A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst (22 page)

Cazalas said that based on his interviews, Black hadn’t been the best of neighbors, yelling all hours of the day and night, even going so far as to turn off the circuit breakers in the house when he thought the other tenants were using too much electricity.

“Definitely not the easiest person to get along with. But I don’t think that’s cause for murder,” said Cazalas. “As far as Black and Durst knowing each other prior to Galveston, Joe, that’s an interesting theory. The time I spent with Durst, I got the impression he was very smart, very intelligent. Durst left a receipt in a garbage can behind the house on Avenue K. It was for a dry cleaner in New Orleans. I drove there. Six hours across some of the most boring stretches of road. When I got there the clerk told me Durst brought in a comforter. It had blood on it. Why drive three hundred and fifty miles to clean a bloody comforter?”

Becerra didn’t reply. He was thinking back to the NYPD file, to Mike Struk’s report, about Bobby visiting a Laundromat in New Jersey, supposedly to wash a coat.

Cazalas continued on about how last April Bobby had told his sister, Wendy, the only family member he was communicating with, that he would be away for a while. That he’d drop out of sight.

“I think he’s very calculating, meticulous,” said Cazalas, who added that Bobby had been sighted throughout Galveston, walking around in an ill-fitting dress, using the computers at the local library. He appeared to act like a man who needed immediate psychiatric help, but Cazalas thought differently.

“I don’t buy into this psycho stuff,” he said. “Durst was acting like a fugitive long before Black was killed, like he was setting things up. What for, I don’t know. And when it all comes down to it, I don’t have a motive.”

Cazalas leaned forward, not wanting anyone other than those in his group to hear what he had to say next.

“I’ll tell you this,” he said. “I saw how Black was cut up. This guy Durst, he’s done this before.”

—

Jeanine Pirro stood outside the Galveston Courthouse, surrounded by reporters and television cameras and answering questions about Robert Durst and her investigation.

It was Tuesday, October 16, and Pirro was here for Bobby’s hearing.

Election Day was three weeks away, and the polls were not looking good. Pirro was up by only a few percentage points. What should have been a cakewalk victory over her opponent was now a nail-biter. Even without a debate, her challenger had made an issue out of Pirro’s husband’s legal problems, and she couldn’t get away from it.

September, of course, had been marked by the attack on the World Trade Center, and this had given Pirro some breathing room.

But one month later Pirro’s campaign needed a shot in the arm, so she decided to travel to Galveston for Robert Durst’s hearing, not that she had any real business there. District attorneys don’t usually show up in court for simple hearings. And Bobby Durst wasn’t facing any charges in Westchester County, which made her presence in Texas even more questionable.

But there she was, surrounded by the media and standing next to Galveston district attorney Mike Guarino, waiting along with a host of other people to see if Bobby would actually appear. No one had heard from him or seen him since his arrest. His local attorney, Mark Kelly, told the court that Bobby would be present for the hearing. But Kelly had been appointed by the court, and he really didn’t have a clue about whether or not Durst would show.

The assembled media asked Pirro about her investigation, and she said she traveled to Galveston to speak with Guarino and the Los Angeles police, to see if the three cases were connected. The L.A. police wouldn’t even confirm publicly that Bobby was a suspect in Susan Berman’s murder, but that didn’t stop Pirro from mentioning her intention to speak with them.

“California authorities will be joining us. We will sit down together and see if any of the pieces of the puzzle fit together,” she said.

It was a Broadway show in the heart of Galveston, the other actors unaware of their supporting roles.

But in reality, Pirro was just the opening act. The real star was Bobby Durst, and Pirro stood there, along with Guarino, Becerra, Cazalas, and others, waiting for him to arrive.

As the minutes turned to hours, it became apparent that Bobby was not going to attend the hearing and had no intention of appearing in any court.

Nor did he have any intention of remaining in Texas.

Bobbi Sue Bacha was a purebred, full-figured Texas gal with jet-black hair, matching black clothes, and the voice of a ten-year-old.

