A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst (5 page)

“Well, I’m glad you told me. Is there anything else?”

“Yes. I believe my wife is having an affair with this man.”

“You told me there weren’t any problems in your marriage, Mr. Durst.”

“I know. Again, this is extremely personal, as you can imagine. I was thinking about this last night after I returned home and thought you should know.”

Bobby told Struk he believed Burns lived in Mount Vernon, north of the city.

“Okay, Mr. Durst. I’m still making calls. When I hear something I’ll let you know.”

Gibbons walked over as Struk hung up the phone, curious about the conversation.

“He thinks his wife is having an affair with some lowlife, a Michael Burns. Says he’s a coke dealer,” said Struk. “He also says she’s snorting a couple of grams of coke a week.”

Gibbons walked back to his office. Struk turned to his report and typed “marital runaway.”

Five uniformed members of the New York Police Department’s elite Emergency Service Unit combed 37 Riverside Drive, checking every common area inside the sixteen-floor building. The elevators, elevator shafts, basement, backyard area, roof, stairwells, and water tower were meticulously searched.

It was Monday afternoon, February 8, and five detectives from the Twentieth Precinct, including Mike Struk, had joined the search, doubling the police presence at the building. Some of the residents gathered in the lobby, wondering why nearly a dozen police officers were poking and probing throughout their home.

One woman stood wearing her sable fur while an elderly man tried to control his four dachshunds, which were bouncing wildly.

One ESU truck, painted in the familiar blue and white of the NYPD, sat in front of the building, along with one patrol car and two unmarked cars driven by the detectives.

Struk didn’t want to attract attention to the search for Kathie Durst, but his conversation just a few hours earlier with Lieutenant Gibbons had set all this activity at Riverside Drive in motion.

Struk had left the Twentieth Precinct Saturday afternoon all but convinced that Kathie had fled and was sunning herself somewhere with a lover, probably enjoying unfamiliar surroundings and indulging in wine and cocaine. He didn’t think highly of Kathie, believing her to be an out-of-control wife who drank excessively, snorted coke, and slept around. Struk would have closed the book on the case if it hadn’t been for one lingering thought—a doubt he tried to erase, but that just wouldn’t go away. Women left their husbands every day. But his experience was telling him that a woman like Kathie Durst, blue-collar background and all, didn’t just up and leave a guy like Robert Durst, given his wealth and standing. She was in medical school, for Christ’s sake, only a few months away from graduation. What was she thinking?

Struk’s thoughts centered on Bobby. Gibbons thought it was odd that Bobby would wait five days to report his wife missing. And Bobby said
he
called the New York State Police to report his wife missing when it was one of Kathie’s friends who made the call. In reality, Bobby was surprised to see the state police show up at his door Friday morning.

As the squad room came to life that morning after the slow weekend—with phones ringing incessantly, detectives talking, the noise from other parts of the busy precinct rumbling through the floors—Struk and Gibbons talked at length about the case.

Struk observed that Bobby displayed little emotion or genuine concern about his missing wife.

“He just doesn’t seem to care,” he said.

Both agreed that Struk should make a few more calls and perhaps even pay a visit to 37 Riverside Drive. If anything, they could get this settled and move on to other things.

—

The penthouse was on the sixteenth floor, with the Hudson River just across from the Henry Hudson Parkway. Struk showed his badge to the doorman, who called upstairs to Bobby, announcing he had a visitor.

Once inside, Struk noted that the rooms were of medium size and that the apartment was somewhat bare and unkempt, with the furniture nondescript.

If he hadn’t known it already, Struk would never have guessed that the penthouse was the home of a man of Bobby’s means. Kathie Durst might have been a bright woman, a medical student, but she wasn’t much of a homemaker, thought Struk. The place needed a good cleaning.

There was one attraction, the balcony, which offered spectacular views of the Hudson River.

Bobby quietly followed as Struk entered each room, searching for any signs of a struggle, or blood, or anything that might suggest something was amiss.

The tour lasted ten minutes. Struk hadn’t expected to find anything. After all, if something did happen here, Struk reasoned, would Bobby Durst let a detective nose around?

When the two men settled down in the living room, Bobby seemed more relaxed. At six feet, three inches tall, Struk towered over Bobby, but sitting, they were close to being eye to eye. Bobby’s Norwegian elkhound, whom he’d named Igor, settled down at his feet. Bobby offered Struk something to drink, which he declined. Struk was more interested in hearing where Bobby had been the past week.

