A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst (3 page)

“Give me a couple of minutes,” he said, walking away.

Becerra went back to his desk, called John Ryan, told him about the conversation with Tim Martin, and scheduled a meeting with Martin at Ryan’s White Plains office.

Five minutes later Luttman returned with a folder in his hand.

“Here you go, the Durst file,” he said, dropping the file on Becerra’s desk. “Have a party.”

The file was thin and the first report was dated February 5, 1982. Two troopers had been sent to the Durst home on Hoyt Street in South Salem, which was about three miles from Route 35, a busy thoroughfare.

The troopers were called to the house after receiving a missing-persons report the night before from a woman named Gilberte Najamy. She claimed her friend Kathie Durst hadn’t been seen since January 31. Becerra noted that Kathie was spelled with an
ie
instead of a
y
. Her full name was Kathleen, and she had been twenty-nine years old at the time of her disappearance. Her husband was Robert Durst, thirty-eight, who worked for the Durst Organization, a firm with vast real estate holdings in Manhattan.

There were several interviews in the file, nothing revealing, mainly accusations from Gilberte Najamy that there were problems with the Durst marriage.

Becerra looked over to Luttman, who was back at his desk.

“Is this it, Henry?” said Becerra, holding the file up in the air.

“Yeah, that’s all we have. Call down to New York. It was their case. They did the bulk of the work, if I recall correctly.”

New York’s case? Becerra looked at the file again. The interviews said she had left her home in South Salem and was last spotted in Manhattan.

Becerra picked up the phone, called down to NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza in Manhattan, and asked if they could fish out whatever files the NYPD had on the Kathie Durst case.

He was told that since the file was seventeen years old, it was in the archives and would take a few days to retrieve.

After Becerra hung up the phone, Luttman walked over and sat on the edge of his desk.

“Whaddaya got?”

“I don’t know,” said Becerra, scribbling with his pen on a piece of paper. “But I think I want to find out.”

Timmy Martin sat in a small waiting area in John Ryan’s legal-aid office in White Plains, his deep blue eyes staring down at his feet. Martin wasn’t much to look at: his thinness was the kind you suspected by sight was the result of an enduring drug habit. Of medium height, he had cracks and crevices around his eyes that made him look much older than he was. His cheeks were drawn in toward his mouth, his brown hair pointed in different directions, and a pale complexion gave him a sickly appearance.

It was early December, a week after Martin first called Becerra, who was still waiting for the NYPD file on Kathie Durst. The information in the state police file was intriguing, but didn’t reveal much. The two troopers who had visited the house back in 1982 saw Mr. Durst, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The interviews with some of Kathie Durst’s friends and neighbors, if taken at face value, revealed a woman who seemed to be having some difficulties in life, particularly with her marriage. She was scared of her husband, but Becerra couldn’t find anything definitive in the file that screamed out that she was murdered or that her husband had anything to do with her disappearance. Maybe she didn’t disappear. Perhaps she just decided to jettison one life and pick up another somewhere else.

Seventeen years was a long time, and no one but Martin had even mentioned this case. But Becerra was the curious type, and he wanted to hear what Martin had to say.

Ryan, an easygoing fellow with a middle-aged lawyer’s physique—round in the middle and in the face—explained that Martin was out on probation, but wanted the time cut down from six months to one.

Becerra wasn’t buying it, knowing that probation was the only thing keeping Martin from opening his pants in public again. Another bust, and Becerra knew that Martin would do some jail time.

“See what he has to say and we’ll talk some more,” said Ryan.

Becerra agreed, and Martin was led into the office. He shook Ryan’s hand first, then looked toward Becerra, who was standing with arms folded across his chest.

“Hello, Joe,” said Martin, sheepishly looking at the floor.

“How ya doing, Timmy? Staying out of trouble, I hope.”

Martin nodded, but didn’t reply. Ryan told him to sit down. Becerra remained standing.

“So, Timmy, what do you have for me?”

Martin tried to make eye contact with Becerra, but he just couldn’t lift his gaze off the floor.

“Well, like I told you on the phone, I know who killed Kathie Durst,” he said.

“Keep talking. You got me here, so I’m listening,” said Becerra.

