A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst (25 page)

Gilberte Najamy canceled her planned meeting with Jeanine Pirro the Monday after Bobby’s extradition hearing, explaining she had more important work to do. Instead she drove from her home in Connecticut to the Garden State Parkway and on to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, to meet with Tom Brown Jr.

Brown is a world-famous survivalist and tracker who had grown up in south Jersey. Gilberte heard about him from a reporter. It was explained that Brown, the subject of several books, could be tossed into the middle of a thick forest, buck naked, and come out a week later dressed in leaves and vine and ten pounds heavier.

His specialty was the Pine Barrens.

When he was just a child, as the story of Tom Brown Jr. goes, he was taught the art of tracking and surviving in the harshest of elements by an old Apache Indian, and in his lifetime he has covered large parts of the 1.1-million-acre natural wonder, part sand dune and part forest, filled with exotic trees, plants, and animal life. Brown lived there, alone, often for weeks. And he taught there, taking students deep inside to ready-made huts to teach them the basics about living and surviving outdoors.

Over the years Brown developed a number of talents in the Pine Barrens, including the recovery of long-buried bodies.

During his long stays there, Brown sometimes came across a depression in the ground, which signaled the sandy earth had once been disturbed, probably with a shovel.

His fame, and ability to detect gravesites, went far beyond New Jersey. Police departments throughout the country would call, asking for his help in finding missing bodies.

So it made sense to Gilberte to call Brown following a conversation with her old friend Eleanor Schwank.

Eleanor was working as a nurse in Matagorda, Texas, a one-restaurant town on the Texas coast southwest of Galveston. A Texas secret, Matagorda was known by only a few for its great fishing and beautiful beaches.

Schwank put up with the burning-hot weather and never-ending mosquito onslaught for the peace and quiet of Matagorda. She had a small cabin next to a winding river that filtered into the ocean. It was a great fishing spot and a place she hoped to one day rent out to earn a few extra dollars.

After hearing about Tom Brown, Gilberte called Eleanor to see if perhaps she would agree to chip in to pay Brown to search for Kathie’s remains.

It was a long shot, but Eleanor agreed, as did Ellen Strauss. But after Gilberte met with Brown in his house and he agreed to undertake the search, telling him the story of her lost friend who everyone believed was buried somewhere in the Pine Barrens, she didn’t call Eleanor or Ellen to let them know.

Instead she made another call.

Brown had explained that given the fact that Bobby had been in Ship Bottom and across the bridge in Manahawkin, there were a few old, long-forgotten trails nearby that Bobby might have been able to drive through. And it was possible that if Kathie’s remains were buried there, they could be found. Brown said he would put together a group of his students to help in the search, and they could do it sometime in April, after he returned from a training session in Florida.

Gilberte was absolutely delighted, and instead of calling her friends to share the news, she promptly called Jeanine Pirro.

After explaining where she had been and who she had talked to, Gilberte handed the phone to Brown, who said that yes, he could possibly find someone who had been buried twenty years earlier.

“I doubt he’d go far into the Pine Barrens,” said Brown.

Pirro told Brown that Bobby was probably driving a maroon Mercedes at the time. Considering its low clearance from the ground, the burial possibilities were narrowed even more.

Pirro agreed to an April search, but asked Brown not to tell the press or the Ocean County police. Confidentiality was a top priority.

Brown gave the phone back to Gilberte, who said her good-byes to Pirro. The two women agreed to meet the next week, when Gilberte would finally tell Pirro her story.

Since the start of his investigation two years earlier, Joe Becerra had collected written depositions from nearly all of Kathie’s old friends, except for Gilberte. She always had excuses, even for people like Ellen Strauss, who asked why it was taking so long. Gilberte said she didn’t like what she had written, it was far too long, or that there were things she had forgotten about but needed to include. With Becerra now out of the picture, Gilberte felt comfortable that her deposition wouldn’t be needed. Instead, she’d tell her story directly to Pirro.

After leaving Brown, Gilberte floated back to Connecticut, convinced that she would be the heroine of the story if Brown could find Kathie’s remains. It would make her version of things complete. Best friend keeps long-held promise.

