He Killed Them All Page 28

  That was my comfort zone, right in the middle of a heated battle of words. I realized that was where I felt at home.

  DEGUERIN’S FOCUS ON ME seems to go beyond any legitimate defense tactic. I’m convinced he’s one of those men who I’ve come across throughout my career who can’t deal with an intelligent, assertive, stand-on-her-own woman, or at least he knew I had his number and didn’t like it. Look, I respect defense attorneys. I do not respect Dick DeGuerin and his ilk. They take the truth and turn it inside out. In his pompous southern drawl, he sells lies and snake oil to jurors in a place where people swear on the Bible to tell the truth, in a place where the sign on the wall reads “In God We Trust.” The stench of people like DeGuerin, who laugh about distorting the truth and in many ways come close to perjury, should be an outrage to good, law-abiding Americans. I believe in truth and justice. I’ve dedicated my career to the fight for a level playing field for victims who never chose to be in the courtroom in the first place, and for the victims, like Kathie, Susan, and Morris, who couldn’t be.

  The New Orleans prosecution needed to determine if my office investigated Susan Berman, and if my team went to Los Angeles. They wanted to prove that Susan knew we were coming to question her about Kathie, and that Susan told Robert about it. If so, then the legal interpretation of his actions—marrying Debrah, planning this trip to L.A., and so on—would be that he was “lying in wait.”

  If Durst knew that she was about to talk to us, he was “lying in wait” to shoot her to prevent her testifying. In that case, the murder becomes death penalty eligible.

  In L.A., if there is a trial, I suspect the defense is going to say that Susan Berman did not get a grand jury subpoena from me (she didn’t). But DeGuerin doesn’t know whether I spoke with anyone close to her, or what information we might have kept in our back pocket. He doesn’t know much of anything about our investigation of Susan Berman. By trying to get me on the witness stand, he intended to find out. So far, he’s out of luck.

  The judge, clearly a genius, denied bail for Robert. Since then, the feds have indicted Durst for federal felony gun charges and DA Leon Cannizzaro has dismissed his charges. Durst is housed in St. Charles Parish’s Correctional Center. His case is scheduled for hearing in January 2016. The L.A. case will proceed after that.

  Meanwhile, Durst’s lawyers are throwing things at the judge in New Orleans, trying to make something stick. But U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan isn’t falling for it. DeGuerin and company asked for the handwriting comparisons that the prosecution will be using against him in California, no doubt to figure out a way to discredit them. Judge Shushan ruled that the prosecution does not have to turn them over, that the defense can make do with a detailed document that summarizes the history of the comparisons.

  In the spring of 2015, they couldn’t wait to get to Los Angeles. Now they’re stalling with pretrial hearings.

  Even if this one doesn’t go his way, DeGuerin and company must be salivating about a trial in Hollywood. He’s probably shopping for new cowboy boots and hat right now.

  And I will definitely be there, in the front row with my notebook, my Chanel bag, and in that bag, Peppermint Patties.

  FIFTEEN |

  | ANALYZING ROBERT DURST

  John Sharp, MD, an adolescent and adult psychiatrist, is a faculty member at Harvard and UCLA with clinical practices in Boston and Los Angeles and more than twenty years’ experience. He’s been a friend of mine and has appeared on Justice with Judge Jeanine as an expert on human behavior. Dr. Sharp was kind enough to travel from Boston in August 2015 to talk with me about the mental health and behavior of Robert Durst.

  Me: Thanks for speaking with me today, Dr. Sharp.

  John Sharp: My pleasure, Judge.

  What the hell is wrong with him?

  His behavior is consistent with someone who has a major personality disorder, specifically, an antisocial personality disorder.

  What are the specific characteristics of someone with an antisocial personality disorder?

  Just to mention a few: deceitfulness, repeated lying, use of aliases, conning others for personal profit and pleasure, impulsivity, irritability or aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of others, constant irresponsibility, lack of remorse.

