A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst

by Matt Birkbeck

  “I guess I’m a little concerned. I made a report with the New York State Police and I thought I should file one here.”

  As Durst spoke, Struk sensed something about him, that aura, that New York look that shouted wealth. It wasn’t his clothes or any jewelry. He looked more like a vagabond, one of those guys who hangs out on the corner begging for quarters. It was just his attitude. This was the West Side of Manhattan, and Struk knew that attitude well. This wasn’t a street guy, that’s for sure, thought Struk.

  “How’s your marriage?”

  “It’s okay, I guess. No major problems.”

  “What’s your occupation?”

  “I’m in real estate. My family owns commercial and residential buildings in the city,” said Durst, who was now making direct eye contact with Struk. “My father is Seymour Durst.”

  I knew it, a rich punk, thought Struk, who had no idea who Seymour Durst was.

  Struk then looked down at the New York magazine.

  THE MEN WHO OWN NEW YORK stared out at him. Struk wanted to ask him if one of these guys on the cover was his father, but he hesitated. He knew if that should prove to be the case, he’d probably take the magazine and stick it up this punk’s ass. Struk hated these money guys and the way they flaunted their wealth and their power, claiming they were prominent.

  Here, on the West Side, everyone was prominent.

  “Mr. Durst, how old is your wife? And can you give me a description?”

  “She’s twenty-nine. Sandy hair, hazel eyes. About five feet, five inches tall, one hundred and twenty pounds,” said Durst.

  Durst told Struk that he and his wife had been married for nine years and had two apartments, the penthouse on Riverside Drive and a smaller apartment at 12 East Eighty-sixth Street near Fifth Avenue. As far as Durst knew, there hadn’t been any ransom demands.

  “And you say there aren’t any marital problems?”

  “No, not really,” said Durst. “She just has a problem drinking. She was seeing a therapist for a while but stopped.”

  He handed Struk a photo of Kathie. She was very pretty, he thought. Long, straight hair, a nice full smile.

  Struk took down Durst’s home and business phone numbers and the number to the medical school. He also asked for phone numbers to speak with Kathie’s relatives.

  “I don’t have those,” said Durst. “Her maiden name is McCormack. Her mother, Ann, lives in New Hyde Park, Long Island. Her brother, Jim, lives in Queens.”

  Durst signed a single missing-persons form, then got up from his chair.

  “Okay, Mr. Durst. I’ll be in touch. There’s a criterion that has to be met for this to become an official missing-persons investigation, and I don’t think we’ve met that yet. I’ll make a few calls and get back to you. Of course, should you hear from or see your wife please give us a call,” said Struk.

  The two men shook hands and Durst quietly left the building, his dog, a Norwegian elkhound, following at his heels.

  Struk knew plenty of guys like Durst who walked meekly into the precinct all the time claiming their wives were missing. He also knew, in most cases, the women had either shacked up with another guy or had had enough of their beloved and jumped a bus.

  After seventeen years on the force, Struk would know if someone was missing.

  He reviewed his notes and filled out an initial report, or a “scratch,” which was really nothing more than a blank sheet of paper with a name and address and phone number.

  This wasn’t a missing-persons case, he reasoned, but he’d make a few phone calls, at least make some effort to see where this woman was.

  After all, the work would keep him busy, and keep his mind off of his family.

  —

  The walk back to Riverside Drive and Seventy-seventh Street took less than fifteen minutes, and Robert Durst walked past the doorman and boarded the elevator.

  As the doors closed, another tenant entering the building called out to hold the elevator, but Durst offered a quick glance to the elevator operator, who knew to ignore the plea.

  He arrived at the door of his sixteenth-floor penthouse apartment. Once inside, he opened a bag of dry dog food and filled a bowl, placing it on the kitchen floor.

  He calmly walked into the living room, sat on his sofa, and picked up the phone, dialing a familiar number.

  “Hi, it’s Robert. There’s something I have to tell you. I just came back from the police station.”

