He Killed Them All Page 17

  David Hebert gave the classic reply to the press about DeGuerin’s bet. “A fool and his money are soon parted,” he said.

  The Texas big hat was casting roles, with yours truly as the Devil. Of course, every story needs an antagonist. So let’s try some role reversal. Take a woman in law enforcement who spent her career fighting for the underdog, crusading for the silent victims of crime, and make her the villain. And the guy who chopped up a human body better than my butcher Tommy at A&P? Let’s make him the victim.

  The fact that I was doing the job I was elected to do, that prosecutors all over the country were doing—dusting off and trying to solve cold cases with the advancements in forensics and DNA—was of little note. He would have been happier if the little woman quietly sat behind her desk and waited for murderers to just turn themselves in. Instead, according to DeGuerin, I was on a witch hunt, and was thus cast as the Wicked Witch. He was good.

  The truth? He was the media hog. I was not.

  ON JANUARY 25, TWO months after his Wegmans arrest, Durst went to court in Northampton County to be officially released on gun and pot charges so that he could be sent to Texas to face murder charges. I met with John Morganelli, the Northampton County DA. Morganelli was a no-bullshit kind of guy. We bonded over our fury at the so-called gag order. He told me and a group of reporters that he was glad to get Durst out of his state. The Galveston County sheriff’s office was represented to escort Durst back to the Lone Star State. Cody was there and prepared to testify in the event Durst fought extradition to Texas.

  Before the hearing, John O’Donnell and I waited in the hallway of the courthouse for Durst to be brought in.

  I was finally going to get to eyeball the bastard.

  Tons of people were lined up against the walls—police, reporters, ADAs. They started murmuring at the far end of the hallway and I knew Durst was on the move. He was surrounded by police. Durst was very short and the cops around him were very tall. Even in my heels, I was no giant. I stood on my tiptoes.

  He got closer to me, and I craned my neck to catch a glimpse.

  He was a small, beady-eyed nothing. The chains were standard operating procedure, but it seemed like overkill given his escorts and his size.

  I said to myself, What a wimp! This little man, this schlep in glasses with a shuffling gait, killed his wife, killed his friend, dismembered his neighbor, evaded law enforcement for weeks? How could this elf be a monster? I couldn’t believe he could lift a bow saw, let alone use one to hack up a body.

  I thought, If it came to it, I could probably take him.

  He was totally focused on just looking forward. No eye contact—and I was so ready to give him a big smile to unsettle him. I later learned that he’d been coached by Debrah to show nothing, to put on a poker face. I don’t think it was a challenge for him. I got the feeling he was bored by the whole situation. Boredom was the mask of entitlement and arrogance.

  He thought he would get away with anything, because so far, he had.

  In the courtroom, I sat right behind Durst. Once I’d recovered from the initial shock of just how tiny he was, I could get a better read on him.

  He was fidgety, twitchy. His hair had partially grown back, but it was patchy and sparse. He looked around with flat, dead eyes, and I remember thinking, “How does he even pass for human?”

  Gilberte was in the back row. She hadn’t been in the same room with him since before Kathie disappeared, and had been dying to ask him one question for the last twenty years. When the hearing was over, she got her chance. I watched as he walked down the aisle right by Gilberte.

  She yelled, “Tell me what you did to Kathie.”

  He paused and stared at her. His beady eyes showed nothing, no feeling, no remorse, not even recognition. And then he moved along.

  I thought, He’s the Devil walking. Not because he was radiating malevolence, but because any one of us could walk by this little old man on the street and have no idea of the violence he was capable of.

  Undercover evil. Anonymous evil. Evil you thought of as a friend that crept up on you from behind and shot you in the head. Evil that got a haircut after dismembering a human being with a saw. Evil that wouldn’t let a family put their beloved daughter to rest in peace.

  I felt a chill as he turned away from Gilberte. I can still feel it.

