The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015) s01e03 Episode Script

She had everything to live for, and yet she just disappeared.
Now new and alarming questions are being raised about what happened to a young wife and medical student here in New York some 20 years ago.
Two decades later, Kathie Durst is suddenly more than a memory, thanks to a tip from a defendant in an unrelated case.
I had arrested an individual named Timothy Martin.
And Timmy was arrested for several counts of public lewdness.
He was basically exposing himself to women.
He was convicted, and shortly before sentencing, his attorney contacted me and stated that Timmy wanted to sit down with me and talk to me about some information he had on an old murder that occurred up here in Northern Westchester.
What he stated was that he had heard that there was a young woman named Kathie Durst who was murdered by her husband at their cottage up in South Salem.
I remember that day the little, red light was flashing on my answering machine, and I hit the button and it was Joe Becerra.
And he said, "We're looking into the Kathie Durst case.
" My heart almost stopped.
Explosion.
This whole set of fireworks that went out that was like hope has been regenerated.
We were, like, stunned.
I mean, you know, it's, you know, it's, don't forget it's almost 20 years after the fact.
And all of a sudden, Kathie's disappearance may be close at hand in terms of a solution.
These two guys pulled up in a car, and they came onto the property and said they were detectives and could they come in and look at something in the house and ask me a couple questions.
They looked into a closet, and they took a shelf down and they started pulling things out and dug back to an area that I didn't even know existed in my house.
I guess they were looking for a weapon or, you know, bloodstains or something.
No one had ever searched the house.
No one had ever attempted to search the house, search the lake, search anywhere else.
I mean, it was very telling that there was a whole area that needed to be investigated.
That this case was not investigated the way it should have been.
No one even looked at it.
You know, starting at square one.
Is Robert Durst a suspect? We're not ruling him in and we're not ruling him out.
He certainly was a person who had the most information about Kathleen Durst.
So, you hear about this investigation.
You read the article.
And it blew me away.
Absolutely, totally blew me away.
I'd never heard the name Jeanine Pirro before.
And I was told about Jeanine Pirro.
Has higher aspirations.
Wants to run for something big statewide.
I wasn't the least bit concerned about the details.
The divers searched the lake until you're blue in the face.
You took a wall out of the house.
Ridiculous.
What were the divers for? Obviously, they were looking for body parts, looking for something that can be used as evidence.
But what they don't announce is what they found.
Uh, nothing of evidentiary value.
I remember being disappointed, uh, you know, that nothing came up in the search.
But it also piqued my interest.
Because I knew, based upon whether it was the inconsistent statements or, you know, the prosecutors, or the cops, that there was something more here.
My name's Ed Murphy.
I'm a senior investigator with the Westchester District Attorney's Office.
I've been in law enforcement approximately 40 years.
Now with the case being reopened, and it's being looked at again, certain things come to the surface.
And the decision was made by my office to explore this and see what we can do.
So, we went back and we reinterviewed everybody who was interviewed 20 years prior.
When I started speaking with Kathie's friends, they all said to me that I should speak to Susan Berman.
That she was a very close friend of Bobby's.
That they were close since college.
That when Kathie went missing, she protected Bobby from the press.
And they basically told me if anyone knows anything about Kathie's disappearance, it would be Susan Berman.
Susan and I would spend a lot of time together, we could talk, we had the thing in common, both of her parents died when she was young, and I had one parent die when I was young.
And her background? Rich, Las Vegas, mobster father.
This happy, little girl was 5 years old when this snapshot was taken.
Her mother had been a tap dancer, but gave it up when she married.
Her father was rich and powerful and doted on his only child.
That little girl today is Susan Berman.
And she's the author of Easy Street.
You grew up to age of 21 not knowing that your dad was a gangster.
How'd you finally find out? A friend at UCLA, Jane, asked me if I'd seen a certain crime book that just came out.
And I said, "No.
" And I ran to the store in Los Angeles and looked, and there was my father, described as an ex-con from Sing Sing who'd kill a man with one hand behind his back.
He was tied in with the so-called "Murder Incorporated.
" After all, he was a bank robber at one time, you know.
So She was quite proud of him.
And he was bigger than life.
So, yes, she does, yes, she deified him.
She even had his mug shot framed in the living room.
Something happened when she met Bobby Durst.
It was like "Here's a man as powerful as my father.
"He is connected.
"He has money.
"He can always get out of trouble.
And he needs me.
" And she always used to say, "He needs me.
" "We have a special friendship.