  —

  The paint chips hanging from the ceiling caught Mike Struk’s attention as he sat with his head back. The squad room, which had been empty the last two hours, was now coming to life. Two detectives led a handcuffed teen wearing a green parka and black Jefferson Starship T-shirt into the room. One detective stayed with the teen, the other, Eddie Regan, walked over to his desk, which was behind where Struk sat.

  “Wake up,” said Regan. “You working or you sleeping?”

  “No, I’m just thinking,” said Struk, who lifted his head up and pulled his chair closer to his desk. “What did you bring in?”

  “Remember that break-in last week at the music store on Eighty-ninth? We found the kid, sixteen. Got him hanging out in Central Park. Anything going on here?”

  “Just some guy, came in with his fucking dog to file a missing persons on his wife. Can you believe these people? He brings a dog here? Anyway he tells me he thinks his wife is missing, I take down the details, he leaves, and I make a few calls. Turns out the guy didn’t tell me everything, and I’m sitting here figuring who to call next.”

  Struk picked up a yellow legal pad and pointed to his notes from an interview he completed minutes earlier with Dr. Jean Cook, the dean of the Albert Einstein Medical School in the Bronx.

  Struk had circled several words, including “failing” and “marital difficulties” and “stressed.”

  “The guy comes in here with the dog and tells me everything is all right with the world, that his marriage is okay, and his wife may have a little drinking problem. This dean tells me a different story. Says she was supposed to repeat a class on Monday but called in sick and hasn’t been heard from since.”

  “When did the husband last see her?”

  “On Sunday.”

  “That’s five days. He waits five days to report her missing? What’s his name?”

  “Durst. Robert Durst. Says his father is some big real estate guy.”

  “Shit, he is. You know who his father is? Seymour Durst.”

  “He said that, said his father’s name was Seymour.”

  “Did he also tell you that his family owns half of Manhattan?” said Regan, walking away from Struk to attend to the teen, who was taken downstairs to the holding pen.

  As Regan left the room, and with the police radio squawking in the background, Struk decided he would call Larry Cohen, a suggestion made by Dr. Cook.

  Cohen was a medical student at Einstein whom Cook knew to be friendly with Kathie.

  When he picked up the phone and learned he was talking to a New York City detective, Cohen seemed disturbed, not with Struk but because he hadn’t spoken to or seen Kathie in over a week.

  Cohen was also perturbed when he learned that it had been her husband who reported her missing.

  “Why is that bothering you?” said Struk.

  “Because he was beating her. He scared the hell out of her.”

  “He was hitting her?”

  “Yeah, a lot, from what I could tell.”

  “You ever see any marks on her?”

  “No, but she’d call me late at night, sometimes crying, telling me she was slapped or punched. She was pretty scared of him.”

  “Did she ever say she was planning to leave him?”

  “She was talking about divorce. But she’s scheduled to graduate this summer, so I told her to sit tight, finish sc
hool, then take care of her marriage.”

  Struk wanted to ask Cohen if he was involved with Kathie. Cohen wasn’t married, and Struk was old school. In his world, men and women didn’t confide in each other unless they were sleeping together. The words were there, rolled on the end of his tongue, ready to spit out.

  But he didn’t ask the question. He hung up and circled Cohen’s name on his pad, then wrote “boyfriend?”

  Before breaking for dinner, Struk decided to make two more calls—to Ann McCormack, Kathie’s mother, and the New York State Police.

  Ann McCormack was a widow, she said, her husband passing from cancer in 1966. Kathie was the youngest of five children; having moved into Manhattan when she was only nineteen, renting an apartment in a building owned by the Durst Organization.

  She met Robert Durst one morning while paying her rent. They’d had but two dates when she decided to move with him to Vermont, where he was going to run a health-food store.

  Ann said at the time she wasn’t pleased with her daughter’s decision, reminding her that Catholics marry, they don’t cohabitate.