  A stronger determinant than anything else is a total disconnection from emotion. The only emotion we see in Robert Durst is on the dimension of irritability to outrage. It’s a very narrow band. Inside his own mind, he doesn’t connect to the full range of feelings. He’s out of touch with his own emotions. The flip side of the same coin, he’s out of touch with the feelings of others. It strikes me how fully Robert Durst meets the criteria.

  Other people—Gilberte Najamy and Jim McCormack, for example—observed that he and Kathie were madly in love in their early life together.

  His “madly in love” was in a primitive form. He was fascinated with someone who was synchronous with his needs at the time. Other people look at their relationship and see love, but they were attributing normal emotions to a man who doesn’t have them. He doesn’t have the capacity to truly love.

  What about his great friendship with Susan Berman? Many people talk about how close they were.

  They both had childhoods with special circumstances that related to each other’s. But their apparent fondness was utility driven. Susan Berman and Robert Durst were useful to each other when they met in college. On an operational level, he needed friends. They shared an understanding of growing up with wealth and power, so she was a wise choice. When her usefulness to him ended, so did their friendship, and her life.

  He was known to have a lot of sexual relationships. He had affairs with Prudence Farrow and possibly others while he was married to Kathie. He was with Kim Lankford when he was married to Debrah, and presumably others. He took Viagra and is clearly a sexual being.

  He cannot be a considerate person. His sex life was probably mechanical, not different from pleasuring himself. As for his ability to have affairs, he was a man who lacked remorse and empathy. He could do anything. He’s not in touch with his feelings, which makes him an incomplete. That said, he is also free from the constraints of legality and morality. The concerns of others—a wife that he be faithful, a lover that he be considerate—do not concern him.

  You’re describing something that’s more animal than human being.

  He has operated like an animal in the wild. If something or someone poses a life-and-death threat to him, he kills. When the threat is gone, he just goes on his way. There was a wonderful book by Robert Sapolsky called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers that illustrates my point. You’d think, living in the jungle, grazers would be nervous wrecks all the time. But researchers determined that they sense their threat level. They deal with it—by running away, or fighting the lion—and then, when the threat is gone, they return to normal.

  Durst did the same thing. He had no qualms about dealing with a threat by killing his wife. And then, when the threat was gone, he went back to his other business.

  But back in 2000, how did he react to me? Did Durst take me seriously as a threat?

  He couldn’t be business-as-usual when you, Judge, entered the picture. You raised the threat level to a unique high to him, one he couldn’t dispose of. He said in The Jinx that, in 2000 when you reopened the investigation, everything changed. You had authority and power. All of a sudden, the threat (or the lion) isn’t going away. You kept saying, “Sooner or later, we’re going to know the truth.” He knew when he saw you, it was not ever going to be fine. The lion wasn’t going away.

  He never tried to eliminate me as a threat—that I know of. He did visit the Ritz in White Plains very close to my home several times, though. But he didn’t dare come here. Even in the mob, you don’t kill prosecutors.

  I would think it crossed his mind to kill you, and he decided he couldn’t pull it off. There’s no way it didn’t occur to him.

  What about Gilberte? She’d been saying he was a m
urderer for eighteen years. Wasn’t she a threat?

  He didn’t think of her as a real threat in the sense that she didn’t have power or authority. She was a witness, and he probably detested her—hate falling on the same narrow band of emotion with irritation and outrage—but what could she do to him in practical terms? She’d already told police what she knew. She’d been arrested for drugs. She had no clout and her claims could be dismissed. You were someone with power and clout, someone he perceived of as on his level.

  Growing up in his family, he learned early on that power and clout were to be respected. He learned from them to do what he needed to do.

  Susan Berman and the cadaver letter. If he has no conscience, why did he send it? Some people interpreted it as his way of making sure her body didn’t decompose before it was found, a way to express his affection for her.

