He Killed Them All Page 2

Not that L.A. law enforcement didn’t pull out all the stops to get a handwriting match on the cadaver note, but the exemplars (other samples) of Durst’s handwriting weren’t nearly as good as what the filmmakers ultimately unearthed more than a decade later. On camera, Susan’s stepson, Sareb, found another letter addressed to her, on Robert’s letterhead, which had been sitting in a box all that time, and appeared to be an exact match to the cadaver note, right down to the misspelling of the word “Beverley” on the envelope.

  Now, I had also studied a copy of the cadaver note in 2001, as well as other samples of Durst’s awkward, boxy hand printing. The expert used by the Los Angeles authorities could not find sufficient similarities between the handwriting on the cadaver note and the exemplars provided. My disappointment was overwhelming. If ever there were a hurdle to overcome in proving Robert Durst’s guilt in the Susan Berman homicide, this one expert’s opinion would make it almost impossible to scale it.

  Most would be surprised to know the cadaver note was written in green ink. To me, that was another telltale sign. Everything I saw that Durst wrote was in green ink. Green—the color of money, the thing he loved so much.

  It’s been suggested that the killer sent the “cadaver” note because he may have had feelings for the victim. That could be true. It appeared that Susan was kneeling down with a tissue to wipe up dog feces when she was shot in the back of the head. The note may have been written so that she would be found before she decomposed or her dogs ate her.

  In the days leading up to the episode-six finale of The Jinx, everyone involved was on tenterhooks. Would Jarecki confront Durst with the side-by-side comparison of the two Beverleys? Would it be so huge, people would need to run for cover? What could it be? The finale had to be even more explosive than the finding of the note itself.

  So when I was invited to join Jarecki and some of the other key players who’d been part of The Jinx that Sunday, March 15, at his Manhattan apartment to view the finale, I was champing at the bit. Fox News channel, like everyone else, was anticipating something big, so I had another one-hour live show to do immediately after The Jinx aired. Time would be tight, but I’d figure it out. What better than to have all the players in one room, and to drag along the guests to tell the world what I already knew in my heart—that Robert Durst was a serial murderer?

  ON SUNDAY, MARCH 15 a town car picked me up shortly after 5:00 a.m. to take me to NBC for my hit on the Today show, and apply another layer of paint to my face. The Jinx was such hot news that even the networks were airing segments on what viewers might see on the finale that night. What no one—not even NBC or me—knew at that point was that big news had already happened.

  Anchor Erica Hill said, “You said in a recent interview, and I’m going to quote you here, ‘I think Durst knows the jig is up.’ That’s a pretty strong statement.”

  I discussed with Erica the inconsistencies in Durst’s statement to the filmmakers versus what he’d told police investigators when the crime originally happened. Clearly, the series had been building up to reach a resolution. “I think that tonight will take this thing to another level and I’m looking forward to seeing it,” I said.

  She asked, “In terms of Durst deciding to speak out against the advice of his attorney? Why would he do this now? Is it based on ego?”

  I reviewed some of his ego-driven actions over the years, including his stealing of a sandwich from Wegmans when there was an outstanding murder warrant for him. “He keeps pushing the envelope,” I said, “and interestingly enough, it’s an envelope that may push him.”

  What I didn’t say was that Andrew had previously revealed to me that there would be real closure in the finale. But he and his producer, Marc, would only go so far when they appeared on my show, which aired on March 7, just over a week before the finale. “Our job here is to place it in front of the audience for them to see. That’s what we’re going to do and what people are going to respond to,” he said.

  Jarecki’s goal had always been to find the truth. I asked him if he found it. He said, “I think we did,” but he refused to elaborate. Finally, tonight, eight days later, we would all find out what truth they uncovered.

  After the Today show segment, when I got into the town car heading back to Westchester, my phone rang. It was Cody Cazalas. Cody was the detective from Galveston, Texas, who scrupulously and painstakingly, piece-by-piece as a good cop does, built the case against Durst for the murder of Morris Black. It was as solid an investigation as I had ever seen. Most in law enforcement would have called it a slam dunk.

