Durst Kathleen - He killed them all: Robert Durst and my quest for justice

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Gallery Books

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2015 by Jeanine Pirro

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition November 2015

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Interior design by Renato Stanisic

Jacket design by Lisa Litwack

Jacket photograph Pat Sullivan/AP/Corbis

Author photograph Fox News

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-5011-2500-3

ISBN 978-1-5011-2503-4 (ebook)

To Kathleen Durst and all the women silenced by the men who said they loved them.

~~~

To Cody Cazalas, who stands tall among the men and women in law enforcement, who fight every day to protect victims, and whose moral compass never wavered.

~~~

To Gilberte Najamy, who, for thirty-three years, to her dying day, led the charge to find Kathie.

I hope she has her answers now. RIP Gilberte.

~~~

To my mom, Esther Ferris, who taught me never to remain silent in the face of injustice.

If Ms. Pirro had kept her mouth shut, none of this would have happened.

Michael Ramsey, criminal defense attorney for Robert Durst

As I write this, Robert Alan Durst is rotting in a federal facility. But I dont want him to die.

And, no, I am not relying on his lawyer Dick DeGuerins statements about his clients poor health.

If Dick DeGuerin told me what time it was, Id check my watch; if he told me the sky was blue, I still wouldnt believe him.

All you have to do is look at Robert Durst to see that hes not long for this world. The man is seventy-two years old, but he looks like a thousand. His physical disintegration from when I first laid eyes on him in 2001 in Pennsylvania to 2013 when he filmed the HBO documentary series The Jinx to now is startling. Hes stick thin, weak looking, and shuffling. A strong wind would topple him.

On one side of his shaved head, hes got a shunt to drain out excess brain fluid. The condition is called hydrocephalus. It might kill him. It might not. If the brain fluid doesnt do him in, his esophageal cancer will. For now, Durst is being held in a federal facility, having been transferred to St. Charles Parishs Nelson Coleman Correctional Center to be treated for his illnesses, in Hahnville, Louisiana.

Im praying his brain and cancer treatments work. I want Robert Durst to live long enough to stand trial in Los Angeles and be convicted for the December 2000 murder of his friend Susan Berman in that city. I want him to live long enough to be indicted for and convicted of the murder of his wife, Kathleen, who vanished in 1982. And then I want to dance in my Manolo Blahniks on his grave.

As district attorney of Westchester County, New York, I took a fresh look at Kathleens case in 1999 when new questions about it came to light.

The decision to reopen that seventeen-year-old cold case was like kicking a hornets nest. Sixteen years after that, the hornets are still buzzing, louder than ever, and a lot of people have been stung in the interim.

I kicked that nest because I knew it was hiding a man who killed his wife, a woman who disappeared without a trace. I knew it then, and I know it now. How? Guts and instinct. When youve done enough of these cases, as I have, you just know. Theres a second sight, a dj vu, an overwhelming sense that youve been here before and you know how it ends. The dots are all over the place, but the lines arent yet connected.

But pure guts and instinct arent enough to bring a criminal down. You need evidence, pure and simple. And Robert Durst, for some reason, is expert at getting rid of evidence. Actually, he doesnt deserve that much credit. He was aided by money, power, society, and a culture (including the police) willing to believe that a woman who vanished from the face of the earth probably just fell off. Case closed.

Ive been on a mission since 1999 to prove that Kathleen didnt just fall off or run off, but had been murdered and disposed of by her not-so-loving husband. Not just that. Ive been fighting to expose the ineptitude, ignorance, abuse of power, and, yes, cover-up, that have allowed Durst to live free for more than three decades.

Hes skated for two other murders since then. He was suspected of shooting his best friend Susan Berman in Los Angeles in 2000. Theyd been each others close, close confidants. But when he feared, heard, and knew shed talk to the police about him, he was not about to let that happen. He had to shut her up.

He admitted to killing a neighbor, Morris Black, in Galveston, Texas, in 2001. But the half-wit juryaided and abetted by an out-of-her-depth judge and an odiously brilliant but unscrupulous defense dream teamacquitted him of it. I actually believed that kangaroo courts ended... But, then again, people were starting to question the criminal justice system. O. J. Simpson: acquittal. Michael Jackson: acquittal. Durst testified on the witness stand that he shot and dismembered his neighbor Morris Black. After he was caught, he jumped bail and stayed on the lam for six weeks. To my mind, and the minds of most normal peoplenot to mention an accepted legal inference, which, as a judge, I charged juries for yearshis flight alone showed consciousness of guilt. He killed Black intentionally, and then the entitled dirtbag thought he could just drive away and never look back. Actually, he did!

One of the jurors who let him get away with murder (and wore it as a badge of honor) visited Durst in jail five times while Durst served a year on separate charges of bond jumping and evidence tampering. Why did this man visit Durst so many times? His actions were questionable at best. So much for Texas justice. Isnt Texas where murderers go straight to hanging immediately after arrest?

In a perfect world of equal justice, Robert Durst would be shot in the head and then dismembered with an axe and a bow saw, like Morris Black. (I didnt kill my best friend, Durst told the jury. I did dismember him.) Or hed be shot in the back of his head like Susan Berman, one of his other best friends. With friends like him... Or he would meet whatever heinous fate was inflicted on Kathie.