Martin told Becerra that his older brother, Alan, had once been married to a woman named Janet Finke, who owned a maid service. One of her clients was the Dursts. Finke regularly cleaned their cottage in South Salem.

Tim Martin explained that after Kathie Durst disappeared in January 1982, talk centered on her husband, Bobby.

“Janet told us that Bob killed her and buried her,” said Martin.

Becerra listened, but didn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Why would he kill his wife?”

“Because he was nuts. Janet used to say he had a really bad temper. She also said his wife was threatening him. Janet used to talk to Bobby. I think he liked her. She was very pretty. Janet hung around with Kathie, too, said Kathie was going to be a doctor but she was failing school. She was doing too much blow and was hanging out with a lesbian who kept trying to get her to divorce her husband.”

“Come again?” said Becerra. “The maid was friendly with the Dursts and said the wife was threatening her husband and was friendly with a lesbian who liked her? Are you kidding me?”

“No, no. That’s what Janet said. We all knew what happened,” said Martin.

“Do you know how he killed her?”

“No.”

“Do you know where he buried her?”

Martin shook his head.

“But Janet told us that she was in the house a couple of days after Kathie disappeared and it didn’t look right. She was cleaning that house for years and knew it well. She said some of the furniture was out of place, like it had been moved,” said Martin.

Becerra, unmoved by the story, looked at Martin, who was again staring at the floor.

“So you’re telling me you think this guy killed his wife because of a story you heard from a woman who was once married to your brother? You don’t know this for a fact, and you don’t know where he buried her,” said Becerra.

Martin just shrugged his shoulders.

Becerra asked Martin if he knew where Janet Finke lived. He said somewhere in Connecticut, that she had divorced his brother and married some other guy.

“Is that it, that all you got for me?”

“Well, I thought that was something,” said Martin. “I wanted to give it to you because—”

“Because you respect me. Okay, right,” said Becerra, stopping Martin in midsentence. “Why don’t you take off while I talk to your attorney here. And Tim, I don’t want to hear that you’re in trouble again.”

Martin stood up and reached across the floor, extending his thin, bony hand to Becerra, who offered his hand in return.

After Martin left the room, Ryan turned to Becerra and asked him what he thought.

“Not much. That’s a crazy story. But let me take some time to look into this and I’ll get back to you,” said Becerra. “Besides, I’d rather have him on probation. One more slipup, and he’ll be flashing in prison.”

—

On the drive back to the Somers barracks Becerra stopped for lunch—a Caesar salad with chicken and a Diet Coke. Timmy Martin’s story didn’t give him much to think about, and he wasn’t about to ask his superiors for permission to commit himself to a seventeen-year-old cold case based on a tip from a guy who’d been busted for flashing.

As he neared the barracks his cell phone rang, and he recognized the number. It was his attorney, probably with some news about his divorce. He asked Becerra if he had received a letter from his estranged wife’s law firm. Becerra lied, telling him no but remembering the envelope he’d seen earlier in the day.

The conversation ended as Becerra pulled up to the barracks. The letter was nothing, just some perfunctory legal drivel he had to sign. He sat there for a few minutes, thinking about the divorce. He came from a big family, the fourth of six children, some of them married with kids. That’s how it was supposed to be for me, he thought.

As he slowly got out of the car, thoughts of the Kathie Durst story were replaced by a wave of depression that numbed his thoughts, almost knocking him back into the driver’s seat.

He walked into the barracks, past Luttman, who was talking on the phone but pointing with his left hand to Becerra’s desk.

It was the Kathie Durst file, courtesy of the New York City Police Department.

“Came in this morning,” said Luttman, holding the phone to his chest. “How’d it go with Martin?”

Becerra shook his head and stared down at the file. It had to be about four inches thick.

Luttman hung up the phone and walked over to Becerra, whom he considered a protégé. Luttman had always liked Becerra. He thought he was a real gumshoe, a guy with a curious nose for the truth. Investigators came and went, but Luttman knew Becerra had talent.

Luttman also knew that the divorce had weighed down on Becerra.

“What ya gonna do with that?” said Luttman, looking at the file.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m going to have to read it. All of it.”

“Good luck, buddy boy. That’s a whopper of a file. You know where I am if you need me.”

Luttman walked back to his desk while Becerra opened the file, if only to have a glance at what was in store for him. There were dozens of interviews, police reports, requests for search warrants, medical records.

