He Killed Them All Page 13

  I needed to sit with the Galveston DA and talk to him about Kathie. The McCormacks had been waiting twenty years for answers and Durst was finally on the ropes—or about to be hanged with one. And I wanted to eyeball Durst. I wanted to size him up. I wanted to see for myself what made this man tick. His arraignment was scheduled for Tuesday, October 16, five days away.

  I was jumping out of the chair, ready to make a run for the airport. “I’ve got to get down there. John O’Donnell, you’re coming with me.”

  But I also knew that I’d take a political hit if I went. If I left the office to go to Galveston on a case I was not prosecuting, Castro would make hay of it. The only upside of leaving town was that he’d lay off Al for a couple days.

  I looked at David Hebert, my most trusted confidant.

  “What do you think?”

  “Judge, you don’t have any choice. You have to go.” All my detectives called me Boss, but David always called me Judge because he first worked for me when I was a county judge.

  I buzzed Ro and said, “Call Pat D’Imperio [my chief financial officer] and get me a flight to Galveston, Texas. And one for John O’Donnell.” I weighed whether to include Becerra. As disgusted as I still was with him for the leak, the case was more important. I said, “After that, get Superintendent McMahon on the phone so Becerra can join us.” He okayed Becerra and added state trooper Domenic Chimento, paying their way since we couldn’t because of liability issues.

  On Monday, October 15, the day before Durst’s arraignment, we flew into George H. W. Bush Airport in Houston. It was already 4:00 p.m. when we landed. And we had a lot to do.

  While we waited at the baggage carousel, I checked in with Ro, as I always did if I was out of the office for more than three and a half minutes.

  “David needs to speak to you,” she said, in that tone of voice that made me wonder, What now? She put me through to his line.

  “Press calls,” said David. “Lots of press calls. ‘Did you go? Why did you go? If she didn’t go, why didn’t she go?’ ”

  “Tell them I went to a damn rodeo,” I replied, though I knew he wouldn’t.

  I dropped my phone back into my Chanel bag and looked up to see O’Donnell walking toward me with an enormous cop in khaki pants and a buzz cut. You can always tell a plainclothes detective, even in Texas, even if he’s wearing shit-kicker boots like this guy was. I thought, Who cuts their hair like that?

  “Boss,” said O’Donnell, “this is the lead detective on the case, Cody Cazalas.”

  “Your name is Cody?” I blurted.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I was stunned. Nobody had called me ma’am before. But I skipped right by that. “I love that name! I have a dog named Cody!” I said.

  He didn’t take the offense that one might, and I certainly didn’t intend any. He just kind of looked at me. Looked down at me. He was a good foot taller. He smiled, amused.

  We all walked out of the airport together and toward a dark blue van in the parking lot.

  “I got a van to drive us to Galveston,” said Detective Cody.

  O’Donnell muttered what I was thinking. “Looks like a school bus.” In big letters, DARE—for Drug Abuse Resistance Education—was painted on the side in red.

  I climbed in, almost broke a heel. The van had bench seats. I sat in one behind Cody, who was driving. I was a little antsy on the ride, bumping along (did they not have shock absorbers in Texas?). It was not quite what I was accustomed to in New York, in my black super-duper Tahoe with a fax machine in the back and phones in every corner. We were going as slow as molasses through Houston. I wanted to get to Galveston before dark. Hell, I wanted to get there before Christmas. But Detective Cody was in no rush. No siree. I leaned forward to eyeball the speedometer. Forty-five miles per hour? You’ve got to be kidding me.

  “Does this THING go any faster?” I asked loudly.

  Cody didn’t skip a beat.

  “Ma’am,” he replied, “you mind reachin’ around and grabbin’ me a beer from that cooler in the back?”

  O’Donnell tried hard not to laugh.

  I actually turned around, wondering if there really was a cooler of beer in the back. Shame on me.

  Now Cody was shooting the shit with O’Donnell. He was telling him that Texas passed another law saying you couldn’t drink and drive. (I forgot to ask, “What happened to the first law?”) And that just recently, Cody said, “They made it illegal for a passenger to drink.”

