Death and the millionaire drifter

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

Mike Ramsey:

This case is far, far too bizarre and too strange to be fiction

Jim McCormick: My first reaction was shock, disbelief.

Gilberte Najamy: This is Bobby Durst. Expect the unexpected.

Robert Durst, a sometimes cross-dressing millionaire, is one of the more bizarre characters to ever stand trial in an American courtroom.                                     

His enemies will tell you he's the luckiest man alive... someone who's gotten away with murder three times. Others will say he's a tragic figure mired in misfortune.                                                                           

Look around New York City's Times Square--the gleaming new towers--and you're looking at the motherlode of Durst's wealth.                                                    

His family--mainly his father--cannily bought up blocks of midtown Manhattan back when 42nd Street was still a seedy strip of porno arcades and ominous drifters.

Robert Draper: They compare very much so to the Trumps, and to the Helmsleys.

Robert Draper is a writer for GQ Magazine. He's followed the suspicions that have trailed behind the 65-year-old multi-millionaire for more than two decades.

Robert Draper: When you take a stroll through Midtown Manhattan, through some of the sort of obvious tourist spots of Manhattan, you can't help but see- - impressive buildings that are ultimately the acquisition or the handiwork of the Durst Organization.

The Durst Organization real estate development company has been valued at more than a billion dollars and Robert Durst is one of the direct heirs.                                       

The story goes that a young Bobby Durst in the early '70s was collecting rent from a tenant in one of his father's apartment buildings when he met his soul mate.                                       

The tenant and soon live-in girlfriend was Kathleen McCormack, an 18-year-old dental hygienist, youngest of five from a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Long Island.

Her brother Jim.

Jim McCormack: Their early days were truly I think, you know, Prince Charming and Cinderella with the means to enjoy a modest but comfortable hippy lifestyle.

The couple married in 1973. He: shy, a little aloof, some thought. Nearly 10 years older.                                       

She was lively, attractive, the one to gather friends for dinners.

They had a snazzy penthouse apartment in New York.

And a pretty little cottage in the country in Westchester County.

And, there were perks to being the heir to a Manhattan real-estate dynasty when it opened doors to some of the most elite clubs in town: Studio 54, Xenon, discos, the fabulous people. Champagne and drugs when they were labeled "recreational."

It looked as though Kathleen McCormack from Long Island had hooked herself a prize.                      

Robert Draper: Bobby Durst was Kathy Durst's passport to an outside world to which she had not hitherto been privy but very much wanted to be part of. And for a series of years that arrangement worked very nicely and they were very much in love.

But Kathleen wasn't going to settle for being arm furniture for her rich young husband. She got her nursing degree then enrolled in med school.                               

Gilberte Najamy: She was just brilliant. She was beautiful. She was bright, happy and she had everything going for her.                                       

College friend Gilberte Najamy remembers Kathleen's dream was to open a clinic for children.                                       

Gilberte Najamy: What was going for Kathy as she told me is that she wanted to have children and Bobby did not want to have children. So she decided to have a career.

Another college friend, Eleanor Schwank, remembers Kathleen saying that her husband had told her in so many words to go out and get a job and not rely on his family's wealth.                                       

Eleanor Schwank: At that point, never having met Bob and this being the first conversation I had had with Kathy, I thought of Bob as really someone who was extremely cheap. 

Kathleen threw herself into studies for medical school. She was focused with goals in her life. While he, by several accounts, was smoking a lot of marijuana, spinning his wheels in a corporate world he loathed, and seeing other women on the side. Kathleen's friends said the nearly 10-year-old marriage was suffering, turning violent.

Gilberte Najamy: The turning point in the marriage was the frequency of phone calls that I received from Kathy. They got more desperate. She sounded more panicked, more fearful. "Bobby was hitting me." These are her words now. "Bobby's hitting me. He wakes me up in the middle of the night and he starts a fight."

Eleanor Schwank: She called me and she was hysterical. She was crying. She was clearly upset and I said, 'what's the matter? And she told me, she said "Bobby just beat me."                                      

Gilberte Najamy: I just kept telling her, "Leave him. Leave him. Get the divorce eventually but leave him."

Kathleen's brother Jim McCormack also said he witnessed the marriage turn violent.

Jim McCormack: He could show rage--verbal rage. And, ultimately, I think he was very capable of physical confrontation. Physical rage. He wanted to control Kathy because probably he couldn't even control himself and Kathy was the only thing or person he ever controlled in his life. And he was losing control of that. And it just didn't cut with Bob Durst.

Durst filed an affidavit in 1983 denying he ever abused Kathy and his lawyers say they know of no abuse.                                       

But back in 1981, Kathleen Durst got a lawyer and began the paperwork to prepare for a divorce.                                       

Jim McCormack: All she wanted out of the disillusionment of the relationship with Bob was just a fair settlement. She wasn't going for the $1-million payoff.

So it happened on a winter Sunday night in January 1982 that Gilberte got another distraught call from Kathleen. She needed to get away from Bob and the cottage. Gilberte said "c'mon over for dinner." As soon as she arrived, though, the trouble started.                                       

Gilberte Najamy: And then the phone calls started. And Bob would call and he'd say "get home" and they were screaming.                                       

At 7:15 that night, Kathleen gave up on her evening away from Bob. She was going back to their cottage, 45 minutes away. The friends agreed to meet for dinner in the city the next night.               

Gilberte Najamy: And then she stood on my front porch and she said, "Gilberte, if something happens to me tonight, promise that you'll check it out. I'm afraid of Bobby." And I let her go. I let her go home and I’ve never seen her since.

As Durst would tell it later, when his wife arrived home, they polished off a bottle of wine, argued, then she said she wanted to go back to the apartment in New York City.                                       

Robert Draper: The story that Robert tells is that on January 31, 1982. He dropped her off at a train station in South Salem bound for New York City and that was the last that he'd seen of her.                                       

Four days later, Durst walked into a police station on Manhattan's West Side.                                       

Then-detective Mike Struk was working a shift short-handed.  

Mike Struk: He entered with his dog. He was even-tempered, well mannered. Really didn't have too much to say other than the fact that he was reporting his wife missing.

Durst told the detective his wife was embroiled in studies for the final months of med school and it wasn't unusual for her to sleep over at school for days at a time.                                       

The detective didn't make much of it. Just another domestic problem at most.                             

Mike Struk: If we conducted full-blown investigations in any similar case like that on a daily basis, that's all we would be doing.

But Kathleen Durst--about to become a doctor, about to be independent from a husband friends say she regarded as violent and abusive--stayed missing. And Robert Durst stopped talking about her disappearance.   

Jim McCormack: And we started learning that Bob was throwing out her personal effects. Her clothing. Her books. I mean, here's a guy who's offering $100-thousand dollar reward in the newspaper and a few weeks later he's throwing out her personal effects.                                       

Eleanor Schwank: I know that she died. I have no doubt that Bob killed her.                                       

Jim McCormack: I've come to believe that Kathy never left Westchester County alive.

Robert Draper: The most suspicious thing about Bobby Durst and which might have led someone to forming the conclusion that he was behind her disappearance was his near total lack of interest in the investigation. His near total lack of concern about the possibility that his wife may well have been brutally murdered.

And if any reporters in New York started nosing around the strange circumstances of the millionaire's wife who vanished, Durst could rely on his joined-at the-hip publicist friend of many years, Susan Berman, to bat the dark rumors down.

But Susan Berman is another story. On another coast. A murder story that made people wonder if she was number two.

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