He Killed Them All Page 16

  • Names, addresses, and phone numbers. Among the names and addresses we found: Peter Schwartz (the photographer Robert assaulted in the eighties) in Stratford, directions to “exit 105 Garden State Parkway,” phone numbers for “Arthur,” “Mich.” Were they dealers? Pimps? We had no idea.

  • Flight information. An old trip, in April 2001, between Susan’s and Morris’s murders. I guess he wasn’t really on the run.

  • Pages from a self-help book. It’s a book called You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?! A Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder, by Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo, originally published in 1995. He’d circled passages of the book, including the lines, “The grown-up ADDer often has trouble working steadily on the job,” “The adult with ADD . . . is so distractible that she isn’t with her feelings long enough to deal with her emotions. Unable to process emotions very well and blaming the world for problems, she might experience explosive outbursts or depressive episodes,” and “arguments with spouses and coworkers and yelling matches with children can become a way of life for some ADDers. The short fuse that causes temper tantrums in childhood can now create problems of intensified negative interpersonal relationships.” The paragraph about adult ADDers and impulsive spending and financial hardship? He scratched that one out. He was circling what might apply to him and crossing out what obviously didn’t.

  • The most disturbing piece of evidence we found: A note written on a notepad from the Hilton Garden Inn in Danbury, Connecticut, in green ink, of course, with the address of the Center for Women and Families on Fairfield Avenue—Gilberte Najamy’s workplace—and her personal cell phone number. Cody believes he was waiting for his chance to kill her. “There’s no doubt in my mind he was going to try to kill her,” he told me recently. “I guess he never got a good chance to shoot at her. But he stayed at that hotel for a week waiting for the opportunity.”

  He wrote a “like” list in the spiral notebook with names and contact info for people he did not want to kill, including Emilio Vignoni, his sister Wendy Durst Kreeger, Teresa Joan Something-stein (his script was almost illegible), Greg Press (some PR person?), Diane Leonard, Delly, Lu. We knew some of the players, but most would have to be tracked down. Fortunately, he’d supplied their phone numbers.

  I found out years later that he’d also penned a “hate” list. It had three names on it.

  1. Jeanine Pirro

  2. Douglas Durst

  3. Gilberte Najamy

  What we did not find:

  • Morris Black’s head.

  • A map to Kathleen Durst’s remains.

  • A signed confession.

  When we pieced together his travelogue, it was clear that he’d visited old haunts. The guy couldn’t resist returning to the scene of the crime(s).

  He went to the Jersey Shore—to Atlantic City, only a few miles from Ship Bottom and the Pine Barrens, where Kathie’s remains are most likely located.

  He spent a week in Danbury, Connecticut, where Kathie spent part of her last night alive and where Gilberte currently worked.

  He’d paid a visit to his brother Douglas’s Katonah home, even drove up the driveway in his Chevy and looked in the window. He left without firing a shot.

  It stands to reason that he swung by my home in nearby Harrison, too. Cops from my town were doing regular drive-bys. Al hired investigators to trail the kids to and from school and to patrol our property at night. He was always more worried about me than I was about myself. At the office, I was surrounded by law enforcement at all times. I’d faced death threats as an everyday part of the job for decades. A prisoner I’d put away mailed me a drawing of my face covered in blood. (I still have that one.) A man who had threatened to throw his chair at me as I was cross-examining him was threatened with removal by the court. That was unnecessary since I got him removed to state prison for twenty-five years. My window had been shot at years earlier when I was prosecuting a Rastafarian for shooting and killing his wife and then placing her in an oven while their children slept in the next room. I wasn’t shaking in my Louboutins about Robert Durst on the lam. I was armed to the teeth. I had gates, a security system, cameras, and guns all over the house. If Durst had driven up my driveway in his Chevy, I would have grabbed my Mossberg pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun and blown his head off.

  His last stop in this trip down memory lane was in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he attended college at Lehigh University back in the sixties. And that was where he got a strong craving for a chicken salad sandwich.

  HOW COULD A SMART man be so stupid, stealing that sandwich?

  Simple: Robert the millionaire was a cheapskate.

