He Killed Them All Page 7
The next night, on February 1, Kathie and Gilberte had plans to meet for dinner at the Greenwich Village restaurant the Lion’s Head. Gilberte waited there for hours. She moved to a bar stool close to the door to be sure she wouldn’t miss Kathie. But her friend didn’t show up. That wasn’t like Kathie. She didn’t stand her friends up. She had impeccable manners and was so kind; she’d never in a million years do something like that.
Gilberte knew something was wrong. She called Robert Durst. He told her he assumed Kathie was in the city since he had dropped her off at the train station in Katonah Sunday night. Gilberte didn’t buy that for a second. There wasn’t enough time for Kathie to drive home to South Salem from the party, have dinner and drink a bottle of wine, and then drive to the Katonah station. She never would have made the 9:17 p.m. train.
To confirm her theory, Gilberte took the Metro-North from Katonah into Grand Central on Sunday nights for several weeks in a row and showed Kathie’s photo to the commuters and the conductors. There were only two train cars on the 9:17. Almost all of the passengers were regulars. And it was not a crowded train. That no one noticed young, beautiful Kathie Durst in her snowy white parka and high boots could only mean one thing: She was not on that train. No one remembered seeing her.
Gilberte gave the NYPD all of this information. She was written off as an obsessed kook and essentially told to stay out of it. More sexism. Step aside, lady, and let the men handle men’s business.
Instead of staying out of it, Gilberte took her investigation further. Gilberte and a couple of cohorts made clandestine weekly trips to South Salem. She would wait until the house was empty, then go through Robert Durst’s trash. She discovered that he was throwing out Kathie’s clothes and her schoolbooks, even her unopened mail—things a criminal might do only if he knew his wife was never coming home.
But she also found a list in Durst’s handwriting, in green ink.
It read:
Town dump. Bridge. Dig. Boat. Other. Shovel or? Car truck rent.
Obviously, it was a to-do list for disposing of a body.
When Gilberte and Kathy Traystman, another of Kathie’s dear friends, showed this list to Struk, he was unfazed and gave them a “so what?” response. He seemed to dismiss Gilberte’s crew outright, calling them “an entourage of girls.” Wow.
The first time I talked to Gilberte on the phone in 2000, three things went through my mind.
One, she was spot-on correct in her assumptions about Robert.
Two, she did an investigation that should have been done by the cops.
And three, we should all have a friend like Gilberte.
I know a bullshitter when I see one. I know a truth-teller when I see one. Gilberte Najamy was a truth-teller. She was motivated by honest emotions: fear about what happened, guilt and regret about letting Kathie go back to Robert, and love for a friend. To her dying day, Gilberte never dropped her passion for finding out what happened to her friend Kathie.
What she did to dismantle Robert’s story amazes me. It is infuriating that no one in law enforcement took her seriously. Her unofficial investigation put the real cops to shame.
Gilberte and company were providing the NYPD with hard evidence of Robert’s suspicious actions in the aftermath of his wife’s disappearance. They ignored it. The question is why.
I WONDERED HOW MICHAEL Struk wound up working on the investigation in the first place. To get an understanding of how the NYPD operated in the eighties, I called my friend Bernie Kerik, former commissioner of police there. “In 1982, NYPD was still spinning from the corruption investigations, the Knapp Commission, and everyone would’ve been on their guard,” he said. “If someone walked into the Twentieth Precinct and went to the desk saying, ‘My wife is missing,’ he would be directed to go up to the squad room and then go up the bureau.
“As soon as the bureau found out that it was Robert Durst, there’s no way that they wouldn’t notify Manhattan North,” he continued. “Manhattan North would notify the borough captain. There’s no way that the chief of detectives wouldn’t be notified by a squad commander through a file 49 ‘memo to chief.’ It’s possible that Struk just caught the case or was randomly put on the case, but, in light of the times, it would be rare for someone [on Struk’s level] to direct how the case would be handled. At least a first-line supervisor, like a sergeant, would run that case.”