  Except that it wasn’t. Durst walked.

  But wait: Let me tell you something about cops—good cops, anyway. When they’ve lived and breathed a case for years, when they’ve dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s and damn near killed themselves in the process, when they do all that and the defendant is acquitted, it’s personal. It’s devastating. The one piece of critical evidence that Cody searched high and low for but could not find was Morris Black’s head. If he had found that head—which Durst had admitted to severing at the sixth vertebra—with the bullet lodged inside, he would have found the telltale piece of evidence. Without it, forensic experts could not offer their theory of the homicide or evaluate the trajectory of the bullet to establish whether the shooting was an execution (a bullet entry to the back of the head) or otherwise. Without this crucial piece of evidence, the defense was able to promote a self-defense or accident theory. Without the head, it would be difficult to get a conviction, but certainly not impossible.

  I picked up the phone, assuming Cody was calling about The Jinx.

  “Hi, Cody.”

  “Durst was arrested last night in New Orleans.”

  “What?!”

  He had been nabbed in the lobby of the JW Marriott Hotel late that Saturday, March 14, where he had been staying under the alias Everett Ward. He was in possession of guns and pot—the two things this man can’t seem to live without—as well as ammunition, a latex mask, a note with a UPS tracking number on it (that package would later be found to contain $117,000 in cash), and a map of Cuba.

  Durst was taken into custody and booked while I was on the air, live, talking about whether he’d be arrested soon.

  News of the arrest hadn’t been leaked yet, but Cody had the inside track.

  “Turn around!” I directed the NBC-hired driver to drop me off at Fox News. My 10:00 p.m. live show had just gotten a lot more interesting, and I had work to do. My first call was to David Clark, the head of weekend news at Fox, to tell him Durst had been arrested. Fox was the first to break the story. My next call was to Andrew. He seemed as exhausted as I was, but at breakneck speed, I told him what I knew. When he said he hadn’t known about the arrest, I was surprised and said, “Really?”

  He said, “I didn’t.”

  Later, there’d be much discussion and hand-wringing over whether Durst would have been arrested in New Orleans had it not been for The Jinx.

  The short answer: of course not!

  Yes, most of us who were in the loop knew the FBI had been monitoring him for a while, in tandem with the LAPD. But more significant was that, after episode five and the two-Beverley stunner, Durst stopped using his phone. They knew he was in Houston, where he owned a condo, and then New Orleans. Someone (possibly his wife, Debrah Lee Charatan) had just wired him a lot of money. Sanctions for U.S. travel to Cuba were being lifted. The first flight out of New Orleans was scheduled for the night they nabbed Durst. Nothing is accidental with him.

  Thanks to The Jinx and the persistence of the FBI, “Bobby” would not be sunning in Havana, smoking his Marlboro Lights or a joint and drinking Jack Daniel’s. He’d check out of the JW Marriott and move directly without passing go into the Orleans Parish Prison, a jail unlike anything he’d experienced, on Sunday. Trust me, there are jails and then there are jails. Orleans Parish Prison is the worst. Well suited to guests like Robert Durst.

  But it wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. I
had a one-hour show scheduled, and I still didn’t know what the upshot was going to be. My head was blowing up with the possibilities. Was it a Susan clue? Kathie’s bones? Another body? There was no end to what it could be.

  At 7:30 p.m., after I spent every moment since the morning phone call from Cody frenetically preparing for my show—except when I changed into Seven jeans and Manolos, my version of casual—Cody and I arrived together at Andrew Jarecki’s apartment in a gorgeous prewar building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  Jarecki is an interesting guy. He comes across as unassuming and down-to-earth. I actually had a hard time believing this hipster in a hoodie is an Emmy-winning and Academy Award–nominated documentary filmmaker (for Capturing the Friedmans). Don’t let the hoodie fool you. He’s worth hundreds of millions. He founded Moviefone and sold it to AOL for $388 million in 1999. Apparently his shabby chic is the official look of New York screenwriters and directors, a group I wasn’t familiar with.