  “Huh,” said O’Donnell.

  “Next thing the state’s going to say,” deadpanned Cody, “is that you can’t drive and shoot your gun out the truck window.”

  “You can do that down here?” I asked, shocked, horrified. Terrified.

  “Gotcha,” said Cody, and the boys were now laughing their asses off.

  Southern charm? I started laughing, too, and decided that, apart from Robert Durst, maybe Texas wasn’t so bad.

  WE WENT STRAIGHT TO Galveston Bay off Channelview Road where, two weeks before, on the Sunday evening of September 30, a thirteen-year-old boy out fishing with his father came across the headless, limbless torso of seventy-one-year-old Morris Black washed up on the rocks. It was a gruesome thing for anyone to come across, let alone a kid. We got there just before sunset, about the same time the boy found Morris.

  We got out and walked along a concrete bulkhead. Cody steered us to the rocks where the torso was discovered.

  “Watch your step, ma’am,” said Cody.

  He showed us where the garbage bags had been bobbing in the shallow waters by the pier, about eighty feet from the torso. Morris’s legs were in separate bags. His arms were in a third bag. The cops didn’t have to look far or long for the body parts. The idiot dumped his dismembered friend while the tide was coming in.

  “That’s how we knew right away,” said Cody, “that we probably weren’t looking at a homegrown killer.” No one who grew up in Galveston would be so stupid as to dump a body at low tide. “And anybody with any sense,” he continued, “wouldn’t have left them in bags.” Bags float. “Now if he just threw the body parts in, even in a short time, marine life could eat on them. We got big fish that could grab an arm and take it anywhere.”

  “You okay, ma’am?” He was referring to my heels. We were walking along large granite boulders that made up the bulkhead. Next time, I’d wear flats.

  With the sun setting, and the water splashing against the rocks, we talked about Morris’s missing head. Even then, Detective Cody was pretty certain of two things: One, that Durst did not dump the head in the bay; he deposited it somewhere else. (Very soon, Cody would have a damn good theory about where.) And two, if they ever did find the head, there’d be a bullet in it, and the bullet would have entered from the back, as Susan’s did.

  From the bay, we went to the apartment house at 2213 Avenue K, where Durst and Black lived across the hall from each other in the only two apartments on the first floor. They each paid three hundred dollars a month in rent. Going from the bay to the apartments was precisely what Cody had done two weeks ago, because Durst had left him directions.

  Wrapped around one of Morris’s legs in one of the trash bags was a newspaper, stamped with the home delivery address of the building we were standing in.

  Also in the bag of limbs? A receipt from Chalmers hardware store for trash bags and a drop cloth, also a price tag for a paring knife and the cardboard cover from a new $5.99 bow saw. The receipt was dated September 28, two days before Morris’s body parts were found. Interspersed were tens of individual Metamucil packets, all of which came from the same box as identified by the lot number.

  The wood-framed house at 2213 Avenue K was somewhat shabby, but you could tell that, once, it’d been cute. There was something very sweet about Galveston, despite how some parts, like any other city, were run-down.

  “Before we go in, come around here,” said Cody. He wanted to show us what he did first, which was check the trash can in the alley behind the ho
use. There, he said, he’d “hit pay dirt.” In Durst’s trash can, he found a .22 caliber pistol plus two clips of ammunition. One bullet was missing. The empty shell casing was in the garbage, too. Also in the trash: the box that the black trash bags came in, packaging for a four-inch paring knife, a bloody sock, an eviction notice for a man named Morris Black in Apartment One, and a receipt from a local optometrist for one Robert Durst in Apartment Two. This was the first time Cody had read the name Robert Durst.

  Cody started to tell us about how he asked the landlord who Robert Durst was, and almost magically, the landlord appeared. Klaus Dillman, a bandana on his head, was a bit of an odd duck. But hey, it’s Galveston! There was also a no-bullshit charm to the guy. He told us what he’d told Cody two weeks ago—that he had never heard of Robert Durst “before all this,” that the person who rented Apartment Two was a mute woman by the name of “Dorothy Ciner.” Dillman explained that a man had called earlier to inquire about renting an apartment, saying he was calling on behalf of Dorothy Ciner. When Dillman actually met “Dorothy,” she wrote that a man would be coming around periodically because she traveled but still needed her plants watered. She even paid up front in full.

