A Deadly Secret: The Bizarre and Chilling Story of Robert Durst
By Matt Birkbeck

The crime:

Robert Durst was heir to a New York City real estate fortune whose wife Kathleen disappeared in 1982. For years there were suspicions that Durst had murdered her, and as the investigation ramped up Durst went into hiding. In 2000 a long-time friend of Durst’s, Susan Berman, was found murdered in Los Angeles. In 2003, while staying in Galveston, Texas, Durst killed a man named Morris Black, chopped Black’s body up, and threw the remains (minus Black’s head) into the bay. Claiming self-defence at trial, Durst was found not guilty of murder. But in 2021 he was found guilty of killing Berman. Durst died in 2022.

The book:

If you know the name Robert Durst it’s probably because you were either following the tabloids closely back in the early 2000s or you saw the six-part HBO documentary on him by Andrew Jarecki called The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Dust. The Jinx aired in 2015, making it one of a trio of docuseries that all came out around the same time, signaling an explosion of interest in true crime – the others being Making a Murderer (also 2015) and the podcast Serial (which began in 2014).

The first thing to say about A Deadly Secret then is that it was first published in 2002, with later updates in the form of very brief notes that take us up to the point of Durst’s arrest for the murder of Berman (which followed immediately upon the airing of the final episode of The Jinx). So while it does a good job covering the initial investigations into the disappearance of Durst’s first wife, it only skims over the later parts of the story, which are also the ones that you’re probably more familiar with. While Durst died in 2022, Jarecki made a sequel, The Jinx Part 2 that came out in 2024 and brought the story even more up to date. For true crime addicts the Durst saga was the gift that just kept on giving.

I think everyone at the time realized the story was gold. Multiple murders. An unsolved mystery. And at the heart of it a superrich eccentric. And because it was such a great story, everyone involved in its telling wanted a piece of it, to claim some degree of ownership over it. This was a criticism leveled at Jarecki, whose The Jinx Part 2 was seen as being a little too self-congratulatory about having bagged Durst in the first docuseries. But it was the same with Jeanine Pirro, the New York DA who saw the case as her meal ticket for greater things. In addition to forbidding anyone in New York from talking to the media, Pirro would jet about the country (Texas, California), insinuating herself into all the different Durst investigations even when her presence was neither welcome nor necessary. Other jurisdictions came to dislike her, feeling she was just playing to the camera and “talked too much.” They hadn’t seen anything yet.

Another figure who tried to take ownership of the story was a friend of Kathleen’s named Gilberte Najamy. She would play the media with the same skill as Pirro, and it wouldn’t take long before the two would be working together. Both Pirro and Najamy come off looking pretty bad in Birkbeck’s book, and I don’t think he was being unfair to either.

But the figure who did the most damage to Durst’s case by talking too much was Durst himself. This was his undoing at the end of The Jinx, when a hot mic caught him confessing that he “killed them all.” But that’s a moment foreshadowed here after Durst is caught shoplifting a chicken-salad sandwich from a Wegman’s when he had $500 in his pocket. Sitting in the back of the police cruiser taking him to his booking he was overheard muttering to himself about how stupid he’d been.

His biggest mistake, however, wasn’t the hot mic moment so much as his agreeing to sit down and be interviewed for The Jinx in the first place. This surprised Birkbeck, as up until then Durst hadn’t talked to anyone. But as Shakespeare knew, people are no good at keeping secrets. Murder, in particular, will out. This is the logic behind Hamlet’s staging of The Mousetrap:

I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have, by the very cunning of the scene,
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.

Dostoyevsky and Freud both said something similar. The way people give themselves away, even if through a process of subconscious compulsion, has long been recognized.

