A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst

“Provocative.”—CourtTV.com

“In covering the Durst case for nearly two years I’ve found there has been one constant—that what appears to be the truth, what has been told to be the truth, is not.”

—From the author’s preface

A DEADLY SECRET

The Bizarre and Chilling Story of Robert Durst

From award-winning investigative reporter Matt Birkbeck—the first journalist to have access to the NYPD files on the Durst case.

Also based on interviews with family, friends, and acquaintances of the Dursts’ and others involved with the case.

Includes eight pages of photographs.

Berkley titles by Matt Birkbeck

A DEADLY SECRET

A BEAUTIFUL CHILD

T
HE QUIET DON

A DEADLY SECRET

The Bizarre and Chilling Story of Robert Durst

MATT BIRKBECK

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

A DEADLY SECRET

Copyright © 2002, 2005 by Matt Birkbeck.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-98743-8

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley hardcover edition / September 2002

Berkley mass-market edition / September 2003

Berkley trade paperback edition / April 2015

Cover art: Front cover photo of Robert Durst © by Steven Hirsch/

Splash News/Corbis.

Most Berkley Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales, promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: [email protected].

For Donna, Matthew, and Christopher
With love

This book is dedicated to
Donald W. Birkbeck
NYPD
1957 to 1979

In November 2000, my bureau chief at
People
magazine asked me to cover the story about the renewed police investigation into the disappearance of Kathie Durst.

Since 1997 I have reported on dozens of stories for
People
as a freelance correspondent, but none as bizarre, and tragic, as the Durst case.

Kathie Durst, twenty-nine, was married to Robert Durst, thirty-eight, the heir to a New York real estate fortune, now estimated to be worth $2 billion. Kathie was last seen January 31, 1982, her disappearance front-page news. The New York City police investigated Kathie’s disappearance, but Robert, who reported his wife missing, later hired a criminal attorney and refused to cooperate. His family, notably his powerful father, Seymour, also refused to cooperate.

Charges were never filed, and Kathie’s body was never found.

—

Like Kathie, the case disappeared. Seventeen years later, in 1999, the New York State Police reopened the investigation after receiving an innocuous tip.

In November 2000, as I was reporting on the story for
People
, interviews with the friends and family of Kathie Durst, and with the NYPD, suggested that Robert Durst had indeed killed his pretty wife, who was just months shy of graduating from medical school.

The
People
story was published on December 4, 2000. Three weeks later, on Christmas Eve, a woman named Susan Berman was found shot to death in her Los Angeles home.

Berman, the daughter of a well-known Las Vegas mobster, was considered one of Robert Durst’s best friends and was long rumored to have known what happened to Kathie. Several of Kathie’s friends suggested I interview Berman. Regrettably, calls were made but a fast approaching deadline prevented it from happening.

Berman’s death sent shock waves from coast to coast. The Durst story again became front-page news, and subsequently the subject of numerous print and television news reports.

—

In September 2001, the case took yet another bizarre turn when a human torso washed up on a shore in Galveston, Texas.

The victim was Morris Black, seventy-one, a drifter. He was dismembered, his arms and legs found floating in garbage bags near the torso. His head was not recovered. Little more than a week later, Galveston police arrested Robert Durst and charged him with Black’s murder.

Durst had quietly rented a $300-a-month apartment in Galveston nearly a year earlier after learning about the new investigation into the disappearance of his long-lost wife. In yet another bizarre twist, Durst arrived in Galveston in drag, masquerading as a woman.

Police searched Durst’s blood-soaked apartment and his car and found two guns, a .22 and a nine-millimeter, the same type of gun used to kill Susan Berman.

Durst posted bail but later slipped out of Texas, skipping a hearing and becoming a fugitive and one of America’s most-wanted men.

He was found six weeks later in Bath, Pennsylvania, arrested first for stealing a chicken salad sandwich from a local supermarket, his true identity later revealed to an alert Pennsylvania cop.

In January 2002, Durst was extradited to Texas. His trial for the murder of Morris Black is scheduled for 2003.

—

In covering the Durst case for nearly two years I’ve found there has been one constant—that what appears to be the truth, what has been told to be the truth, is not.

The story that you are about to read is the result of hours upon hours of research, along with painstakingly long interviews with the friends, family, and acquaintances of the Dursts’ and others who are involved in the case.

The 1982 investigation into Kathie’s disappearance, as it unfolds in
A Deadly Secret
, was taken from interviews and first-person accounts of those involved, along with access to the actual NYPD files. No other journalist has had access to those files, until now.

The same methodology, along with a good dose of investigative reporting, was used to pull together the shocking events that have transpired since the investigation was reopened in November 1999.

All the names in the book are real, except for one, where I agreed to withhold an identity. (It is marked by an asterisk*.) The events in the book are real, or as close to real as humanly possible, based on interviews and first-person accounts of the participants.

Thanks to Maria Eftimiades, the former New York bureau chief at
People
magazine; Helen George, a journalist and associate professor at Northampton Community College; and Paul Moses, a former reporter and editor at
Newsday
, author, and associate professor of journalism at Brooklyn College, for their help and guidance with this book.

A cold wind blew easily through the thick oak trees that protected the palatial home on Hampton Road, pressing down the almost bare branches and forcing them back and forth in rhythmic fashion, blowing off the few remaining leaves, which were swept out into the open air.