  This was the previous fall, shortly before Susan Berman was murdered.

  Dillman took us inside. We went to Durst’s apartment first, just inside the front door and to the right. The cops had taken anything that might have evidentiary value. A mattress remained on the floor. It was what you’d expect for three hundred dollars a month, the kind of apartment a student or two to be living in. Two frying pans sat on the stove. But most striking was the linoleum floor, already carved up by Galveston’s forensic guys. Of course, the blood from the body he chopped up would seep through that linoleum, $3.99 tarp or not. Even two weeks later, we could see the stains from Morris’s blood under the patches of flooring the cops had removed.

  Morris’s apartment, which Dillman showed us next, was even creepier. According to the forensics experts who processed the place, what was most stunning was that Morris’s own fingerprints were not in the apartment. The walls, the cabinets, the doorknobs seemed to have been scrubbed clean. All of his clothes were gone.

  Morris wasn’t exactly a fashion plate, but still: Why get rid of all of his clothes?

  I felt a chill down my spine. In the early days after Kathie “disappeared,” there was a great deal of evidence that Robert had been throwing out her clothes and personal belongings. Gilberte found some of Kathie’s clothes in the trash cans outside the house in South Salem. A maintenance man at one of the apartments Robert and Kathie owned in Manhattan complained that Robert had thrown so much stuff in the trash chute, including clothes and medical school books, that it got clogged.

  Cody would later discover that Robert paid a woman to clean both apartments, including the walls.

  The saddest parts of Morris’s apartment were the clues to how he lived. Durst hadn’t bothered to clean out the kitchen cabinets while scrubbing down the walls. The man apparently lived on canned peaches, Fig Newtons, and Spaghetti-O’s.

  Our next stop was at Chalmers, the hardware store where Durst bought the garbage bags, tarp, and saw. We walked there from the apartment. I said to John O’Donnell, “Wow, it’s quiet, isn’t it?” There was no one around. The evening was clear. The streets were lined with really old trees. “Would you like to live down here?”

  John was a hunter, and said, “Not enough deer.” I later found out that there were never any deer in Galveston. Bambi refused to travel to places that averaged ninety degrees in the summer.

  We walked into Chalmers and Cody showed us the kind of saw Durst purchased. I said, “Oh, my God.” If you’re not aware, a bow saw is shaped like a bow (I’m not talking a bow on a present), with a curved side and a straight side with sharp, serrated teeth. I don’t think I’d ever seen one before. When I heard “saw,” I pictured something a lumberjack or a carpenter would use. I don’t know from saws. But Durst did. Why would he even know what a bow saw was? It’s not like he was a lumberjack or a carpenter. Or a butcher, for that matter. Why pick that particular type, unless he’d had experience using it?

  Had he used one on Kathie?

  Our tour continued. Next, Cody showed us where Durst got a haircut and had dinner—the same day he’d dismembered the body. I would have loved to find one of Durst’s classic agenda lists for that day in green ink: “Kill. Dismember. Haircut. Dinner.” What kind of cold-hearted animal could saw off a leg and then go get a haircut? There was never any doubt in my mind. The man was evil. Pure and simple.

  It was close to 9:00 p.m. when Cody drove us toward our hotel. On the short ride there, he told us how the arrest went down. It started to become clear to me that this cop knew what he was doing. He went to the eye doctor’s office with the receipt he found in the trash, told them he was looking for one Robert Durst, and said that if he came in to pick up his glasses, to please call him. It was a long shot. Why would a man who had just dismembered his neighbor and dumped a torso and limbs in Galveston Bay, having already moved out of his apartment, and surely suspecting that the cops were on his trail, pick up his glasses?

  A friend of mine with bad eyesight and thick spectacles loves this part of the story. “I totally get it,” he said. “It’s not easy to function without a good pair of glasses.”

  But surely Durst could have gone to a LensCrafters or whatever in a different town for another pair?