Nobody skimped here, thought Becerra, looking at the fastidious notes, most written by a Detective Michael Struk.

Becerra closed the file, put a rubber band around it, and tucked it under his right arm.

He walked out of the office, whispering to Luttman that he was taking the file home to read. It was late on a Friday afternoon, and Becerra had the weekend to absorb the report. Besides, he had nothing else to do. It wasn’t like he had a family outing to go to.

Becerra stopped on the way home for some Italian takeout, lasagna and a ginger ale. When he arrived home, he was greeted warmly, as usual, by Bullet and Roxy, who weren’t just happy to see him but wanted their dinner, too.

Becerra changed into sweats, fed his dogs, and finished off his lasagna.

Then he settled in on his couch and opened the Kathie Durst file.

The detectives’ squad room on the second floor of Twentieth Precinct in Manhattan was empty, save for one lone detective, Michael Struk, who was sitting at his desk, a cheap cigar tucked in the corner of his mouth, the smoke curling up slowly around his nose.

Struk was an hour into his 4-
P.M.
-to-1-
A.M.
shift and was staring at a picture of his five young children as a steaming cup of freshly brewed black coffee teased his taste buds. The coffee smelled good, but, as usual, it tasted like paint thinner.

It had been a month since Struk had seen his kids, and he was hurting. He missed everything about them, even the confusion that came from having such a large family. The screaming, the yelling, the toys all over the house, the mad dinners, the breakfasts. It wasn’t easy raising five kids.

Not being with them, not hearing their voices, was much harder.

Struk was working a “stay-over,” otherwise known in detective circles as a flip. He’d work nine hours, early into the morning, and then come back at 8
A.M.
for another tour. It was often grueling and was known throughout the ranks as a marriage killer. Struk’s had been no exception. The only thing left between him and his wife after eighteen years of marriage was the five children he was staring at and his signature on the divorce decree.

Struk put the photo in the top drawer in his desk. His eyes were moist. The room was empty, but he knew someone could walk in at any moment. The last thing he wanted anyone to see was Mike Struk crying.

He stood up and took a handkerchief out of his pocket, rubbed the last few tears from his eyes, cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and looked out the window onto West Eighty-second Street.

This was the Two-0, Columbus Avenue and Central Park to the east, Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway to the west. Actors, celebrities, captains of industry, all lived here. With its trendy bars, restaurants, and ultra-fashionable clubs, this was fertile ground for any cop—married or unmarried—a playground within a playground, professionally and socially.

In front of the precinct, police cars lined up, front ends parked facing the building, while several uniformed officers mingled.

Struk went back to his desk and finished off his ten-cent cigar, crushing it into an ashtray. He looked at his watch; it was only 5
P.M.

Struk wished his timepiece counted off years.

He had been on the job since 1965 and was but three years from retirement. He was as experienced as they came: Brooklyn-born and bred with the kind of street smarts that carried him through his seventeen years on the job and countless drug, porno, and murder busts. But seventeen years was a long time on the front lines. It was now 1982 and he was fatigued from engaging the enemy.

He hadn’t always been this tired. When he joined the force right out of the army, he was tall and handsome and looked like a poster boy for the NYPD.

He walked a beat in Brooklyn, accumulating collars and earning a promotion to plainclothes with the First Division, which patrolled the breadbasket of lower Manhattan, from Wall Street to Thirty-fourth Street, and boundaries that stretched from the East River to the Hudson River.

Struk didn’t waste any time fitting right in. He worked nights, taking part in raids on the West Side meat markets, which were owned by the mob and served as fronts for a number of profitable gay clubs.

And he didn’t complain when he was asked to dress in drag and tag along with another cop. There they were, two undercover cops in a third-floor loft, holding pinkies, drinking beers, and watching guys fuck on the bar, or scanning the long line of men waiting to enter a closet, where a guy sat hidden inside, dressed as a penguin, giving round-the-clock blow jobs.

The real targets weren’t the clientele, even though Struk wanted to lock them all up for masquerading as men. It was the ownership, which was any one of New York’s crime families. This was the early 1970s. Big business. Hundreds would walk through the door paying a three-dollar cover charge, and then get hit for one to two dollars for a can of beer, or more for a mixed drink.

