He Killed Them All Page 25

• Did Robert always speak about himself in the third person? Just add it to the long list of “Ways Robert Durst Is Creepy.” He explained his reasoning for finally doing an interview with a journalist after ignoring countless requests for thirty years. “I will be able to tell it my way,” he said. If his version causes viewers to see “a different story to what’s been put in the media, they’ll have an opportunity to believe it.” Or to know he’s full of baloney. Or, as it finally played out, that he was an unapologetic, lying, violent serial murderer.

  • The blinking! I have learned from body language experts that there are ways to tell whether someone is speaking the truth or lying. Great detectives swear that body language, eye shifts, and mannerisms speak louder than words. When I tried cases, I was often some distance from the person I was cross-examining because of the layout of the courtroom. The witness stand was immediately adjacent to the judge’s bench, yet distant from both the defense or prosecution tables. I was always cognizant of the layout because I wanted jurors to be able to assess directly a witness’s credibility. And, although there were times when I would be an in-your-face cross-examiner, I was always told to pull back by the judge. So, watching The Jinx was a pleasure because I could plainly see the tiniest shift in Durst’s eyes. His eyes always shifted or blinked when what I knew were blatant lies came out of his mouth. But, to give the Devil his due, he was good.

  I read fan theories online about the blinking. Some commenters believe he was wearing Japanese contact lenses called “Doe Eyes” that make the whites of the eyes appear smaller and the irises larger, giving an innocent, baby deer gaze.

  Another costume! The theater never ends.

  • And the twitching! The guy couldn’t keep his facial muscles under control, which indicated to me that he was trying to project a false front. It was very distracting, how he constantly fidgeted and picked his hair. I shouted at the TV, “Stop twitching, you freak! You’re twitching because you’re worried, dirtbag!”

  • Bernice Durst’s suicide. I have a theory (of course) about why she did it. She had four kids under the age of seven, including a brand-new baby. Was it possible Bernice was suffering from postpartum depression? And did Robert’s father really take him out to wave at Mommy and watch her jump from the roof? Did Seymour think that was a smart thing to do?

  • Jim McCormack described Robert as “Prince Charming.” True, he did have a Prince Valiant hairstyle in the late 1970s. Maybe he was a prince then. Kathie went to live in Vermont with him after only two dates.

  • First appearance of Gilberte and Eleanor Schwank, another one of Kathie’s loyal friends. Gilberte died on July 26, 2015. At least she lived long enough to hear Durst say it, although I know from speaking with her a few weeks before her passing that she still hoped to find out where Kathie’s remains were buried.

  • Detective Michael Struk’s apathy. I threw the phone at the TV when Struk said, “Not that you’re jaded about the effort you’re going to put forth, but it’s like maybe she’s shacking up or she’s just tired of this guy. He’s a banana, and she doesn’t want to involve herself with him anymore. And she took off.”

  Speaking from personal experience, perhaps, Detective Banana?

  Every utterance from Struk enraged me. How could this so-called gold shield detective have the nerve to go on TV and rationalize his sexist, inept, and uncaring investigation?

  When Struk was advised that there were problems in the marriage, he concluded that she must have run off because “that happens all the time.” This man, instead of being a detective, should have been a relationship counselor.

  When he heard that Robert Durst lied to him about the phone calls and having the drink with William Mayer, Struk concluded that maybe the neighbor was wrong. Really?

  When the women met with Struk to relate the incidents of violence, the threats, and the destruction of her books and her clothes, he didn’t bother to take notes. His condescension to the women, who were better investigators than he was, was reflected in his response to them. “ ‘If anything happens to me, blah blah blah,’ ” he said. The more evidence he received of foul play, of domestic violence, the more firmly he concluded that there was no reason to suspect foul play? You got it backward, buddy. Your words are blah, blah, blah!

  When he was presented with the dig/shovel to-do list, he asked, “What are you going to do with a shovel in South Salem in February? You’re not going to be able to dig a hole to bury somebody.”

  He dismissed the possibility of foul play. “No corpse, no crime scene. This is a missing-persons case.” In Struk’s world, if you’re smart enough to get rid of the body, you can get away with murder. No questions asked.