  In a taped phone conversation with Debrah Lee Charatan while Durst cooled his heels in the Pennsylvania prison, he told her he stole the sandwich because he was trying to stay within his two-hundred-dollar-per-day budget. “I was renting cars at face value and I was living for two months,” he told her. “That’s why I got into shoplifting, trying to stretch my money. If I just hadn’t done any of that shit . . . That’s why I’m in jail, because I started counting my money.”

  I’ve often wondered, besides driving and thinking about his “likes” and “hates,” what was he doing during those weeks on the run? He’d originally fled with, as he told Debrah on the prison tapes, “five envelopes each with $9,500 in it,” or a total of $47,500. In less than two months on the lam, Robert spent $10,000. He was staying at inexpensive hotels. The Chevy rental was paid for with $2,500 in cash. So what did he drop thousands of dollars on? Gas. Food. Ipecac. And we don’t know what else he stole. We know he bought a razor to shave his head and eyebrows. I wonder, was he alone all that time? Could he have been pushing the envelope as usual, and burning through his money on hookers who could potentially ID him? Did he get off on that?

  While he was in prison in Pennsylvania, Durst’s phone conversations were recorded. He often spoke to Debrah about Douglas. In one such call, she said, “[Douglas] screwed you out of everything, your birthright, the entire Durst Organization . . . He took it from you. He could have done it with you. But no, he took it from you.” She fanned the flames of Robert’s hatred, for sure.

  Debrah Lee Charatan is a dangerous woman. No wonder she wasn’t afraid of Robert. You wouldn’t want to tackle her in the pots and pans section of aisle five in Walmart.

  In another of his taped conversations, she referred to Robert’s heavily armed visit to Douglas’s home in Katonah, and then said, “Douglas knew you were planning suicide.” As if he drove to his brother’s house with guns to shoot himself out of spite?

  I don’t believe Robert intended to kill himself for a second. But—he would rather die than let his family get his money. So he married this woman to keep his cash out of his hated brother Douglas’s hands and to spin his criminal actions into a pathetic cry for help.

  Robert replied, “I screwed up.”

  There has been a lot of speculation about what she meant by the suicide comment. I believe Debrah was sending a coded warning to Robert that Douglas knew Robert was gunning for him. Robert’s “I screwed up” was an expression of regret, because now he knew he’d never get as close to his sibling again.

  In fact, Douglas hired bodyguards after that incident.

  I WAS CRITICIZED FOR going to Texas. Why should my trip to Pennsylvania be any different? Reporters and pundits asked, “What’s she even doing there? This has nothing to do with her cold case.”

  It was climb-the-walls infuriating that people didn’t understand that it was all connected. What Durst did in Los Angeles, Galveston, and Bethlehem were related to what he’d done in Westchester in 1982. One day, I’d prove it. But, in the meantime, I had to see the evidence for myself, and go through it piece by piece. I needed to be there to offer insight and share information with law enforcement in other states.

  They didn’t know Robert Durst like I did. But they were learning.

  We banded together on this case. Texas, California, N
ew York, and Pennsylvania were working together. Texas was tracking evidence. We were watching the money. Pennsylvania was recording prison phone calls. Los Angeles was interviewing witnesses. We all wanted this guy. No one more than me.

  I take that back. Cody wanted him as much as I did. He tracked down every lead, tirelessly, without complaint. He probably logged as many miles as Durst did during those six weeks of cross-country investigating. I came to think of Cody as the moral core of the whole investigation. He pushed and pushed and never lost faith or hope. Cody and I banged the Durst drum the loudest, and the longest.

  I always knew that, eventually, we would find out what happened to Kathie.

  I STARTED THINKING ABOUT Durst’s defense. How was he going to try to get away from a murder he admitted committing? The pop psychology book pages in the Chevy hinted at an insanity defense. During his time on the lam, he was probably turning it over in his mind, wondering, How can I prove I’m crazy?