As long as you keep in mind that this was a very early take on the story and so leaves a lot out, I think people with an interest in the Durst case will find it worthwhile. It offers a fuller perspective than you get in The Jinx, especially from the point of view of some of the police investigators. But I have to confess that I started off really digging my heels in against the way Birkbeck was presenting things. What I mean is that he goes for a novelistic style that often had me shaking my head at how he could possibly be recounting events in such detail. Here, for example, is how things kick off:

It was late November 1999, and a misty haze enveloped the northern New York City suburbs, soaking the landscape. [New York State Police investigator Joe] Becerra, who ran his usual four miles on the muddy trails, never once had to call out to his dogs to keep up, and worked up a good sweat in the unusually warm, late-fall-morning air. Becerra was drenched, beads of sweat and rain falling from his brow. At the end of the run, which took him in a full circle back to his cottage, he stood bent over, breathing heavily, his palms down on his knees.

The dogs were right with him, their paws, lower legs, and underbellies muddied. They barked and reached up to Becerra on their hind legs.

Becerra pushed them off, then wiped the mud from his sweatpants.

“C’mon, you guys. You’re filthy,” he said, still taking deep breaths.

The dogs still continued to bark.

“Okay, I know,” he said.

Is this exactly what Becerra said? An approximation? Did he stand bent over, hands on knees? Did he wipe mud from his sweatpants? This is very cinematic, and made me think of the opening of The Silence of the Lambs. But it seemed too perfectly visualised to be an exact recollection.

Then a few pages later we have this scene:

Becerra thought for a moment, then looked over to Luttman, who was still reading his paper. . . . Becerra walked over to Luttman’s desk.

“Henry, did you ever hear of a woman named Kathie Durst?”

Luttman quickly took his eyes off the paper.

Really? And later, as part of the same episode: “Luttman folded his newspaper, took a last sip of coffee, and stood up.” How does Birkbeck know that’s what Luttman did on that particular day? How would Luttman have remembered? It’s impossible to recreate moments like these at this level of detail. It does make for an easy read, but these are dramatic reconstructions and can’t be taken as entirely factual.

As a final point relating to when this book was written, there’s a lot of time spent considering whether or not a case could have brought against Durst either for the murder of his wife or Susan Berman. Because we know he was later convicted of killing Berman and almost certainly at least had a hand in killing his wife, it’s easy to be critical of the police and prosecutors in this regard. But what were the prosecutors in particular supposed to do? They might have got to Berman quicker, but it’s unlikely she was going to talk. And if Durst was acquitted in the murder of Morris Black in Texas, a case where he was caught dead to rights, what were the chances of getting convictions in New York or L.A., where they had far less evidence? In fact, as the one detective puts it, they had “nothing.” I’m usually all for criticizing the police, but in this case it doesn’t seem fair. Unless you want to call out the two-tier justice system that makes it so hard to convict rich clients like Durst of anything in the first place.

Noted in passing:

The New Jersey Pine Barrens are huge: just over a million acres of forest and wetlands. I’d recently read a magazine piece on the Jersey Devil, a resident evil spirit, so I should have been more up on it, but I was still surprised at how a big chunk of Jersey the Barrens constitutes. For various reasons – ease of digging, a reputation as a favourite place for mobsters to hide bodies, the phone record of a call from the area – it’s thought that Durst might have disposed of Kathleen’s body there, and there were some preliminary efforts made to search parts of it. Which would have been a tall task indeed if we’re talking about having to cover the entire Barrens. But I wonder if it would have been possible to narrow things down quite a bit. Durst wasn’t a big guy, so you’d figure a burial site would have to be somewhere near a road. And on the evidence of what he did with Morris Black’s remains, Durst was no genius at getting rid of bodies.

Takeaways:

Guilty or innocent, it doesn’t pay to talk to anyone about possible crimes you’re being investigated for. As one of the detectives working Durst’s case remarked before The Jinx interview, the only way of pinning anything on him would be “if Bobby Durst himself would tell the world what happened to his long-lost wife.” That seemed a long-shot at the time. But maintaining silence requires a lot of discipline. Most people want to tell their story, in their own words. Robert Durst certainly did. And you can see where it got him.

True Crime Files

The Best American Crime Reporting 2008
Ed. by Jonathan Kellerman

The crimes:

“The Story of a Snitch” by Jeremy Kahn: snitches get stitches, or in Baltimore they’re shot multiple times and left for dead.