Michael Struk was an experienced detective with some notoriety for having solved the “Murder at the Met” case, which involved the murder of a violinist at the Metropolitan Opera House. He was a smart detective. So how did he screw this up? He obviously reported to seniors in the precinct, first-grade detectives or a lieutenant. I wondered, Was he handpicked to handle this case? John O’Donnell thought so.
Would a man as wealthy as Robert Durst, flashing an article about his father owning half of New York City, catch just any person in the Twentieth Precinct? Would some husband in Harlem, complaining about a missing wife, wind up with Michael Struk as the investigator? Was he tapped for his judgment, his discretion, his loyalty?
And to whom? The department? His superiors?
I was actually stunned and horrified by Struk’s work on the case. Struk seemed determined to ignore vital evidence. I was convinced he had marching orders or was so prejudiced against women that he didn’t give a damn that someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend was missing.
I have the utmost respect for cops, especially New York’s Finest. I kept telling myself, “Give him the benefit of the doubt.” But, as time went on, it seemed clear to me he had no interest in solving this case. The consensus among the cops and lieutenants quoted in the papers at the time was, “Yeah, she ran off with another guy.”
How many times is a police department criticized for prioritizing cases involving the rich, beautiful, and connected? Well, Kathleen Durst was all of those things. As she was a part of the Durst family, the NYPD would have given her disappearance a high priority. And yet they gave it to Michael Struk, who kicked it around for a while until he dumped it?
Any low-level first-year Podunk, Wherever, cop would have taken the countless stories of Robert’s abuse and Kathie’s plan to divorce him for a large settlement to its logical conclusion. The fact is, Struk didn’t do that.
Struk’s bosses had to know what was going on. The press dutifully reported the line from the family spokesperson (who turned out to be future murder victim Susan Berman, Robert’s BFF from UCLA), and put Kathie on the front page, dropping hints that she was a bad egg who ran off with her drug-dealing lover. Struk apparently agreed with what was in the papers, the rumors and lies fed to reporters from Robert’s camp. The investigation was either unethical, corrupt, or incompetent. Maybe all three.
Eighteen years later, I saw clear as day that Struk ignored those gaping holes in Robert’s story. Why didn’t he search Durst’s car? Why did Struk disregard the evidence hand-delivered to him by Kathie’s friends? Why wasn’t he searching the garbage at the South Salem cottage? Why didn’t he show Kathie’s photo to train passengers? Why didn’t he reach out to the Dursts and the McCormacks? Why didn’t he upgrade the missing-persons investigation to what it obviously was—homicide?
For that matter, why didn’t the Durst family move heaven and earth to help solve the case?
Struk could have used any one of a dozen linchpins, but he let each one slide between his fingers. He let the case die with a whimper.
Why?
Was he blind to the telltale signs of domestic violence and guided by entrenched sexism?
Did someone above Struk instruct him to leave it alone? Was that person himself pressured by one of the Five Most Powerful New Yorkers?
Or was it just that he sucked at his job?
Struk would later tell People magazine, “At that time, when there was a missing person without the obvious presence of foul play, you can’t run a full-blown investigation.”
Really? So if the criminal is smart enough
to get rid of the body, he skates?
And wait: “no presence of foul play”? How about Robert’s abuse? How about Kathie’s telling her friends, her family, and her lawyer that she feared for her life?
Struk continued, “People take off on their spouses every day.”
This was clearly not a case where a wife emptied the bank account, packed up her suitcases, and hit the road to Vegas with her secret boyfriend. Kathie didn’t take any of her possessions with her. She never picked up the phone or used a credit card—ever again.
The woman wasn’t missing. She was dead. Any idiot could see that.
Michael Struk retired from the NYPD and went on to consult for the TV juggernaut Law & Order. I may be the only person in America who’s never seen Law & Order. I lived it; I don’t need to watch it. But from the great reviews of the show, I can’t imagine that the TV cops do lackluster investigations. I’ll bet the victims of spousal abuse aren’t written off as druggie sluts. I’ll bet the abusers are arrested and convicted. And I’ll bet the husbands do not get away with killing their wives.