  The family photos—which he hadn’t been in possession of when arrested in Galveston, Texas—hinted at a sympathy ploy, like, “Look how much I love my family and friends! I carry around their pictures!” So what? That had nothing to do with his fleeing from Galveston, evading arrest for weeks, plus all the evidence of his longer-term plans to go off the grid.

  He married Debrah to protect his money before he killed Susan.

  He rented or bought all those apartments, including the Galveston one, before the L.A. murder as well.

  To me, all the signs pointed to premeditation. He’d been plotting for months how he’d get away with Berman’s murder before he committed it. And then, after he murdered Black, he continued to plot and scheme to get away with that one, too.

  He’d need a miracle to pull it off. He dismembered a body and jumped bail. It looked bad, no matter how many self-help books he studied.

  With Debrah’s help, Durst hired a triumvirate of Texas swagger, some local big guns, to represent him. Collectively, their fees were $1.8 million—a mere pittance for the price of freedom.

  Dick DeGuerin, a criminal defense attorney from Houston, had defended David Koresh, the cult leader in Waco, and would go on to defend Tom DeLay for money laundering. He was a good old boy with a Texas accent and a ten-gallon ego.

  Michael Ramsey from Dallas had just unsuccessfully defended Kenneth Lay of the Enron Corporation. He tended to take on the corporate clients accused of fraud and conspiracy to the detriment of the little guy. He had a reputation for loving a fight.

  Chip Lewis, also from Houston, was a trial lawyer and former prosecutor. He was younger than the other two, but I didn’t make any assumptions about his competence.

  Michael Kennedy was out. Debrah hated him. As she ranted on the prison tapes, he didn’t have Robert’s interests at heart—only those of the Durst Organization. Ultimately, he was kept on, but as an impotent spectator, not an active defender.

  A good wife, Debrah went to Northampton County Prison in Pennsylvania to meet with Robert and his freshly hired Texas legal eagles to talk strategy on the Morris Black murder.

  A few days later, at the request of Durst’s defense, the judge who’d been assigned the case in Galveston, one Susan Criss, issued a gag order on me and the DA in Pennsylvania. We were banned from speaking to the press about our cases.

  Outrageous! Since when can a judge silence out-of-state DAs who are doing their jobs? Who was this judge?

  But the ADAs in my office suggested that we lie low and let the Texas prosecutors do their jobs, after which Durst would be locked up for ninety-nine years if not immediately dragged to the closest hangin’ tree. So I lay low.

  I didn’t like it, though. This judge had no legal authority to gag me or anyone else. At the very least, there was no notice or a hearing or evidence that what I, or anyone, might say on the record was relevant material to an upcoming murder trial in Texas. This judge was shooting from the hip and she did it at the behest of the defense. There was no basis for the gag order. For a judge in Texas to think that she can just deprive somebody of her First Amendment right of free speech is ridiculous. The woman wasn’t in Texas. She was in Lalaland.

  I couldn’t talk, but I could certainly write. I sent Susan Criss a letter.

  December 7, 2001

  Dear Judge Criss:

  I was just advised that Your Honor issued an order prohibiting me, as well as every member of my office, from making any public statements regarding Robert Durst in the disappearance of his wife twenty years ago.

  Quite frankly, this order mystifies me. Neither my office nor I was served with any motion papers requesting this relief. I am neither a party nor a participant in the criminal matter before you. And I know of no authority that grants to a Texas state court the power to control the free expression of an individual in another state, particularly one seeking public cooperation in a “cold case.”

  Moreover, while I have made public statements regarding our New York investigation, long before it is even alleged that Robert Durst beheaded and dismembered a senior citizen in your county, I have said virtually nothing about the substance of the Texas case. Even were I within your jurisdiction, which I am not, the defendant could not make any showing of statements on my part regarding the Texas case sufficient to warrant such a dramatic restriction of my right of expression.

  I am investigating the disappearance of a young medical student who was gravely concerned about her own safety prior to her disappearance. In addition to using ordinary police methods, it is essential that I am able to appeal to members of the public who might possess information regarding the fate of Kathleen Durst. Given the passage of time, these individuals may be living far away from Westchester County. Your Honor’s order not only is unauthorized and unjustified; it also has attempted to foreclose a significant investigatory option that should remain open to me, particularly in view of the age of New York’s case.

