A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst (30 page)

I began working on the Robert Durst story for
People
magazine in October 2000. Three weeks after my story was published, Susan Berman was murdered. I later wrote a lengthy piece on the Durst case for
Reader’s Digest
in 2002 and served as a consultant for
CBS News
in 2003.

During that time I traveled from New York to Pennsylvania, Galveston, northern California and back, interviewing dozens of people including law enforcement personnel involved in the various investigations, and friends and acquaintances of the victims. I also developed numerous sources who kept me abreast then, and now, of developments in the Durst case.

In preparing for the eBook edition of
A Deadly Secret
, I made the rounds again in August 2010 and reached out to various people and sources, some of whom I haven’t spoken to in several years, to see if there was anything new to report.

There was, which is included in the Finale chapter, which I updated again in 2012.

The strange story of Robert Durst continues . . .

While the FBI was unable to connect Durst to the Long Island murders, the bureau did become interested in Durst in relation to his long-missing wife, Kathie, and Susan Berman. They subsequently formed a loose Durst task force in 2012 with the Westchester district attorney’s office and the Los Angeles police and began probing.

In the fall of 2014, HBO announced that it had acquired a documentary from producer/director Andrew Jarecki, who had been studying the Durst case for almost a decade. I first met Jarecki in 2005 when we sat down along with his producing partner, Marc Smerling, to discuss my book and research. The pair was working on a feature film adaptation of the Durst story; their movie,
All Good Things
, which starred Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst
,
premiered in 2010.

The film, which drew the wrath of the Durst family, faired poorly at the box office, due in large part to the pressure placed on studio executives by Douglas Durst.

In 2011, I had lunch with Jarecki, and he told me he was again working on a Durst project, this time a documentary. And, he added, Bobby Durst had agreed to be interviewed.

It was, shockingly, Durst’s idea, said Jarecki, who explained that Durst had seen
All Good Things
and liked Ryan Gosling’s sensitive portrait of the fictional Robert Durst character—that of a son overwhelmed by his powerful father and family.

Jarecki said he already had several of hours of interviews filmed with Durst, and that some of what he said could be incriminating. I congratulated Jarecki for doing something no one else could—getting Bobby to talk. Jarecki was still of the opinion that there was more to Bobby Durst than the tabloid headlines, and that he was a complicated character. I knew enough about Durst to be convinced otherwise. We agreed to disagree. So when Jarecki asked me during our lunch to give an interview for his film, I politely declined then, and again during another meeting we had a few months later.

Three years would pass until the fall of 2014, when HBO announced that it had acquired Jarecki’s long-gestating documentary, now called
The Jinx
. The six-part series premiered on February 8, 2015, and for the uninitiated it served as a primer on the basics of the Durst story. It wasn’t until the fifth episode that we saw for the first time a letter Durst had sent to Susan Berman in 1999. The writing appeared to be the same as that on the so-called “cadaver letter” sent to the police in 2000, and included the identical misspelling of “Beverley Hills.”

As interest in the Durst case swelled due to
The Jinx
, on the morning of Sunday, March 15, I received a call from Jim McCormack telling me that the FBI had arrested Bobby the night before in New Orleans on a murder warrant from Los Angeles. Bobby had apparently been planning to leave the country, possibly for Cuba, and FBI agents had surrounded him outside his hotel. The arrest came the night before the final episode of
The Jinx
.

That finale, in which Jarecki prepares to confront Bobby about the handwriting on the 1999 letter and the similarity to the cadaver letter, led up to one of the most stunning moments in television history.

When the interview concluded, Bobby walked into a bathroom, apparently unaware that his microphone was still on. He could be heard saying, “There it is, you’re caught.” He then shifts into what appears to be a multipersonality back-and-forth conversation with himself that concludes with “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

Those three chilling words,
killed them all
, sent shockwaves throughout the nation. Combined with his arrest the night before, the finale of
The Jinx
put Durst on the front burner of the national news cycle. And that included, after tweleve long years, attention to other cases, including that of Karen Mitchell.

On Wednesday, March 18, the FBI issued a nationwide alert to police departments in cities where Durst was known to have lived to review cold case missing-persons files. Durst, the FBI now believed, could very well be a serial killer. Earlier that day in New Orleans, police had released the search warrant issued on Durst’s Houston apartment. Inside they found a latex mask, fake identifications, more than $42,000 in cash, and three books, two of which were copies of
A Deadly Secret
.

Kathie and Bobby, New Hyde Park, New York, Christmas, 1979.

Courtesy Jim McCormack

Kathie with Igor at Seymour Durst’s Katonah, New York, estate, circa 1978.

Courtesy Jim McCormack

Graduation day, Western Connecticut State College, May 1978. Kathie Durst kneeling on left, Eleanor Schwank on far right.

Courtesy Eleanor Schwank

Ellen Strauss, 1981. The would-be attorney kept her notes and documents on the Durst case in a safe-deposit box.

Courtesy Ellen Strauss

Eleanor Schwank, Nantucket, 1981. Eleanor blamed Bobby soon after leaning of Kathie’s disappearance.

Courtesy Eleanor Schwank

Mike Struk, detective NYPD. Lead investigator on the Durst case, 1982.

Courtesy Mike Struk

Joe Becerra, investigator, New York State Police, 2001. Becerra reopened the Durst case in 1999 after receiving a tip.

Courtesy Frank Becerra

Private investigator Bobbi Sue Bacha in her Webster, Texas, office, 2002. Her relentless work on the Durst case exposed more of Bobby’s secrets.

Courtesy Bobbi Sue Bacha