He Killed Them All Read online

  For a while, I was often the only woman in rooms full of men. As I progressed, I was the only woman in rooms full of men with guns. I was never threatened or intimidated by them. There was always a line of respect. It was earned and warranted. For Becerra to cross that line was amazing and insulting. Although I was infuriated and disgusted, as with the incident with the judge, I said nothing about it. I understood what it was like working with men. I knew how they thought, and how they were wired. But I would not and will not step aside from my goals to address petty, pathetic sexual advances. I wasn’t interested, I didn’t have time for it. I wasn’t going to be distracted from why I was there. I just thought to myself, What an asshole.

  Make believe it never happened, and try never to be alone with him again.

  I said, “I don’t think so, Joey.”

  The door opened on my floor, and I walked out of the elevator.

  Nowadays, I’d say to Joe, “Keep it in your pants.”

  So, for those keeping score, in one year, I had shot Joe down both professionally and personally. No wonder he gunned for me in the press.

  It was a classic male move to try to deflate my power. If a woman was sexualized at work, then she was no longer an authority figure. His pathetic attempts to run the case, to control me, to bring me down to a person-to-person level were inappropriate. I’m not better than anyone else, but when I was the DA, and you were working on a case for me, you did not ever cross that line.

  The next morning, I didn’t even address the elevator incident. As previously planned, we all met up in the lobby to go to breakfast. Becerra was in a suit and tie. I wore a pantsuit and flats. I hardly ever wore pants. But I figured, Texas. Dirt. Horseshit. Cactus. Tumbleweeds. I’d nearly broken my ankle in heels yesterday. The rest of the guys were dressed casually.

  “Why are you all dolled up?” I remember asking him.

  He said something like, “Why aren’t you in a dress? We all like looking at your legs.”

  I gave him a withering look and said, “Really, Joey?”

  After our breakfast, we headed over to the courthouse for the arraignment. Joe was walking ahead of us. I was moving pretty fast, too. I was finally going to see Durst in the flesh. As we came around a corner of the building of the courthouse, cameras and photographers were all over the place. It was a wall of press. I said to myself, “Son of a bitch.”

  No wonder Joe was all decked out. He knew the press was going to be there (for all I know, he tipped them off). I was supposed to be the media savvy one, and dressing up for a press event hadn’t occurred to me.

  We went into the courthouse and I met with the DA at the time, Michael Guarino, telling him about my desire to give Kathie Durst’s family some peace. I said, “This family needs to know where the body is.” I explained that her mom was over eighty years old. “Any deal you cut, any plea, please include us. We’ll help you. I’ll give you whatever you need on this guy.”

  Guarino was a well-respected district attorney, recognized as one of the best DAs in Galveston County history. He was attentive, respectful, and agreed to include us if any deal were to be made.

  I took a seat in the courtroom, in the front row on a wooden bench, swinging my foot, checking my watch, waiting for Durst to appear for his hearing. I was anxious to finally eyeball him. Fifteen minutes went by. A half hour. An hour.

  He never showed.

  Durst blew off his arraignment. I was more than surprised that the Texas guys were shocked that a guy would forfeit that much bail. They had no idea.

  For Robert Durst, three hundred thousand dollars was lunch money.

  We waited for another hour. Durst’s court-appointed lawyer in Galveston couldn’t get hold of his client. It became clear to everyone present that there would be no hearing.

  My flight was scheduled to leave, so John asked Cody if he could take me to the airport. He said, “Sorry, I have to stay and testify.”

  John asked, “Where are you testifying?”

  “In the grand jury.”

  I said, “Today?”

  And indeed he did. Before lunch, the Galveston DA indicted Durst for murder. It was that fast. They might drive slowly in Texas, but they indict like lightning. They understood that if Durst were found in another state, Texas would need an indictment to extradite him back.

  I said, “Whoa! Texas justice! I’m glad I got down here before the hanging!”

  I remember Cody looking at me as if I was a wack job. I would catch that look from him many times over the years. His idea of a proper lady doesn’t match up with my New York, no-nonsense, in-your-face personality, but he’s gotten used to me. Or maybe I’ve grown on him.