  AFTER MORRIS BLACK’S MURDER, the LAPD was suddenly looking at Durst for Susan Berman.

  Took them long enough!

  They’d been barking up the wrong tree on their case for nearly a year and hadn’t come close to indicting anyone. Now they were calling me for help. Texas was calling. I was so determined to solve all of our cases that I put together a task force of detectives from New York, Texas, and California.

  My office, state police, Paul Coulter from Los Angeles, and Texas investigators met in White Plains and brainstormed, looking for similarities, looking for common denominators. In the past year, Coulter had been digging a bit into Durst, running credit card and phone records, tracking Durst’s movements.

  Eddie Murphy gets credit for putting Robert Durst in California in December 2000. He discovered that Durst took a United flight from New York, stopping in San Francisco, and ending in Eureka, California, on December 14, ten days before Susan’s murder. Five days later, on December 19, Durst got his Ford Explorer out of long-term airport parking. Murphy next tracked him to a flight from San Francisco to New York at 10:00 p.m. on December 23, twelve or so hours after the murder. There was no evidence Durst had been in Los Angeles on December 23, unfortunately. But it was possible. He had enough time.

  Our investigation took many turns. One was a trip to Homer, Louisiana. In the summer of 2002, we received a letter from an inmate who said that Robert Durst told him where Kathie was buried. I immediately sent John to interview this inmate. John flew to Dallas, then to Shreveport, then to Homer, Louisiana. In the meantime, I called the district attorney, James Bullers, and told him that the inmate said he met Durst when Durst was on the run after killing Morris Black and that he was willing to say where Kathie was buried in exchange for being removed from the Louisiana prison system and brought to New York.

  The DA said, “Are you kidding? This guy stole my motor home! He ain’t going anywhere!” As serious as the case was, there were times when we all got a chuckle or two. This was one of them.

  After I suppressed a laugh, it was clear to me that that motor home was very important to Bullers. But, in the end, it mattered not, since there was very little information that could be corroborated.

  John O’Donnell came back and said, “Boss, he talks a good game but he’s full of shit.”

  To which I responded, “I hope the crawfish was at least good. And what makes this idiot think the New York prisons are better than Louisiana?”

  We spent a lot of time on the cadaver note. For months, Los Angeles had been trying to get a match on the cadaver letter with samples from Nyle Brenner, Susan Berman’s manager, but they couldn’t make it happen. Of course not! Brenner didn’t write it. But I knew who did.

  When John told me about the note—I hadn’t been in the meeting that day—I had one question about it. “Was the note written in green ink?”

  John said, “Yes, Boss.”

  “Of course it was.”

  We were hanging on to hope about the cadaver letter because, as Robert Durst would say in The Jinx, “Only the killer could have written it.” Now all we had to do was get a handwriting match, and it would be enough evidence to indict him.

  God knows, we tried.

  Handwriting analysis is as much an art as a science. It isn’t exact, like DNA (although don’t tell the O.J. jury that). The LAPD handwriting expert opined that, based on the Robert Durst exemplars—he’d been forced to produce handwriting samples while awaiting trial in Galveston—it was not a definite match. It was “highly probable” that it was his writing, but the evidence was inconclusive.

  Could Robert Durst have disguised his handwriting? O
f course. He knew what the issue was and what the damning evidence was. He knew exactly what he shouldn’t write like. He put on wigs. He would put on a style of printing, too. By doing so, he created an almost insurmountable hurdle for the prosecution in the Susan Berman case. We didn’t have the evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this guy wrote the note, or killed the woman, to a unanimous jury of twelve.

  The inconclusive handwriting analysis was a get-out-of-jail-free card for Durst.

  When Paul Coulter was in New York, I kept saying, “Paul, there’s more. You know there’s more.”

  He didn’t believe there was. “Not according to the handwriting experts.”

  I said, “Who the fuck are your handwriting experts?” Not that I had any reason to question them, but I was convinced Durst wrote the note. Why couldn’t there be a match?