" 19 years ago, Robert Durst told police he had driven his wife from their country house in South Salem, New York, to this nearby train station, where she boarded the city-bound train, headed for their Manhattan apartment and a busy week at medical school.
But no one close to Kathie would see her again.
"The beautiful wife of a wealthy Manhattan real estate developer has disappeared.
" "There has been no trace of sandy-haired Kathleen Durst, 29, "since January 31, when she returned to her penthouse "after a weekend in the country.
"The doorman at 37 Riverside Drive "saw her arrive home that Sunday evening and go to her apartment.
" This would not be information gleaned from the police.
We wouldn't give that out.
It's being fed to the newspaper at that time from the Durst side.
When Kathie disappeared, I saw the media was calling.
I told Susan, "I got a call from this reporter and this reporter.
Could you call them back and you just handle it?" Since she was a writer, she was used to dealing with the press.
Susan took it upon herself to become his spokesperson.
She was facilitating a story that established the fact that Kathie arrived in Manhattan alive.
Bob and Susan were in a concerted campaign to plant these ideas out there, and already people are starting to pick up on them.
So, it becomes that much more difficult to find out what really happened.
If you reconstruct the case of Kathie, there were several people who saw Kathie when we know she was dead.
And she was heard from Monday morning.
Mrs.
Durst was a fourth year medical student here at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and she was to have a clinic class that morning, but she called up saying she wasn't feeling well and she wouldn't be in that day.
And as far as police know, that's the last time that anyone had contact with her.
The dean at the medical school, obviously somebody was, um, assisted Mr.
Durst in calling him.
Well, sitting here today, it's, it, my, my money would be that it was Susan Berman.
In our minds, Kathie made it to Manhattan.
So, with luck and a little bit of cunning, it slipped through.
He got that one past us, I guess.
I think we all know now, 30 years later, that anything Bob says you have to question, you know.
I don't think they thought that way then.
You want to talk about the guts of our case? The guts of our case is that Kathie Durst and Bob Durst were married.
The marriage spun out of control.
Became increasingly volatile.
We found out she asked him for a divorce.
Got a divorce attorney.
That prior Thursday before she went missing, Kathie's attorney told her that Bob Durst had turned down their request for an agreement on a divorce.
So, 3 days prior to this, you know, Bob's turning down this settlement that she wants in this divorce, and they're going up there together.
At the time of her disappearance, they were together in the upstate house in South Salem.
And there is no evidence, credible evidence, that she ever left South Salem.
I don't know how he killed her, but I don't think she ever got on a train, that's for sure.
Did you have anything to do with the death of your wife? I don't know that she's dead.
Do you think that it's possible that she's alive now? It's possible.
Not likely.
It's not what I think.
I think she's almost definitely dead.
But I don't know that she's dead.
So, to put a finer point on it, did you have anything to do with the disappearance of your wife? No.
I don't know where she is.
I don't know what happened to her.
I don't know how it happened to her.
I had nothing to do with what happened to her, except very, um, obliquely or whatever you would It was a bad marriage and that was at least half, probably a lot more, my fault.
But other than that, I had nothing to do with what caused her or what happened to her disappearance, in her disappearance.
When he gives his original statement to the police, he leaves the car at home.
Doesn't bring it into the city.
Doesn't have the car the day he reports her missing, you know? Maybe he was afraid to have the car there, because they might want to search it or look at it.
He probably took Kathie, put her in the trunk of the car, and got rid of her somewhere.
We did some phone record sweeping, and we found that some of the phone records show that the Durst Organization got collect phone calls from Ship Bottom, New Jersey, on Tuesday, after Kathie's disappearance.
We were able to track down where those calls came from.
And there was a coin-operated phone in the laundromat.
Now, how do we know that Bob Durst made those calls? Well, one of the things we know is that there are only two people who made collect calls to the Durst Organization.
We know that from the people who worked there.
And one of those people was Bob Durst.
The other person was Seymour.
So, Seymour undoubtedly wasn't in Ship Bottom that day.
You used to call the office collect.
Oh, all the time.
- Tell me about that.
- I would call the office collect.
Why did you do that? I didn't want to pay for it.
Let Seymour pay for it.
The only reason I'm calling is because he wants me to call.
There were a series of collect calls made from Ship Bottom, New Jersey.
That's on the coast somewhere.
- Yeah.
- So, there are 3 calls made to the Durst Organization from Ship Bottom.
Now, you were the collect call guy, so, I think the speculation is "Well, Bob must have made those phone calls.
" Except Bob didn't make those calls.
Bob was not in Ship Bottom.
