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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Friends advised Kathie to simply walk away from the marriage, but she was determined to get her share of Robert's fortune. She began to collect his financial records and other documents. One of the key documents was the police report of the assault on Peter Schwartz. A felony assault conviction could have given her leverage in a divorce. But to her astonishment and dismay, she discovered that the assault charge had been reduced to disorderly conduct. Her dismay deepened when Schwartz told her that he had settled his civil suit against Durst "for pennies on the dollar."
Najamy recalls, "Suddenly she realized that she had no power in her divorce case. She told me, 'Gilberte, this man thinks he can do anything he wants to do and get away with it.'" Friends from nursing school counseled Kathie to report to the emergency room the next time Robert hit her so that the abuse would get on record. She was reluctant but on January 6, 1982, she showed up at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx with bruises on her face.
Three weeks later she vanished. She was 29.
THE INVESTIGATION INTO KATHLEEN Durst's disappearance on the night of Sunday, January 31, 1982, was halfhearted at best. That was one of the first things New York State Police investigator Joseph Becerra realized when he opened the long-dormant file almost eighteen years later. Becerra was acting on information from a man who had been arrested for exposing himself to several women and claimed to know something about the Durst case. Becerra had never heard of the case or of Robert or Kathie Durst. "I was still in high school at the time she disappeared," he told me. "The tip didn't pan out, but the more I read, the more intrigued I got."
That was because so much of the evidence seemed to point in the direction of Robert Durst. Durst hadn't reported his wife's disappearance for five days and only after State Police officers came to his lake cottage in response to Najamy's repeated suggestions that something bad might have happened to her friend. He then filed his missing person's report not in Westchester County but in Manhattan, where his family had enormous influence. Even before filing the report, he had sublet her apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street. He did it to save $900 a month in rent, his lawyer explained. In spite of all this, New York City police officers had accepted Durst's story that he had put her on a train back to the city that night and that she ran away because she was unhappy with her marriage and her studies. Either that or she'd been killed by drug dealers. Durst informed the officers that Kathie was a cocaine user, and his lawyer took some coke to detectives, saying it had been found in her apartment. The police never troubled themselves to search the lake cottage or the surrounding woods, nor did they drag the lake.
There were a number of glaring inconsistencies in the case that the original investigators had never resolved. For one thing, the timeline was highly suspect. It seemed to indicate that, at a minimum, Durst knew more about Kathie's disappearance than he had admitted. Kathie had agreed to accompany Robert to their lake cottage that weekend. Gilberte Najamy was preparing for a family dinner party at her home in Connecticut when Kathie telephoned Sunday at around noon. She told Najamy that things were not going well. "I've got to get out of here," she said. An hour later Kathie arrived at Najamy's house in her Mercedes, wearing a sweat suit. She was extremely upset and talked about the Peter Schwartz incident. That afternoon Durst telephoned several times; as Kathie spoke to him, Najamy could hear him screaming through the receiver. At about seven o'clock Kathie called Durst. After Kathie hung up, she told Najamy, "I have to leave. Bobby wants me home. He's really upset." At the time Kathie was four months short of graduation and according to Najamy felt she needed to pacify her husband at all costs. As Kathie was preparing to leave, at about seven-fifteen, to drive to the lake cottage to meet her husband, she repeated her fear to Najamy. "If anything happens to me," she said. "Check out Bobby." Then she drove away in a snowstorm. Najamy never saw her again.
If Najamy is correct about the time, Durst's story is shot full of holes. He told police officers that the quarrel continued after Kathie had returned to their cottage. "She was in a tear about something," he said. Considering the driving conditions that night, she couldn't have arrived before eight-thirty. They ate a hamburger and Kathie drank a bottle of wine and changed clothes, Durst recalled. Then he drove her to the train station at Katonah, a trip of about twenty minutes, and watched as she boarded the 9:17 back to Manhattan. He told the police that he stopped to have drinks with some neighbors. When the neighbors denied this, Durst changed his story and said he ate alone at a cafe in town. He claimed to have phoned his wife at about eleven-thirty that night, at the penthouse on Riverside Drive. When a detective suggested that phone records could verify the call, Durst changed his story again, saying that he had called Kathie from a pay phone while walking his dog. This seemed implausible: It was a miserable night, cold and sleeting, and the nearest pay phone was three miles across the lake. Nevertheless, back in 1982, the police had bought his story that Kathie had indeed boarded the train back to New York and had concentrated their investigation in the city. After a few unproductive weeks, both the police and the media lost interest.
