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Robert Durst told a cable TV audience that he lied about his whereabouts to the New York City Police Department when he filed a missing person’s report back in 1982, four days after his first wife Kathie Durst disappeared. Just as stunning was his admission that “I am complicit in Kathie’s not being here.”
The revelations are revealed in the second episode of the HBO documentary The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst about the wealthy son of a Manhattan real estate magnate.
Another startling admission by Durst in the film is that he hit and slapped his wife on more than one occasion, including on the night of her disappearance.
“I was the dominant one in the relationship,” Durst explains in the six-part series that began airing in early February. “I was making all of the decisions, all the shots, as (Kathie) would say. She went along with that for a while and then she just got tired of it. She said she wanted her independence and didn’t want me controlling her all the time.”
“I don’t remember the first time I slapped her or hit her,” Durst continues. “By 1981, our life was half arguments, fighting, slapping, pushing, wrestling. It deteriorated from there on. It never got better. It got worse and worse.”
His words are eerie, considering that by early 1982, things appeared far worse for Kathie Durst when she disappeared, never to be seen again. A possible legal problem for Durst is that he seemingly and unwittingly provided a motive for detectives still investigating the disappearance of Kathie Durst.
The image portrayed by the HBO series is a sympathetic Durst. But are viewers buying it? If nothing else, it’s providing new details and possible evidence for police.
A sticking point with the slant of the series is that Durst approached filmmakers himself about doing a documentary on his life in exchange for exclusive interviews with him, a man also suspected of killing his best friend Susan Berman and the admitted killer of Durst’s elderly neighbor Morris Black. Durst claimed self defense in Black's death, after which Durst chopped up Black's remains and dumped them into Galveston Bay. The jury bought the defense and Durst was acquitted.
The question that begs asking is did Durst bankroll the documentary? At the time of the filmmakers’ interviews with Durst and others for the series, HBO had not yet picked it up to air. In the meantime, the filmmakers traveled around the country interviewing people for the documentary. Did Durst cover those costs in exchange for a sympathetic portrayal of him, a man at the center of three murder cases?
Dick DeGuerin, Durst’s attorney, noted in the documentary that Durst really is “a sympathetic” character, saying, “He had some rough times. You talk about poor little rich boy, one thing that was very telling was when Bob said, ‘All my life I’ve had more money than I could spend, and it didn’t make me happy.’”
He hardly comes across as sympathetic, especially when going into detail about the Sunday night his wife disappeared. “She said she was going to a party and asked me to come,” Durst says in the film. The two argued, and Kathie Durst left for the party. When she returned, Durst says, they argued again because she wanted to drive to Manhattan, to their apartment, to spend the night. “That was a pushing and shoving argument,” Durst admits—details omitted when he filed the police report.
By Thursday of the week Kathie disappeared, Durst went to NYPD’s 20th precinct to report his wife as missing. “I didn’t want to do it—the idea of talking about it and trying to convince them,” he says.
And that’s when he lied to police. Durst in his missing person's report told the NYPD that after he had dropped off his wife at the train station, he went to a neighbor’s house for a drink. “I told that to the police,” he says about the falsehood in the film. “I was hoping it would make everything go away.” A detective, he says, wanted to know what he had done that night, so he invented visiting his neighbor. “I thought that would get them to leave me alone and accept the missing person like that,” he says.
The lie also provided an alibi for Durst. He lied again, he says, when he told police he had stopped at a pay phone on the way home from walking his dog that night to call Kathie at their apartment. “I told them I called her from a pay phone, she answered the phone, that puts her in the city, and I thought they’d leave me alone then,” he says.
Lucky for Durst at the time, police never followed up to see if the alibi was true.
Perhaps Durst believes that the statute of limitations for a missing person’s case has expired and he now feels free all these years later to speak candidly about what went down that night. The problem with that premise, however, is that there is no statute of limitation for homicide.
As police contemplate these latest revelations, compliments of Robert Durst, the Kathie Durst investigation, case number 1524, remains very much open.
For me, I can’t wait for the third episode of The Jinx to see what other nuggets of valuable information are revealed that might help solve not one, but two murders. Coming up in episode 3 are details about Durst’s lifelong friendship with and the murder of Susan Berman, fatally shot in the back of the head at her home on Christmas Eve 2000. The Berman case also remains unsolved—at least for the time being.