  He first appeared on my radar in 2003. He contacted the DA’s office about Durst and requested a meeting. The call was directed, as any call like his would be, to the press office. David Hebert, my executive assistant DA and most trusted adviser, handled press requests, and agreed to meet him. David, not generally impressed by many, was impressed with Jarecki’s encyclopedic knowledge of Durst, his curiosity, and the chutzpah it took to ask for unfettered access to our law-enforcement files.

  Jarecki referenced making a fictionalized account of our case.

  “I don’t see the law-enforcement value,” David said to me at the time.

  I fully concurred. I had established a hard and fast rule about cooperating with the media—any media—despite what some people might have thought: If the exposure didn’t further our law-enforcement investigation, forget it. Jarecki received a hard “no.”

  But that wasn’t the last of Jarecki. He resurfaced in 2005, just before I left the DA’s office. He was certainly persistent, and he was smart and, since he seemed to have a vast knowledge of Durst, I’d hoped that maybe he’d found a kernel of information that we didn’t have. My concern was that, upon my moving to another career, the next DA wouldn’t continue to investigate a case that I had so much invested in. I agreed to meet with him and his team with several high-level members of my staff. The ground rules were established ahead of time. We would give them nothing, but would listen to them. If and when they touched on something that we didn’t know about, my staff and I would inconspicuously make eye contact. Their hope was that, if we needed their help, we might assist them in their endeavor. But it doesn’t work that way in law enforcement. At one point, when Jarecki’s information was too close for comfort, I politely but respectfully asked them to leave. After they did, we couldn’t get over how much they knew.

  All Good Things came out in 2010. But that wasn’t the end of it. In 2011, Jarecki resurfaced with a new project, a documentary about the case, this time with Durst’s willing involvement. He promised it would be the first of its kind, with all police, prosecutors, family members and friends of Robert’s victims, and even the accused himself. When I first heard that, I thought, Why would someone accused of so much wrongdoing sit down and discuss his actions and movements when there was such great risk? Someone was cutting a deal somewhere. But who? Why? It made no sense. Most people don’t do things out of good intentions. Murderers never do.

  Also, I was less than pleased about how Jarecki portrayed the DA in All Good Things, and repeatedly told him “no.” It would take a couple more years for Jarecki to wear me down. I finally agreed to participate when Jarecki showed me a link on his iPad with Durst’s Texas lawyers having a good old time, talking about how they took license with me and created a mythical character. I couldn’t believe they had admitted to their shenanigans. Deal done. Lead me to the cameras!

  As Cody and I pulled up to Jarecki’s building, we both noticed the three men standing outside. You can always spot a plainclothes security guard. Or at least, Cody and I can. Jarecki told Cody later that even though Durst was in police custody, he wasn’t taking any chances. He had a family to protect. Hipster-in-a-hoodie types aren’t accustomed to having dirtbags running around the way those of us in law enforcement are.

  We took the elevator—old-fashioned with an accordion gate—up to a big open area, where we hung our coats up and then went into Jarecki’s apartment. It struck me as elegant, old world, kind of dark with lots of wood. There were seating areas in a huge central room. The high-backed chairs reminded me of something you’d see in an English castle; a huge portrait of one of his kids hung proudly in the center.

  I surveyed the crowd of around thirty people. It was like a mini reunion of so many who’d suffered through years of the odyssey that was the Robert Durst case. It was all supposed to come together and I couldn’t believe it might end that night. The anticipation and waiting for the conclusion was awful. Cody was anxious as well.

  The first person I made eye contact with was Jim McCormack, Kathie’s big brother, whose life had been a living hell for thirty-three years.

  Grief destroys people. It makes them angry. They lash out at the very people who are trying to help, especially when investigations that should be wrapped up quickly continue to drag on; especially investigations starting eighteen years after the crime. I, too, was frustrated about not having sufficient evidence to get an indictment. I tried to move heaven and earth to indict him from 1999 to December 2005, when I left the DA’s office after thirty years. Along the way, a narrative formed in this case that I was more interested in self-promotion than in justice. A small cabal perpetuated this notion, including some who were close to the good-hearted McCormacks.

