He Killed Them All Read online

  Maybe he and his brother had some things in common after all.

  I made it clear that I was speaking as the DA, and that I was not done with Kathie’s case and would look to impanel a grand jury and, if I did so, he would be called. I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Hopefully, their civic responsibilities would kick in. More often than not, I am disappointed. I was threatening him, and fishing. I thought if he believed we’d convene a grand jury, he’d start talking to me right there, in that French restaurant. It was largely an empty threat. But that didn’t stop me from making it.

  Douglas hadn’t risen to the top of the Durst Organization because he’s stupid. He had to know that my mission wasn’t necessarily to help him. It was to prove my case.

  “I’d like to see my brother put behind bars as much as anyone,” he said. “He’s a danger to me and my family, and to society at large.”

  I thought, Don’t give me this hogwash! Of course, it was in his interest to get this guy locked up now. The whole country wanted him locked up. He was acquitted after dismembering a human being, to universal public outrage.

  I wanted to say, “If you were so intent on getting Robert locked up, why didn’t you do more in 1982? Or 2000?”

  Instead, I asked him straight, “Why was Scoppetta hired? Why wasn’t Kathie’s disappearance on the front page every day? Why wasn’t there more attention on the case?” I was trying to tee him up. That’s what we do.

  “There was a lot of attention on the case.”

  I was an ADA in Westchester, running a domestic violence unit, training NYPD about the signs of spousal abuse, and I never heard of it.

  “Scoppetta?”

  “I didn’t make that decision.”

  “What advice did he give you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Were you at the meetings?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Perhaps Douglas had Asperger’s, too.

  “Did your family block the NYPD investigation into Kathie’s disappearance?”

  He said, “No.”

  “Was there a Durst Organization cover-up?”

  “No.”

  “Where is Kathie?”

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Do you recall having any thoughts when it happened?”

  “No.”

  He wasn’t going to say anything. Neither was I. The meeting was over before it even began.

  I wouldn’t call it a waste of my time. The coffee was excellent.

  My breakfast with the Devil’s brother lasted half an hour tops. I didn’t even finish my coffee. We ended it politely. I asked that he take precautions and to notify my office if he heard from Robert. “If anything comes up, the door is always open,” I said. “Please stay in touch with me.”

  Although it was tense at points, the meeting never got heated. It was poker. He was looking at me and I was looking at him. I was the one with the power. He had the most to lose.

  But Douglas played the game very well. If he thought I was going to confront him with new evidence, he was wrong, and probably extremely relieved. He agreed to meet me only because he wanted to know what I had. He probably kicked his heels up when he walked out of the restaurant.

  I got back into my DA car with James, disappointed.

  The grand jury idea wasn’t going to pan out, I realized. I’d just get more denials and claims of ignorance. Without hard evidence, there would be no point. I didn’t think I had enough to convince twelve people beyond a reasonable doubt that Kathie’s murder had to be intentional.

  Why intentional? Why was that a sticking point?

  People have often asked me, “Why didn’t you charge him with manslaughter?”

  Manslaughter is a brutal accident, like they had a fight, she was drinking, he pushed her, she hit her head. He could say anything and get away with manslaughter, not that it would matter. New York had a statute of limitation on manslaughter—five years. To charge Robert with manslaughter, I needed a time machine to take me back to 1987.

  It had to be intentional murder or nothing. And people have criticized me for not pursuing a lesser charge.

  Everyone thinks he’s a fucking genius.

  IN JANUARY 2015, ELEVEN years after it happened, Douglas described our legendary meeting to Jim Dwyer of the New York Times. He said that I arranged the meeting. True. After that, our recollections differ.

  He said, “[Pirro] told me that, based on what happened in Texas, Bob was not smart enough to make his wife disappear and I must’ve helped him. I told her that if I had any way of getting my brother behind bars, I would do everything I could, but there was nothing I could do.”

