February 2002
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.
GALVESTON IS ONE OF GOD'S FORSAKEN PACKAGES, a place where the desperate and the disenfranchised wash ashore with every tide, so the wiry little man with the bleached peach-pit face and a fishing cap pulled over his ears looked no different from the other drifters waiting for food vouchers. The staff at the Jesse Tree, a small storefront charity on Market Street, a few blocks from the port and hard against a sprawling ghetto of shotgun houses and abandoned cotton-storage warehouses, was always ready to hear a tale of woe. Except Morris Black came not for a handout but with a proposition. He'd been surfing the Internet on a computer at the library, he explained in a high-pitched, rapid-fire voice, and he'd discovered that the same reading glasses that sold for $10 to $12 dollars at Wal-Mart could be purchased in bulk for 46 cents a pair.
"Interesting," Jesse Tree's director, Ted Hanley, told him, not sure what else to say.
Black seemed restless and impatient and repeated what he'd just said, then repeated it again, and then repeated it a third and a fourth time. Eventually he came to the point. "I need you to come up with two thousand dollars, and I'll do the rest," he said. His idea was to pass out thousands of pairs of eyeglasses to the poor and needy. He made it clear that he intended to supervise the project personally and screen prospective recipients. "This is how it will be," he said. Hanley tried to explain that although the project sounded worthy, the Jesse Tree didn't have that kind of money. Black wasn't interested in explanations. He faded back into the throng of hungry men.
Hanley saw him again two months later, in March 2001. Black was handing out free reading glasses to a group of homeless people in a food line at the First Presbyterian Church. He carried with him eight bags of eyeglasses and moved down the line, businesslike, sizing up the needs and suitability of each man. When one man who had just received a pair of glasses reached for a cigarette, Black demanded that he give the glasses back. "If you can afford cigarettes," he exploded at the man, "you can afford to buy your own glasses!"
Soon Black was delivering eyeglasses to the Jesse Tree too. Hanley had no idea how he had gotten the money to buy them. Black would show up several times a week, and his giveaways became extremely popular. Still, Hanley wondered if it was worth the price of dealing with Morris Black. "It was like Chinese water torture," Hanley told me a few months later. "No matter how busy we were, he would break in and demand that I stop everything and see him." By May Black had become disillusioned with his project, complaining that he couldn't tolerate so much contact with "freeloaders and lazy people." In July, however, he reappeared. He said he had heard that the Jesse Tree was interested in purchasing a vacant building across the street from its office. He told Hanley, somewhat mysteriously, that he knew "someone with a lot of money" who might give the Jesse Tree an interest-free loan.
A few days later Hanley made another bizarre acquaintance. A volunteer knocked on the door of his office and told him that there was a mute in the reception room, extremely agitated and demanding attention. The man was small and thin, with gray-white hair that spiked up like a punk rocker's. He wore dirty jeans and a tattered long-sleeved shirt, and his face was partly concealed by a pair of large-frame eyeglasses that were completely covered with tape except for a small triangular opening over one lens. Hanley attempted to communicate in sign language, but the man motioned for Hanley to follow him to a room adjacent to the reception area. When they were alone, he said, "I don't speak to women." Shielding his face with his hand, he told Hanley that he was penniless, that he lived in his car, and that he needed $50 in cash for gas so he could drive to Beaumont and look for work.
"We're the Jesse Tree, not the money tree," Hanley joked. But the man was in no mood for levity.
"Is this one of those goddam places that give you the runaround?" he demanded to know.
Hanley explained that the charity didn't give out cash but that he could give the man a blanket, some food, a place to sleep, and a voucher for gas.
"What the hell am I supposed to do when I get to Beaumont!" the man snarled. Hanley didn't know what to make of him. He wasn't crazy, and he wasn't a crack addict. He decided that the man was testing him to learn how he would deal with an unreasonable request, though for what reason he couldn't guess. He told the man to come back in three hours. He never saw him again.
Hanley did see Morris Black one last time. One morning in August he spotted Black leaning against the Cotton Exchange Building, apparently distraught and in pain. He stopped his truck and asked Black if he was all right. "No!" Black creaked. "I have terrible, terrible problems."
"I work every day with people's problems," Hanley told him. "Maybe I can help."
"Nobody can help—ever!" Black cried. "Nobody can understand the nature of my problems. Not you, not anyone!"