Some of the leaves were hurled to the ground while others were caught in the draft and forced upward, landing on the roof of the picturesque two-story home and at the bare feet of a woman, who was standing alone in the cool, nighttime air, high above the concrete driveway, wearing only a nightgown and robe.

Below her, in the driveway, was Scarsdale police Sergeant Vincent Jural, who arrived at the house around 8:30
P.M.
, the wailing sounds of a fire engine not too far behind in the distance.

Jural spent several minutes trying to convince the woman to sit down, since the dark brown, ceramic roof was pitched sharply, making it almost impossible for someone to stand on it without losing her balance. But there she stood, her toes pointed downward, her weight supported by the balls of her feet, performing a kind of balancing act as she looked up toward the starry fall sky, oblivious to the elements.

Standing nervously behind Jural were three men. Just a half hour earlier they had been sitting in the living room, discussing the woman’s condition, a radio turned on in the background, a newscaster reporting that United Nations forces were battling the Chinese in Korea.

With cigar and cigarette smoke slowly rising toward the ceiling, their quiet discussion about depression and paranoia had been interrupted by a loud scream. It came from a little boy, only seven, who had ventured into his mother’s bedroom to see if she was comfortable. Instead he found the bed empty, and he raced through the upper floors, frantically searching from room to room, then running down the stairs.

He found his mother.

“Mommy! Mommy!” he said, panting. “Mommy’s on the roof!”

“On the roof? Where?” said the boy’s father, jumping up from his seat.

“In the back. Over the garage. Hurry up,” he said. “We have to get her.”

The three men followed the boy, who ran toward the back of the home, out through the kitchen, and onto the driveway.

“Look, up there,” the boy said, pointing.

The men could see her, standing above a second-floor bedroom window and far above the driveway, which was sloped downward, half a floor below the ground level.

“Bernice, Bernice, are you all right?” shouted one of the men. “You have to get down from there. Do you hear me? Walk over to the window and come back inside.”

The woman slowly turned her head and looked down toward the men, focusing on her husband, but she did not reply. She stood there, staring intensely, before taking her eyes off him and redirecting her blank gaze out beyond the trees.

“Somebody call the police,” said the husband.

The call went out at 8:18
P.M.
, and the husband, wearing a pained expression on his face, greeted Jural upon his arrival.

“She’s in the back, on the roof,” he said.

As the two men took hurried steps, Jural asked why she was up on the roof in thirty-five-degree November weather.

The explanation was brief: his wife had suffered what appeared to be an asthma attack earlier in the day. The doctor gave her some prescription medication, which helped her fall asleep.

The man said he was in the living room talking with his father-in-law and the doctor, thinking his wife was still asleep, when they heard his oldest son scream.

Jural was now in the back of the house looking up at the woman, knowing he had to get her off the roof.

“Ma’am. Can you just sit tight while I come up there to help you back into the house?”

“No, I’m not ready to come in,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

The woman didn’t answer.

The fire truck finally pulled up to the front of the house, and Jural yelled out for someone to tell the firemen to bring a long ladder.

The firemen unhooked an extension ladder and two of them, each carrying one end, headed down the driveway, the truck’s flashing red lights attracting several neighbors like moths to a porch light. They swarmed, gawking, from the side of the house between the swaying oak trees.

The lead fireman, Tom Langan, reached the back of the driveway, looked up, and could see that the woman was in trouble.

“Hey, Tommy,” said Jural. “We need to get that ladder up there and get her down. She’s not going to move herself.”

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Her husband and father were telling me that she had some kind of asthma attack and was on medication. They thought she was sleeping, but one of the kids noticed she wasn’t in her room and found her up on the roof. I don’t know what her condition is. She seems distant.”

Langan looked up and called out, telling the woman he was going to prop his extension ladder against the house, in front of the garage, and would pull the rope, raising the extension just high enough to reach over the gutters.

“What’s her name?”

“I think it’s Bernice,” said Jural.

“Ma’am, please don’t move. I’m coming up to get you,” said Langan, who locked the ladder in place and began his ascent.

“No, I’m all right,” she said. “I’m really all right.”

“Bernice, I want you to stay put. Don’t move. I’m going to climb up there and you can come down with me, okay?” said Langan.

The woman peered over the gutter as Langan slowly made his way toward the roof, putting one foot on a step, then placing the other foot on the same step.

She looked down onto the driveway, where her husband and father were standing. Her eyes remained fixed on her husband. There were no words, no facial expressions, just a blank stare.

The husband looked back, but said nothing.

As Langan neared the roof, he could see that the woman had moved forward and was now teetering on the edge, her robe whipped by the cold wind.

“Ma’am, you can’t move,” said Langan nervously, extending his arm out. “You have to stay still. Let me come up there and we’ll come down together.”

Her father cried out from the driveway, “Bernice, don’t move, don’t move!”

Langan checked his feet to secure his footing, then looked up, only to see the woman falling over the edge, headfirst, as if she were diving into a swimming pool.

Langan heard the screams coming from neighbors who were standing among the trees as he reached out with his left hand, hoping to grab onto a part of her robe, or maybe a limb. He touched the robe, but it slipped out of his hand. The woman fell to the cold, hard concrete pavement below with a sickening thud.

Langan raced down the ladder while Jural and the three men ran over to the woman, who lay still.

“Bernice, Bernice!” shouted her husband.

Behind him was his seven-year-old son, his oldest boy, teary eyes open wide, his mouth trembling.

“Mommy!” he cried. “Mommy!”