“A Season in Hell” by Dean LaTourrette: an American finds himself on the wrong side of the criminal justice system in Nicaragua.

“I’m with the Steelers” by Justin Heckert: claiming to be a member of the Steelers (an NFL team) gives a boost to a romance scammer living in Pittsburgh.

“The House Across the Way” by Calvin Trillin: a fight between neighbours on a New Brunswick island gets nasty.

“The Caged Life” by Alan Prendergast: Tommy Silverstein spends a very long time in isolation.

“Badges of Dishonor” by Pamela Colloff: the case of a pair of border guards who shoot an illegal and then try to cover it up becomes a political football.

“Dangerous Minds” by Malcolm Gladwell: the “science” of criminal profiling may only be a parlour trick.

“Dean of Death Row” by Tad Friend: a profile of Vernell Crittendon, who was in charge of executions at San Quentin for thirty years.

“The Tainted Kidney” by Charles Graeber: serial killer Charles Cullen (whose crimes were covered by Graeber in more depths in The Good Nurse) wants to donate a kidney. This turns out to be more difficult than it would be in, say, China.

“The Ploy” by Mark Bowden: army interrogators track down an al-Qaeda leader in Iraq by interviewing people connected to him.

“Day of the Dead” by D. T. Max: author Malcolm Lowry died after drinking heavily and taking a bunch of barbiturates. His wife may have helped him along.

“Just a Random Female” by Nick Schou: the capture of serial killer Andrew Urdiales.

“The Serial Killer’s Disciple” by James Renner: child murderer Robert Buell is executed, protesting up until the end that he was innocent of one of the murders he’d been implicated in. James Renner suggests Buell’s nephew may have had some responsibility for that one.

“Mercenary” by Tom Junod: the security manager at a nuclear power plant in Michigan imagines a fantasy life as a super-soldier.

“Murder at 19,000 Feet” by Jonathan Green: Tibetans looking to escape China by crossing over the Himalayas are shot by border guards, but the incident is viewed, and filmed, by Western mountaineers.

The book:

I’ve talked before about how I’m a big fan of this series, and how disappointed I was that it was cancelled. That said, I found this to be one of the weaker entries. For starters, there were a few stories I don’t think I would have included, for various reasons. One outlier would be acceptable, but even though true crime is a big tent I wouldn’t have included the Malcolm Lowry story here (which is just speculation), or the stories about the security manager who is a fabulist, the army “gators” at work, or the Chinese border incident. That’s not to say they aren’t good reads – I found “Mercenary” to be particularly intriguing – but I just didn’t think they belonged here.

I also didn’t think any of the stories stood out as being particularly memorable, aside from maybe Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of the science of criminal profiling. I even remembered much of that one from when I first read it in the New Yorker almost twenty years ago. I’m no fan of Gladwell, not even a little bit, so you can take it from me that it’s a piece worth checking out. Though his take really isn’t original. Indeed, it draws on a lot of work that had been done in the field, and various other true crime writers and reporters had been saying similar things. By coincidence, in one of the other pieces collected here, “The Serial Killer’s Disciple,” the police go to the FBI to get some help hunting a killer preying on young girls. I’ll let Renner tell the story:

The FBI commissioned a criminal profile of the perpetrator by Special Agent John Douglas, whose pioneering studies of the habits of serial killers inspire the book The Silence of the Lambs. Krista’s killer should be in his early to late 20s, Douglas said. He is a latent homosexual.

“When employed, he seeks menial or unskilled trades,” wrote Douglas. “While he considers himself a ‘macho man,’ he has deep-rooted feelings of personal inadequacies. Your offender has a maximum of high school education. When he is with children, he feels superior, in control, non-threatened. While your offender may not be from the city where the victim was abducted he certainly has been there many times before (i.e., visiting friends, relatives, employment). He turned towards alcohol and/or drugs to escape from the realities of the crime.”

Even without knowing how things turned out, I would have thought this unhelpful. Who doesn’t feel superior, in control, and non-threatened when among children? In any event, the police arrested Robert Buell only after one of his victims escaped.

