A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst (9 page)

Kathie had completely unraveled over the last year, and as the McCormacks sat there in Mary’s apartment, they talked not just about Kathie, but about their frustrations with the police. Mike Struk wasn’t telling them much, if anything, and the McCormacks didn’t know if the police were taking the case seriously, or perhaps had been compromised by the Durst family.

It wasn’t out of the question. The McCormacks weren’t naive. That much was certain after their utterly strange encounter with a man who called Mary and introduced himself as John Vigiani. He said he was a private investigator and offered a unique solution to the case, but needed to deliver his proposal in person.

Jim and Mary agreed to meet Vigiani at a diner on Third Avenue, near Mary’s East Fifty-first Street apartment. Jim and Mary sat on one side of a booth, waiters and waitresses busily walking by, their arms filled with plates. Vigiani appeared, on time. He was surprisingly small, no more than five seven. He had short, dark hair and a nose that protruded out from a thin face. He was very businesslike, wearing a smart, firmly pressed dark gray suit and tie. He appeared to be no more than fifty years old and walked with a noticeable limp.

Vigiani introduced himself and sat on the other side of the table, facing the siblings. He said he was a former employee of a government agency, which he would not identify, and said his limp had resulted from being shot.

Jim and Mary said nothing as Vigiani explained that it was obvious that Bobby Durst knew what had happened to Kathie, and that there was only one person who could reveal that information. Bobby Durst himself.

“I can help you,” said Vigiani. “For ten thousand dollars, arrangements could be made to interrogate Mr. Durst and get the information you desire.”

Jim looked at Vigiani, not quite sure how to respond. Interrogate Bobby? Was this guy kidding?

“Just how are you going to get Bobby to talk to you?” said Jim.

Vigiani folded his hands together and moved forward, closer to Jim and Mary, and spoke softly but clearly.

“Do you know how easy it is to get taken off a street without anyone seeing it happen?”

Mary could feel her stomach turn as she pinched Jim’s leg under the table. They said nothing, but continued to listen as Vigiani described his plan to kidnap Bobby Durst.

“It would involve the use of dogs. Doberman pinschers. They would walk up and gently place their mouths around the wrists and escort a person, in this case Mr. Durst, into a waiting vehicle. Have you ever heard of a technique called the Red Room?”

“No, can’t say that I have,” said Jim.

“Well, by the administration of certain drugs, the person would become disoriented and by the use of a red light a person can become so disoriented as to not be able to tell if they are upside down on a chair or floating in a room. If they are questioned properly, information can be obtained successfully,” said Vigiani.

Jim and Mary didn’t know what to say. Was this guy a crackpot? Was he really suggesting that they pay money to kidnap Bobby Durst?

“Nothing will happen to him,” said Vigiani assuringly. “There will be no trace. He will be returned home, but you’ll have the information you need to find your sister.”

As bizarre as it sounded, Jim thought for what seemed like the longest second, or two, that it could be possible. Nothing else was working, and the police investigation seemed to be going nowhere. Jim let out a deep breath, and his better sense overcame him as he shook his head.

“First of all, we don’t have ten thousand dollars. Second, I’m not going to solve one crime by committing another crime. What you’re suggesting is pretty extreme,” said Jim.

“Extreme circumstances require extreme measures,” said Vigiani.

“Thanks for suggesting this, but I think we’ll pass,” said Jim.

Vigiani unfolded his hands, took a sip of water, rose from his seat, and reached into his back pocket, pulling out his wallet.

“If you change your mind,” he said, handing Jim a white card with nothing but a phone number on it.

Vigiani left the diner, limping out the door onto Third Avenue.

Jim took his card, ripped it down the middle, and tossed it on the table.

As the family discussed the bizarre meeting, it was agreed that, at the very least, someone was trying to help the McCormacks.

Less could be said of the Durst family.