When she answered the phone at Blue Moon Investigations, Galveston County
Daily News
reporter Ted Streuli didn’t know if he was talking to a seasoned private investigator or a child who had accompanied a parent to work and mistakenly picked up the phone.

Or maybe he’d just dialed a wrong number.

“Hi, this is Bobbi,” came the sweet, innocent voice.

Streuli had been working the Sunday night when Morris Black’s body parts washed up in the bay. After Black was positively identified, Streuli began the task of putting the dead man’s history together. The only problem was that it appeared that Black had no history.

Aside from a previous address in Galena Park, Texas, and one in South Carolina in the late 1990s, Black was an enigma. No wife, no kids, no car. Nothing.

So Streuli turned to Bobbi Sue.

Bobbi Sue was born and raised in Galveston and just happened to had grown up in the neighborhood where Black’s remains had been found. She knew those waters well, having gone fishing and swimming there daily.

She was now forty-two years old, on her third marriage, and so full of sweetness she still called her father Daddy. To everyone else he was Robert Trapani, a retired Galveston police officer who’d served on the force for thirty-seven years.

When Bobbi Sue’s first marriage, to her high school sweetheart, ended after several years and one child, she needed a job—so she decided to become a private eye. Considering her father’s background, the career choice wasn’t far out of line. Investigative work was in Bobbi Sue’s blood.

She caught on quickly, and by the mid-1990s was running a growing private investigative firm.

Her life seemed to settle down after she married her third husband, Lucas Bacha, a soft-spoken NASA engineer whose résumé included work on the space shuttle. He even took in Bobbi Sue’s three children, one of whom, a fourteen-year-old daughter, was a budding model. They all lived in a large, neatly maintained white Colonial home on a corner lot in nearby League City.

Blue Moon’s offices were on the second floor of a sleek, glass-enclosed office building in Webster, a town off I-45 between Houston and Galveston that was peppered with restaurants that catered to NASA employees who worked nearby. Bobbi Sue had thirty-seven employees of her own, and over the years had carved an impressive reputation for herself as a relentless investigator. Along with catching cheating spouses, her firm specialized in research, insurance fraud, and criminal investigations.

Lucas Bacha served as the CEO of Blue Moon, handling the finances and business affairs, and had been blessed with the kind of office a CEO deserved. The furniture was cherry wood, and included a seven-foot-tall bookcase that covered an entire wall, a big desk, sofa, two upholstered leather chairs, assorted photos, and a marble chess set.

Bobbi Sue’s office was across from Lucas’s and much smaller, but she didn’t care. She had her computer and access to every searchable database imaginable. If you wanted to find someone, or information about someone, Bobbi Sue was the person to turn to. She was, at her core, a bloodhound. Private investigation wasn’t just a job for her. She thirsted for every opportunity that came her way.

So when Ted Streuli called, asking Bobbi Sue to look into the history of one Morris Black, she didn’t hesitate.

It took her but two weeks to organize a preliminary file on the man, but it wasn’t the kind of thorough information Bobbi Sue expected she’d obtain.

Morris had been born in 1929. Originally from Massachusetts, he had several brothers and sisters, some of whom hadn’t spoken to him in more than fifty years.

One sister, Gladys, still lived outside Boston and was the only sibling Morris maintained any contact with. He would call her on occasion, becoming infuriated if she wasn’t home to take his call. She never had any idea where he was, and when they did talk, he wouldn’t say where he was calling from.

He had a brother Harry, who lived in Florida, but Morris spoke on occasion only with Harry’s ex-wife, Trudy.

After joining the Merchant Marine and traveling the world, where he developed a preference for coastal towns, Morris had returned to Boston. Bobbi Sue couldn’t tell what he did there. There was no information on him. Morris’s life didn’t pick up again until he turned up in Galena Park, Texas, in the mid-1990s, and North Charleston, South Carolina, in 1998, where he had apparently been arrested for threatening to blow up a utility company over a disputed bill.

Somehow, he ended up in Galveston, living next door to Robert Durst.