At the time, Buell was 42 years old. He had a college degree and was employed by the city of Akron, writing loans for the Planning Department. He was dating an attorney. He had a daughter at Kent State. Those who knew him described a neat, clean, orderly man, almost to the point of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He didn’t exactly fit the FBI’s profile of their child killer.

So that’s the second burn of John Douglas in the book, which you’d think would be two too many for someone with his reputation as a legendary mindhunter. As I’ve said before, there are good reasons why the public has stopped trusting experts.

Though it’s hard to characterize an annual anthology like this as having a particular theme, the fact that they have editors with presumably different interests and points of view does mean that each volume has its own character. In the inaugural collection edited by Nicholas Pileggi I noticed a recurring interest in the theme of bad fathers. In 2007 I found a lot of the stories had to do with a betrayal by individuals in a position of trust. If I had to point to a theme for the 2008 edition I might say it’s community.

Before the advent of the digital age, with its romance scammers and crypto frauds, most crime was local. It matters that the first story here is set in Baltimore, the second takes place in Nicaragua, the third in Pittsburgh, and the fourth on an island just off the coast of New Brunswick. In each of these stories the place plays an active part in the events, as do the later stories dealing with border incidents. But community isn’t just about these sorts of locations. It’s also about places like death row, and the community of prison officials and inmates.

In the early twentieth century there was a literary movement known as Naturalism that saw humanity as basically bound by deterministic laws. One’s fate was a combination of heredity (genetics) and environment. This is something a little different than nature and nurture, the terms most often used in explaining criminality, and the question of whether criminals are born or made. Obviously an emphasis on community puts the focus on the environment, but it’s not an equation that’s being argued for here, or even a strict chain of causation. It’s more that place and community do a lot to define what constitutes criminal behaviour in the first place. Is “snitching” worse than witness intimidation? Is taking a shot at a noisy newcomer who’s wrecking the neighbourhood by running a purported drug house a crime? It depends on the neighbourhood and its community values.

Noted in passing:

Over the years I’ve come back many times to an essay by Tennessee Williams called “The Catastrophe of Success,” which was about the impact the success of The Glass Menagerie had on his life. It seemed to me to be the kind of paradox that isn’t often addressed, either by artists themselves or the people who write about them. The point being that it can actually be harder to follow-up a critical or commercial triumph than to break through in the first place, and that success itself can be a crushing creative burden or otherwise be destructive to the conditions that made the breakthrough possible. As Williams put it:

The sort of life that I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.

Success, however, brought not only the comfort of “an effete way of life” but a sense of “spiritual dislocation.” “Security,” Williams concluded, “is a kind of death.”

For Malcolm Lowry life never became that cozy, but after Under the Volcano there would be no second act. And he might have recognized something in what Williams said. “Success,” Lowry wrote to his mother-in-law, “may be the worst possible thing to happen to any serious author.”

Takeaways:

Crime is defined by a community, and though not always restricted by place it at the very least always has a specific cultural context. From the Histories of Herodotus:

Just suppose that someone proposed to the entirety of mankind that a selection of the very best practices be made from the sum of human custom: each group of people, after carefully sifting through the customs of other peoples, would surely choose its own. Everyone believes their own customs to be by far and away the best. From this, it follows that only a madman would think to jeer at such matters. Indeed, there is a huge amount of corroborating evidence to support the conclusion that this attitude to one’s own native customs is universal. Take, for example, this story from the reign of Darius. He called together some Greeks who were present and asked them how much money they would wish to be paid to devour the corpses of their fathers – to which the Greeks replied that no amount of money would suffice for that. Next, Darius summoned some Indians called Callantians, who do eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of the Greeks (who were able to follow what was being said by means of an interpreter) how much money it would take to buy their consent to the cremation of their dead fathers – at which the Callantians cried out in horror and told him that his words were a desecration of silence. Such, then, is how custom operates; and how right Pindar is, it seems to me, when he declares in his poetry that “Custom is the King of all.”

True Crime Files