Bobby had broken off all contact with the McCormacks. The Dursts, as a family, had all but spurned any contact with Kathie’s family. In the six weeks since Kathie disappeared, not one Durst family member, brothers Doug or Tom or sister Wendy, called Jim or Mary or any of the other sisters. And Bobby wouldn’t answer Mary’s questions about why he was throwing Kathie’s stuff out of the East Eighty-sixth Street apartment and the house in South Salem. Even worse, none of the Dursts had reached out to Kathie’s mother. Not even Seymour, the all-powerful real estate mogul, who, with one phone call, could give Mike Struk another twenty or thirty or forty detectives to work on this case. Indeed, with his money, the elder Durst could have hired his own private detectives.

But Seymour remained conspicuously quiet, and as the McCormack family talked more about the Dursts, their anger rose to the surface.

They decided it was time to approach the mogul.

A call went out, the strength to make it fueled in part by alcohol, and a meeting was demanded. Surprisingly, Seymour agreed, and the McCormacks hurried down to Seymour’s town house on West Forty-eighth Street.

They were greeted by a doorman, who brought the group up to the second floor. As they made their way up the steps, Jim noticed that every inch of every wall was covered by a book or photograph. He heard about Seymour’s mythic collection of memorabilia and literature on New York City, and now he was looking at it.

The McCormacks were taken into a room shaped like a railroad car, but extending from the front of the town house to the back. A long, rectangular-shaped wooden table occupied the middle of the room in which the McCormacks were seated.

There were no offers of coffee, or tea, or soda, or even water.

A side door opened and Seymour slowly walked in and took his position at the head of the table. Like his son Bobby, Seymour was a smallish man with a thin, rodentlike face. He offered a weak hello, then sat back as the questions came quickly.

What is happening? Can you do anything? Can the police be pushed to do more? Why won’t Bobby cooperate?

The McCormacks were desperate, and the questions seemed to be coming from every part of the room.

Seymour listened and nodded his head, but said little.

“The police are doing the best that they can,” he said. “We need to be patient.”

“Seymour, please, we know you can help us,” said Mary. “I think Bobby can help us.”

Seymour remained evasive and was becoming increasingly frustrated with the tone of the questions, which now turned into an interrogation.

What is Bobby hiding? He has to know something? Can you hire private detectives?

As the questions continued, a door opened on the other side of the room and in walked Tom Durst, Seymour’s youngest son. He had just returned from a trip to California and was surprised to see the family of his brother’s wife inside his father’s home.

“What’s going on here?” he said, not even taking a moment to say hello.

Seymour told Tom that the McCormacks had come over to talk about Kathie, and he told them there was little he could do, that the police were doing everything they could.

Tom looked down at the McCormacks.

“Meeting’s over, you’ll have to leave,” he said abruptly.

“Wait a second,” said Jim. “We’re talking to your father. We need his help!”

“I said the meeting is over,” said Tom.

Seymour just shrugged his shoulders and stood up from his chair. The McCormack family quietly exited the room in single file, resigned in the fact that the Durst family had given up on Kathie.

Gilberte Najamy continued her Sunday-night garbage runs for seven weeks, swiping Kathie’s medical books, clothes, and other personal effects Bobby had tossed out of the South Salem home.

Each week, Gilberte would take someone along. One night it was Ellen Strauss, who didn’t quite fancy herself as a garbage picker but was nonetheless focused on the task at hand.

Ellen and Gilberte and Eleanor Schwank had spoken almost every day since Kathie was reported missing, discussing various theories, trying to locate clues.

After seven weeks Eleanor was convinced that Kathie had been the victim of foul play. Ellen tended to agree with Eleanor, though she held out the slight hope that Kathie could be alive in some mental institution, the victim of a total breakdown.

Ellen even traveled to Boston to visit the psychiatric ward—Bullfinch 7—at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she spent two hours checking beds and the hospital computers after getting a tip that Kathie might have been admitted there under a different name.

