that Bobby had twice visited the shoe store that Mitchell’s aunt owned at the mall, and that Bobby had visited a local homeless shelter where Mitchell had volunteered. Bobby expressed his deep concerns about the Mitchell investigation to attorneys Dick DeGuerin and Chip Lewis following the publication of the mass-market version of A Deadly Secret in September 2003.
Bobby was certain he would be indicted. DeGuerin told him to concentrate on the upcoming trial. “We’ll worry about any other charges when they’re filed,” he told Bobby.
Frustrated, the San Francisco investigators contacted the FBI in Sacramento for help, but no one could convince the Eureka police to follow the Durst trail.
As the Mitchell case wallowed, the Susan Berman murder probe hit its own roadblock.
Several years after Berman’s murder, Bobby remained the one and only suspect. Berman had been killed wi
th a bullet from a nine-millimeter gun fired at close range, the same type of gun Bobby had in Galveston. The bullet fragmented and couldn’t be traced but the L.A. police were nevertheless able to place Bobby in Los Angeles the day Berman was killed. He had flown from Eureka to San Francisco, rented a car and drove to Los Angeles. He returned the car two days after Berman’s murder.
Berman’s killer had sent a note written in green ink to the Beverly Hills police saying that a cadaver could be found inside Berman’s home. Green was Bobby’s favorite color and Paul Coulter, the lead L.A.P.D. detective on the case, was so sure Bobby killed Berman, he flew to Galveston to obtain Bobby’s writing sample while he was in prison there. Bobby wrote on several pages under the watchful eyes of Coulter and a writing expert who concluded that indeed Bobby’s handwriting was the same as that on the note.
Coulter had enough to charge Bobby with murder under the working theory he killed Berman to keep her from talking about Kathie’s disappearance. It was Berman, police believed, who helped Bobby in the days and weeks after Kathie disappeared and the mobster’s daughter was the only one who could link Bobby to Kathie’s murder.
But just to be sure, and for some still unknown reason, another handwriting expert was called in. Only he wasn’t as convinced as the first expert that Bobby authored the note. Probably, he said, but not positively, and he ruled the comparison as “inconclusive.” The dueling opinions presented a legal dilemma and forced Coulter to back off. In August 2010, NBC aired a one-hour program on Berman’s murder, Solve the Mystery, in which Coulter, Joe Becerra, and others involved in the Susan Berman and Bobby Durst investigations appeared. The program ended with one clear-cut suspect: Bobby.
Following his release from prison in 2006, Bobby remained under the radar until he reappeared in Galveston again. He had been seen standing in the front yard of the home on Avenue K where he killed Morris Black, staring into the house. He was also spotted looking out onto Galveston Bay where Black’s remains were found, and at a Walmart dressed as a woman carrying a large duffle bag.
He was told to leave the store out of concerns about shoplifting.
Galveston judge Susan Criss had always feared Bobby and she was unnerved yet again when he was spotted in a car next to the parking area reserved for judges at the new Galveston courthouse. During the summer of 2010, Bobby was seen in Galveston feeding the seagulls near Forty-Fifth Street and the seawall.
But the most disturbing news for Douglas Durst centered on Bobby’s return to New York. During his flight in 2001, Bobby drove to Douglas’s home in Westchester County and parked in his driveway with two guns at his side. When he was captured in Pennsylvania, police found a notebook with names and phone numbers of hotels Bobby had stayed at, and names of aliases Bobby had used.
On another page Bobby wrote, “I live to eat, other things are just to get thru the day.” Underneath, he wrote, “What DD is doing to me, puts me in the same place, as what Kathy did to me.”
Bobby never identified “DD,” but nearly everyone involved in the case believed it was Douglas.
So following Bobby’s release from prison, Douglas placed him under virtual twenty-four hour surveillance and monitored his movements, especially when he was in New York where he was becoming a frequent visitor. Bobby would fly in and stay at a midtown hotel. But something new was afoot, something so disturbing, so chilling, Douglas decided the authorities had to know: Bobby had visited the Pine Barrens.
The sandy, secluded expanse in southern New Jersey was the very place where NYPD detective Mike Struk believed was the last resting place of Kathie Durst.
Nearly twenty years later, in early 2010, Bobby had been followed by two private investigators hired by his brother to a storage facility in Manhattan, where he removed a large suitcase, placed it in the trunk of his rental car, and drove into New Jersey and down to Ship Bottom and into the Pine Barrens. He remained there for several hours before returning to New York. Fearing for himself and for his family, Douglas Durst provided the information to the authorities in Westchester County, where the Kathie Durst case remains an open investigation.