  There is no way he had a guilty conscience, but he may have been troubled by her body lying there. She had to go, and he took action. But then he might have thought that he’d be respectful. The letter could have been a code of honor, like “honor among thieves,” something he owed to her. Sending it could have been a coldly calculated move, but it was definitely not an emotional one. He lived in a world without remorse.

  Since the defense never asked an actual doctor about Asperger’s, let me put it to you, Dr. Sharp: Do you believe Robert Durst has Asperger syndrome?

  For starters, Asperger’s no longer exists. The fifth and latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders doesn’t list it. It’s been dismissed by experts as a kind of autism that doesn’t merit a unique name.

  Now, is Robert Durst autistic?

  Autism is a totally different way people can be out of touch with themselves and the feelings of others. But autistic people are not disconnected or lacking in empathy. They are relatively insensitive to interpersonal cues.

  It was a good idea to use it in the defense. Durst’s lawyers took his problem with human interaction and reframed it in a socially acceptable way. No one blames a kid with autism. They say, “The poor kid can’t read human cues.”

  What about the dissociative state the defense said Robert was in when he dismembered Morris Black? They compared it to the fog of war, that Robert was traumatized by the shooting, went into a fog, and can’t remember anything about it.

  The dissociative state defense is too Hollywood. You can find cases, but it’s exceedingly rare that people can’t remember a thing.

  When you look at people who have been through traumatic events—like soldiers who fought in an actual war—they don’t have global amnesia, or completely forget what happened. Transient global amnesia, temporarily forgetting everything, is related to head injury.

  And he couldn’t have been overcome by emotion. The only way to have a traumatic reaction is to feel. He’s not a feeling person. He’s like a machine. He doesn’t have emotions to overcome, so he couldn’t have had a traumatic reaction.

  Durst did primal scream therapy in the 1980s. What is that, and would it have changed him?

  Primal scream therapy is no longer practiced. It’s long been discredited. The theory was to connect with trauma by screaming. Robert Durst could scream primally every day of his life and it wouldn’t make a difference.

  Could Durst have been treated with another therapy and been cured?

  Antisocial personality disorder is considered untreatable. I’m a therapeutic optimist. If he were my patient, I would require him to stop smoking marijuana and use cognitive behavior techniques to manage his personality. I’d look for underlying unconscious pain that could be at the root of his problem and then try to see if he were capable of addressing that. A tiny percentage of antisocial personality disordered people have some capacity to tolerate the pain driving their disconnection. But the odds of successful treatment are infinitesimal.

  What’s it like inside Robert Durst’s head?

  Dark rooms with paper-thin walls. Cold. He’s only partially aware of where he is and where he’s going. He’s unmoored, like he’s floating around the world. Thoughts come in and go out.

  He’d marked up pages from a book about adults with ADD. Is there any validity to ADD explaining his crimes?

  A guy this disordered? His is not an ADD-level problem. It doesn’t touch on the depth and power of this true nature.

  He once described what sounded like a traumatic reaction to learning that I’d reopened the Kathleen Durst investigation. He told his sister that when his family’s PR agency was receiving calls from the tabloids, he felt sick to his stomach, went to the bathroom, and threw up. Then he went to sleep.

  He felt outrage. It’s on his narrow band of emotion. Since it’s as easy for him to lie as it is to tell the truth, I wonder if he really threw up.

  Maybe he ate some bad caviar. Or maybe he made himself throw up. There is a history of Robert dealing with bulimia.

  Most bulimics are struggling to maintain control of their feelings. But, as someone who matches up with the traits of antisocial personality disorder, his bulimia must have been more methodical, a cleaning ritual perhaps. Or it was vanity based. He wrote once that he lived for food. Food would satisfy his base-level pleasure drive—food, sex, sleep. Like an animal in the wild, he organized his life around them. He enjoyed eating and wanted to stay slim, so bulimia would have been a quick and calculated strategy, not the result of intense feeling or emotional distress.

  Robert said he enjoyed prison life.

