History Lesson 
Durst Case Scenarios
How did a human torso end up floating in Galveston Bay? That's just one of the many unknowns that police officers in several states (and true-crime junkies in the popular press) are grappling with as they learn more about the bizarre life of multimillionaire murder suspect Robert Durst.
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Durst's story line was less vague, but what did surface was as bizarre as any pulp-fiction plot. Far from being the down-and-outer he presented to the world, Durst came from one of New York's wealthiest and most powerful real estate families. Later in the investigation, law enforcement authorities froze $1.8 million in one New Jersey bank account alone and believed he had millions more in other accounts not yet located. Another thing the Galveston authorities learned about Durst was that in 1982, his beautiful wife, Kathleen, had vanished without a trace. She was four months short of graduating from medical school and had just told a friend that she planned to get a divorce. Durst had been questioned about his wife's disappearance by New York State Police investigators but was never charged with anything.
As a young man Durst had rebelled against his family's wealth, but after marrying Kathleen, he had joined the Durst Organization and helped his father, Seymour, and his younger brother Douglas build skyscrapers on Avenue of the Americas. In 1994, when it became apparent that Douglas would become the head of the empire upon their father's death, Robert split from his family and began drifting across the country with no apparent purpose or destination. At the time of his arrest in Galveston, he owned homes in Manhattan, Connecticut, San Francisco, and Northern California. While he was renting his grubby $300-a-month apartment on Avenue K, Durst also had a small apartment in New Orleans and a luxury $3,800-a-month apartment in Dallas. He often lived among the homeless, sometimes dressed as a woman, and used a number of disguises and aliases. The real Dorothy Ciner, the police discovered, had attended Scarsdale High School with Durst, where both were members of the class of 1961. But she hadn't seen him in forty years and had never been to Galveston.
In 1999 New York authorities reopened the investigation into Kathleen Durst's disappearance. The police were seeking Durst for more questioning around the time he lost himself among the vagabonds of Galveston. They also planned to question one of Durst's friends, Susan Berman, the daughter of Dave Berman, one of Las Vegas mobster Bugsy Siegel's top lieutenants. Susan Berman had been one of Durst's closest friends and confidants since their days together at the University of California-Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. At the time Kathleen Durst was reported missing, Berman was living in Manhattan and promoting a book on her life as a Mafia princess. When Kathie's disappearance broke in the newspapers, Berman served as Durst's spokesperson. Unfortunately, just as New York State Police investigators were about to interview Berman, she was found murdered in her home in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, 2000, shot coincidentally by the same caliber pistol—9mm—that police officers later found in Durst's Honda.
But Galveston authorities knew none of this until after Durst's bail hearing. Otherwise they wouldn't have set bail at $300,000, which at the time seemed prohibitive. But the $30,000 required to post such a bond was pocket change for someone as wealthy as Durst. One of the phone calls Durst made from the Galveston city jail on the day of his arrest was to a wealthy, attractive 44-year-old New York real estate broker named Debrah Lee Charatan, who arranged to secure his bond. Later, when Charatan attempted to withdraw money from a Durst bank account that the police were monitoring, the authorities discovered that the couple had secretly married in December, a few months after Durst had gone to Galveston and not long after his missing wife was declared legally dead. But by the time the Galveston police began to understand exactly whom they had arrested, Durst had jumped bail and vanished.
Kurt Sistrunk, Galveston County's first assistant district attorney, told me that he knew that Durst wasn't just another psychotic tramp when he received a telephone call from a reporter for the New York Post, shortly after Durst failed to show up for his arraignment, on October 16. When the court declared Durst a fugitive, Sistrunk had asked that the bond be increased to $1 million. As he was about to learn, even that was bird food. "This Robert Durst you have in custody?" the reporter asked. "Could he possibly be our Robert Durst?" Once Sistrunk had time to digest the story that everyone in New York knew by heart, bail was bumped to $1 billion. But, of course, Durst was long gone by then.
THE DURST FAMILY WAS ALREADY well known to New Yorkers in early 1982 when the story broke that Kathleen Durst had vanished. It resurfaced as front-page fodder when the investigation was reopened two years ago. And it exploded again when the news from Galveston hit the East Coast last fall. Police officers and prosecutors from New York, as well as police officers from Los Angeles, hurried down to interview Durst—too late as it turned out. Television and print reporters from both coasts, many of whom had barely heard of the place, descended like waves of migraine headaches on what was variously called "the gritty Gulf Coast city" and "the windblown island town." Prime Time Live was there. So was America's Most Wanted. Galveston hadn't had this much attention since it nearly washed off the map in the 1900 hurricane.
That was because family patriarch Seymour Durst was an enormously powerful man. He had been the Donald Trump of the forties and fifties and built skyscrapers all over midtown Manhattan as well as twenty residential buildings. By the time he died, in 1995, the Durst Organization was worth $650 million. Seymour Durst was strong-willed, eccentric, and opinionated. Robert was the eldest of his four children.