  I never would have said that Robert was too stupid to do anything. Based on what happened in Texas, the guy proved that he was smart enough to kill people and get away with it! It was always my contention that Robert was a chess player, planning his moves long in advance. He might make stupid mistakes, but he was by no means an idiot.

  Was the Durst family complicit in the suppression of evidence and in using their influence with the NYPD? Was there a cover-up from the get-go? From the start, I saw an ample basis to pose these questions.

  • The Dursts hired a high-powered criminal defense attorney when Robert was never considered a suspect or under arrest.

  • No one in the Durst family gave interviews to the police at the time. The police didn’t even ask for an interview with any of them.

  • Robert’s college buddy became the family spokesperson. Why didn’t they use the in-house PR guy, Marty Matz, to handle press? Was it because a pro would have encouraged them to offer a decent reward, not the ten thousand dollars Durst put up, or to start a Kathleen Durst Foundation to help solve missing-persons cases? He would have organized a citywide search and put Robert on TV, begging the public for tips. Did that never happen because the Dursts had to know, or at least suspect, that Kathie would never be found, and that Robert could not pull off being the aggrieved husband?

  Do I know for sure that there was a cover-up? Can I pinpoint specifics of proof, how someone gave an envelope full of money to this person, or made a hushed phone call to that person, or gave an arm-twist to someone else, and so on up the chain? No.

  What I do know is that the Dursts were heartless in not reaching out to the McCormack family to express support or sympathy, especially to Kathie’s then seventy-year-old mother.

  I also know that the daughter-in-law of the family that built the landscape of New York disappeared and they were satisfied with a half-assed police investigation, including a detective and a lieutenant who believed she probably just ran off with another guy.

  Instead, after all these years, until The Jinx was upon them, the extended Durst family essentially dared not speak the name Kathleen. Wendy’s son Evan Kreeger said as much in The Jinx. Whenever he’d tried to ask his parents or his uncle Douglas about his aunt Kathie, he was told by the older generation that it was something they did not talk about.

  At the very least, it’s a conspiracy of silence.

  As far as I am concerned, Douglas Durst is not the man he wants the New York City real-estate world to believe he is. He presents himself as a patron of education and the arts, donating to the New School and the Roundabout Theater Company. He bought an organic farm. On The Jinx, he was given an award from Children’s Rights, a welfare-advocacy group. But Douglas and his family failed to protect Kathie from the psychopath who is their son and brother. And, even if they managed to be blind to Robert’s nature prior to Kathie’s disappearance, their failure to act afterward as Robert went on to kill again . . . and again, is unforgivable.

  Douglas’s brother Thomas suspected from the start that Robert had killed Kathie. The report of Scoppetta’s investigator made clear that Robert was lying. Robert says Douglas was at meetings with the investigator. Douglas says he never spoke with the investigator. I believe he did. But whomever he spoke to, I do not believe that the heir to the kingdom had no
clue that a major crisis was unfolding in his own office. I find it remarkable that when he spoke to the New York Times’ Dwyer thirty-three years later, he admitted that he suspected Robert, although he was uncertain. “Even though he wasn’t my favorite person in the world, it was hard for me to believe—to completely believe—that he had killed her.” Given what’s at stake, why didn’t an incomplete belief incite Douglas and his family to action?

  Certainly the family is quick to act to protect themselves from attack. As I was finishing my edit of this very chapter in July 2015, I received a letter from Richard Emery, Douglas Durst’s lawyer. It was a warning to me, and to Simon & Schuster, that if I wrote anything in my book that defamed him, Douglas would sue.

  Douglas sued Jarecki on the eve of the airing of The Jinx to determine his sources and to express his concern that the documentary wouldn’t be fair to his family.

  Then he threatened to sue me.

  Douglas and his family have all the money in the world. They have used it to defend a psychopathic murderer. They have used it to protect their name. But as far as I am concerned, there is simply not enough money in the world to buy them free of their failure, whether by action or inaction, to do right by Kathie Durst and ultimately Susan Berman and Morris Black.