  The fact that Struk didn’t even think about looking at the car of Robert Durst is astonishing. Wouldn’t a detective want to pull out all the stops to impress one of the wealthiest families in New York City? Wouldn’t he want to show his law-enforcement gravitas? Of course he would. So, why? Why no search of anything, anywhere? Because if you didn’t bother to preserve a crime scene, there was none?

  He didn’t question Durst’s lack of an alibi. There were no interviews with anyone from the Durst family in the original case folder. And yet Struk remained nonplussed when a criminal defense attorney called to tell him to refrain from speaking to his client. His antenna didn’t go up then. Maybe he doesn’t have one.

  Lieutenant Gibbons, Struk’s superior, told Jim McCormack that there are two ways to look at this. Kathie was “either dead or she voluntarily left, and I wouldn’t be surprised as to the second, as a matter of fact.” How could a lieutenant with no evidence support a claim that a fourth-year medical student within months of graduation who was pursuing a divorce from her husband ran off? What evidence supports his conclusion?

  Or is it, as Struk explained, that maybe she was “shacking up” or “tired of this guy”? That was definitely the simplest way to explain a woman’s vanishing: She’s a slut. She’s shacking up, and it makes perfect sense.

  What’s even more infuriating is that Struk, to this day, sticks by his theory.

  That an NYPD detective and a lieutenant could do so little and draw such conclusions based on information provided by Robert Durst’s spokesperson and employees of the Durst’s building was reflective of a society that felt women were disposable.

  • Eleanor Schwank seemed to throw epic shade on Ellen Strauss. Eleanor was describing the efforts of the “entourage of girls” to locate Kathie or get a bead on her, canvassing the train and hospitals with her photo. Then she seemed to sigh and said, like an afterthought, “Anyway, Ellen became involved,” referring to Ellen Strauss. After hearing from Gilberte about Strauss I found this hilarious.

  • Ellen Strauss, annoying and as fake as ever. She opened her diary and said, “Ah, March 7, 1982,” like a snooty wine sommelier. “Ah, 1982, a very good year.” So fake. So self-important. Gilberte told me on her deathbed that Ellen Strauss did not participate in the garbage collection at the South Salem cottage. In The Jinx, Ellen claimed to have been there, waiting in the getaway car. Was she too prissy to do the dirty work? Gilberte generously described Ellen as “my partner in crime” in the episode. They were using each other. Ellen used Gilberte for information.

  Gilberte used Ellen like a secretary.

  • Seymour and Douglas probably discouraged Robert from going to the police. Robert said, “I got a call she hadn’t been in class for several days. I went to talk with my father and my brother Douglas. And they all said, ‘You two have been having arguments for so many years. She’s probably just over there, over there. You go and report it to the police, they’re not going to do anything, but you’re gonna get all this press dealing with the family.’ They discouraged me from reporting it to the police until it got to be Thursday night. Then I just felt like, ‘I’m worried. This is what I should do.’ And I did it. They discouraged me.”

  I don’t, as a rule, believe anything he says, but this rang true to me, sort of. I believe he cons
ulted his family about how to handle the situation, and they urged him to keep it quiet.

  What they knew about Kathie’s fate is an open question.

  • “That puts her in the city.” Robert’s attitude with Struk was dismissive and packed with lies. Did he lie because he believed there would be no follow-up? Regarding his many lies—he didn’t have a drink with the neighbor, he didn’t call her that night, and so on—Robert said, “What I told the police—I was hoping it would make everything go away.” And he further explained, “They wanted to hear, ‘What did you do?’ So I told them, ‘I did that.’ It was like a negotiation. You tell somebody something; that’s it. They don’t go back there. They don’t look back there or ‘why is he telling me this?’ kind of thing. I thought that would get them to leave me alone, accept a missing person like that. Now the police are going to leave me alone. I said, ‘I called her from a pay phone and she answered.’ That puts her in the city.”