Ellen stopped at every bed in the ward, but as she expected, Kathie wasn’t there. She later sent pictures of Kathie to a hospital in New Hampshire to check another lead. This one involved an amnesia victim. The description of the victim offered faint hope: a woman, around thirty years old, about five feet three inches tall, weighing a hundred pounds, wearing a Lord & Taylor jacket. But like all the other leads, this one went nowhere.

Desperate, the women even drove to Southington to meet with a private eye, Jim Conway, a former New York cop. After four hours sipping soda with Conway at a Howard Johnson’s, the best he could offer was a suggestion to hire a psychic.

The Dursts? Conway wanted no part of this.

“You can’t go head-to-head with that kind of family. Too much money, too much power,” said Conway.

Rebuffed by the private eye, Gilberte talked Eleanor into taking a late-night stroll along the grounds of the estate owned by Bobby’s brother Douglas, who lived in Westchester County.

The women weren’t sure what they’d find as they walked gingerly through the estate grounds, their path illuminated by the moonlight. They quietly searched the carriage house, gardens, and tennis courts.

As they huddled behind a row of bushes, preparing to make their way off the grounds before they were discovered, Eleanor tried to convince Gilberte that this was all fruitless.

“But she’s not dead, she can’t be,” said Gilberte, who still held out the belief that her friend was either in the witness protection program or lost and unidentified in some hospital.

“Gilberte, stop with the witness protection program stuff,” Eleanor said, thoroughly annoyed that the other woman could not, or would not, face what she believed to be the awful truth.

Eleanor was well aware that the past few years with Kathie had been heady times for Gilberte, times when she’d join Kathie and Bobby, perhaps for dinner at Elaine’s and then dancing at Xenon or Studio 54, when Bobby would walk right in, past the velvet ropes, like Moses parting the Red Sea, his entourage right behind him. Because of his wealth and family standing in New York, it was exciting to be with Bobby, even more exciting for a woman like Gilberte, who had no business hanging out with Bobby Durst or any of his close friends.

Without Kathie, Gilberte would have been left at the door, waiting outside the velvet ropes like the rest of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, hoping against hope that she would be extended the exclusive privilege of socializing with the rich and the powerful, if only for a few hours.

Bobby had his own small circle of friends, which included Doug and Rachel Oliver, journalists Judy Licht and Julie Baumgold, comedian Laraine Newman, and writer Susan Berman.

The Olivers, like Bobby, lived off of real estate money, and lots of it. They owned a town house in Manhattan filled with priceless works of art, sculptures and paintings. Rachel was the daughter of Abe Hirschfeld, a maddeningly colorful character and real estate baron whose sanity had been questioned for years.

Doug was considered a weird sort with a short fuse. Aside from Susan Berman, no one was closer to Bobby than Doug Oliver.

Baumgold had known Bobby growing up in Scarsdale, while Judy Licht was a local television news reporter who at one time rented the South Salem home for a few months. Laraine Newman was perhaps the most recognizable friend, an original member of the
Saturday Night Live
cast, a comic and one of the few people who could make Bobby laugh.

And then there was Susan Berman, who was considered Bobby’s best friend of all.

They had met in the 1960s when both attended UCLA, where Bobby floated through economics classes, pretending he was studying for a Ph.D. after graduating from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with a major in economics.

Like Bobby, Susan was a child of privilege, the daughter of gangster Davie Berman and a member of the royal family of Las Vegas.

“Davie the Jew,” as her father was called, was by Bugsy Siegel’s side as Las Vegas rose from the desert of Nevada.

Following Siegel’s violent demise, Davie became a kingpin. He adored his only daughter, bringing in Liberace to perform for a birthday party, and inviting the children of other mobsters, kids Susan didn’t even know.

Davie died when Susan was twelve, the cause of death determined to be a heart attack. Susan lost her mother a year later. She was told her mother swallowed a handful of barbiturates.

