Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (16 page)

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At the second trial, his brother-in-law testified against him, reveal-ing how Crafts had bragged that divers searching the Housatonic

River would never find Helle’s body because ‘‘it’s gone.’’ He was

equally unconcerned when police tracked down the wood chipper.

He had seen to it that no one could ever prove his wife was even dead,

much less that he murdered her—or so he thought.

The defense conceded nothing the second time around, but asked

that the jury be given the option of manslaughter in addition to

murder, arguing that even if Crafts did kill his wife, there was no

convincing evidence that the crime was planned.

The jury rejected that argument, convicting Crafts of first-degree

murder. In early 1990 he was sentenced to fifty years in prison. He

could, however, be released after as little as twenty years.

Q

Some eraser killers are willing to do anything to get away with

murder, including eliminating those who threaten to bring them to

justice.

When Nashville attorney Perry March was finally arrested for

killing his wife, Janet, he hired a fellow inmate to kill his wife’s

parents, believing that without their efforts to bring him to justice,

the case against him would fall apart. His in-laws, Lawrence and

Carolyn Levine, had loved March as they would their own son,

paying his way through prestigious Vanderbilt law school and hiring

him to work in Lawrence’s own practice. But he paid them back by

stealing from the firm, murdering their daughter, refusing to let them

see their grandchildren after the murder, and trying to kill them on

several occasions as well.

Through his legal skills and sheer chutzpah, March had managed

to elude justice for a decade, eventually moving to Mexico, where he

believed he was beyond the arm of the law. He was so confident that

he would never be held accountable that a year after the murder he

penned a manuscript for a ghoulish police-procedural novel called

@murder.com, trumpeting his knowledge of forensics and other

investigatory techniques.

At the time police arrested March and extradited him back to

the United States in 2005, the case against him was not appreciably

stronger than it had been in 1996, when March claimed that his wife

left on an impromptu solo vacation and never returned—offering as

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proof a twenty-three-item to-do list of tasks he said his wife had typed

up and forced him to sign promising to complete before she returned,

including tasks as routine as changing light bulbs and balancing their

checkbook. He may very well have been able to beat the system at

trial, but his narcissistic need to stack the deck and bend the world to

his will gave the state of Tennessee the smoking gun it needed to put

him away.

March was so Machiavellian that he had enlisted his own father

after the murder to help him dispose of his wife’s body and to

coordinate the logistics with the hit man he hired to kill the Levines.

But the second murder plot was foiled when the would-be assassin got

cold feet, contacted authorities, and agreed to record conversations

with March and his father. Janet’s body was never found, but based in

part on his father’s own statements against him, he was convicted in

2006 of murder and conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced

to fifty-six years in prison.

Q

Probably no one has gone to greater lengths to cover up the

murder of a spouse, and been more successful at eluding justice,

than Robert Durst. The heir to a billion-dollar Manhattan real estate

fortune, Durst is suspected of three separate killings over a quarter

century, all stemming from the mysterious disappearance of his wife

Kathleen in 1982. He has been charged with only one of the murders,

a case that ended in acquittal even after Durst took the stand and

admitted killing and dismembering his victim and submerging the

body parts in Galveston Bay.

Kathie Durst, twenty-nine, was just three months away from

graduating from New York’s Albert Einstein School of Medicine

when she vanished after spending a tumultuous weekend with her

husband in a cottage they owned in Westchester County outside New

York City. At the end of the weekend, Durst claimed he stayed on

in Westchester and put his wife on a commuter train back to their

Manhattan apartment, as she had classes to attend in the city the

following morning.

They had first met when Kathie, then a nineteen-year-old tenant

in a building his family owned, came to his office to pay her rent.

Durst swept her off her feet, jetting her around the world and taking

her to star-studded events. On their second date he asked her to move

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in with him, and two years later they tied the knot. It seemed like a

fairy tale, but it was too good to be true. Durst had a dark side, an

anger that perhaps stemmed from witnessing his mother jump to her

death from the roof of their home when he was seven years old.