  The fact is that I was the chief law-enforcement officer, elected both to investigate and to prosecute crime in a county of upward of one million people. It was my job, and it didn’t matter whether a case was cold or otherwise, and that’s exactly what I was doing, like other prosecutors across the country. You would be crazy not to take advantage of DNA and advanced forensics to go after cold cases. I had hoped advances in DNA testing would help solve Kathie’s case, but I needed something to test.

  I smiled at Jim. He smiled back. You could see the anxiety on his face. We embraced. It was a hug of hope and healing.

  I wandered a bit. In an adjoining room, a semicircle of folding chairs, benches, and couches were assembled around a huge flat-screen TV. The couches were opposite each other; the benches and chairs were behind them. In another room were a buffet and an open bar with impeccably clad servers at the ready. The food looked delicious, but I was too amped to eat, and I rarely drink, certainly not while trying to put together a live TV show.

  Around ten minutes to eight, Nancy Jarecki, Andrew’s wife, asked us to take our seats in front of the wide-screen TV in that adjoining room. There were cameras set up, surrounded by studio lights with those big umbrellas. Jarecki is never off duty, apparently. It occurred to me that the odyssey was not going to be over, that they were now going to film our reaction to watching the show.

  Cody was directed to his assigned seat on one couch, closest to the screen. He took me with him, and I sat next to him. To my left and perpendicular to us were the McCormacks—Jim, his wife, Sharon, and his gorgeous daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth had also been interviewed in The Jinx and looked uncannily like her aunt Kathie—a woman she never knew. It was chilling to sit within a few feet of her, but also oddly comforting, because it seemed as if Kathie was in our midst.

  The anticipation grew. It was like an adrenaline rush that came pumping faster and faster. Time went slowly. I didn’t want to chitchat. I wanted to see what they had.

  In the row behind the McCormacks sat Charles Bagli and his wife, Ellie. Bagli was the New York Times reporter who’d done a stellar job on this case for years. He appeared in The Jinx and provided one of the most memorable lines, recalling the moment when he got a tip in 2001 that a Robert Durst had been arrested in Galveston for chopping up his neighbor. “OU
R Robert Durst?” he asked. It reflected perfectly what all of us had asked.

  The rest of the crowd included suits from HBO, people I couldn’t place, and . . . Diane Sawyer? She was dressed simply, but well put together. There was a palpable sadness in her eyes and her demeanor, as she had recently lost her husband, legendary director Mike Nichols. Jarecki dedicated the last episode of The Jinx to Nichols, and, as I’d later learn, he had been friends with Mike and Diane for years. Apparently, when he first got Durst on tape, he showed the footage to them for guidance on how to proceed. Diane advised him not to go to a network with it, but to think outside the box. Good advice.

  And then there was Cody. In Midtown Manhattan, Cody’s Texas definitely stood out. It wasn’t just the cowboy boots, his height, thick horseshoe mustache, or western drawl. He was just straightforward and honest. I asked him if he saw Diane Sawyer. His reply? “I couldn’t ID her in a lineup.”

  Sawyer sat next to Jarecki’s wife, Nancy, a cool, quick-witted blonde with short spiky hair and an easy laugh. She was far more extroverted than her husband, which should come as no surprise given that she owns a company that sells hair dye for your private parts. Nancy Jarecki is that kind of gal who you immediately know you would want on your side in a bar fight.

  The person sitting on the other side of Nancy was Rosie O’Donnell. I said to myself, Why is she here? What could her connection possibly be? But, then again, there were plenty of odd characters in the Durst universe, from socialites to drag queens, but Rosie O’Donnell? In about an hour, she’d make her presence known in a very big way. But first, the countdown to the show.

  Wait a minute! Where was Jarecki? Where was Smerling?

  The host was missing from his own party. My antenna shot up. We were promised closure. It was about five minutes before the finale. And for Jarecki and Smerling not to be there meant something huge was happening somewhere else. Nancy, in our midst, took a phone call. Everyone seated in the semicircle of chairs quieted to hear her end of the conversation. She hung up and relayed the news: “Andrew is upstate working on something sixty miles away,” she said. “Something to do with the case.” My antenna reached a whole new altitude.