Susan survived the loss of her parents, and as a young adult she was intoxicating. She looked exotic, with almond eyes slightly slanted in the corners, her jet-black hair combed straight down past her shoulders.

She was drawn to Bobby’s quiet way, his innocence. Susan sensed that Bobby carried a deep pain. Like many other women she felt a need to mother him, nurture him, care for him.

By the mid-1970s Susan developed a reputation as an up-and-coming writer in San Francisco, eventually moving to New York and taking a cramped, one-bedroom apartment in Beekman Place with a shower but no bath.

She soon took a job with
New York
magazine, and joined Bobby on his outings throughout the city. Susan loved New York and all its trappings. She had little money, yet still found a way to host fantastic dinner parties in her tiny apartment, and she didn’t blink at paying a $300 bill following a meal for eight at a trendy New York restaurant. She could be demure and charming; at least she thought she was. She thought nothing of running into the next-door apartment of a friend, Steven Silverman, at all hours of the day and night to take a bath. He could have been butt naked on the floor, engaged in a romantic liaison, and she’d burst in, not even think to apologize, and run into his bathroom.

Others who crossed the headlights of Susan’s life thought she was more like a Sherman tank. She could be venomous, kissing you on the lips one evening and spreading rumors and gossip about you the next day. She lived in a surreal world in which she was the queen and all others, except for Bobby, were her loyal subjects.

She was proud to be a gangster’s daughter. It was a badge of honor and caused people to react with fear. Cross her and she’d readily remind you that she was
the
daughter of Davie Berman. It didn’t matter that Davie had died long ago and most people didn’t have a clue as to who or what he was.

While others were drawn in or tossed out of Susan’s life without so much as a good-bye, Bobby was always different. They were soul mates. It was Bobby—Susan called him her brother—who threw her a party to celebrate the publication of her first book,
Easy Street
, which detailed the life of a gangster’s daughter.

They had fun that night, Susan and Bobby, holding each other and posing for pictures, cheek to cheek. Kathie remained in the background, as she always did when socializing with Bobby’s friends. Out of sight. Seen but not heard. Kathie emerged only when socializing with
her
friends, Eleanor or Kathy Traystman or Gilberte. Kathie liked Susan—or at least she pretended to, since she knew very well how her husband felt about her. It was plainly evident that Bobby and Susan shared something Bobby could never share with Kathie. It was a deep loyalty that clearly surfaced after Kathie was reported missing. It was Susan who called Kathie’s friends, asking if there was any news to report, digging for information. Everyone knew she was calling for Bobby, especially after Susan became Bobby’s unofficial spokesperson, answering questions for the media.

She’d tell the press that Bobby was heartbroken, and unable to cope with the disappearance of his wife.

“He’s completely distraught and is clinging to the hope that Kathie is alive,” Susan told the
Post
. “He loves her very much and he’s terribly worried.”

Those close to the case, like the McCormack family, Mike Struk, and Kathie’s friends, thought otherwise.

Susan relished the spotlight. And she was protecting a friend. Her best friend.

She was still a gangster’s daughter, and she wore that distinction like a medal.

As much as Bobby loved Susan, he despised Gilberte Najamy.

To Bobby, Gilberte was a name-dropper, a hanger-on, a social climber. Gilberte was some caterer from Connecticut to whom Bobby would never have given the time of day if she hadn’t befriended his wife in nursing school. Bobby had little use for most of Kathie’s friends, especially Gilberte, whom he blamed for fueling Kathie’s cocaine use and for pushing the divorce.

Gilberte wasn’t attractive, and Bobby questioned her sexuality, though Kathie always told him that Gilberte liked men.