  We talked a little bit before we went our separate ways. I remember saying, “Are you going to catch this guy?”

  Looking down at me he said, “Have no fear. We’ll get him!”

  I had a vision of Cody in a ten-gallon hat, with a gun belt and six-shooters, galloping on a horse, lassoing Durst as the prairie dust made a cloud around him.

  I liked the vision, and clung to it all the way back to New York.

  EIGHT |

  | DEBRAH LEE CHARATAN, QUEEN FOR A DAY

  In October 2001, I was just back from Texas. John O’Donnell remained in Galveston to work with Cody Cazalas.

  A call came in to the Galveston police department from a retired NYPD officer working for an investment bank. He said that one Debrah Lee Charatan had come into the bank to wire a $180,000 bond to Texas. As soon as he spotted the Durst name on the wire, he picked up the phone and called Cody Cazalas. John was in the office with Cody at the time and spoke with the quick-thinking retired NYPD officer. Then he called my chief investigator, Casey Quinn, to identify the person who wired the money.

  Casey had Roseanne patch both him and John O’Donnell to my phone.

  I was in Manhattan in the backseat of my black Tahoe, shuffling through a stack of files as usual. I answered my phone. John said, “Boss, we found Robert Durst’s wife.”

  My heart stopped. They found the body? I said, “Where?”

  He said, “She’s living in New York City.”

  Kathie was alive? I said, “What do you mean?”

  He said, “He’s got another wife—Debrah Lee Charatan. She’s the one who bailed him out of Galveston. They got married in December 2000.”

  My head was reeling. Who in her right mind would marry Robert Durst? Was he legally allowed to marry if he wasn’t divorced from Kathie?

  We’d learn soon enough that Robert was, in fact, divorced, and had been for quite some time.

  In New York, you can get a divorce on abandonment grounds even if one spouse is absent—if you jump through a few hoops. First, you have to make an effort to find the spouse through channels, such as the DMV, the Board of Elections, or just a Google search. If a search came up empty, you would then publish a summons that said, essentially, “Attention, spouse, wherever you are! I’m going to divorce you.” The only specifications about where your notice appeared in print? The publication had to be available in the area you believed your spouse was living (or, in Durst’s case, not living). If a normal person used this law to get a divorce in an upstanding way, he’d place the summons in the Daily News, a well-read paper the spouse might actually read. Robert Durst’s notices appeared in the Westchester Law Journal. Never heard of it? Exactly. His objective was to adhere to the letter of the law in the sneakiest possible way.

  He ran the notice for three consecutive weeks and waited the requisite thirty days for her to respond.

  Robert Durst knew that wasn’t going to happen. Why? Because he murdered her.

  Next, Robert took his proof of publication, and an affidavit that said Kathie didn’t reply to his summonses, to Westchester Supreme Court Justice Matthew Coppola, who signed the divorce decree in June 1990.

  A secret divorce.

  Followed by a secret marriage.

  What the hell was going on?

  I asked Surrogate’s Court Ju
dge Rennie Roth, “Is it bigamy?”

  She looked into the question and concluded, “It’s not bigamy.” An uncontested divorce by publication was completely legal. In Durst’s case, it was also devious. No one except Robert’s lawyers, the judge, and, presumably, Debrah Lee Charatan knew that he’d gotten divorced. Not the Durst family. Not the McCormack family. No one had a clue that Robert divorced Kathie in June 1990, or that he’d married Debrah in December 2000.

  “I’m already in the city. Where is she?” I asked from the backseat of the Tahoe, my paperwork instantly forgotten.

  John gave me the address in Manhattan of Debrah Lee Charatan Realty, Inc., on Madison Avenue.

  “I’m going to talk to her right now,” I said to John on the phone.

  John said, “No, no, no. We’ll do it.”

  I responded, “No, I’m doing the interview.” Again the push-pull DA-investigator thing. What was John going to do? Tell me I couldn’t talk to Debrah? I was the Boss. And I had to meet this woman.

  I said, “James, change of plans. Take me to the East Side.”