  That might be his survival instinct. He said that the prisoners respected him. It’s the same thing we see when people project their own emotions onto Durst. He didn’t show fear or appear intimidated in prison, so the prisoners might have thought, Wow, he must be a tough guy not to be intimidated in here. His lack of feeling would help him in prison. In normal life, it was a deficit.

  Was he born a psychopath?

  Many experts believe psychopaths are born that way. He could have had an early-childhood experience that led to it. Seeing his mother going off the roof was a big injury. His father favoring Douglas was another injury. He might’ve been born fragile and then some serious stuff happened, and he ran away from feelings and closed himself off to protect himself. By disconnecting fully and going through life in an uncaring way, you become a psychopath.

  He talked in The Jinx about the shock of seeing his mother buried when he was seven and saying, “Get Mommy out of the box.”

  Well, I’m sure that made an impression on him. But it’s totally unrealistic for a seven-year-old—one who claimed to have seen his mother’s broken body on the ground—to think that they were actually burying his mother alive. A three-year-old, yes. But a seven-year-old? He clearly had a pattern of being unable to square off with reality. I can imagine his feeling overwhelmingly outraged at her death—sadness and bewilderment at first, but the outrage even more.

  I understand that he has a narrow band of emotion. But does that protect someone from being disgusted by the grisly work of dismembering a body? After he cut up Morris Black, he went out and got a haircut.

  Why wasn’t he grossed out? Medical students who choose to dismember a body for all the right reasons, who volunteer to do it, are grossed out. But Durst was disconnected from his feelings. He didn’t empathize with Morris Black. He was like a butcher, approaching it as a job that needed to be done. He did the work mechanically.

  He doesn’t feel sad or guilty or remorseful. Does he feel pride or joy?

  I don’t think he feels good about himself. At the most, he can feel a sense of accomplishment. He’s impressed with himself.

  In The Jinx, he complained that he was born rich and that nothing he ever did would be his own accomplishment. I wonder if that’s why he left so many bread crumbs and clues. It was his way of sharing his sense of accomplishment.

  His murders and his story are certain ways he’s made a name for himself apart from his family. I can see him taking a kind of pride in that. Why did he contact Andrew Jarecki t
o participate in The Jinx? Only two possible reasons:

  1. Pride in accomplishment.

  2. He wanted to get caught.

  Since he didn’t want to get caught, the only logical reason is that he took pride in his accomplishments. He’s so out of touch with normal that he thought he could, against the advice of lawyers, tell his story the way he wanted to, make stuff up, and get away with it.

  Whenever Robert got caught, he was found with the big three: cash, guns, and pot. I always wondered why he loves marijuana so much.

  Pot relaxes him, as opposed to cocaine, which would exacerbate him. Think of the narrow band of emotion he lives on. Marijuana would calm his outrage and irritation.

  As for the guns and money, they’ve both been very useful to him over the years. With his pot, cash, and weapons, he has what he needs to get things done, to seek sensual pleasure, and to calm himself down. He’s a very practical guy.

  You must have noticed his twitching and blinking on The Jinx. He had a history of belching and farting in public.

  The physical twitches are just him juggling a lot in his head, trying to figure things out. Normal people are centered by their emotions. He is uncentered and grasps for something while there’s a lot of mental cross-talk and noise. Blinking and twitching are signs of grabbing things from here and there, spitting things out and reconciling things.

  Belching, farting, and burping in public is a sign that he’s not aware of or concerned with social cues. A normal person would learn not to do them. I believe Robert is aware of social cues, and chooses to ignore them.

  Why kill Kathie?

  She became more trouble than she was worth, and then she threatened to leave. That was when he realized she had to go. It might not have been as bright a line, but he couldn’t think of a reason not to do it. A normal person would think, Why not just let her go? That was not his way of doing business. He has to dispense with the matter at hand. To him, it was quicker, easier, and more convenient to kill her and get rid of the body.