It just made me mad, and sad. Marjory Fields and I had fought to change laws, and to make sure that police recognized domestic violence, that they didn’t cover it up or ignore it, that they made reports and didn’t look the other way. I thought we’d made headway in the eighties. But when I read the Durst files in 2000, I said to myself, “Nothing we said or did sank in.”
I was disappointed on many levels.
Either a real cop investigated a real crime and blew it or someone above him pulled the plug on it and didn’t care that a real woman was gone.
FOUR |
| THE DURST CASE: ONE “HOLY SHIT!” AFTER ANOTHER
Our plan in 2000 was to redo Struk’s half-assed work, reinterview everyone, talk to people he’d ignored, and examine evidence that’d been overlooked. There was no way that anyone in law enforcement should have looked at this as a missing person in Manhattan.
The husband said he put her on a train?
The NYPD shrugged and said, “Guess he put her on a train!”
The husband said his wife was nutty and slutty?
The NYPD shook its head and said, “Well, that explains why she ran off.”
My guys were on a mission to catch every lie Durst told the NYPD, and they did a brilliant job. Instead of ignoring the eyewitness accounts from family and friends about Robert’s abusive behavior, we factored it into the timeline. My team spoke to the doorman, the elevator operator, the neighbors, the building superintendent, the dean of the medical school. Practically every interview turned up an inconsistency with Durst’s story or an outright lie.
John, Eddie, and Clem would sit in the club chairs in front of my desk or on the couch by the big table in my office. Ro would bring in gallons of coffee, and we’d knock things off the list. As the months passed, I was continually gobsmacked by what O’Donnell and Murphy discovered. It was one “you’re kidding me” moment after the next, such as:
• Durst lied about reporting Kathie missing to state police. Robert claimed he called state police himself before he went to the Twentieth Precinct in Manhattan to report Kathie missing. But my guys reinterviewed the troopers who visited South Salem and found out that Gilberte, not Robert, had made the call.
• Durst lied about taking Kathie to the train station. Gilberte had told the cops eighteen years ago that the timing made no sense. My guys confirmed it all. It was simply impossible for Kathie to have left Gilberte’s house in Danbury at 7:30 p.m., driven forty-five minutes to South Salem, had dinner, a bottle of wine, and an argument with Robert, then driven for thirty minutes to the Katonah station to catch the train at 9:17 p.m. Gilberte’s dogged investigation of the train conductor at the time was confirmed by us. No one saw Kathie on the train.
• Durst lied about calling Kathie in Manhattan that night. At first, Robert said he called Riverside Drive from the cottage. When police suggested they could check his phone records, he amended his story and said he called from a pay phone in a restaurant. He lied again, and said he called from a pay phone while walking his dog, Igor. The nearest pay phone was over three miles from the house. Records showed that it’d been a freezing cold, snowy night. Really? Durst took a six-mile round-trip walk with the dog through a blizzard at 11:00 p.m.? Igor was an Alaskan malamute, but come on. Why would anyone believe this hogwash?
• Durst lied about having a drink with his neighbor. My guys went door to door in South Salem, interviewing all the neighbors. No one in 1982 ever bothered to interview William Mayer to ask him, “Did Robert pop on over for a glass of wine at around ten-thirty on the night Kathie went missing?” In The Jinx, Durst admitted he made it up just to throw police attention away from him. Why would Durst assume no one would question his neighbor? Did he know they wouldn’t check his lie? What gave him such confidence? A normal person would just assume the lie would be uncovered easily enough. But Durst was right, that entitled little shit. Eighteen years went by before John O’Donnell knocked on the Mayers’ door and got the real story. Durst never came by for a drink that night or any night. Ever.
At the time of the disappearance, Ruth Mayer was interviewed by state troopers after Gilberte called in the missing-persons report. Ruth told a trooper named Stan Roman that Kathie and Robert fought often, that Kathie confided in her about the forced abortion—and that she’d seen a blue light shining in the lower level of the cottage shortly after Kathie went missing.
What could the mysterious blue light be? Used in combination with a chemical spray, blue light can pick up blood.