Jeanine Pirro was long gone. She made two unsuccessful runs for political office—for the Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2005 and for state attorney general in 2006—and later hosted a television show, Judge Jeanine Pirro, on the CW network. She graduated to the Fox News Channel, where she hosted her own weekend program. The new Westchester DA was Janet DiFiore, and the message given to her office was that Bobby was involved again in some bizarre behavior. In October 2012, that belief deepened when I reported on my blog that the FBI had renewed its interest in Durst and was investigating him as a potential suspect in a variety of unsolved murders and disappearances, including the Karen Mitchell case. In addition, the FBI was looking at Durst as a suspect in the murders of a dozen or so women whose remains were found on Long Island. Mostly prostitutes and transients, their dismembered remains were found buried in the sand off the south shore. The FBI was never able to establish a connection between the murders and Durst. Meanwhile, Bobby’s earlier appearance in the midtown Manhattan bookstore only fueled the speculation that indeed something was afoot. He had found something to read—and those few who recognized him were terrified at what they saw—Bobby Durst flipping through the pages of a book about the serial killer Ted Bundy.
Sources
I began working on the Robert Durst story for People magazine in October 2000. Three weeks after my story was published, Susan Berman was murdered. I later wrote a lengthy piece on the Durst case for Reader’s Digest in 2002 and served as a consultant for CBS News in 2003.
During that time I traveled from New York to Pennsylvania, Galveston, northern California and back, interviewing dozens of people including law enforcement personnel involved in the various investigations, and friends and acquaintances of the victims. I also developed numerous sources who kept me abreast then, and now, of developments in the Durst case.
In preparing for the eBook edition of A Deadly Secret, I made the rounds again in August 2010 and reached out to various people and sources, some of whom I haven’t spoken to in several years, to see if there was anything new to report.
There was, which is included in the Finale chapter, which I updated again in 2012.
The strange story of Robert Durst continues . . .
Author’s Note
While the FBI was unable to connect Durst to the Long Island murders, the bureau did become interested in Durst in relation to his long-missing wife, Kathie, and Susan Berman. They subsequently formed a loose Durst task force in 2012 with the Westchester district attorney’s office and the Los Angeles police and began probing.
In the fall of 2014, HBO announced that it had acquired a documentary from producer/director Andrew Jarecki, who had been studying the Durst case for almost a decade. I first met Jarecki in 2005 when we sat down along with his producing partner, Marc Smerling, to discuss my book and research. The pair was working on a feature film adaptation of the Durst story; their movie, All Good Things, which starred Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, premiered in 2010.
The film, which drew the wrath of the Durst family, faired poorly at the box office, due in large part to the pressure placed on studio executives by Douglas Durst.
In 2011, I had lunch with Jarecki, and he told me he was again working on a Durst project, this time a documentary. And, he added, Bobby Durst had agreed to be interviewed.
It was, shockingly, Durst’s idea, said Jarecki, who explained that Durst had seen All Good Things and liked Ryan Gosling’s sensitive portrait of the fictional Robert Durst character—that of a son overwhelmed by his powerful father and family.
Jarecki said he already had several of hours of interviews filmed with Durst, and that some of what he said could be incriminating. I congratulated Jarecki for doing something no one else could—getting Bobby to talk. Jarecki was still of the opinion that there was
more to Bobby Durst than the tabloid headlines, and that he was a complicated character. I knew enough about Durst to be convinced otherwise. We agreed to disagree. So when Jarecki asked me during our lunch to give an interview for his film, I politely declined then, and again during another meeting we had a few months later.
Three years would pass until the fall of 2014, when HBO announced that it had acquired Jarecki’s long-gestating documentary, now called The Jinx. The six-part series premiered on February 8, 2015, and for the uninitiated it served as a primer on the basics of the Durst story. It wasn’t until the fifth episode that we saw for the first time a letter Durst had sent to Susan Berman in 1999. The writing appeared to be the same as that on the so-called “cadaver letter” sent to the police in 2000, and included the identical misspelling of “Beverley Hills.”
As interest in the Durst case swelled due to The Jinx, on the morning of Sunday, March 15, I received a call from Jim McCormack telling me that the FBI had arrested Bobby the night before in New Orleans on a murder warrant from Los Angeles. Bobby had apparently been planning to leave the country, possibly for Cuba, and FBI agents had surrounded him outside his hotel. The arrest came the night before the final episode of The Jinx.
That finale, in which Jarecki prepares to confront Bobby about the handwriting on the 1999 letter and the similarity to the cadaver letter, led up to one of the most stunning moments in television history.
When the interview concluded, Bobby walked into a bathroom, apparently unaware that his microphone was still on. He could be heard saying, “There it is, you’re caught.” He then shifts into what appears to be a multipersonality back-and-forth conversation with himself that concludes with “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst Page 28