As Bobbi Sue studied Morris’s past, she could tell that something was amiss. Whole chunks—decades of time—were blank. No previous addresses. No cars. No credit cards. It was as if he appeared for a little while, then disappeared, showing up in the oddest of places. It would take more time, she figured, to get a read on Morris Black. But she was curious. It was her experience that people with no history planned it that way, that they purposely lived in the shadows of society. Thoughts of Morris once serving as a hired assassin or mob soldier crossed her mind.

Frustrated over her inability to learn more about Morris, Bobbi Sue decided to turn her attention to Bobby Durst.

She ran him on Auto Track, a pay service used by police, private investigators, and the media that provides current and previous addresses along with possible phone numbers and information on relatives. Bobbi’s Auto Track revealed a host of addresses across the country, including Manhattan, Ridgefield (Connecticut), San Marino (California), Miami, Los Angeles, and Dallas.

As Bobbi Sue studied the report, she noticed something odd. Durst had an address in Belmont, New York, under a different Social Security number. She ran the number through Auto Track, and came up with a name, James S. Fleischman. He was fifty-four, married, and lived in Belmont, which was a suburb of Buffalo.

According to the records, Bobby had obtained a New York State driver’s license using Fleischman’s Social Security number and home address. The license had expired in April 1998.

Believing she’d stumbled onto something, she turned each of the nineteen pages of the Auto Track, her curiosity fully piqued. She stopped halfway through. Bobby, it seemed, had assumed the identity of yet another man, Robert Jezowski, of New York City. Bobby had used Jezowski’s Social Security number and name, but it wasn’t clear why.

Bobbi Sue was sitting in her office, trying to make sense out of the different addresses, when Lucas walked by, noticing the quizzical look on her face. He knew that look all too well. His spouse was in full detective mode. She had found something she couldn’t quite understand.

“Look at this,” she said, waving him into the office. “This man lives near Buffalo, New York. This other one lives in New York City. Durst used both their names and Social Security numbers. I don’t get it. What’s he doing? And why is he taking people’s identities?”

Lucas said nothing. He knew Bobbi Sue was onto something. He also knew she wouldn’t stop until she found the answers.

—

Manning Ogden was on a plane en route to Mexico from his home in New Orleans when he read the
People
magazine story about the heir to a New York real estate fortune who was wanted for murder in Galveston, Texas. When Manning read that the accused murderer had been masquerading as a cross-dressing mute, he nearly jumped from his seat and out of the airplane.

Upon landing, Manning rushed to a phone and called his brother Robert in Philadelphia.

“You’re not going to believe this,” said Manning. “Do you remember me joking about the weird transvestite in one of my buildings? The deaf-mute? I’m reading this
People
magazine story on the plane about this guy who dressed like a woman in Galveston who’s wanted for murder. He’s some millionaire from New York. It’s the same guy. He rented an apartment in Galveston dressed as a woman who was a deaf-mute. What are the chances there are two of these guys running around like this?”

Manning had received a call in March from a smooth-talking man who claimed to be an assistant of a woman named Diane Winne, who, said the assistant, was a deaf-mute in her fifties interested in renting one of Manning’s apartments in New Orleans. She was financially stable, said the assistant, and would pay the $650 rent three months in advance, using money orders, if that was acceptable.

When Winne appeared, Manning immediately knew she was a he. The disguise was awful, and he would joke with his brother about the weird transvestite living in his building. But this was New Orleans, after all, and weird transvestites were the norm, so Manning didn’t pay much attention. He didn’t really notice that Diane Winne rarely spent any time in her apartment.

When he returned to New Orleans from Mexico, Manning rushed home and was surprised to see that the apartment he’d rented to the cross-dresser had been cleaned out. Winne had left a scribbled note, apologizing for the abrupt departure, but said her plans had changed suddenly, she was leaving New Orleans, and would not be back.

Inside the apartment, Manning found a wig, a CD burner, computer mouse and mouse pad, and a medallion and key chain, both inscribed with the name Davie Berman.

There was also a VHS videocassette, a copy of the ABC special on Kathie Durst,
Vanished
, which had aired during the summer.

