Death and the millionaire drifter

Kathleen Durst was 29-years-old, almost a doctor, and by the end of 1982 given up for dead by friends and family.                                       

Jim McCormack: I remember sitting in front of a psychic crying. Because I realized the enormity of having a sister who you loved no longer being any place on the face of this earth. Just missing. Gone.                                       

Her college friend Gilberte Najamy had become obsessed with finding an answer to Kathleen's disappearance. She and her sister even broke into the Durst couple's cottage in Westchester County playing amateur detectives. Looking for clues. The house was scrubbed clean.

Gilberte Najamy: I went through that house with a fine-toothed comb. I saw in the garbage can in the kitchen, her unopened mail. And I got a sick feeling in my stomach. And I said "These are bills. These are important things. Why is he throwing them out? How come they're not open?" And then I got the worst feeling. He knew she wasn't coming back.                                      

Meanwhile, the official investigation by professional detectives, like NYPD's Mike Struk, was hitting a brick wall. Robert Durst wasn't cooperating and the evidence was thin to say the least.                                       

Mike Struk: There was never any conclusive evidence as to where a crime had been committed. Mrs. Durst's body has never been found. To think that we could have sustained a conviction in the trial was not there.

Robert Durst, the husband of the missing woman, shy by nature, became even more reclusive. He stopped returning calls and the declined the invitations of old friends to get together.

It's hard to say where he even was for most of the '80s, according to writer Robert Draper.                                       

Robert Draper: From 1982 until the 1992, he bounced around America. Didn't altogether leave Manhattan, but frequently went from one place to the next. Spent a lot of time in Los Angeles with friends of his, but also in New Orleans and elsewhere.                        

Durst became estranged from his family in 1992 after his retiring father snubbed him by passing on control of the family business to his younger brother. Durst became a wealthy drifter, American tumbleweed touching down here and there.                            

Robert Draper: Began to take-up most of all in California where he had a very close friend that he knew back from his days at U.C.L.A. This was a writer named Susan Berman.               

Susan Berman--journalist, publicist, larger-than-life character--was by most accounts a woman who could walk in a room and hold it spellbound with her stories about growing up a mob princess in the bad old days of Las Vegas where her father was a tough-as-nails casino manager. She learned to play gin at 4 with the gangsters baby-sitting her.                                       

Writer Steve Silverman met Berman in New York and remembered a woman with an edge, a knack for getting under people's skin.                                  

Steve Silverman: I have never known anyone murdered but, of everyone I’ve ever met, if anyone I knew was going to be murdered, it was Susan.

Berman was a writer foundering in L.A. Her memoir of life as a mob little darling had fizzled. So had the rejected screenplays.                                   

Looking back, her best days had been at Bob Durst's side at the disco scene in New York in the '70s.

Durst's young wife Kathleen took to her, too.                                       

Eleanor Schwank: Kathy liked Susan Berman a great deal.

When Kathleen went missing in January 1982, Susan the live wire, manic, writer friend stood by Robert Durst, as his wife's college friend recalled.                                       

Eleanor Schwank: Susan Berman being a very, very close friend to Bob, sister and brother relationship. She was, had undying loyalty to him. She represented him and did all of the public relations when Kathy disappeared.                                       

The friends of the vanished wife have long speculated that Susan Berman--Robert Durst's buddy and confidante--might know the whole story about what had happened to Kathleen.                                       

Robert Draper: Bobby Durst had come to confide in Susan about how their marriage de-evolved and ultimately where Kathy went and what became of her.                

What Susan Berman did or did not know about Kathleen Durst's disappearance became an issue quite unexpectedly in the late '90s. A young detective had became interested in the Durst case, by then a very cold file. The district attorney gave the detective a green light to look at the case with a fresh eye. Investigators planned to talk to Susan Berman.

But they didn't get there in time. Just before Christmas 2000, Susan Berman opened her Los Angeles apartment door to someone who police believe she knew. That person followed her to the bedroom and fired a small-caliber bullet into the base of her skull.

It was the signature of a professional hit. Was it the mob's revenge for peddling indiscreet stories?                                       

Or was it possibly about keeping her from talking to the detectives re-investigating Durst?

Robert Draper: The immediate and logical conclusion that people formed was that Bobby Durst has done it again, that Durst is responsible for another murder.                                       

Julie Smith: She just wasn't the kind of person that you could imagine her just getting shot.

Julie Smith, a mystery writer by trade, had a hard time coming to terms with her close friend's murder. It was a plotline that didn't make sense.

Julie Smith: Susan had fears, she had phobias, she had illnesses -- there was always the possibility that she could commit suicide. There were so many ways that Susan could've died. Except the way that she did. 

And Berman's cousin and confidant Denny Marcus, for one, rejects the idea of a mob hit.

Denny Marcus: This isn't the kind of a person that gets shot. Because I’m from the world where bad guys get shot. She wasn't a bad guy. So who would shoot her?

And police investigators seemed to agree. The harder they looked at the mob-hit theory, the more they ruled it out. Berman's memoirs hadn't been tell-alls so much as rambling musings about her father and innocence lost.

And yet, there had been that haunting thing Berman had said to a few of her friends just days before her death, a prediction that she was about to "blow the top off things." What did she mean?

Bobby, the lifetime friend, was a no-show at her funeral.

Durst said at the time he had his own personal baggage and didn't want to divert attention from the family's grieving for Susan.

Denny Marcus: She loved him. And when she spoke of him it was always so endearingly. And that he was such a dear friend. And he had helped her.

He helped her in financial ways, it turned out.

It's known that in the month just before her murder, Robert Durst had mailed Susan Berman two checks totaling $50,000. Was that hush money? Perhaps a blackmail pay-off?

Julie Smith: I think there will naturally be speculation about it but if I were Bobby Durst and if Susan did know something, I’d sure give her some money.

But, Susan's cousin thinks the two fat checks were just Durst's way of helping a friend of 35-years who was down on her luck.

Denny Marcus: I think there was a couple of occasions where she literally, you know, just said to him, I don't know what I’m gonna do. And he was generous. And it wasn't a loan or anything, he just, you know, gave her a few dollars. And she was devastated to take it. She was embarrassed. But she knew she needed it. She needed it to live.

And the mystery-writer friend thinks that the part of Berman that fancied herself a mob princess would never have ratted out Bobby Durst.

Julie Smith: I don’t think so. Not in a million years. She had that mob loyalty thing -- deeply deeply ingrained in her -- and I really don't think there is any chance she would have.

Whatever explains Susan Berman's demise, her cousin knows it came too soon.

Denny Marcus: We don’t have the truth. I looked into her casket hoping I cud like look at her and just kind of see.

Denny Marcus: But I didn't see anybody at rest. I saw somebody that was totally not finished. She wasn't done. It wasn't her time.                                       

When the friends and family of Kathleen, Durst's missing wife, learned of the Susan Berman murder they of course speculated about Robert and some thought the worst.

Eleanor Schwank: I think that Bob Durst did it, but I have no way of proving that.

By the end of the 1990's, Durst was then in his mid 50's, had all but vanished from the city with the skyscraper canyons where his family had created such great wealth.

Robert Draper: Bobby Durst had already checked out of New York, had checked out of America for the most part. And had found himself taking up residency in Galveston, Texas.                                       

Bobby Durst, the sad, odd figure people saw down by the seawall on some humid nights, tottering on high heels and wearing a dress.

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