But Gilberte Najamy didn't. Along with Kathie's brother and sister and her other friends, Najamy has hounded the police and tried to arouse public attention for years. "I thought a thousand times: What if I had invited her to stay with me that night? But Kathie didn't ask and I didn't offer." Najamy began her own investigation after Kathie failed to show up for a dinner date the following night. She says she had a "gut feeling" that Kathie had been killed and made a number of phone calls. By Thursday, she was convinced that Kathie had been murdered and said so to the police. On the following Sunday she boarded the same 9:17 train to Manhattan that Kathie was supposed to have taken. It was only two cars long, she was surprised to discover—one for smoking, another for non-smoking. No question which car Kathie would have chosen: When she was drinking or upset, Kathie would fire one cigarette from another. "The same group of people rode that train every Sunday night," Najamy told me. "I talked to all of them. Kathie was not on that train."
FOR 45 DAYS RUMORS, TIPS, and sketchy reports of the whereabouts of the fugitive Robert Durst piled up on the desk of Galveston police detective Cody Cazalas. When Cazalas wasn't sifting through reports, he was fielding questions from scores of newsmen who arrived almost daily. Writers for magazines from Vanity Fair to GQ to Talk sniffed the salt air and interviewed hundreds of locals, hoping to find some new piece of information. There was a rumor that Durst had fled to Mexico, dressed in drag. A more reliable account placed him in Plano, again dressed as a woman. Another had him holed up in a New York homeless shelter. Still another said he was camping in a pup tent among a group of retired police officers on the Trinity River in Northern California. "With his money, he could be almost anywhere," Cazalas admitted.
Cazalas and New York police officers questioned Debrah Lee Charatan, who reportedly had had a nearly twenty-year affair with Durst before their secret marriage in December 2000. Charatan said she didn't know his whereabouts and speculated that Durst could have killed himself as his mother did. As records would later show, on October 15, the day before his hearing in Galveston, Durst was in Mobile, Alabama, registered at a Residence Inn. Two days later he took possession of a red Chevrolet Corsica from the local Rent-A-Wreck, shelling out $2,500 for a deposit and another $1,056 for four weeks advance rent. For identification he used Morris Black's expired South Carolina driver's license and Black's Medicare card. At that point the trail went cold.
The police know now that Durst had headed north to Atlantic City, where on November 18 he stole a new license plate for the Corsica. A few days later he began a nostalgic journey, visiting many of his old haunts. First he checked into a motel near his alma mater Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He visited his boyhood home in Scarsdale and the school Kathie attended in Danbury, Connecticut. He drove past the Durst family compound in Katonah.
Durst eluded a nationwide manhunt for six weeks. He might still be on the lam, except for an almost willfully stupid act on the afternoon of November 30, at a grocery store in Bethlehem. A security guard noticed a thin, haggard man wearing a black windbreaker and black sneakers, his head and eyebrows shaved. The man took a single Band-Aid out of a box and put in on a cut under his nose. Then he grabbed a newspaper and a chicken salad sandwich and left without paying. Nabbed in the parking lot, the man gave his name as Robert Durst, which meant nothing to the local police. Durst had $500 in his pocket, which made it seem unlikely that he would risk stealing merchandise valued at less than $7. The police would have given him a summons and set him free, except Durst gave them a real address in New York. A computer check revealed that shoplifting was the least of Durst's alleged crimes. Again reporters flew in from all over the country.
The Bethlehem police delayed opening the trunk of the red Corsica until December 5, after detective Cody Cazalas had flown in from Galveston and investigator Joseph Becerra and district attorney Jeanine Pirro had arrived from Westchester County. Searching the trunk, officers found clothing, an elaborate list of directions, $37,000 in $100 bills, a small amount of marijuana, and Morris Black's driver's license. They might have hoped to find Kathie's body and Black's head too. But that would have been too easy.
There is certain to be a lot of legal toe dancing before Durst is tried in Galveston, much less in Westchester County. Durst's family has hired two brilliant, high-profile attorneys, Michael Kennedy, of New York, and Dick DeGuerin, of Houston, and the struggle to manipulate public opinion has already begun. In a hearing shortly after Durst was extradited back to Texas, Galveston district judge Susan Criss approved DeGuerin's motion that police officers, prosecutors, and potential witnesses in the case be barred from discussing it with reporters. In that same hearing DeGuerin artfully disclosed that ballistic tests show that the 9mm pistol found in Durst's car is not the gun that killed Susan Berman.
Any charges brought against Durst in Westchester County will probably be delayed until after the trial in Galveston. New York State Police investigators have talked to a number of friends and neighbors of the Dursts who were ignored by the original investigators, and they have ripped a wall out of the lake cottage and may have collected additional physical evidence from their search of the lake bottom. But they apparently have no body and no witnesses to a crime. The Galveston police have a body but no head. They can't even prove for certain how Morris Black died. There is, of course, the evidence from the apartments on Avenue K, including blood, but is it enough to convict? For the moment, nobody is talking. Except of course most of the media and everyone in Galveston. They can't wait for the next Chinese box to pop open.
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