  TWELVE |

  | ALL BAD THINGS

  Although he’d been acquitted of murder, Robert Durst served time in federal prison for bail jumping and tampering with evidence (aka Morris Black’s body). He was released in July 2005. Counting the time served while awaiting trial in Galveston, he spent three years total in prison, a pale and anemic comparison to the ninety-nine years he should have served if it weren’t for that judge and jury.

  After his release, he was put on parole for two years and allowed to serve it in Houston, where he had a home. Of course, Durst did what he so loved to do: returned to the scene of the crime. He drove from Houston to Galveston to visit the flophouse at 2213 Avenue K, where Durst did the wet work on Black’s body. I have no idea how long he hung out on Avenue K, or what he did there. Probably sat in his car and replayed the disgusting memories.

  He also violated the terms of his parole by going shopping in a Houston mall. In an ironic twist, he bumped into none other than his salvation, Judge Susan Criss.

  Can you imagine that awkward run-in?

  Criss: “Hello, Robert. I didn’t expect to see you at Victoria’s Secret.”

  Durst: “Hello, Susan. Did you get the check I sent you? Consider it a gift.”

  In all seriousness, Criss described their mall encounter to journalist Pamela Chelin of the website Mashable as “friendly.” Apparently, she spotted him first. When he noticed her, he dropped his phone. As he was trying to put the pieces back together, she said, “Hi, Bob.”

  “And he said, ‘I can’t believe you’re talking to me,’ ” she told Chelin. “I said, ‘It’s a job. It’s not personal and it’s just a conversation,’ but I was wondering how I could end this and get away from it. It was the first time I had seen him in the free world and he’s not a dangerous-looking person, so I said, ‘Happy holidays,’ and walked off.”

  Then Judge Criss reported him to the parole board. Durst found himself back in federal prison for another couple of months.

  While in prison for his last stint in 2006, Durst settled his lawsuit with the Durst Organization, cutting his last thin thread to his family. He’d sued Douglas and Jonathan Durst, a cousin, back in 2001 when they tried to limit Robert’s access to his family trust funds after they learned about his secret marriage to Debrah.

  Robert settled the suit for $65 million.

  A month after that windfall, he walked out of prison a free man in every sense of the word.

  So in June 2006, a few months after Durst was released from his second round of probation in Houston, Judge Susan Criss called the Galveston police in a panic, saying someone left a cat head in front of her house. One of the first cops on the scene was Sergeant J. Caldwell. According to his report, “She believed this to be the work of Robert Durst.”

  Officer Garrett Groce examined the gray tabby’s “fully intact head along with the two front legs.” The cat was on the road, seven feet from the sidewalk.

  Criss told Groce she didn’t recognize the cat and thought it’d been put there by Durst “in order to make her feel in fear of her safety,” per his report.

  A good investigator, Groce proceeded to interview Criss’s neighbors and quickly learned that the tabby did, in fact, belong to one of them. Indications were that it had been run over by a car but in light of the judge’s concern, the cat remains were sent to Texas A&M for further analysis, including DNA testing of the claws, X-rays, and a total necropsy of the poor animal, who’d already suffered enough.

  The findings were consistent with the roadkill scenario. No human DNA in the claws. No suspicious fiber or blood. The lab doctors determined that the body was torn apart—not cut with a knife or a saw à la Durst.

  The matter was closed. And yet, after The Jinx aired, and media requests came pouring in, Susan Criss went on TV and exaggerated the facts. As she recounted to Inside Edition in March 2015, she found a “perfectly clean and preserved cat head cut up by someone who knew what they were doing.”