Tens of thousands of dollars passed through clubs like this and others throughout the city every night. It was a cash business, and every time the NYPD shut them down, the mystery owners would eventually find a new place to start up again, get the word out, and be back in business.

Struk worked vice for three years, a long stretch for any cop, before he was transferred to the Thirteenth Division narcotics task force back in Brooklyn. It was a good move. He was going to work with some tough, fearless, maybe even crazed cops. But Struk had bought a house in Middletown, in upstate New York, and his young family saw little of him as it was. So he put in for a hardship transfer and landed farther north, in the Bronx, with another narcotics unit in the Eighth District.

The commute was easier, but it didn’t matter. He was hardly home, first spending time on the street making low-level drug buys, then graduating to the twenty-to-thirty-kilo investigations complete with wiretaps.

Struk did his job well, and he was rewarded in 1975 with a promotion to detective working in the Fourth Homicide Zone, which encompassed three police precincts and covered the “gold coast” of Manhattan, from Fifty-ninth Street in the south up to Eighty-sixth Street on the West Side, and Fifty-ninth Street up to Ninety-sixth Street on the East Side, from river to river, including Central Park.

Headquartered in the Two-0, this was the crème de la crème of detective assignments, and Struk was living a detective’s dream. He had the heart of the city during the day, and he’d go home to his wife and five children at night. At least he tried to go home.

By 1980, the NYPD eliminated its specialty units, including the Fourth Homicide Zone, but Struk managed to stay at the Twentieth Precinct, as only one of two experienced detectives working in what he described as a
Barney Miller
squad—soft detectives with no real, hard experience.

Struk volunteered to stay at the Two-0 even though some of the better detectives were sent to the Manhattan task force, which, under the new system, would assist local precincts when they needed additional manpower. Struk would now catch murder cases within the Twentieth Precinct, and on July 2, 1980, he caught the case of his career, what the press dubbed the “Murder at the Met.”

When Struk arrived on the scene at the Metropolitan Opera House that morning, the body of Helen Hagnus Mintiks, thirty-one, lay naked and broken, having been tossed down an airshaft from the third floor of the famed building. She had been performing the night before with the Berlin Orchestra. Around 10
P.M.
she left her station in the orchestra pit. She never returned, her $20,000 violin left on her seat.

Early the next morning, around 5
A.M.
, Mintiks was found dead, bound and gagged.

The Met was hallowed ground, and the murder of a world-class violinist from British Columbia was front-page news, even in the staid
New York Times
.

Struk knew this case was big when Manhattan Chief of Detectives Richard Nicastro arrived on the scene. Top brass like Nicastro wouldn’t have come if it had been just some mom-and-pop murder.

Surrounded by a media circus, with reporters poking and probing every which way, Struk had needed less than a month to find the killer, Greg Crimmins, a twenty-two-year-old Met stagehand who later confessed that he boarded the elevator with Mintiks during her break. He was smoking a joint and drinking a beer and made a clumsy sexual advance toward Mintiks, who responded with a slap to his face.

His beer muscles took over. He pulled out a hammer from his belt, grabbed her, and forced her to a lower level that housed some of the Met’s large, magnificent sets. There he tried to rape her on a stairwell. Mintiks was having her period, but Crimmins told her to take out her tampon. Mintiks did, but Crimmins couldn’t get erect. Too much beer and too much pot. So he pulled her up to her feet and took her to the roof, three floors above street level. Bound, gagged, and naked, she still tried to make a run for it, jumping over a large water pipe. Crimmins chased her down, leaving his palm print on the pipe.

He grabbed her around the waist, brought her to the edge of the roof, and threw her off, later confessing to Struk after learning that his palm print matched the one left on the pipe.

It was by far Struk’s biggest arrest, and for several weeks he was something of a celebrity, the detective who solved the Murder at the Met. He expected a promotion, at the very least a bump up from his third-grade status.

But the police brass did not react kindly when they learned not only that Struk had cooperated with a writer who wrote a book on the Met murder case, but that portions of the book were to be serialized in a porno mag. Struk was forced to cancel a national book tour, his “fifteen minutes” of fame lasting but a few months.

And here he was, two years later, February 5, 1982, sitting at his desk with the rank of detective, third grade, smoking cigars he bought at a bodega, drinking bad black coffee, and longing for his family, when a short man and his dog walked into the second-floor squad room.