• The doorman on Riverside Drive was unreliable at best. The eyewitness accounts from the employees at Riverside Drive were easily unraveled. Eddie Lopez was the front door and elevator operator from midnight to 8:00 a.m. He worked there for nine years. But that same Eddie Lopez told another investigator that he wasn’t sure if he saw her at all.
By the time we opened the case, Lopez was dead.
Antoine Popovic, the relief elevator operator, said Kathie never came in and he didn’t see her. A doorman who had said he’d seen Kathie the next morning on the street was ancient and he told my guys he honestly couldn’t swear to anything. Retractions and foggy memories were typical on cold cases. Back in ’82, the statements from the building employees were dubious and vague at best. We talked to every living doorman and elevator man who had worked at 37 Riverside Drive in 1982. Some confided that Lopez was an alcoholic who regularly left his post. Not one of them recalled telling the press that she’d been staggering drunk or that he’d taken a mystery man up to her apartment late that night.
How did these lies get into the papers? Susan Berman, in her role as family spokesperson, hammered away on the “confirmed” Kathie-in-Manhattan sighting to the press.
If you repeated a lie often enough, did it turn into the truth? It sure seemed to as far as the NYPD in 1982 was concerned.
• Robert lied when he told Struk his marriage was “pretty good.” Was it pretty good for a wife to jump from her balcony to her neighbors’ to escape her husband?
Was it pretty good for Kathie to hire a divorce attorney?
Was it pretty good to tell her lawyer and several friends that she feared for her life? Was it pretty good for her to go to Jacobi Medical Center to be treated for injuries?
The divorce lawyer refused to talk to my guys. She claimed all of her conversations with Kathie were protected under attorney-client privilege. She told John, “I can’t give you the file.”
When this was reported back to me, I said, “Kathie’s dead! It’s been nineteen years. When’s the last time this lawyer cashed a check from Kathleen Durst?”
I called Rich Weill, a brilliant attorney, my chief assistant at the time, and said, “How can we get this file?”
He said, “If Kathie is declared dead, you’ve got a shot.”
Kathie had been declared dead, but the lawyer didn’t budge.
And then the lawyer died herself.
• Robert sublet Kathie’s “escape” apartment on East Eighty-Sixth Street on February 4, one day before he reported her missing to the NYPD. According to the building superintendent, Robert rented out his missing wife’s haven, a nine-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment, as soon as he could. Why? The cheapskate knew she’d never come back to it, so he might as well collect rent.
• Robert got rid of her stuff, and lied about doing so. The super told my investigator that he fielded complaints from other residents because Durst clogged the garbage chute by dumping his wife’s possessions down it. Several friends and workers who lived at the East Eighty-Sixth Street address filed an affidavit that he discarded his wife’s possessions within days of reporting her missing. Robert said, in a February 1983 affidavit in Surrogate’s Court, “I have not disposed of any of Kathie’s belongings.”
Robert Durst never worried about telling the truth, or how his actions looked to any rational, thinking person. Did he have reason to feel safe? Had the Durst name worked its magic by then? Was he reassured that Struk would never come after him? Was he just too entitled to care? Struk would live up to Robert’s apparent estimation of him. “It sounds like a guy that’s pissed off. It sounds like a guy who’s fed up as well. You know, I mean, he could be throwing his hands up as well as saying, ‘Good riddance to you’ as well,” Struk said on Primetime Live in 2001. Why would a real cop say this?
• Kathie’s call to the dean was phony or never happened at all. I never believed this lie for a moment. No medical student was going to call the dean and say, “I feel sick today.” Besides that, Robert claimed he got a call from the medical school and they said she hadn’t been in classes for several days. If she had called in sick two days before, why would they call looking for her?
Apparently, the first reference in print to Kathie’s calling in sick was in late February. Someone in the Durst camp created this narrative after the fact. I don’t believe Kathie or anyone called the school on Monday. I believe the medical school called Robert, looking for Kathie, and that prompted Robert to meet with his brother, Douglas, and his father, Seymour, and then to report her missing. If you believe that a dean on a Monday morning is going to take a phone call from a student with a cold, you need a reality check.