  Investigator James O’Donnell was driving. Chief Quinn dispatched investigators Bob Jackman and Pat Sturino to interview her alongside me.

  When we arrived at her Madison Avenue office, a pretty receptionist smiled at us.

  I said, “Debrah Lee Charatan, please.”

  “And you are?”

  “Jeanine Pirro.”

  She might not have recognized my face, but the name clicked. Her eyes got big. “One minute,” she said, and went through a door into the rear of the office suite. She came back a minute later and said, “I’m sorry. She can’t see you. You don’t have an appointment.” Years later, this same receptionist would corner me at a charity event at Lincoln Center. “Don’t you remember me?” she asked, and we had a nice dishy conversation.

  But that day, she was not my friend.

  “Well, you tell her she can talk to me now or she can come to the grand jury,” I said, which was my number-one favorite threat. On cue, James whipped out his badge. It was a law-enforcement bully move—and it never failed.

  The receptionist went back in again, and two minutes later, she came out and said, “Follow me.”

  We were brought to a large, sunny office. The woman behind an impressive desk said, “I’m Debrah Lee Charatan.”

  “Are you married to Robert Durst?”

  In her gravelly smoker’s voice, she answered, “Yes.”

  I have a firm handshake to begin with, but I would have made sure I had one that day. I took one look at her and knew two things. One, she was not a woman you could mess with. And two, she was my kind of broad. She was impeccably dressed in high-end designer clothes. Great jewelry. She was fit and obviously worked out. Here’s a woman who spends a lot on clothes and lifestyle. Money is very important to her. She oozed confidence and was, as I’d realize quickly, sharp as a whip.

  “Did you try to withdraw $1.8 million from his bank account the day of his arraignment?” While we were cooling our heels in the Galveston courtroom, Debrah was in New York, trying to withdraw a truckload of cash. The accounts were frozen, though. We knew a tall, thin woman had tried to get at his money, but we weren’t sure who.

  “Yes.”

  I eyeballed her; she eyeballed me. It was just bizarre to be standing in front of my nemesis’s wife. If Debrah Lee Charatan and I had happened to meet in the 1980s at a restaurant like Elaine’s or Michael’s, and were introduced by mutual friends (Al was a real-estate lawyer and was part of that crowd), I could see talking to her over a cocktail and thinking, This is one smart cookie. She was attractive, stylish, an unapologetically ambitious woman who’d made a success of herself despite her modest upbringing. We actually had a lot in common.

  But we weren’t meeting under pleasant circumstances.

  She was married to the man I believed murdered two women and one senior citizen. Why do it? Why marry him? Robert didn’t make a move unless he had a damned good reason, so their secret marriage had to serve a larger purpose. Knowing him, and getting to know her, I concluded that reason could only be one thing: money. It sure as hell wasn’t love.

  “When did you marry Robert?” I asked.

  “Last year,” she replied.

  Last year, meaning 2000? Instantly, I thought, Susan Berman, who’d been murdered in December 2000. “Do you remember the date?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember the day you got married?”

  She said, “Not really.” She didn’t even try to sound enamored of her new husband.

  She was giving me the runaround while two men with guns stood behind me. This woman had seriously big, clanging balls.

  But so did I. “Why don’t you get your calendar and we’ll take a look?” I asked.

  Debrah called in the receptionist/assistant to get her calendar. She came back with the leather-bound book. Debrah flipped through it and said, “We got married on December 11.”

  Twelve days before Susan Berman was murdered.

  I said, “Were any people at the wedding?”

  “It was a small ceremony.” I’ll say it was small. As my team later discovered, Robert and Debrah had the smallest ceremony ever—and super-romantic. She’d opened a phone book and picked a rabbi, one Robert I. Summers. He arrived at 1500 Broadway, an office building in Times Square, and performed a fifteen-minute ceremony in a conference room. Robert gave her a $78,000 ring. It might sound like a lot. But consider that Durst received $3 million a year from his trust. If you used the one-month-salary rule, Durst should have spent $250,000 on the ring. The betrothed couple next went to a lawyer’s office, and he signed over his power of attorney to her, giving her control of his vast fortune. Durst would himself describe the union to his sister, Wendy, as a “marriage of convenience. I had to have Debrah to write my checks. I was setting myself up to be a fugitive.”