Pirro hung up with Gilberte convinced that she would raise her stock immeasurably if Brown was somehow able to locate the last resting place of Kathie Durst.

It would be the press conference of all press conferences.

Joe Becerra knew nothing about Tom Brown or the planned search. Pirro stopped talking to him after the
Vanity Fair
story was published. He was still working on the Durst case, but any relevant information was written up and sent to Pirro’s office.

There were no face-to-face meetings, no phone calls. Becerra was cut off.

—

The constant hum from the traffic crossing the causeway in the distance sounded like a large beehive from the concrete pier where Bobbi Sue Bacha stood looking down into the waters of Galveston Bay.

It was 7
A.M.
on Friday, February 7, and Bobbi Sue was scoping the pier and inlet where Morris Black’s remains had been found bobbing in the water. The tide on this morning and the next was expected to be the lowest of the month, so low you could see the rocks and boulders on the bottom of the bay. It was the perfect time to search for and possibly locate Morris Black’s head.

Bobbi Sue was investigating the Black case on her own time, helping his family back in Boston. One of the sisters, Gladys, had even filed a wrongful-death suit against Bobby.

Bobbi Sue was fascinated by the case. Although she was initially frustrated with her inability to find out more about Morris and Bobby Durst, the frustration spurred her to work even harder.

It took several months, including interviews with Morris’s siblings, but Bobbi Sue eventually learned more about Morris Black.

And what she discovered was both frightening and sickening.

His parents had suffered from apparent mental problems, forcing them to place their six children in foster homes. One of his brothers was later placed in a mental institution in Boston. Some of the children, including Morris, eventually returned home. But home was hell, with charges against the father of sexual abuse, abuse in which Morris had participated. Some of the siblings hadn’t spoken to Morris in decades and were not the least bit disappointed upon hearing the news that he was dead.

Morris left home for the Merchant Marine when he was eighteen, following his older brother Harry. He returned in the early 1950s, but there was no trace of him until 1972, when he bought a building near Boston Harbor with a woman named Lorraine Black, who was apparently his wife. They had no children anyone could remember, and no one knew what became of Lorraine.

His sisters Gladys and Beatrice never heard of her.

The building was taken by the city of Boston in 1976 after a bank foreclosed on Morris. In 1980 he scraped up enough money, $6,500, to buy another building in the Boston area, a three-story tenement at 10 Hannon Street.

Bobbi Sue tracked down an old tenant, Carrie Williams, who was now living in South Carolina. An elderly woman, Williams described Black as the landlord from hell.

He refused to pay for any repairs, opting to do them all himself to save money. He once sued the TV cable company because a technician put a small hole in a wall while wiring an apartment. He personally picked up the rent every month, money orders or cash, and spent his time limping along the streets wearing a red knit hat, even during the summer. The limp was the result of an injury suffered when he was a child.

Morris had no phone, no car, and never any visitors, said Williams. He was a testy, mean, nasty, and difficult man who would argue with anyone and everyone. He often expressed a profound hatred for women.

He had one quality, though, that Bobbi Sue found interesting: he was fearless.

A shopkeeper around the corner from 10 Hannon Street described an occasion when Morris learned that one of his tenants was dealing drugs. When the shopkeeper suggested that he call the police, Morris said no, he’d handle it himself. He went into the building, grabbed the suspected dealer by the neck, and tossed him out onto the street, along with his clothes and personal items, screaming and yelling throughout the “eviction.”

The dealer was never seen again.

There were times during the early 1980s when Black would disappear. He landed in New York in late 1981, renting space in a barbershop in the lobby of a midtown office building and working as a watch repairman. Bobbi Sue thought it was odd that Morris would be in New York around the time that Kathie Durst disappeared.

Morris returned to Boston in late 1982 and tried working as a watch repairman in that city, along with other assorted jobs. Bobbi Sue wondered if he had traveled to Boston every month to collect the rent checks during his stay in New York.