Can you think of any reason why these phone calls, these collect calls, would be made to the Durst Organization during the day? I have no idea who made the calls.
Were there other people that you knew of that would make collect calls to the company? Several.
Yes.
Yes.
Executives? Or family members? Somebody had a, had a beach house and was calling and, and getting one of the receptionists Not the usual receptionist To accept the calls.
That had happened periodically that spring and summer and fall.
Make no mistake, we went digging looking for a body.
I mean, you know, we know that he was in New Jersey within a couple of days of her disappearance.
Do you have any thought about where she is? About where her body might be? I have no idea.
Wouldn't know how to begin.
Wouldn't know if her body If she was dead I would not know if her body would be in the State of New York, or in the State of New Jersey or in the Northern Hemisphere, or anything like that.
If you go to Ship Bottom and the area surrounding the Pine Barrens, you see ample, ample real estate where he could have dumped the body.
It's actually a place where mob bosses used to order that bodies be dumped.
And what connection is that? Well, Susan Berman, who was very friendly with Bob at the time, had a lot of connections and a lot of friends in organized crime.
I would say that Susan would do anything to help her close friends.
No matter the situation.
Mm-hmm.
She was She was loyal.
I think she was a loyal soul to the end.
What was your relationship with Susan Berman over all those years? When Kathie disappeared, initially the first several years, Susan was living, still living in New York.
And I saw her frequently in New York.
Then she moved to Los Angeles.
I went online and I traced Susan Berman from Beekman Place all the way out to Benedict Canyon in California.
I gave the police a map to her door.
And I said, "Whatever you do, interview this woman.
"She knows more than she's saying.
"She's a good friend of Bob's.
Maybe she won't tell you anything, but maybe she will.
" We had a conversation in which I said, "Susan, "did you see the piece in the New York Times about Kathie Durst's case being reopened?" And she said, "Julie, don't talk to me about that.
"I don't want to talk about that.
They're out to get Bobby.
" That's what she said.
Did you have contact with Susan around that same time? Yes.
What did she say, if you remember? - She wrote, "Oh, Bobby.
- This is terrible for you.
I hate that you have to go through this.
" But you heard from her that she had been contacted by the police? - Yes.
- What did she say? "The Los Angeles Police contacted me.
They want to talk to me about Kathie Durst's disappearance.
" Something happens to Susan then.
Oh, not long after that, Susan Berman was murdered.
Around Christmas of 2000.
Yeah, I was going to Europe for, like, 3-ish weeks for the holiday.
And my, I had no parking in my neighborhood, so, I parked my car in the garage, and Susan kept her car here.
And we hung out and sort of exchanged gifts and cards and well wishes, and then the taxi came and, you know, we said, "I love you," and I got in the taxi and left.
I met her at 13.
She, uh, had started dating my father.
We moved in with her, uh, I want to say, like, a year into their dating.
Because of how light, happy, joyous, quick, brilliant, aware she was, daily life was fascinating and fun.
She laughs a lot.
She laughed a lot.
And, um, you know, frivolously spent a lot.
And everything could be turned into a story.
She came alive for those few years that she became their mother.
It was, it was just, it was wonderful to see.
When the relationship of their father's was breaking up, both of these kids, willingly and together, made the declaration that they are choosing to live with their mother Susan.
When I called and she didn't pick up Christmas Eve, obviously I didn't know what, but something was wrong.
Well, I called because she was late for dinner by a half-hour, and she was always very, very punctual when it came to little family dos.
I said, "Susie.
It's Deni.
"Um, I hope you didn't confuse tonight with tomorrow night.
"I've got Koo Koo Roo.
We're waiting for you.
"Tommy's hungry.
Mom's hungry.
Where are you?" So, then the phone did pick up.
It was a man's voice.
I said, "Who's this?" He said, "Detective" I didn't even hear his name.
I heard the word "detective" from the L.
A.
Police Department.
"On December 24, 2000, "West Los Angeles patrol officers responded to a radio call Open door at 1527 Benedict Canyon Drive.
" "The officers, upon arriving at the scene, "observed the rear door standing open, and entered the residence.
" "The officers discovered the victim's body "supine on the floor of a bedroom located in the southwest portion of the residence.
" "The victim had sustained a gunshot wound to the head.
Paramedic pronounced death at 13:48 hours.
" The first thing I remember was the condition of the house.
Uh, it was, uh, pretty barren.
I think all the furniture that was in there was things that people had loaned her.
There was no carpeting on the concrete floors.
There was no heat in the residence.
And there's no drawers overturned.
Nothing had spilled out.
Everything is intact.
The computer is there.