  She told Struk she wasn’t fond of her son-in-law. He rarely socialized with Kathie’s family and, despite his wealth, lived on the cheap. He drove old cars, wore old clothes, and hovered over Kathie’s spending, watching every penny.

  “That’s why she’s in medical school,” said Ann. “She needs her own career. She needs her own money.”

  Ann hadn’t spoken to her daughter in a week or so, but said she had been in good spirits.

  “Did your daughter have any problems with her marriage?” said Struk.

  “We all have problems with our marriages sometime or another,” said Ann.

  “Yes, we do,” said Struk, who thanked Ann for her time and said he’d be in touch.

  He then made his second call, to the New York State Police, and spoke to a Sergeant William Kidney.

  Kidney knew all about Kathie Durst, thanks to her friend Gilberte Najamy, who had called Thursday night insisting on filing a missing-persons report.

  “I told her we could only take a report from a family member, but this woman wouldn’t take no for an answer. So I sent two troopers to the South Salem home Friday morning.”

  Kidney said Robert Durst answered the door and invited the troopers inside. Although they didn’t search the house, they later reported nothing out of the ordinary.

  Kidney said one of the troopers asked Durst when he’d last spoken to his wife. Sunday night, after she returned to New York, he replied.

  When Durst was told the call could be traced, he said he spoke to his wife from a pay phone off of Route 35, which was three miles away.

  “Why would he walk that far to make a phone call?” said Struk. “It was raining that night.”

  “And snowing up here,” said Kidney. “The Najamy woman said some other friend, a Michael Burns, told her that Kathie had taken off, that she’d had enough.”

  “Enough of what?” said Struk.

  “Don’t know. He told Najamy to leave Kathie Durst alone, that she didn’t know Kathie as well as he did. What do you make of that?”

  “Sounds like he’s doing her,” said Struk. “And it sounds like she took off.”

  “That’s what it sounds like to me,” said Kidney.

  —

  Struk went to the Dublin House on West Seventy-ninth Street around 10 P.M., the corned beef always a good choice. Struk sat alone, saying little to the waitress. He left her a three-dollar tip for a seven-dollar meal.

  Upon his return from dinner, the squad room was still devoid of any activity. Regan was back at his desk filling out paperwork for his arrest.

  Struk said nothing, hung up his black trench coat, sat down, and began typing his report, using only his two forefingers.

  An hour later he called missing persons and gave them Kathie Durst’s name, address, and phone number.

  On his notepad, he scribbled, “Wife took off . . . or possible suicide,” before signing out at exactly 1 A.M.

  4

  The steam rose slowly from the manhole covers that line the middle of West Eighty-second Street, the cold morning air biting Mike Struk’s face as he walked up the front stairs of the Twentieth Precinct.

  It was 8 A.M. and he was back in the office, greeted with the smell of fried eggs. It was Regan. Like Struk, he’d been working a stay-over, only he’d decided to spend the night on a bunk in the back of the squad room. Regan was cooking breakfast on a hot plate. Along with the bed and hot plate there was a small TV and a refrigerator.

  Regan motioned to the eggs. “Want some?”

  Struk shook his head, held up a brown paper bag, placed his coat in his locker, and sat at his desk, opening the bag and pulling out a fresh coffee and hard bagel.

  The morning winter sun was bright, casting long shadows that filtered over one side of the squad room through the broken window blinds and illuminating the half-inch of dust that lined the sills.

  Two other detectives walked in just after 8 A.M. and Struk pointed to his watch.

  “I told you guys you have to get home by five A.M. when you work a stay-over, not stay out all night and stumble into work,” he said, smiling widely.

  The two detectives didn’t appreciate the humor. They needed coffee, and a lot of it.

  Struk was in better shape. He’d been in bed by 2 A.M. and up exactly five hours later. He could function on limited sleep. If he had been out drinking until dawn like his two cohorts, he’d be sitting at his desk, eyes closed, praying no one would bother him and the next nine hours would somehow whiz by.