The marriage turned abusive when Kathie began pursuing a career.

Durst had millions of dollars at his fingertips, but he wouldn’t pay for

his wife’s medical school tuition. He cheated on her and forced her

to get an abortion. Once while visiting her mother, Durst grabbed

Kathie by the hair and yanked her off the couch when he wanted

to leave and she didn’t. A few weeks before she disappeared, she

was treated in the ER for contusions to her head and face. She told

several of her friends that she feared for her life and wanted out of

the marriage.

‘‘If something happens to me, check it out; I’m afraid of what

Bobby will do,’’ Kathie said in her last conversation with girlfriend

Gilberte Najamy on the same day that Durst claimed he last saw her.

It wasn’t the first time Kathie had made such an ominous statement

to her friends, but it would be the last. She had gone alone to a

party Najamy was throwing that Sunday, but left abruptly to return

to her husband at the Westchester house after he angrily called and

demanded she come home.

Kathie never showed up at school that Monday morning, and no

one ever saw her again. But someone claiming to be her called the

dean’s office at Albert Einstein College and said she was sick and would

not be coming in that day (a strange thing to do because students did

not report absences to the dean’s office). Police believe Kathie never

lived to see Monday, that Durst killed her that Sunday and somehow

disposed of her body. That call, however, was tantamount to an alibi

for Durst because it made it seem that Kathie had made it back to the

city alive after her weekend with Robert.

Jeanine Pirro, former Westchester County district attorney, who

believed Durst killed his wife and who reopened the cold case

eighteen years after Kathie’s disappearance, suspected that the person

who made that call was actually Susan Berman, a college friend of

Durst’s who acted as his spokesperson after Kathy’s disappearance.

The two were so close that Berman, a writer, dedicated some of her

books to Durst, and he gave her away at her wedding. One of the

bonds Berman and Durst shared was that both of their mothers had

committed suicide. At one point, she had even considered asking

Durst to father the child she so desperately wanted.

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When Pirro reopened the investigation into Kathie’s murder,

investigators from the district attorney’s office planned to interview

Berman, but they never got a chance. On Christmas Eve 2000, she

was found dead in her Los Angeles home, shot once execution style

in the back of the head. There was no sign of struggle or forced entry.

In fact, both the front and back doors were found unlocked—a

strange fact, considering that Berman was notorious for her paranoia

about security, always keeping her doors locked— leading police to

conclude that she must have known and trusted her killer very well

to have let him in.

Police believe Durst killed Berman to eliminate the one witness

who could potentially do him harm. Shortly before she died, Durst

sent Berman two checks totaling $50,000, leading authorities to

wonder if he had been attempting to buy her silence.

Five days before she was killed, Berman told a close friend, ‘‘I have

information that is going to blow the top off things.’’ After Susan’s

death, one of her friends told
New York
magazine that Berman had

made the ‘‘false alibi’’ call but believed Durst was innocent. Police

say they have documentation proving that Durst was in Los Angeles

at the time of Berman’s killing, but he has never been charged with

that murder either.

Q

After Pirro reopened the investigation into Kathie Durst’s disap-pearance and again after the murder of Susan Berman, Robert Durst

went on the lam, crisscrossing the country using a series of stolen

identities, both male and female. He eventually ended up at a seedy

Texas boardinghouse, where he dressed in drag and posed as a mute

woman who communicated only in writing and paid her rent in

unsigned money orders.

There in 2001 at the age of sixty, Durst killed a seventy-one-year-old

neighbor named Morris Black. He claimed Black was shot in the face

accidentally when he found Black in his room and they struggled

over a gun. Prosecutors believe he planned to kill Black, who looked

somewhat like Durst, in order to assume his identity.