  Emphasis on “puts her in the city.” Meaning, he shifted her disappearance to Manhattan, to keep South Salem, Westchester County, the actual crime scene, out of it. He just admitted to obstruction. Circumstantial evidence was piling up. I was infuriated that he could be so cocky about his falsehoods. But they were all caught on camera. He couldn’t take them back.

  | EPISODE THREE: THE GANGSTER’S DAUGHTER

  • The Kathie Durst case is now prosecutable. When Jarecki questioned Robert about my investigation into Kathie’s disappearance, he asked, “Why do you think they searched [Lake Truesdale]?”

  Durst said, “I guess they were looking for body parts.”

  Body parts.

  Not “a body.”

  Not “my wife’s body.”

  Body parts. That sealed it for me. He might as well have stood up and declared, “I chopped up Kathie, just like Morris, just like the Igors.”

  This is an admission. No one was talking about body parts. In 1982, police were looking for a body, a wife, a missing person. No one even suspected that Durst was capable of chopping up a body until Morris Black. This suggests that Kathie’s body was not just disposed of, but disposed of in pieces.

  • There’s Eddie Murphy! I love this man. On camera, he was direct. His charming honesty came through. You can imagine what a pleasure it was to hire him and have him working in my office. He mentioned that Susan Berman became the self-appointed spokesperson for Robert, and then Charles Bagli made the excellent point that, with Susan planting ideas out there—“the doorman saw Kathie,” “the dean took a call,” “she had a late-night male visitor”—it was hard for the press or the police to find out what really happened.

  • There’s Kevin Hynes? What was he doing on the show? The fact that he was included in the series confirmed my suspicion that he’d ingratiated himself with Jarecki in 2003 or 2004 and probably told him about my breakfast meeting with Douglas, which had been so inaccurately portrayed in All Good Things and, to my mind, again by Douglas in 2015 in the New York Times. Here on The Jinx, Kevin’s inaccurate portrayals continued. He acted as if he were a major player in our investigation. Really? He wasn’t even on our staff until two years after the investigation. John O’Donnell, Eddie Murphy, Clem Patti, and Steve Bender ran the case. Kevin was just a new set of eyes on the file—years after the investigation opened.

  • The collect calls from Ship Bottom. Durst tried to wiggle out of having made the collect calls from the Laundromat in Ship Bottom by claiming a Durst client had a beach house down there, and it wouldn’t be unusual for the receptionist to accept those calls. We knew the calls were from the Ship Bottom area and along that coast, but how would he know about these collect calls unless he was the one making them? Does he want us to believe that he rifled through the telephone bills of the Durst Organization to identify collect calls made in the spring, summer, and fall from that area? He knew collect calls were made. He knew because he made them.

  • “I gave them a map to her door.” Ellen Strauss talked about her Internet searching to get Susan Berman’s address and how she gave it to my office as if it were some huge break in the case.

  We already had Berman’s address. We had every address she’d ever had. We had her income taxes. We had interviews with her neighbors. We practically had the contents of her refrigerator.

  We did not need Ellen Strauss’s computer printout.

  • Sareb Kaufman’s denial. It’s sad that Sareb, Susan’s adoptive son, clung to his faith in Durst when virtually all of Susan’s friends didn’t trust him. The one exception: Kim Lankford, who took a trip to Palm Springs with Robert after Susan’s murder to “mourn her” and remember her together, as she said to me on my show Justice with Judge Jeanine, without Robert bothering to tell her that he’d married Debrah. Sareb said, “It never made sense to me, even for a second. I knew how Susan felt about him. People explained the theory [of why Robert was suspected of shooting Susan] and said, ‘There’s no such thing as coincidence.’ Of course there’s coincidence!” No, Sareb. There’s no coincidence with Durst. There’s only plotting and scheming, like how he plotted to keep you docile and quiet by offering you one hundred thousand dollars for college.

  | EPISODE FOUR: THE STATE OF TEXAS VS. ROBERT DURST

  • It’s the idiot jurors! Chris Lovell and Joanne Gongora came back for another helping of pseudo-celebrity. Those two never missed an opportunity to get in front of a camera. Lovell said, “It’s shocking,” referring to the dismemberment of Morris Black. So why did you fall in man-love with Durst? He said, “I felt in my gut it was murder.” So why didn’t you go with what you knew to be true? Small minds were easily swayed. These two were wooed by DeGuerin, Ramsey, and Lewis to go against their own better judgment, assuming they had it.