Though Robert grew up wealthy in the Westchester County suburb of Scarsdale, his childhood was marred by tragedy in 1950, when his 32-year-old mother, Bernice, jumped to her death from the roof of the family home. Robert, who was then seven years old, witnessed the death, and the memory of it haunted him for years. Robert and his younger brother Douglas fought so frequently that their father sent both boys to a counselor. Robert was a loner, shy and withdrawn. In the 1961 Scarsdale High yearbook, there was a single photo of Robert and no mention of extracurricular activities.
After graduation from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1965, Robert moved to California and enrolled in a doctoral program at UCLA. The California lifestyle appealed to him. He met Susan Berman, a cool, sexy, and flamboyant young writer (a few years later she authored a piece titled "Why I Can't Get Laid in San Francisco") who grew up among mobsters in Las Vegas. He met John Lennon and Yoko Ono in California during primal scream therapy with psychotherapist Arthur Janov. He was also a follower of Beatles guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Friends say Durst affected a hippie image, living in cheap apartments, and smoking a lot of dope.
In 1969 Robert returned to New York to work for his father. Two years later he met Kathleen McCormack, who had recently moved to the city from her home in New Hyde Park, New York, and rented an apartment in a building owned by the Durst Organization. Robert and Kathie fell in love, moved to Vermont, and opened a health-food store. They made a handsome couple. He was good-looking, athletic, droll, somewhat reclusive but likable. Friends called him "sweet" and "kindhearted." She was strikingly pretty, funny, smart, and high-spirited. Seymour Durst was less than thrilled by his son's lifestyle, however, and at his urging the couple returned to New York in 1973 and married. Though Robert joined his father and brother Douglas in the family business, he resisted the trappings of the upper class, preferring to drive an old Volkswagen Beetle and wear casual attire. By contrast, Kathie loved the bright lights and the good life afforded by Robert's family fortune. "It was as though Cinderella had married Prince Charming," says her older brother, Jim McCormack. "He had the resources to do the things she had dreamed of doing. Robert was shy, not exactly antisocial but reluctant to enter into conversations. Kathie was the exact opposite, vivacious, witty, ready to enjoy life. She brought out the best in him."
Still, their life together was far from perfect. In spite of their wealth Kathie drove an old Mercedes and complained that Robert was too cheap to buy her a new one. She told friends that she was unhappy with what she termed "living below our means." She was also disappointed that Robert refused to have children. Instead of the family she wanted, she decided to pursue a career in medicine, first gaining a nursing degree from Western Connecticut State College. During the week, Kathie stayed at their country cottage on Lake Truesdale, in the Westchester County community of South Salem while Robert remained in the city, at their penthouse at Seventy-sixth and Riverside Drive. On weekends he would come out to visit. "Kathie was very much in love with Bobby when I met her [in 1976]," says Gilberte Najamy, a woman who became Kathie's close friend while they were undergraduates at Western Connecticut. "From Monday until Friday she would wait by the phone for him to call." Later, after Kathie was admitted to the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx, Najamy and other friends came to the city on weekends to visit and party with Kathie.
Using Robert's connections, the group got reservations at expensive restaurants and nightclubs like Studio 54 and Xenon. Sometimes Robert accompanied them, but he seldom seemed to enjoy it. "Bobby was not thrilled with her circle of friends," Najamy told me. "I think he suspected that we were telling her that she didn't need him or his money, which we were." Robert became possessive and abusive, Najamy recalls, sometimes taking his anger out on bystanders. At the penthouse after a night of clubbing, he assaulted one of Najamy's friends, a photographer named Peter Schwartz, because Schwartz was too slow to move when Durst ordered everyone out of the apartment. Jim McCormack told me of watching Robert grab his sister by the hair and jerk her off the sofa one night at their mother's home in New Hyde Park.
By early 1981 their eight-year marriage was clearly in trouble. "He had closed her charge accounts and canceled her credit cards," Najamy told me. "She borrowed money from me, fifty, a hundred dollars, and begged cigarettes from the doorman. She needed to keep Bobby happy until she finished school, but she made it clear that as soon as she graduated, she was out of there." In March 1981, while they were vacationing in Puerto Rico, Kathie confided to Najamy that she was getting a divorce. Back in the city, Kathie had rented her own apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street and hired a divorce lawyer. At this time Robert's old friend Susan Berman was in New York, promoting her book, and Durst was not only seeing her but also dating another old friend, Prudence Farrow, Mia Farrow's sister and famous in her own right as the inspiration for the Beatles' song "Dear Prudence." But the thought of losing Kathie was obviously tearing at him, and he became even more possessive and abusive. Kathie began to fear for her life and told Najamy and others that if something happened to her they should look first at Bobby.
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