Anonymous note suggests Durst link to pal’s LA murder
Did Robert Durst write the note in December 2000 alerting police in California to the body of his murdered pal, Susan Berman?
That was the implication Sunday night in Episode 5 of the HBO documentary, “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” when the anonymous note was placed side-by-side with an envelope Durst had earlier sent his friend.
The six-part documentary, which concludes March 15, has explored the eccentric life of the multi-millionaire Scarsdale native, who has broken ties with his family and no longer has any role in The Durst Organization, a major Manhattan real estate empire.
In particular it has focused on three sensational cases — the unsolved January 1982 disappearance of his first wife Kathie after she left the couple’s South Salem cottage; Berman’s murder as Westchester investigators wanted to talk with her about Durst; and the 2001 shooting death and dismemberment of Morris Black, Durst’s elderly neighbor in Galveston, TX, where he was living as a mute woman trying to disappear himself in the wake of the reopened investigation in the case of Kathie’s disappearance.
Durst was acquitted after claiming the killing was in self defense and that he had to try to get rid of the body because he didn’t think anyone would believe his account.
He has denied involvement in his wife’s presumed death — though insisting he doesn’t know for sure she’s dead — and Berman’s murder. No arrests have ever been made in either case.
Without getting into specifics, law enforcement authorities in Westchester said in recent weeks that they understood Los Angeles detectives were making strides in their investigation. The New York Times reported Monday that the LA District Attorney’s Office had reopened the cold case.
Durst learned from media reports in late October 2000 that state police and the Westchester District Attorney’s Office were looking into Kathie Durst’s disappearance, which had always been treated as a Manhattan missing person’s case. He acknowledged in the documentary that he had lied initially to police about speaking to his wife later that night from Manhattan after dropping her off at the Katonah train station. He never did speak with her and authorities and her family and friends don’t believe she ever got on the train.
Edward Murphy, a senior investigator with the District Attorney’s Office, said in Sunday’s episode, that Durst immediately went into defensive mode. The next day, he paid $77,000 for an engagement ring for Debrah Charatan, a longtime friend whom he married in a small ceremony the following month. It has long been speculated that the marriage was one of convenience for Durst — that he wanted to use the spousal privilege to ensure that Charatan would not be forced to divulge information she may have had.
In fact, at a 2003 deposition in a Westchester Surrogates Court case regarding the Durst family finances, her lawyer invoked the privilege. But Charatan was allowed to answer about what he might have said before they were married: that he was “scared” and “concerned” about the new investigation into Kathie Durst’s disappearance.
Charatan indicated she remembered hearing about Berman’s murder from a radio news report while in a taxi.
Berman, the daughter of a famed Las Vegas gangster, had met Durst in college and was living in New York at the time his wife disappeared. To shield him from the media, she served as his informal spokesman.
Sareb Kaufman, who considers Berman to be his mother after his father dated her while he was a teenager, was given boxes of her belongings after she was killed. In one he found an envelope from Durst’s stationery that had contained a letter Durst sent his mother.
The handwriting of the address — and the misspelling of “BEVERLEY HILLS” — were remarkably similar to that in a note mailed to Beverly Hills police on Dec. 23, the day Berman was believed to have been shot execution-style in her home. The note read simply “1527 BENEDICT CANYON” — Berman’s address — and “CADAVER” — and police surmise it was written by someone who cared for her and wanted her body found before it could decompose.
Durst was known to have been in Northern California, in Trinidad, where he owned a home, a few days before Berman was killed. But a police detective, Paul Coulter, said he had been unable to place Durst in Los Angeles.
Still they suspect he was moving south, Murphy said, headed to LA, where Berman had told friends she expected to see him. Murphy said Durst was believed to have used a calling card to make two phone calls from a pay phone in Garberville, 80 miles south of Trinidad, on Dec. 20. And for three or four days, even though he was known to routinely check his cell phone messages, there was no reported activity on the cell phone, as if it had been turned off, Murphy said.
They do know that on the night of Dec. 23, Durst was at the airport in San Francisco boarding a flight back to New York.
Durst insists on camera that the timing of the killing and his movements that week “is very, very tight” and brushed off the significance of police knowing he was in California.
“California’s a big state,” he said with a smirk.
In Episode 3, he said he couldn’t imagine what would lead someone to write the anonymous note to police, that is was a “big risk” because “you’re writing a note to the police that only the killer could have written.”
Kaufman, who was close with Durst, said the best case scenario for him would be that his mother’s killing was random, committed by a stranger, maybe during a robbery gone bad. And the worst case? “Its a friend, it’s somebody she knew; it’s somebody I’ve spoken to.”
In the documentary, he shows the envelope that Durst sent Berman in March 1999 to one of the filmmakers, Marc Smerling. “It was clear enough that I might be dancing with the devil,” he said.
A teaser for this Sunday’s final episode offers a handwriting expert comparing the envelopes and Durst on a phone call, saying he knows what they will confront him with and suggesting he doesn’t plan to be interviewed again.