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.
And what did they find?
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.
Did you meet Susan Berman at UCLA?
Yes, my very first summer there I met Susan.
We became best friends right away.
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.
Who do you think that might have been?
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.
Tell me about the last time you saw her.
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.
When did Susan Berman first become a part of your life?
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.
What was she saying about her situation?
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.
But, Bob reached out to you, right?
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.
What did he say?
"My God, isn't this awful?"
Did he ask about the investigation into Susan's murder?
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.
When was the first contact that you had with Bob after Susan's murder?
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.
After Susan's death, did Bob ever give you money?
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."
In the months after that
did you see Bob again?
On his next trip around,
Bob said he wanted to have dinner.
And, did you have that dinner?
We did not.
We did not have that dinner.
Why didn't that happen?
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?