The front door was secured with deadbolt locks.
There was no evidence of any kind of forced entry.
Which meant to me, or indicated to me, that whoever killed her had probably been let in by Susan Berman.
I'm in an office waiting to interview someone.
And I look at The Daily News, and there's this tiny, little story out of L.
A.
that Susan Berman was found shot dead in L.
A.
And I almost fell out of my chair.
I just sat straight up and I wanted to leave.
That was probably the only time in this case that really, really took my breath away.
I was standing up when I answered the phone.
I felt my knees get weak.
Because I, it was like, I told them, "Go out there.
" When I heard that Susan had been murdered, the first person I thought of was Robert Durst.
Because we were about to speak with her.
Susan Berman wasn't just killed.
I mean, it was execution.
Her death is a very questionable death, not just in terms of the fact that it was a homicide, but the timing is extremely curious.
How did you react when you heard about Susan's murder? I felt terrible for Susan.
I was astonished that they were putting all this together that I did it or I caused it to be done.
Did you have anything to do with Susan Berman's death? I had nothing to do with Susan Berman's death.
Did you have any theory yourself of what might have happened to Susan? No.
Does it make sense to you that there were people that suspected you of having? Oh, sure.
I mean, because she was my spokesman.
All of a sudden, she's dead right after Jeanine Pirro's doing the investigation of me.
Mm-hmm.
That I shut her up.
She wrote about mobsters, and she was the daughter of one.
So, when author Susan Berman was found dead of a single gunshot wound to the head at her Benedict Canyon home on Christmas Eve, all of the obvious questions came up.
Mostly "Was it a mob-style hit?" We were surprised to learn that Robert Durst was not a suspect in Susan Berman's murder.
The LAPD was looking at mob connections of that murder.
Susan Berman's business manager said that she had been working on television projects about the mob's days in Las Vegas when she was killed.
She did talk to me about something she was working on that I think was not a screenplay.
I think it was a journalism story.
And I think that it involved the mob.
"Something big.
" She was going to blow the socks off of something.
"Something big was going to happen.
" And I said, "Well, what?" "Well, I can't talk about it now, but something big is going to happen.
" I was suspicious right away.
Back of the head.
That's traditional in mob killings.
The Beverly Hills Police Department received a letter in the mail.
The envelope was addressed "Beverly Hills Police.
" Beverly is spelled wrong, spelled with LEY instead of just LY.
And the note read, "1527 Benedict Canyon," and the word "Cadaver.
" The letter was postmarked the day before the discovery of the victim's body.
That letter says a lot.
It gets mailed to a police department, so that somebody would come and find her body so it's not sitting there, decomposing, rotting away.
I mean, it's somebody that obviously cares about her.
So, we eliminated the mafia being a possible suspect.
So, what do you think about this? About this note? I mean, does this note mean anything to you? Yeah, I mean, that's her address.
Block letters so somebody was hiding their signature.
And they spelled "Beverly" wrong.
Can you think of a reason why somebody might write a note like that? I can't imagine.
Can't imagine.
One of the speculations is that if it was somebody that liked her, they wouldn't want her lying around in her house.
You know, if she had to die, she shouldn't die If somebody liked her, why kill her? And now you're taking this big risk.
Which big risk? You're writing a note to the police that only the killer could have written.
One of the things that we confiscated was Susan's computer hard drive.
And we found a ledger, of names of people that had sent her money.
She was reaching out to past business associates or friends for money.
She started having money problems.
She was months behind in rent.
You know, she's going to get through this.
She has deals that, uh, were looking good with, you know, different projects there in Hollywood.
Susan wrote a lot of screenplays.
She had a lot of meetings.
And she had so much faith in herself.
She really did.
Um, but none of the screenplays ever got bought.
Being a woman, being an older woman in this young industry just was hard and getting harder.
She was in desperate straits.
So, Susan in desperate straits was very different than the Susan that I knew.
People do things that Their relationships change.
Susan could manipulate, for sure.
She was a good manipulator and could manipulate for things that she wanted.
There was indications that she had received a couple checks from Bobby Durst.
Susan was tough.
And it, you know, it probably would not have scared her to I'm not saying "threaten blackmail," but to suggest, "I can really use" You know? "And wouldn't it do us both some" I could see it.
Was there anything that Susan knew as your confidante that you would have been uncomfortable with her telling the police? Well, we had lots of private things, but none of it had anything to do with Kathie.
I mean, when Kathie was, you know, going bananas, we would talk about Kathie all the time.
I couldn't imagine her talking to the police about that, just sitting here right now.