Manning found an old telephone bill, all local calls. The phone was still turned on, so he picked it up and pressed Redial. It connected to an answering machine in California. The recorded voice on the other end, the one Manning immediately recognized as belonging to the “assistant” who had called him about Diane Winne, said it was Robert Durst, please leave a message.

Manning told his brother Robert, who in turn called several news organizations in New York, looking to sell photos of some of the items left behind as well as to obtain a phone number for Cody Cazalas in Galveston.

When he got the number, Robert called Cazalas, who immediately drove to New Orleans.

—

Jim McCormack didn’t know what to say or even what to think when he heard that Bobby was a fugitive. His mind was a bowl of mush, his hopes and dreams of finding closure for his family now all but gone. This whole experience, from the day he received the call from Joe Becerra nearly two years earlier to the call he received from Gilberte Najamy just days before telling him that Bobby had fled, only served to reinforce a growing feeling that Bobby would never be brought to justice. Not for the murder of Morris Black, and certainly not for the murder of his sister Kathie. It was a game, a game the McCormacks were losing once again.

Even the plea that Michael Kennedy, the soft-spoken and well-respected New York attorney hired by the Durst family trust, had made for Bobby to “come home” was met with skepticism by Jim and his family. Kennedy held a news conference in New York after Bobby’s flight, fearful that his client was desperate, carrying a gun, and in imminent danger of meeting a violent end from trigger-happy cops. Kennedy described Bobby as a “fragile human being.”

Jim didn’t think much of that description. Bobby was a lot of things, he thought, but he wasn’t fragile.

Despite the disappointing turn of events, Jim and his wife, Sharon, persevered. When a reporter would call requesting an interview, Jim would oblige. If it was a national magazine, he’d invite the reporter to his comfortable home. Jim had never heard of Morris Black, and the only information he could offer about a possible relationship between Bobby and Morris was that Bobby had often traveled to New England—Morris was from Boston—driving up alone or with Kathie.

Sharon even sat in on several interviews, recalling her fond memories of her long-lost sister-in-law, how beautiful and kind she was, and how during the last years of her life, she seemed to fall into a vacuum that sucked her into a lost world of drugs and alcohol.

Sharon remembered the long discussions she and Kathie had had. Once Kathie started drinking wine, she couldn’t stop talking. And her conversations always centered on her husband and his family.

Kathie even told one story about a fire in a Manhattan building that killed a man. She claimed it had been a case of arson, that it was part of the never-ending power grab for real estate in New York, though, of course, there was never any proof.

“You don’t know these people, Sharon. You really don’t know what they’re like,” she said to Sharon between long gulps of red wine.

While Jim continued to speak with the media, his sister Mary shut herself off completely. Aside from their mother, the loss of Kathie had affected Mary the most. She was emotionally fried, unable and unwilling to discuss Kathie’s disappearance with anyone, especially reporters. She had even found it difficult to talk to Joe Becerra during her four-hour interview.

If a reporter wanted to speak to Mary, they had to go through Jim, ask him the question, and he’d call his sister. If a question was posed to Jim that he couldn’t answer, he called Mary.

With Bobby now on the run, Mary refused to answer any questions directed her way. For Mary, the entire episode was a nightmare, a bad dream with no ending.

—

As the Thanksgiving holiday came and went and Christmas approached, Bobby Durst was still a fugitive. He had the money and the resources to hide just about anywhere, from an island in the Caribbean to the wilderness in South America. Heightened security, a result of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, had made it that much more difficult to sneak out of the United States, so law enforcement, including the FBI in Houston, figured that Bobby was probably still in the country. Just where was the big question. There had been several sightings, including one in San Marino, California, which was about three hundred miles north of San Francisco. Bobby owned property there, in a remote area, but neither that sighting, nor any others, panned out.

America’s Most Wanted
, a weekly program on the FOX Network, was preparing to air a segment on Durst, having interviewed Jim McCormack, Gilberte Najamy, and Jeanine Pirro. The show was slated to air December 1, 2001.