The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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"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.

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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.