A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst (29 page)

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 wife 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.

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.

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 with 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.