  The reason: he’d left a deposit on the glasses and Durst was a cheapskate. He was always the guy who forgot to bring his wallet to a restaurant. Who cut Kathie off from his credit cards when she wanted to leave him. Who called collect from Ship Bottom. This was a man who would rather risk arrest than forfeit a fifty-dollar deposit on a pair of specs. Cody was shocked when he got the call from the optometrist’s office that Durst showed up for his appointment. Cody drove over and saw Durst when he drove right by him. He called a traffic unit to knock him down on a traffic violation because he noticed the inspection sticker had expired, but continued to follow him until they showed up and pulled him over. Lights and siren on, guns out. Traffic told him to get out of the car and handcuffed him.

  In plain view in the rear window of his SUV—the bow saw.

  He was then taken before a judge, who ultimately set bail at $300,000—$250,000 for murder and $50,000 for the illegal possession of marijuana.

  Cody spent a great deal of time with Durst during the booking process. Mugshots, fingernail scrapings, processing DNA. Cody would later say there was something different, off, about Robert. His conclusion: this was one creepy little bastard.

  Robert asked him, “What should I do?”

  Cody replied, “I don’t know. Do you have $300,000?”

  “Well, not on me,” he said. Cody could tell by his demeanor and tone that this guy might very well have the money.

  Within twenty-four hours, the full amount arrived via wire transfer, and Durst was out on bail. Free as a vulture.

  What to make of all those clues he left behind? It seemed as if he wanted to get caught.

  On the face of it, he did make a lot of mistakes. Not weighing down the bag with Black’s body parts. Putting a newspaper with his address in the bags. Throwing out guns in the garbage outside his home. Coming back to Galveston to get his glasses.

  To him, they weren’t mistakes. They were just pushing the envelope, which he got off on. He’d leave a trail of bread crumbs, but would anyone follow it? Would he get caught, or would he dance away on that edge again? He’s a guy who likes to fly close to the sun on waxy wings, like Icarus. But Durst, when he fell to Earth, usually bounced. Testing the system was a game to him, one he loved playing. I get the sense that he doesn’t have a lot of friends. So he plays games with the police to keep himself amused.

  Like, “If I steal this sandwich . . .”

  Or “If I use a fake ID . . .”

  Or “If I put on a wig . . .”

  Or “If I appear on an HBO documentary
. . .”

  Does his predilection for playing dangerous games make him crazy?

  Yes. Crazy like a fucked-up fox (no relation to Fox News).

  WE CHECKED INTO OUR hotel and then went to dinner at Gaido’s, a popular seafood restaurant overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. We traded stories with our southern brothers in arms. Lots of laughs, good food. It was a good time. I remember the guys in Texas were very interested in 9/11, asking, “How bad was it? What did you see?” I liked all the guys and got along well with them. The vibe was positive. John and I were relieved Durst had finally been caught. Cody did an excellent job of collecting evidence and nabbing him. I wouldn’t call that dinner a celebration, but a few beers were lifted.

  After dinner at Gaido’s, I had a beer at the hotel bar with John and a few others. One nightcap was enough for me. It’d been a long day. I said good night and excused myself and proceeded to the elevator.

  All of a sudden, Joe Becerra appeared. I looked up and there he was. It was just the two of us in the elevator. As I would with any guy in a small space, I moved away. It was awkward, and I was uncomfortable, to say the least.

  I pushed the button for my floor. The door closed, and he took a giant step closer to me. And another. “You want to get a drink or something?” He looked me up and down.

  There was no question in my mind what he wanted.

  The thought of it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  My skin crawled. I knew his reputation. He had a lot of success smooth-talking the panties off secretaries and lonely Hamptons socialites. For me, his charm was nothing but smarm. And to top it off, this guy was a low-level investigator coming on to the chief law-enforcement officer. The gall was stunning. Here I was, married, with an impeccable reputation. To make a move on me was the height of arrogance and delusion.

  Starting in law school and for decades after, there was only one previous time that a man had been inappropriate. It was a judge. I was an ADA. He commented on my legs at sidebar. In response to my rude reply, he banged his gavel and dismissed the case I was prosecuting.