Bobby answered each question slowly and deliberately, a slight twitch noticeable at the corner of his mouth.

“We had an argument that Sunday night. Kathie came home from Gilberte Najamy’s in a foul mood. She walked in and started yelling and screaming. She appeared to be drunk. She opened a bottle of red wine and poured full glasses, yelled some more, then said she was driving back to the city. I told her she was in no condition to drive, so I drove her to the Katonah train station, where she caught a nine-seventeen
P.M.
train back to Manhattan.”

“What were you arguing about?”

“Issues, with us. Things concerning our relationship. She always argued with me whenever she hung around with Gilberte Najamy.”

“And you spoke to her later that night?”

“Yes, I was walking my dog, so I called her from a pay phone near Route 35.”

“That’s pretty far from your house, isn’t it?” said Struk, remembering the conversation with Trooper Harney, who’d wondered out loud why Durst would make a call from so far away.

“Yeah, a couple of miles, but I was walking my dog and we ended up there, so I made a quick call to see if she was all right.”

The conversation shifted to Bobby’s week, where he was and what he did. The answers came quickly: a couple of business trips, one in Connecticut on Tuesday to scout properties. Nothing really special.

“I’m usually very busy during the week,” said Bobby, who didn’t look very busy this Monday morning, wearing sweats and sneakers.

Struk flipped to a fresh page in his small notebook, easily following Bobby’s responses, which were delivered in a slow drawl.

Bobby reiterated his suspicions about Michael Burns, whom he believed to be a drug dealer engaged in an affair with his wife.

“Is that just a feeling you have, that he’s having an affair with your wife, or do you know this for a fact?”

“It’s more a feeling. He’s always with her. I thought it was for the cocaine, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Any idea how they met?”

“Gilberte Najamy. He knew Gilberte and she introduced him to Kathie. When Burns wasn’t around, Kathie would get her drugs through Gilberte.”

“Gilberte Najamy?”

“Yeah, she’s like a drugstore,” said Bobby. “She is a very bad influence on my wife. She’s also been trying to break us up. I don’t know why. I mean, I heard she liked women, though I don’t think she’d be silly enough to think she’d ever get Kathie into bed with her. Have you met her? She looks manly. Always wears these awful combat boots. I think Kathie just hangs out with her for the drugs. When they’re together, Kathie’s always coming back here, picking a fight.”

Struk noted Bobby’s comments on Najamy, folded his notebook, and slipped it into an inside pocket in his black trench coat. As he got up to leave, he had one more question for Bobby.

“Did you ever hit or beat your wife?”

Bobby handled the questions easily. “No, I’d never hit Kathie.”

He walked Struk to the door, assuring him of his continued cooperation, maintaining he only wanted to see that his wife was safe.

Struk boarded the elevator and told the operator to take him to the ground floor. The operator closed the door and the elevator descended. Struk reached into his pocket and pulled out his notebook, scribbling some quick notes, including Bobby’s denial that he ever hit Kathie. He then took out his badge and showed it to the elevator operator.

“Say, buddy, do you know Kathie Durst?”

The operator nodded yes.

“Were you working last Sunday night?”

The operator paused for a moment, then said he worked until 6
A.M.

“Did you see Mrs. Durst?”

“Um, yeah, I did. I did see Mrs. Durst. Last Sunday night, yeah, right, I took her up to her apartment.”

Struk took out his pad again. “What’s your name?”

“Eddie, Eddie Lopez.”

“And you saw Mrs. Durst last Sunday night? On January thirty-first?”

“Yes, about eleven
P.M.
”

“Was she with anybody?”

“No. Mrs. Durst was alone. But I did take a man up to her penthouse about an hour or two later.”

“Can you describe him?”

“White guy, I don’t know, maybe thirty-five years old. Good dresser, dark pants, leather jacket. He had a very thick neck and, I remember, marks on his face, like little craters.”

“You’re sure he went to Mrs. Durst’s apartment?”

“Yeah,” said Lopez. “I see her open the door.”

“Ever see this guy before?”

“No.”

Struk returned to the station house around noon and told Gibbons they had an eyewitness, an elevator operator, who saw Kathie and even brought a visitor to her apartment.