  Pathetic.

  Later in the episode, Gongora said, “[Pirro] was really out to get him. He was running away. I can’t fault him for that.” He was a murderer on the run covering his tracks!

  I thought, You idiot. You’ve been played and you don’t even know it.

  Why on earth was this woman so terrified of me? You know what? Maybe she should be.

  • Ramsey’s mold. I am still reeling from the cavalier attitude to the defense about the scripted drama they directed in court. Ramsey said, “Bob had intelligence and wit. He’d been through the mill. I had to look past that and see this lump of clay I’m going to have to mold into the shape I want him to be before we go to a jury.” He also admitted to molding the victim so that the jury would believe that, as he said, “He had it coming. Morris Black was such a bad guy. We touched on so many ways we could prove it.” But they never did prove it. They called zero witnesses to corroborate their assertion.

  But again, the idiot jury bought it.

  • Lewis’s myth. Referring to DeGuerin and Ramsey, he said, “We created this mythical creature—Jeanine Pirro.” Bingo. He’s right! “We took liberty with how directly she was involved in the pursuit of Bob.” Disgraceful. Lewis also created the myth of Robert’s faulty memory. “It was a concern on our part that the way he sometimes described things without emotion, hearing him describe the technical dissection of the body, would lead someone to believe he was a cold-blooded killer,” he said. He’s right. It would. Because Durst is a cold-blooded killer! Lewis’s instructions to Robert? “Say, ‘I don’t remember.’ Your memory is very fuzzy. Your memory is suppressed. It’s very common you don’t remember the details. Don’t try to.” Again, he admitted on camera that he essentially coached his client to lie on the stand.

  • “I got this idea that I could cut it in half.” Durst said this on the witness stand to explain why he dismembered Black. I took notice of his use of the word “it.” Morris Black was not a friend or even a man to him. Morris Black was an “it.” Serial murderers dehumanize their victims. It’s what they do. They don’t think of them as people.

  • Cody’s testimony. DeGuerin cued him up by saying, “It’s the prosecution’s burden to disprove self-defense. You found no evidence that would dispro
ve it.” All Cody could do was say, “No, sir.” Cody would later say, “The victim is not there to tell his story. You are there to represent the victim. To tell his story. You’re doing that for God.” He got choked up on camera and said, “Can we stop?” Only those closest to Cody knew what he went through after the acquittal. He carried the guilt and shame for years. I told him the prosecution should have been on their feet objecting, saying, “That’s for the jury to decide. It’s a question of fact. It’s a conclusion. Your Honor, without the head, we can’t tell.” Despite what I and his family told Cody, he blamed himself. Watching the last episode with him, I could see the one-hundred-pound weight fall off his shoulders. Thank you, Andrew.

  • “No one tells the whole truth.” Again, Robert was gleeful about how he lied to get away with murder. He didn’t tell the truth at all. He described to Jarecki his faulty interpretation of the phrase “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” He decided to remove “the whole truth” from the oath. “If you want to leave out something that makes you look bad, try it!” he said.

  One, the definition of “the whole truth” was for the jury to decide.

  Two, it was a conclusion, not a fact.

  Three, it was a vague interpretation.

  During a break in filming, Durst practiced different ways of saying, “I did not knowingly, intentionally, purposefully lie. I made mistakes. I didn’t tell the whole truth. No one tells the whole truth.” It was picked up on his hot mic. I wondered why they left that in. It was enough, to me, to hear him say it at all. Why was it necessary to catch him rehearsing his prepared line with the hot mic?

  Of course, now we know. It was for the purpose of showing that he had talked on a hot mic previous to that final admission. He can’t be excused and say, “Gee, I didn’t know the mic worked when I’m alone.”

  | EPISODE FIVE: FAMILY VALUES