But "If the police want to talk to me, "I'm just going to talk to them.
Is that all right?" And, like, that was the conversation.
"Do whatever you want.
" My name is Sareb Kaufman.
Um, Susan Berman was my mother.
There's just one request that I would like to make, which is that we keep the best in mind, and try not to dwell too much on the sadness of these events.
People were flying in for the memorial, and it was expected Bobby was going to be there.
I believe he was in L.
A.
at the time, but he didn't come to the funeral To the memorial service.
Yes.
He called me.
I found the call a little bit threatening, to tell you the truth.
Um, he said I, I don't recall what he really said.
You know, I don't recall what he gave as the reason for the call.
It could have been something like "Just checking in with you.
" Never interested in me for one second.
Bobby called.
And why wouldn't he call? He was her best friend Or one of her best friends.
And we commiserated with that.
"My God, isn't this awful?" Maybe he did, now that you're saying that.
He was trying to, to make allies in Susan's camp.
For what reason, I'm not sure.
Maybe, you know, to keep us from talking to the cops, which we already had.
I, I have no idea.
But he definitely was trying to, to, um, find out where he could find allies.
It was shortly after.
Um, I, I forget if he called me or I called him.
I mean, there It was a point where I was kind of going through her Rolodex and just letting people know.
This was kind of again, like, I was calling the reporters, I was calling, you know, the police.
He was obviously very sympathetic and, you know, sad to hear about it, and asked what he could do.
And then it was around that time that people were starting to talk about him as a suspect.
But it never made sense to me.
Not for even a second.
I knew how Susan felt about him.
Sareb and Bobby became very close right after Susan died.
Which was a problem, because the rest of us You know, felt that we were living in different realities.
When people try to explain to me the predominant theory as to, "Hey, his wife went missing, and, you know, plenty of people think he killed her" and "Hey, look, they just opened up this case "just, you know, a month before, two months before, isn't that curious?" And "Hey, there's no such thing as coincidence.
" Um, it I first say, "Of course there is coincidence.
There's always coincidence.
" Yes, he is a part of the list, because he would have been allowed in.
He, you know, she would have turned her back on him, you know.
But, uh, nothing else make, makes sense to me on that.
I can see how a young person, who had just lost his mother figure and he was starting out in life, would like to believe in a multimillionaire who could be his good friend.
Well, no, it wasn't I mean, well, he had, well, he basically in a conversation that we had had at some point, again it came up, I hadn't gone to college.
He asked me, "How much would it cost for you to go?" And so I, you know, I told him, "About $200,000.
" It was a little padded, admittedly, but not by much.
I mean, it was tuition, living, being able to focus.
He said, "I'll give you $25,000 a year for 4 years.
" On his next trip around, Bob said he wanted to have dinner.
We did not.
We did not have that dinner.
Because apparently shortly thereafter, he was on the run for the, uh Well, at the time it was arrested for murder and dismemberment of a body.
So, he missed the dinner.
Galveston Police are convinced 58-year-old Robert Durst killed and dismembered his 71-year-old-neighbor Morris Black, then threw his body parts into Galveston Bay.
I spent one night in prison.
I had been told by the detective that, uh, "You've been charged with murder.
Bail has been set at $250,000.
" And I didn't think that when you were charged with murder I mean, I didn't know nothing, but you, you can't give someone charged with murder a bail, because they're going to run away, of course! But was your intention when you put up the $250,000 to run away? Oh, good-bye, $250,000.
Good-bye, jail.
I'm, I'm out! Manhattan real estate heir Robert Durst back in custody.
Busted while trying to shoplift a $6.
00 chicken salad sandwich at a Pennsylvania market.
I went into the Wegmans to do grocery shopping, get the newspaper.
I don't know what gave me the idea that I should shoplift.
To see if I could get away with it, or whatever it was.
But I decided rather than to pay, I was just going to take it.
And as I was leaving, the, the two security people were out front, and they have to talk to me.
We're sorry.
You'll have to come with us.
Blah blah blah.
Idiotically, I went with them.
Um, and I was arrested.
Durst was wanted for murder in Galveston, Texas, and he's a suspect for murders in Los Angeles and Westchester County, New York.
What about Susan Berman? Did you have anything to do with her murder? Why were you bald? - I was on the lam.
- I was trying to disguise myself, and that worked real good.
Did you shave your eyebrows? - Everything.
- Why? It looks more like a Less like me.
You, you look like a You look weird with your eyebrows shaved in addition to your head.
And that was intentional? Yeah! How do you accidentally shave your eyebrows?