  The Jinx team came up against the same problem we did. Unlike the tristate task force, Jarecki and Smerling had a far wider collection of samples—including the rental application where Durst described his job as “chief botanist” in block letters.

  Where did they get all of their samples?

  I have no idea where they got them, or countless other documents, recordings, videos, and photos. Jarecki and Smerling were able to amass documents we in law enforcement couldn’t get.

  It helped that Durst was on board for the first few years of the project. He gave the producers a lot of material to work with. Every photo and document he turned over to them was a risk. He must have known that. But taking crazy risks, dancing on the edge of discovery, was his comfort zone.

  I have a pet theory about the misspelling of “Beverly.” Robert and Susan met while they were students at UCLA. Later, Susan went to Berkeley College for a masters in journalism. Robert likely wrote letters to Susan while she was at Berkeley.

  Berkeley.

  Beverley.

  You can almost see how he’d get used to writing “Berkeley,” associated that word with Susan, and then misspelled “Beverley” when he wrote to her at her new address. For all we know, he misspelled it on purpose, like an “in” joke with her, and then forgot or didn’t think to correct the spelling when he wrote the cadaver note.

  That note would prove to be the first time Durst pushed the envelope—quite literally—too far.

  But it took fifteen years for anyone to prove it.

  TEN |

  | JEANINE PY-RO, THE DA, MADE ME DO IT

  The Durst defense playbook:

  A trial is a simple retelling of a story.

  The courtroom is the theater.

  The voir dire is when you get your ticket.

  The opening statement is when the curtain goes up.

  And, of course, like any script, it is worthless without an actor who is believable, portraying the image, exhibiting the emotion, and connecting with the jury.

  The pretrial motions are the rehearsals where the evidence gets tested and the lawyers find out what they have to work with.

  On March 28, 2002, Dick DeGuerin changed Durst’s plea from “not guilty” to “not guilty by reason of self-defense or accident.”

  Really? I thought to myself. Interesting. This guy DeGuerin knows the other guy is dead and can’t speak for himself, so self-defense is probably a smart move. But it told me that Durst would have to take the stand to make the self-defense or accident argument. How could this guy take the stand when there was so much out there that implicated him in so many questionable situations? A defendant doesn’t have to be convicted of something for a prosecutor to cross-examine him about it, but, with all the skeletons in this guy’s closet, he’d have to be an amazing actor to get the jury to believe him, not the truth. And I wasn’t sure that Durst could be rehearsed so well that he would be prepared for the inevitable tough cross-examination regarding his past.

  Little did I know that DeGuerin and company were the best directors, producers, and puppeteers that money could buy.

  I was also fascinated by the choice not to go the insanity route. Personally, I don’t think the insanity defense has any place in a criminal courtroom. The whole concept is crazy. Either the criminal did it or he didn’t do it. Save that psychological mumbo jumbo for sentencing. Having prosecuted more than my share of insanity defense murder cases, I know that juries rarely buy it. In more than 80 percent of cases, the strategy fails.

  But, then again, this case was so bizarre that it lent itself to that defense.

  Durst had seen a shrink after his mother jumped off the roof of their family home when he was seven years old. He had tried primal scream therapy back in the 1980s. He had taken enough psychology classes to believe that he could self-diagnose. The pages from the ADD book found in the trunk of Durst’s car in Pennsylvania and his highlighting of diagnoses—in green ink, of course—that he felt applied to him indicated that he intended to use some psychiatric defense.

  In fact, the ADD book may have been his first attempt to see if he fit into “crazy.” What better case to use an insanity defense than in one where the defendant chops up some guy like a side of beef?