Bobby knew the main attraction was drugs. When Kathie and Gilberte socialized, the cocaine often flowed like champagne. Bobby suspected that Gilberte was dealing, though Kathie would deny that, too. During one especially outrageous party in Connecticut, instead of bringing a bottle of wine, Gilberte presented Kathie a coke spoon tied loosely around her right arm as her gift. Gilberte would stand behind Kathie and direct her through the crowd, and partygoers would stop them, reach for the nose spoon, dip it into a cellophane bag Kathie held in her left hand, and snort away.

It was a novel idea, and it made for quite a sight. The partygoers loved it, and Gilberte loved the attention. She relished her relationship with Kathie. She would tell anyone who would listen that she was Kathie’s best friend, which was far from the truth. Kathie had lots of friends, and after spending two years in medical school while her life was falling apart and her drug use was increasing, her choice of friends mirrored this contradiction. Some she did drugs with, others she didn’t. From the latter she’d keep her drug life a secret and maintain the illusion that, at heart, Kathie was still an Irish-Catholic girl from Long Island, the kind who grows up, marries, has children, worries about paying her mortgage, and lives happily ever.

While Gilberte absorbed Kathie’s pain like a sponge, giving ear to every single story and event, Eleanor Schwank had grown tired of listening.

When they’d met at nursing school, they hit it off immediately, their competitiveness and desire for good grades forming a bond. Eleanor was especially impressed when Kathie once challenged the statement of a professor, something about potassium and osmotic pressure. Kathie had argued the point so intelligently, Eleanor thought.

Eleanor knew she had found a female soul mate when Kathie challenged the administration’s rules on the wearing of those little white caps that have long identified nurses. Women had always worn those caps, so it was a great surprise when Kathie Durst questioned why.

“Men don’t wear medical caps, and caps have contaminants,” was Kathie’s argument.

Eleanor, a former flower child and self-professed radical, joined Kathie’s crusade, and the two women signed a letter, written by Kathie on Durst Organization stationery, to President Jimmy Carter, protesting the cap-wearing requirement, claiming it was a violation of their civil rights. The letter caused an uproar, and WCSC gave in, fearful it would lose its federal funding. Kathie won the battle, and Eleanor, her co-conspirator, couldn’t have been happier.

But Eleanor never understood why Kathie, a member of the wealthy Durst family, was in Connecticut taking nursing courses in the first place.

She’d broach the subject with Kathie, and the reply was always the same: her husband wanted her to have a career, and he made it clear that just because he had money, he wasn’t going to support her.

Eleanor thought this made little sense. Married to a multimillionaire and you’re taking nursing courses because he doesn’t want to give you money? Don’t get me wrong, she’d say, but that’s not my kind of guy.

What she really wanted to say was “what a cheap fuck.”

Her poor opinion of Bobby was cemented when the two women set a date to meet at a restaurant in Connecticut with their husbands. Bobby was barely sociable, introverted and quiet. Eleanor could plainly see he showed little affection for Kathie, and it didn’t appear that he showered his wife with money and gifts. At Kathie’s graduation party in 1978, held in the backyard of their Lake Truesdale home, Bobby once put his arms around Kathie, but not as an expression of love or affection. Instead, Eleanor had the distinct feeling that he was showing his guests that Kathie was his possession. This little rich man with the poor personality owned this pretty, personable woman.

Kathie didn’t seem to mind. It was the most she expected to get from Bobby, a man whose wealth, she would say, prevented him from completely trusting people.

Besides, Kathie would add, it was tough for a man who’d seen his mother fall to her death when he was a kid to show great emotion to a woman.

Eleanor didn’t quite understand what Kathie was talking about during another marathon session on the phone when Kathie reported this traumatic incident.

“His mother, she fell off the roof of their home up in Scarsdale. She jumped, committed suicide,” said Kathie.

“He saw that?”

“Yes. He was only seven. It really screwed him up. He had a lot of psychological problems. He was sent to several doctors when he was a child, but they couldn’t treat him. He really hated his father. I have a letter. It describes what was wrong with him. It says something about a ‘decomposing personality,’ or something like that. I’ll show it to you one day.”