A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst (12 page)

“Would Mr. Durst be willing to sit down for a polygraph test?”

“Absolutely not. He’s done nothing that would warrant him to be embarrassed like that,” said Scoppetta. “But we do have something you would be interested in. Drinking glasses with what appears to be a powdery residue on the side. We think it’s cocaine. The glasses belonged to Mrs. Durst. We’d be happy to give them to you. Perhaps you could run them through for prints? Mr. Durst has said all along that he believes his wife may have gotten in trouble with drug dealers. That sound good, Mikey? And should something else come up relevant to this case, feel free to call me, okay, Mikey?”

Struk could hear the click on the other end of the line, and he slammed his phone down onto the receiver. At the moment he didn’t know what he was more upset about, the fact that Bobby hired an attorney or being called Mikey.

He got up and walked over to Gibbons’s office.

“Bobby’s lawyered up,” said Struk. “He’s got some guy, Nick Scoppetta, representing him.”

“Scoppetta?” said Gibbons. “He’s a player. A criminal attorney. Bobby’s bringing out the first team.”

Gibbons knew all about Scoppetta, a New York City insider, a member of Mayor John Lindsay’s administration in the 1960s, a former deputy mayor and city investigations commissioner who knew just about everyone within city government, and everyone knew him.

“He says there’s no way Bobby will talk to us, and no way he’ll sit down for a polygraph. Does that shut us down?” said Struk, knowing there was no chance he’d be talking to Bobby Durst anytime soon.

“For now, until we get the phone records,” said Gibbons.

Bobby had dropped the bomb. All Struk could do was sigh.

“Damn,” he said.

A month later, as promised, Nick Scoppetta produced two glasses containing what appeared to be a white, powdery residue. As a matter of routine, Struk had the glasses examined, and the residue tested positive for cocaine, though there were no identifiable fingerprints.

Struk was back working other cases. A murder here, a burglary there. There’d be occasional calls from Kathie’s friends, particularly Ellen Strauss, seeking updates, but there was nothing to say and nothing to report. The only leads that trickled in were false sightings or crazed psychics claiming they’d seen Kathie’s body buried under a tree, or under the Meadowlands parking lot in New Jersey, next to Jimmy Hoffa.

In early June, the
New York Post
reported the Bobby Durst affair with Prudence Farrow. Bobby was even quoted in the story, saying that Kathie was doing badly in life, flunking medical school and having a problem with drugs, particularly cocaine. He said Kathie came home the Sunday night of her disappearance from Gilberte Najamy’s home in a foul mood, and he blamed Gilberte.

“She’d come home from Gilberte’s yelling and screaming and giving me a tough time over lawyers and why I do this and why I do that. It was a tirade,” Bobby told the
Post
. “Gilberte Najamy from the very beginning has been trying to get us to break up. For whatever reason, she never liked me.”

Bobby also admitted publicly that Kathie was using cocaine and wondered if her drug use was the reason for her disappearance.

“All I want to know is that she’s someplace and she’s all right,” said Bobby. “I’m not trying to drag her back.”

The
Post
story quoted anonymous officials saying they didn’t know if Kathie was murdered or had run away and assumed a new identity. Struk had no idea where they’d gotten that information, but he was amused that Bobby would talk to the
Post
but not to the New York police. For a man who had nothing to hide, he wasn’t saying much.

The day the
Post
story was published, Kathie’s sister Mary Hughes parked herself in front of Bobby’s apartment, waiting with reporters for Bobby to emerge. He did, late in the morning, with his dog, Igor, and Mary called out to him, asking why he and the Durst family were ignoring Kathie’s family.

Mary called Struk later that day. She had been crying.

“I told him, ‘I know you killed her!’ But he just looked at me as if he didn’t even know me and said, ‘I have nothing to say to you.’ That’s it. He’s married to my sister for nine years and that’s all he can say? Isn’t there anything you can do?”

“Mary,” said Struk, “I don’t know what to say. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

Central Park was awash in color, and Mike Struk was enjoying the view. He always liked the autumn months, the cool weather a welcome relief from the stifling, humid summer heat that turned the Twentieth Precinct into a super-oven.