By 1987, his $6,500 investment on Hannon Street was worth $137,500, and Morris decided to sell the building and take off for warmer climates in the South. He bounced around a variety of harbor towns, including Charleston (South Carolina), Long Beach (Mississippi), and Galena Park (Texas).

He arrived in Galveston shortly before Bobby Durst.

The profile Bobbi Sue created contained much more information on Morris, and gave her a clear indication he had been a troubled, and dangerous, individual. But she knew the file was far from complete, and she tested every search engine she knew of to find more information, but there was none. He was still an enigma, a man who, for some still-unknown reason, hung around the homeless and down-and-out of society during the last year of his life.

Something was missing, and it grated on Bobbi Sue to no end. Durst wouldn’t have killed Morris just because he was an annoying old man, would he? She was aware of the story that came out of the Jesse Tree, that Ted Hanley believed Durst was the wealthy man Morris knew who could provide a loan for a new building.

Another thought occurred to Bobbi Sue. She learned from New York reporters about the itinerary Bobby allegedly wrote in 1982. There was a name, Marshall Bradde, that Bobby wrote down and supposedly met on Monday, February 1, the day after his wife disappeared.

The reporters were familiar with the names of most of Bobby’s friends, but none had ever heard of a Marshall Bradde. Bobbi Sue searched for the name but came up empty. She wondered, could Bobby have possibly written “Marshall Bradde” as a pseudonym for Morris Black? They had the same initials, M.B. If so, did Morris help Bobby dispose of Kathie’s body? It was just a theory, a wild shot in the dark. But this was a case full of theories, since there was little history on the mysterious Morris.

Even more grating to Bobbi Sue was that Morris’s head was still missing, believed to be at the bottom of Galveston Bay.

The Galveston district attorney, Mike Guarino, appeared to be confident that the evidence in hand would be more than enough to convict Bobby of murder, even without the head.

Bobbi Sue wasn’t so sure.

To make it a slam dunk, Bobbi Sue decided that prosecutors needed the head, and if they weren’t going to search for it, she would.

Along with her husband, Lucas, and Jeff Moore, Blue Moon’s chief investigator, she walked the pier in the morning sun preparing for their search the next day.

Even “Daddy”—Bobbi Sue’s ex-cop father—came along for the ride, and as soon as he got out of Lucas’s Dodge Durango, he walked out toward the water and then headed back inland, following the coastline.

“Daddy, where you going?” said Bobbi Sue.

Her father didn’t reply.

“I can’t stop that man,” she mumbled.

As they looked out over the water, they knew that the police had theorized that Black’s torso had washed up between the pier and a rock jetty, the garbage bags filled with body parts on the other side of the pier. The police said Bobby had probably come by late at night, probably around 2
A.M.
, and dumped everything somewhere near the rock jetty. They arrived at that theory after discovering through interviews with neighbors that Bobby was in the neighborhood earlier that day, asking people if anyone fished these waters at night, or if the police were ever in the area.

This theory may have worked for the police, but it didn’t wash with Bobbi Sue. Dropping Morris’s body near the rock jetty made little sense. Bobbi Sue wondered out loud how anyone could walk along the jagged rocks carrying such heavy weights. She believed it was far more feasible for someone to toss the torso and garbage bags off the end of the flat concrete pier, expecting everything to float out toward the shipping lanes, where it would sink and never be found.

Instead, the tide pushed it all back to shore.

But as she gazed out over the water, Bobbi Sue wondered why the torso would have floated one way, toward the jetty, which was over to the right, and the garbage bags the other way, to the left, on the other side of the pier. Bobbi Sue knew how unpredictable these waters were. She’d practically lived in them as a child. But it didn’t seem possible that the currents had been going in separate directions.

Unable to solve the question about where the remains were tossed into the water, Bobbi Sue walked up and down the concrete pier, dressed to her ankles in black, bending over to look into the murky water, which was only a few feet deep. Dark objects of various sizes, which appeared to be rocks, could be seen. One particular object was small, about the size and shape of a human head. It appeared to be covered with green algae and had two white, stringy objects floating upward. They looked like they were coming from where the eyes would be.