  Struk had come to work with the Durst case on his mind. He tried to reason why a young woman, married to a millionaire, six months away from being a doctor, suddenly takes off. It didn’t make much sense. Struk was sure Durst had lied to him when he said their marriage was fine. But what self-respecting man would acknowledge that there were problems in his marriage? Struk himself wasn’t exactly standing out in the middle of Broadway announcing to the world, or even his close friends, that his marriage was over.

  And if Durst was hitting his wife, as was suggested, was there a reason? Durst spoke softly, gently. He didn’t appear to be the violent type. Maybe she was sleeping with another man, maybe this guy Burns, or Larry Cohen, and Durst had found out about it.

  Struk realized the real problem he had with the story: Why would Kathie Durst leave a husband who was a member of a wealthy family? Struk could glean from the conversations of the previous night that Durst had money, and lots of it. He even put together the bit with the magazine, the picture of the five guys and the brazen title that spoke of ultimate power.

  Durst was trying to tell Struk who he was and what family he came from.

  “Tread lightly here, boy” was the unstated message.

  The squad commander, Lieutenant Robert Gibbons, had Saturday duty, and was sitting in his office toward the back of the room reading Struk’s initial Durst report.

  Unlike most supervisors, Gibbons was well liked by those under his command. In fact, the word throughout the precinct was that Gibbons had taken a step back when he made lieutenant. Everyone thought he was a hell of a detective.

  Struk finished off his bagel and walked over to Gibbons’s office.

  “Not much happened last night, eh?” said Gibbons, who was now scanning the Friday-night log.

  Struk told Gibbons about the visit from Durst, the missing-persons report, the interviews.

  “I think she took off,” he said. “The only thing that’s bothering me is why leave the golden goose? This guy has money.”

  Gibbons looked at the name again on the report. Robert Durst. The last name sounded familiar.

  “His father’s name is Seymour,” said Struk. “This little puke actually showed me a magazine with his father on it. Says he’s one of the most
powerful men in the city.”

  Gibbons nodded. “I know this guy. They own a lot of property in the city. Some very big buildings.”

  Gibbons signed the report. He saw that Struk had only phoned in the bare essentials to missing persons; her name, address, age, and physical characteristics.

  “She’s not missing, at least not yet, from what I can tell,” said Struk.

  “I agree,” said Gibbons. “You going to stay on it?”

  “Yeah, I want to make a few more calls. She wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Blue collar, from Long Island. They were married for nine years. You don’t just leave this kind of money. Fucking rich people. You think they have it easy, but in reality they’re more fucked up than we are.”

  Struk spent the morning at his desk, talking to New York State Police trooper John Harney, one of the two troopers who’d entered the Dursts’ South Salem home on Friday, to Gilberte Najamy, and to Jim McCormack, Kathie’s older brother.

  Harney repeated what Sergeant Kidney had said, a friend of Mrs. Durst’s phoned in a missing-persons report, and he visited the house Friday morning. But following the conversation, Struk turned to his notes from the night before. Something had occurred to him, and there it was, midway through his report. Robert Durst said he had called the state police.

  Struk made a note of that discrepancy and called Gilberte Najamy, who seemed surprised, and relieved, when she answered the phone and learned she was talking to a New York City detective.

  “Something is wrong, something is really wrong,” she blurted. “I’ve been trying to call Kathie all week and I can’t find her. She was supposed to meet me Monday night and she never showed. Oh, God. Oh, God, what did I do?”

  “Excuse me?” said Struk, who was baffled by Gilberte’s ramblings. “Why don’t we start from the beginning. You are her, what, a friend?”

  “I’m Kathie’s best friend,” said Gilberte. “She was at my house last Sunday. I’m a caterer and I have my Christmas party at the end of the month; it’s mostly family. We planned to meet for dinner the next evening, Monday, at six-thirty at the Lion’s Head Restaurant in Greenwich Village. But she didn’t show up.”