Summer passed by quickly for Struk, who took a respite from the frustrations of the Durst case and spent some much-needed vacation time with his children. He even found himself a girlfriend.

As he stood on the corner of Central Park West and West Eighty-sixth Street, having returned from a court appearance to testify in a burglary case, he took deep, full breaths, inhaling the cool, fall air. He felt pretty good. Better than he had in months, with the the Durst case and all its problems placed somewhere in the back of his mind.

The case was cold; frozen was more like it. The last newspaper story had appeared in June. Even the calls from the psychics were few and far between.

Struk took one last deep breath then walked west toward Columbus Avenue.

When he returned to the precinct, he saw Gibbons in his office, focused on paperwork laid out on his desk.

“Whatcha got there?” said Struk.

Gibbons looked up, his expression a mixture of seriousness and excitement. “We got the phone records.”

There they were, Bobby’s phone records, subpoenaed months ago by Roger Hayes and finally delivered courtesy of New York Telephone.

Struk pulled a chair up to Gibbons’s desk.

“Look,” said Gibbons, who’d spent the last hour studying the records, pointing to a listing of calls made to Bobby’s office on Tuesday afternoon, February 2. “Collect calls, all of them, from Ship Bottom, New Jersey. It’s down the coast, on Long Beach Island. Just north of Atlantic City. That’s our boy, isn’t it? Isn’t that his MO, making collect calls?”

“You bet,” said Struk. “That cheap fuck wouldn’t put a dime in a pay phone if someone gave it to him. Look at this.”

There were dozens of collect calls to Bobby’s office, but only on that one day did any calls originate from Ship Bottom.

“Where did he say he was that day?” said Gibbons.

“In Connecticut, on business,” said Struk.

Struk ran over to his desk, pulled out his Durst file, and removed a copy of Bobby’s itinerary, the one Bobby had tossed into the garbage and Gilberte Najamy found.

“Here, look. He wrote down that he arrived in South Salem at two
A.M.
that Tuesday morning and left at seven
A.M.
It doesn’t say where he went, but he drove back to Manhattan at eight that night,” said Struk.

“What’s that say?” said Gibbons, pointing to a single word scribbled between the “7
A.M.
leave home” and “8 garage.”

“It says ‘drive,’” said Struk. “The little fucker wasn’t in Connecticut. He went to Jersey.”

Gibbons and Struk agreed they needed to check the local property records for any Durst holdings in the Atlantic City area, including and surrounding Long Beach Island.

Struk suddenly sat up in his chair, shocking himself with his brilliant thought.

“The Pine Barrens.”

“The what?”

“The Pine Barrens. This is near the Pine Barrens.”

The Pine Barrens were 1.1 million acres of sandy expanse and thick forests between Atlantic City and Philadelphia known chiefly as the last resting place for assorted mobsters; the fine, loose dirt was easy to dig up any time of the year, even in early February.

“How would he know to go to the Pine Barrens?” said Gibbons. “Hit men and serial killers go to the Pine Barrens.”

“Maybe he had help. I don’t know,” said Struk. “What I do know is I better get down there.”

—

The cold November wind slapped Struk’s face as he stood on the shore in Ship Bottom on Long Beach Island, watching the breaking waves of the Atlantic Ocean. He stood in the sand, looking like an overgrown seal in his black trench coat and black shoes.

Struk was deep in thought. The instant he saw the Laundromat he made the connection. He tracked down the collect calls to Bobby’s office on February 2. They came from two pay phones. One here, on Long Beach Island Avenue near the beach, and one across the bridge on the mainland, in Manahawkin, which was right in front of a Laundromat.

Struk remembered the coat. That expensive Burberry raincoat hanging on Bobby’s closet, the one he’d apparently washed and ruined.

He washed it here, that Tuesday.

As Struk stood on the beach, his eyes closed, seagulls circled high above him.

He was convinced that Kathie Durst was down here. Somewhere. Bobby supposedly owned property in the area, and Struk was prepared to get a backhoe and dig through every inch of ground. But the Ocean County courthouse didn’t have any listings for property owned by a Robert Durst, or any Durst, for that matter.

And Struk knew that searching the Pine Barrens was pointless. Finding a body in such an expanse would be like searching for a golf ball on the moon.