A few weeks later Hanley and everyone else in Galveston read that, on September 30, a thirteen-year-old boy fishing in the bay had spotted something washing up against the rocks that turned out to be a human torso whose limbs had been removed with surgical precision. A search by police divers turned up two garbage bags containing the arms and legs but no head. Hanley was shocked to read a few days later that the body had been identified as Morris Black. The name of the man charged in the murder was Robert Durst. Hanley felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle as he studied Durst's photograph. No doubt about it, this was the fake mute with the heavily taped eyeglasses.
PEOPLE GO TO GALVESTON TO GET LOST, and that's what 58-year-old Robert Durst and his 71-year-old neighbor, Morris Black, had been doing until a series of grotesque discoveries put them in the national spotlight. Even before Black's corpse was fingerprinted, the police had discovered a clue that allowed them to open the first of a bewildering series of Chinese boxes. In one of the garbage bags was a newspaper with a label addressed to 2213 Avenue K. That address was in a typical Galveston neighborhood, halfway between the Gulf and Galveston Bay, a street of mostly restored homes with gingerbread trim and hurricane shutters. Cottonwoods and palm trees lined the street, and at one corner stood a historic church, St. Joseph, completed in 1860 by German Catholic immigrants. Number 2213 was a nondescript thirties-era bungalow that had been converted into a fourplex.
With no name to guide them, police officers searched the garbage cans in the alley. They found several things of interest, including a .22-caliber handgun that they later traced to Durst. They also found an eviction notice dated the previous July in the name of Morris Black and a current receipt for a pair of eyeglasses in the name of Robert Durst. The landlord, Klaus Dillman, informed the police that Durst had signed a lease in November 2000. Dillman remembered it well because Durst had come dressed in drag, pretending to be a mute named Dorothy Ciner (at the time, Dillman had believed she was a woman; he had recognized Durst only later, from newspaper photos). Two months later Morris Black rented an apartment across the hall. Searching the two apartments, police officers found blood on the walls and floors of both, as well as in the hallway between them. In Durst's apartment the police discovered a paring knife with a four-inch blade and some bloody boots. Another tenant, Maria De Hernandez, told officers that the night Black's body was discovered she had seen Durst loading garbage bags into a silver car parked behind the apartment.
Acting on a tip, the police arrested Durst, who was driving a silver Honda, in Galveston on October 9. A search of the car turned up a 9mm handgun, a small bag of marijuana, and a bow saw. Though the bow saw initially intrigued the police, the precise dissection of the body suggested that someone had used a paring knife to cut away muscle and a hacksaw to cut through bone.
Over the next few months, investigators slowly put together profiles of the two men. Morris Black seemed to have lived everywhere and nowhere—Del Rio; Fort Stockton; Galena Park; Long Beach, Mississippi; Norfolk, Massachusetts; North Charleston Beach, South Carolina. Several of Black's relatives still lived in his home state of Massachusetts, but they hadn't seen him in years. A sister-in-law, Trudy Black, of Plainville, Massachusetts, told Galveston County Daily News reporter Ted Streuli that Black had never married and that he had traveled constantly. "He was the type you wouldn't hear from for years and then you'd hear from him." She added that Black would get extremely upset if she wasn't home when he called. "He always lived in a poor neighborhood," she said. "If he had a disagreement, he'd go protest. He'd march in front of the building. He could make enemies." Black's brother Harry told Streuli that Morris worked as a merchant seaman in the late forties or early fifties. I attempted to reach Black's sister, Gladys Saslaw, but was told that she was suing Durst for wrongful death and couldn't comment.
The few people in Galveston who remembered Black at all talked about a scrawny little man in khaki shorts and hiking boots who walked all over the island and spent hours at the library. Those I spoke with described him as cranky, cantankerous, eccentric, and paranoid, a loner who believed the world was out to get him. He had almost been evicted from the apartment on Avenue K because of his angry protestations that he had been overcharged $19 on his electric bill. The police discovered that in 1997 Black had been convicted in South Carolina of making a terroristic threat—he threatened to blow up the electric company over a $16 overcharge.
The strangest thing about Black was his apparent wealth. Though he had no job and no visible means of support, he maintained nine separate accounts in a bank in South Dakota, with a total balance of about $137,000. No one had any idea where he had gotten that kind of money, though many now theorize that it had come from his neighbor Robert Durst. There were rumors that Black and Durst had known each other for some time. But nobody turned up evidence that the two had ever met before Avenue K. Black's secret—his "terrible problems"—seemed to have died with him.