  It is my sincere hope that Your Honor will reconsider the wisdom of this order in light of the above.

  Very yours truly,

  Jeanine Pirro

  I cc’d Michael Guarino and John Morganelli, the DAs in Galveston County and Northampton County, respectively, as well as Dick DeGuerin, who wasn’t gagged himself. He held numerous press conferences before the trial.

  The stern letter didn’t work. Judge Criss refused to lift the ban.

  Durst hadn’t even been extradited back to Texas for this trial, and as opposed to focusing on her case in her own county, this judge was concerned with my case, an investigation seventeen hundred miles away and long before Durst killed Morris Black.

  So why did she do it?

  She did it because Dick DeGuerin asked her to.

  From the beginning, I suspected that he would get whatever he wanted.

  I’d never heard of the guy before he started calling me a grandstander. What was going on in the Lone Star State? I know they think they’ve got a separate republic in Texas, but they still have the Constitution down there, don’t they? But apparently, DeGuerin was well known in Texas. Was Criss trying to ingratiate herself to people with deep pockets to secure her next election? (In the years after the trial, DeGuerin and Chip Lewis would both give money to Susan Criss’s reelection campaigns.)

  I acceded to the request so as not to create a side issue. In contrast, District Attorney John Morganelli, also gagged, trumpeted in the Galveston papers, “I’m not following the order. . . . A judge in Texas can’t make an order that has any power to apply to anyone outside of Texas. If members of the media want to call me and ask me, I’m going to feel free to talk to them.” So that DA wouldn’t follow the gag order and he wasn’t “slammed,” but yours truly continued to be: PIRRO SLAMMED BY DURST LAWYER, reported the New York Daily News at the time.

  DeGuerin made another pretrial motion requesting that the judge order that I come to Texas to reveal under oath my evidence about Kathie’s disappearance. DeGuerin argued it was time for me to “put up or shut up”—or both!—about Kathie’s c
ase, claiming that I was hounding Durst. “The evidence in this case is going to be complex enough without Ms. Pirro running for governor,” he told the Daily News.

  Wait a minute. This guy is calling New York newspapers, bad-mouthing me, and I’m not allowed to talk about my own case. Smart.

  In response, Rich Weill, the chief assistant in my office, filed an affidavit that read, “It is obvious that counsel DeGuerin’s agenda is to switch the focus from the evidence against his client in the brutal murder, beheading, and dismemberment of a senior citizen to the bizarre claim that the district attorney ‘made him do it.’ ”

  Then Galveston District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk argued on my behalf. Judge Criss rightly denied DeGuerin’s motion, but spewed that I had come close to violating her gag order: “I don’t want her investigation to interfere with Mr. Durst’s right to have a fair trial.”

  Really? Since when is the district attorney, who is obligated to investigate and prosecute crime within her jurisdiction, required to cease and desist using the name of a suspect by a judge seventeen hundred miles away so that the defendant can get a fair trial in that judge’s courtroom?

  Hey, Judge. Stay in your own lane and worry about yourself.

  As if there wasn’t enough insanity in the air, barring the prison tapes of Debrah and Robert hashing out his defense and how he should act, how he should look, and whether his defense would interfere with her cash flow was, out-and-out, crazy. DeGuerin knew the tapes incriminated Durst. He successfully blocked the jury from hearing them.

  But that wasn’t enough for him. He had to lasso me into the fray. Since the tapes were leaked, DeGuerin tried to connect me to the leak. Again, he wanted me ordered to Texas to explain how the press got hold of those tapes. He told the Daily News, “I’ll bet $1,000 right now where it came from.”

  I remember hitting the ceiling. I never possessed those tapes! I read about them in the New York Post like everyone else did. But if I did have them, you can bet DeGuerin’s thousand dollars that I would have fought tooth and nail to get them admitted into evidence. The tapes were that important. You can never have too much evidence, even in Texas. Although the Texas prosecutors tried, Judge Criss denied that request and hid from the jury the creation of the narrative that clearly incriminated Durst.