On the drive back to Manhattan, up the Garden State Parkway, Struk decided it was time to pay a visit to Flo Jones, Bobby’s former secretary, who lived on 145th Street.

Somehow, Jones had slipped through the cracks. Struk had wanted to interview her in the early stages of the investigation, back in February. But it was decided it would be better to wait until after he locked Bobby into a story. The problem was, aside from the first two interviews, Bobby wasn’t talking, and Jones had been forgotten.

She wasn’t pleased to see Struk at her door. But she let him in, and as she began to answer his questions, it was clear she had no love for Bobby, who she said had fired her in April, just a couple of months after Kathie disappeared.

Jones told Struk that she was the recipient of Bobby’s collect calls and said he
always
called the office collect, which made it difficult to remember any specific day, like February 2, and know where Bobby might have been. Whenever he called in for messages, he never said where he was, unless he wanted her to know.

And when Bobby was in the office, aside from business calls, he had an entourage of women who called him or came by the office on a regular basis. Jones remembered their names. Judy Licht, Julie Baumgold, Susan Berman, and Joanna Revson. There was also that Farrow woman, though Jones couldn’t remember her first name.

“I did like his wife. I felt so bad for her,” said Jones.

“Why was that?”

“She told me he was beating her. I said what the hell you doing, get away from that man. He was my boss, but no woman has to take that. You know what I mean?”

And Jones clearly remembered Bobby telling her, before he even reported Kathie’s disappearance to the police, that Kathie was gone.

“He said, ‘You may as well know, Kathie is missing,’” said Jones. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said she was gone.”

It was at this point that Jones told the detective that she had been fired, nearly three months later, in mid-April, and that Bobby had taken all her logbooks and office notes.

“Why did he fire you?” asked Struk.

“Damned if I know,” said Jones.

—

It was a week before Christmas, and Struk once again made his way downtown to Roger Hayes’s office, this time fighting through holiday traffic.

He knew this was going to be his last shot at convincing Hayes to go to a grand jury. Only this time he had the phone records, and the statement from Flo Jones that Bobby had known that his wife was gone before he even filed his report to the police. And, as before, he had the interviews with the friends, Kathie’s family, her professors from medical school, the itinerary, and the boot receipt. He felt confident, more than he had at any other time during the investigation.

As he presented his new evidence to Hayes, Struk was forceful.

“He tells me he’s in Connecticut, but he’s down in south Jersey. Someplace called Ship Bottom. The one and only time any collect calls are made to his office from Ship Bottom is February second. And the calls are made in front of a Laundromat, where he washes an expensive coat. Do we have to guess why?” said Struk. “The next day he buys a new pair of boots and tells his secretary that his wife is gone.”

Hayes listened intently.

“Are you certain it was Bobby down in Jersey?” said Hayes.

“Who else could it be? That’s his MO: he makes collect calls to his office.”

“Did you confiscate the coat?”

“No, but I saw it, along with Kathie’s sister and another woman.”

“And you saw it entering the apartment illegally, right? You didn’t have a warrant. The sister let you in and you tiptoed around the place, right?”

Struk said nothing when Hayes lectured him again on double jeopardy and the simple fact that the Durst family would defend Bobby with the biggest legal guns in New York.

Struk argued that he believed the evidence was more than circumstantial, it was overwhelming, enough to convince a jury. But again, just like the last meeting, Roger Hayes smiled, and Struk knew what was coming.

“I would agree that the evidence is compelling, and I’m talking about the actual evidence you can use in this case. But you know why we can’t go forward,” said Hayes. “You have to give me more.”

Struk didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He knew it was over. He’d spent nearly a year investigating the disappearance of Kathie Durst, and he had everything but Kathie Durst.

In the end, he realized he didn’t have a case.

As Struk rose slowly from his chair, Hayes extended his hand.

“Mike, you fought the good fight, my friend. You know how these things work. Maybe something will turn up.”

Struk reached over, grabbing Hayes’s hand.

“Mark my words, this isn’t over,” said Struk. “One day, years from now, we’ll catch some guy doing something and he’s going to want to cut a deal. And he’s going to tell us that he knows something about what happened to the rich guy’s wife.”