  Instead of the world loathing and mocking her for the way she ran her courtroom, she tried to turn herself into one of Durst’s victims. This judge was hardly a victim. She was investigated for ethical violations and in the years after the trial pocketed cash donations from Dick DeGuerin and Chip Lewis. According to Joel Bennett, she was written up in private reprimands—one for threatening to keep polls open after their closing times—and overstepped her rights. If she had served as a judge in Westchester, I would have filed grievance after grievance against her.

  She dusted off her nine-year-old cat-head story, which by all indications was hogwash.

  It makes me livid that so many of the players have accused me of using this case for media attention, when, in truth, it was exactly what they were doing themselves.

  They still are.

  What’s the saying, that you always recognize the traits in others that are the least appealing in yourself?

  Look, I can understand Susan Criss’s state of mind in 2006. She spotted a dead cat in the road, knew Durst had just completed his parole, and got a little nervous. But the exhaustive investigation—I have to believe never before (or since) in the history of Texas had roadkill received so much attention or cost the taxpayers so much—should have proven to Criss that she had nothing to worry about. And yet, when she sniffed out an opportunity to get back in the spotlight, she went on TV and said Durst chopped off the head of a cat with surgical precision, just like Morris Black’s, and left it on her very doorstep as a warning that he was coming to Igor her.

  Do you not feel the drama? This woman had to beat a dead cat for more attention.

  She also told Inside Edition, “I believe that Robert Durst is a serial killer.”

  Really? Ya think?

  Not to belabor my point that Criss didn’t belong on the bench, but she recently tainted a jury and set free a child pornographer.

  Oh, yes.

  I did a whole segment on this case on Justice with Judge Jeanine. I’m very proud of what I wrote, so here is my summary of the case:

  Imagine a judge arresting a prospective juror because he requests a religious exemption. Prospective Juror No. 48 in Texas tells Judge Susan Criss he can’t look at evidence of child pornography for religious reasons, generally an acceptable excuse for not serving on a jury. Now, additionally, the juror tells Judge Criss that as a Jehovah’s Witness it is not his place to judge.

  Criss, however, wasn’t hearing any of it. Her response was, if a child could suffer through the abuse, then an adult can certainly watch the video. “So if it grosses you out, you can take it out on the person in punishment. That’s what my God tells me,” Criss said. She then tells Juror 48 what she will do if he refuses to look at the evidence, saying, “So you
want to find out what I’ll do? You’ll find out what I’ll do. You want to find out what my God will tell me to do? Let’s test it, buddy. Let’s test it.” Criss continues on her tirade, saying, “If you get picked on this jury, you get picked on this jury. And Jehovah can visit you in jail.”

  Now, at that point, she directs court officers to arrest Juror 48 and remove him from the courtroom. The judge’s outrageous behavior toward this juror created the basis for a reversal of the conviction of the child pornographer of a fourteen-year-old. The appellate court found fundamental error: “The religious beliefs of the citizens of the state of Texas—whatever they might be—are far too important to be subjected to mockery, derision, ridicule or criticism by any of the trial judiciary of this state.” The court reasoned that actually arresting the juror and putting him in handcuffs in front of the other prospective jurors had a chilling effect on the jury and it precluded the defendant from getting a fair trial.

  Way to go, District Judge Susan Criss from Texas, for creating grounds for reversal of the conviction of the lowest of the low in our society.

  That was in May 2015. She has since left the bench. Everyone in Texas can now breathe a sigh of relief.

  WHILE DURST WAS IN prison and on parole, I was going through a tumultuous time in my own life. I made the decision to leave the DA’s office in 2005. It had nothing to do with fear of losing a bid for a fourth term. I felt thirty-two years in law enforcement was enough. I don’t believe that government should necessarily be a lifetime employment just because it’s comfortable or because someone thinks he or she is entitled to it. I believe in term limits. There are none for the Westchester DA. I imposed the limit on myself.

  I walked out of the DA’s office with a stellar record—and I don’t believe a woman should downplay her accomplishments. She should crow about them.

  • Four hundred thousand cases were prosecuted during my tenure as DA.