  I said to her, “You do realize that Robert Durst is a dangerous man.”

  “He’s not dangerous at all. If he came home, I’d open the door.” He was on the lam at the time, having jumped bail in Galveston.

  Clearly, Debrah didn’t scare easily. I would find out that she grew up a butcher’s daughter in Howard Beach, Queens. Her parents were among the few Polish Holocaust survivors—her father lost a foot on a landmine during the war—so you can only imagine how tough they were. Their daughter came with a survivor’s instinct preinstalled. It was in her blood.

  “Do you have kids?” I asked.

  “A son.”

  “Would you let Robert in if your son was home?”

  “I didn’t get custody,” she said.

  Her first marriage, to attorney Bradley Berger, ended in 1985. The divorce, and the custody battle for her then five-year-old son, was brutal. Her husband got full custody. (You just know there’s a crazy story there.) After losing numerous appeals, Debrah didn’t visit or speak to her son for fifteen years. She was also estranged from her mother and siblings. Her father had died.

  “Let’s back up for a second. How’d you meet Robert?” I asked her. “When did you meet him?”

  “Oh, I’ve known him for years,” she said.

  Indeed, they had. As it turned out, they met at the Rainbow Room at a real-estate-industry party in December 1988. I can totally understand why Robert Durst would have zeroed in on her at that event. She was sixteen years his junior, striking and elegant with an unmistakably hard edge. But she was having a rough time. She was buried under lawsuits and legal bills, recently divorced. Her first firm, Bach Realty, Inc., had been an all-female firm founded in 1980. It was, initially, a huge success, with annual billings of $200 million. Her ultimate dream, as she described it to Harper’s Bazaar in 1984, was to become “the female Harry Helmsley.” (Good thing she didn’t say “the female Seymour Durst” or it never would have worked with Robert.) Charatan was obsessed with money and fame. In a profile called “Money Dearest” for Manhattan Inc. magazine in the mid-eighties, she was quoted a
s saying, “If I couldn’t be a star, I wouldn’t be happy.”

  By the late eighties, her star had fallen. The Labor Department was investigating her on three cases, and at least four lawsuits were filed against her by ex-employees. They used words like “tyrannical,” “greedy,” “hawk,” and “shark” to describe their former boss. Susan Berman’s friend Kim Lankford called Debrah a “barracuda.”

  So many predators in this crowd.

  One burned Bach employee, Ronda Rogovin, told Newsday at the time, “I was the top saleswoman there for the last three years in a row. [Charatan] fired me the day I was due for a check. That’s her usual pattern.” Debrah lost most of the suits and had to pay hundreds of thousands in fines and commissions. The firm never recovered and dissolved in 1987.

  In 2015, I spoke to some Bach Realty women for my Fox News show. They characterized Debrah as a woman who’d lie, cheat, steal, and do anything for money.

  Enter Robert, her savior, in 1988. Somehow, he overcame his chronic cheapness and gallantly paid off her lawyers. He showered her with Durst Organization perks like car-service vouchers. Practically overnight, she went from down-and-out to riding in style and living large. In 1990, two years into their relationship, Charatan moved into Durst’s Fifth Avenue apartment.

  After altruistic, naïve Kathleen, Robert must have seen Debrah as appealingly ruthless and savvy. His murky past (he was suspected of having killed his wife) and personality quirks—routinely burping, farting, urinating, and smoking pot in public—wouldn’t faze her. She could handle him.

  For her part, Debrah must have looked at Robert and seen dollar signs.

  Their romance didn’t last long. She moved out after a year of living together. But their friendship was forever. Robert would turn to Debrah when he needed help with his family. In 1994, Seymour gave the keys to the company to Douglas, not Robert. Debrah was there to hold his hand. When Seymour had a stroke in 1995, Debrah convinced Robert to visit his dying father in the hospital. She couldn’t convince him to go to the funeral, though. Robert cut ties with the Dursts. If his brothers or sister needed to get in touch with him, they went through Debrah.