The man stood at the wood gate that served as an entrance to the area that contained detectives’ desks, which were lined up along the cinder-block wall of the rectangular squad room. The beige color of the wall only added to what was a depressingly dour environment.

Struk glanced up from his desk, and was less than pleased with what he saw.

He wanted to say,
Who let you the fuck in here with a dog? This is my office, my domain, and you dare bring a dog in here?

Instead, Struk got up, pulling his tall, lanky frame into view, and slowly walked over to the man.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, I’d like to report my wife missing.”

Struk waved his hand for the man to follow him, and he did, with the dog following right behind him.

Struk sat down at his desk, the third of six, and the man followed suit, sitting in a chair on the side of the desk. He didn’t look like much. Probably some pissant rich guy, thought Struk. His hair was short, and he only stood about five feet, eight inches tall. Struk was much taller—six three. The man pulled out a magazine from under his arm. It was a
New York
magazine from May 1980 and on the cover was a photo of five men standing underneath a headline,
THE MEN WHO OWN NEW YO
RK
. Struk recognized Donald Trump and that other guy, Harry Helmsley, but no one else.

“What can I do for you?”

“My name is Robert Durst, and I believe my wife may be missing.”

Durst spoke slowly, and deliberately. He initially made eye contact with Struk, but then turned away, keeping his head facing down toward the desk.

“What’s her name?” said Struk.

“Her name is Kathie, or Kathleen.”

“Why do you think she’s missing?”

Durst explained that he and his wife had last spoken five days earlier, on Sunday night. They spent the weekend in South Salem, where they had a cottage. He said he drove his wife to the Katonah, New York, train station around 9
P.M.
, where she boarded a train for a trip back into the city, to their apartment on Riverside Drive and West Seventy-seventh Street. They had spoken later that night.

“Where’s South Salem?”

“It’s up in northern Westchester County, near the Connecticut border. We have a small home next to a lake—Lake Truesdale. We go there on weekends and during the summer.”

Struk followed Durst’s answers, writing notes on a yellow pad.

He paused to pull out a cigar from his shirt pocket, then resumed the questioning.

Durst said he had spoken to his wife after she arrived in Manhattan, around 11:15
P.M.

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing really. Just small talk. We had an argument before she left and she wanted to get back. So I drove her to the train station.”

“What time was that?”

“Uh, she got on the nine-seventeen train, up in Katonah.”

“And you spoke to her on the phone when she got back to your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“You said you had an argument?”

“Nothing major. She had been gone during the day and we were supposed to go out for dinner.”

“And you haven’t heard from her since you spoke to her Sunday night?”

“No. But that’s not unusual,” said Durst. “She attends medical school, the Albert Einstein School in the Bronx, and she’s often studying. So we can go days without seeing each other.”

“So why do you think she’s missing?”

Durst said he spoke to some of his wife’s friends, who hadn’t seen her since Sunday. He didn’t seem overly concerned, thought Struk. He was cool, unemotional. He could have been sitting in a diner ordering a tuna sandwich.

“I guess I’m a little concerned. I made a report with the New York State Police and I thought I should file one here.”

As Durst spoke, Struk sensed something about him, that aura, that New York look that shouted wealth. It wasn’t his clothes or any jewelry. He looked more like a vagabond, one of those guys who hangs out on the corner begging for quarters. It was just his attitude. This was the West Side of Manhattan, and Struk knew that attitude well. This wasn’t a street guy, that’s for sure, thought Struk.

“How’s your marriage?”

“It’s okay, I guess. No major problems.”

“What’s your occupation?”

“I’m in real estate. My family owns commercial and residential buildings in the city,” said Durst, who was now making direct eye contact with Struk. “My father is Seymour Durst.”

I knew it, a rich punk, thought Struk, who had no idea who Seymour Durst was.

Struk then looked down at the
New York
magazine.

THE M
EN WHO OWN NEW YORK
stared out at him. Struk wanted to ask him if one of these guys on the cover was his father, but he hesitated. He knew if that should prove to be the case, he’d probably take the magazine and stick it up this punk’s ass. Struk hated these money guys and the way they flaunted their wealth and their power, claiming they were prominent.