  That was nixed. Debrah Lee Charatan Durst and DeGuerin got the idea to go with self-defense instead. Debrah Lee was one smart cookie, even smarter than Robert and his lawyers. She understood that insanity, even if it got Robert off, would be the end of her Chanel suits and mansion in the Hamptons. If Robert were found incompetent, as she told him in the Pennsylvania prison tapes that were leaked to Andrea Peyser of the New York Post, then their marriage and his signing over power of attorney to her would be invalidated. That was why she threatened to divorce Robert if he retained Michael Kennedy as his lawyer, since Kennedy would’ve gone the insanity route, which would have boomeranged the Durst trust back to his family. “I’m not going to stay here and watch this. I can’t handle it. I won’t stand by you if you stick with Kennedy,” she raged on the prison tapes.

  As she shrewdly reasoned, “Michael Kennedy’s allegiance is to Douglas. First, he was going to say you’re incompetent. Then he was going to say you’re insane. That would mean your decisions, like giving me power of attorney . . . it’s not good. What he doesn’t want is for me to get any of the trust money. Since I’m not your wife, since you were incompetent at the time, means that they are the only ones who can make your decisions. So they will take all your money and they will become the guardians of it.”

  Lady Macbeth had nothing on Debrah Lee Charatan Durst.

  Durst did as his wife commanded and hired the Texas good old boys. It was the smart move for anyone who had seen Michael Kennedy so unconvincingly ask Robert to come home on television when he was on the run because his family missed him. “Robert, if you see this or hear this, please come home. You have loved ones who care about you here in New York. Your family is solidly, unifiedly behind you. The trust has the wherewithal to pay for your legal defense.”

  Yeah, right. Robert had embarrassed and humiliated his family. He was skipped over to run the empire precisely because they despised him, a move that, per the New York Times’ Charles Bagli, was one of biblical proportions. Dangling that carrot and leading with their wealth was the way the Dursts worked.

  So, how would Durst’s self-defense strategy unfold? As I would later come to understand, it began, bafflingly, with the gag order that sought to prevent me from “running her mouth,” as DeGuerin put it. He threw a dozen pretrial motions at Susan Criss, the judge, both to shut me up and to bring me to Texas to testify. Either he couldn’t make up his mind as to which way to go or he was employing a rather common strategy: throw everything at the wall, aka Judge Criss, and see what sticks.

  Before the trial began, DeGuerin, Ramsey, and Lewis actually tested their scripts on shadow juries and mock trials. They used jury selection experts, the courtroom equivalent of casting agents.

  There are trial attorneys who swear that cases are won or lost on jury selection. With the right jury composed of citizens who particularly connect to your theory of the case, you win. With jurors who,
for whatever reason, do not relate to your themes, you don’t. I am not sure I subscribe to this theory, but the Durst defense definitely got their money’s worth from their jury selection consultants.

  No doubt the consultants came up with a profile of a good Durst juror—someone who is impressed by wealth, someone who relates to an idiosyncratic personality. And what about someone who might be receptive and predisposed to the “DA made me do it” argument, someone who is disinclined to respect a woman in power doing her job?

  It is in this realm that prosecutors who work for the government are at a disadvantage. We don’t have the money to hire jury consultants. Defense attorneys can pretty much do whatever they want. And, with Durst’s money, the prosecution was clearly outgunned.

  The truth of this is reflected in a CNN interview after The Jinx aired. Twelve years after the verdict, juror Deborah Warren commented on how “brilliant” the defense was, “fighting for him, when the DA only had two people sitting over there fighting for this case,” intimating that, if it were such an important case and they were convinced of Durst’s guilt, they’d have more than two people sitting there. For the record, juror extraordinaire, Robert Durst is rich and famous, able to pay the likes of DeGuerin, Ramsey, and Lewis, along with a whole entourage, to show up in court every day. As prosecutors, we don’t have that luxury because we work for you and are paid for by you, not by Robert Durst.

  I didn’t go to Galveston for the trial. What for? Far be it from me to accommodate the Texas big hat. But the media inquiries were constant. David Hebert and Anne Marie Corbalis in public affairs were called for my response every time DeGuerin took a shot at me. Suffice it to say, what came out of my mouth was never relayed to the media.