Struk had quizzed another building employee, a doorman named Phillip Marrero, who said he thought he saw Kathie Durst leave the building Monday morning and get into a cab. When asked if he was sure it was Kathie Durst, Marrero said he saw her from behind, but was almost certain it was her.

The two sightings were enough for Gibbons and Struk to agree that the building should be thoroughly searched. Gibbons made the call to the Emergency Service Unit and directed Struk and four other detectives from his squad to go to 37 Riverside Drive at 2
P.
M.

As Struk headed for his desk to check his messages before leaving for the search, he turned around to Gibbons, a quizzical look on his face.

“Hey, Lou, one more thing. Durst says he never hit his wife.”

“What guy would admit to smacking his wife around?” said Gibbons. “If that was my wife running around like that, I’d be pretty pissed off.”

Struk agreed, returned to his desk, and decided to make several more calls before leaving for Riverside Drive.

The state police had nothing new to report, and an admissions officer at Einstein, Noreen Kerrigan, said Kathie was thinking of traveling to North Dakota for a clinical study. If anything, it was to get away from her husband, said Kerrigan.

Struk placed another call to Dr. David Kaufman, the course director at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, where Kathie went for several classes. Kaufman repeated the same story everyone else had, that Kathie’s marriage was shaky and she appeared to be incredibly stressed over the last year. So bad was the stress, said Kaufman, that Kathie wasn’t just doing poorly, she was on the verge of flunking out. She’d failed a urology clerkship the previous summer and was less than thrilled when informed she had to repeat the course.

In fact, said Kaufman, Kathie had missed far too many classes and clinics. And she’d offered the most absurd reasons as excuses: things like her car breaking down, sometimes for two or three days at a time. Once for a whole week.

The coke-fiend doctor is missing classes, thought Struk, and called Dr. Al Cooperman, a dean at Einstein, who had interesting news: he was the dean whom Kathie called early Monday morning to say she wasn’t going to make it into school, complaining of headaches and diarrhea.

“Are you sure that was Kathie Durst?” said Struk.

“I believe so. Who else would make a call like that?” said Cooperman.

Struk hung up the phone and headed back over to the penthouse.

—

The search at 37 Riverside Drive lasted about two hours. Two detectives took the elevator to the top floor, then walked down the stairwells, stopping on every floor to check the halls. The basement, where the generator and boiler and building supplies were located, was thoroughly combed, every corner, crack, and crevice.

The roof was searched from end to end, and a single detective checked inside the water tower. The backyard, which was between two large buildings, was clean.

When the police left around 4
P.M.
, Struk was pleased that they got out of there with little notice. He wasn’t concerned so much about the neighbors, but he was leery of the press. The wife of a man like Bobby Durst reported missing? That would make the front page of any newspaper, particularly in New York, where tabloids like the
Daily News
and
Post
existed for stories like this. And Struk had firsthand familiarity with front-page news, having solved the Murder at the Met.

But there were no reporters at the scene. The escape was clean, as was the search, which came up empty.

By the time Struk returned to the Twentieth Precinct, he was tired. Thoughts that Bobby Durst perhaps knew more about his wife’s disappearance than he was letting on still nagged at him, but he was less concerned about Bobby Durst than about this “mystery man” who’d visited Bobby’s wife late Sunday night.

—

Tuesday morning, February 9, began like any other morning for Mike Struk, who pushed himself out of bed around 6:30
A.M.
, showered, and had a quick cup of coffee and half a corn muffin.

The radio was tuned to one of the all-news radio stations, but he wasn’t paying attention and missed the report about the wife of a real estate tycoon who was missing and the large reward being offered for information.

As he dressed, buttoning a wrinkled white shirt and a two-piece suit pulled from the racks of JCPenney, his phone rang, but he was busy tying a knot in his tie and let it ring.

He arrived at the Twentieth Precinct just before 8
A.M.
, and once inside, he walked up the stairs to the detectives’ squad room. A couple of uniformed officers were heading down and said something to Struk about the
Daily News
, but Struk wasn’t paying attention. He just nodded and opened the door to the squad room, where he noticed Lieutenant Gibbons on the phone in his office, frantically pointing toward Struk to come inside.

Gibbons pushed copies of the
New York Daily News
and
New York Post
toward Struk, who picked up the papers and saw their front pages.

WIFE MISSING: 100G
REWARD
was on the cover of the
News
.