One fact is unassailable. Robert Durst knows how to get rid of a

body. By his own admission he dismembered Morris Black with a

bow saw and paring knife, placed the body parts in plastic garbage

bags, and dumped them in Galveston Bay. He believed that the tide

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would take the remains out to sea, but instead it caused them to wash

up near the shore— all except for the head, which Durst disposed

of somewhere else because he feared it was most identifiable. Hack

marks indicated that he also tried unsuccessfully to cut off Black’s

fingertips, presumably to prevent fingerprint identification should

the remains be discovered.

A few days after the body was identified, Durst was arrested when

he was pulled over in a traffic stop and the patrolman noticed a bow

saw on the floor of the car. The license number on the car had been

tied to the mysterious woman who had lived down the hall from

Black and in whose room police found a blood trail that connected

to Black’s room.

Facing ninety-nine years in prison if convicted of Black’s murder,

Durst jumped his $300,000 bail and once again went on the lam,

posing as his murdered neighbor, shaving his head and eyebrows to

look even more like Morris Black. He was apparently hoping to stay

hidden for a good long time. While at large he had his second wife

attempt to withdraw $1.8 million from one of his accounts, only to

discover that authorities had frozen it. (Kathie had not been declared

legally dead, but Durst had legally divorced her in 1990 claiming

‘‘abandonment,’’ and remarried in 2000. This was yet another shock

to Kathie’s friends and family, none of whom knew Robert had ever

remarried until after he was arrested for the Black murder.)

He was caught not by crack detectives but by supermarket security

guards in Pennsylvania for shoplifting a sandwich, even though he

was found to have $37,000 in the trunk of the car he had rented under

Black’s name. Also inside the car were two guns and a notebook that

contained a list of aliases Durst was using, and the workplace address

of Kathie’s friend Gilberte Najamy, who had lobbied tirelessly for

Durst to be prosecuted for his wife’s murder. Was she next on his hit

list?

Q

After failing to win motions seeking to suppress the saw found

in his car, and a paring knife and other bloody evidence found in

his rooming house trash, Durst admitted that he killed Black, but

claimed he did so only in self-defense.

In his opening statement, Durst’s lawyer said that his client suffered

from Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism that he claimed

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dulled Durst’s emotions so much that he could not become angry

enough to commit murder. The syndrome also, conveniently, caused

him to go into a fugue state after the killing and remember nothing

about his attempts to conceal Morris Black’s body, the lawyer said.

But the defense never put on the psychiatric expert hired to back

up that assertion. Instead, Durst took the stand, testifying that he got

rid of Black’s body in a panic because he feared no one would believe

the killing was an accident.

Security camera footage of Durst calmly paying Black’s rent a few

hours after the murder so that no one would know he was missing,

however, belies his assertion that he was in a panicked or dissociative

state. A witness also identified Durst as a man who asked her one day

shortly before the killing whether the place he later dumped the body

parts was a good place for night fishing, which seemed to indicate

that he had scouted out a dumping spot in advance and thus had

premeditated the crime.

Astonishingly, in his closing argument, one of Durst’s defense

lawyers blamed Black’s death on the Westchester DA’s ‘‘hounding’’

of his client for his wife’s murder, insisting that if ‘‘Ms. Pirro had

kept her mouth shut, none of this would have happened.’’

That statement sounded eerily like words Durst himself wrote in

the notebook police found when they apprehended him six weeks

after jumping bail, in which he seemed to blame the whole tragic

course of his life on his dead wife, railing about ‘‘what Kathy did

to me.’’ He couldn’t even bother to spell her name the way Kathie

preferred it spelled.

Durst eluded justice one more time. In a verdict that seemed to

stun even the defendant, who stood with his mouth agape, the Texas

jury acquitted Durst, concluding there was not enough evidence to

prove that he intentionally murdered Morris Black. Local authorities

found a way to keep him in custody a while longer by charging

him with tampering with evidence—for hiding and dismembering

Morris’s dead body—and bond jumping.

While Durst was in custody on those charges, one of the trial jurors

actually visited Durst several times and even referred him to a realtor

so that he could find a new place to live in Galveston. That raised

a suspicion in the minds of some fellow jurors as well as the trial

judge that Durst may have paid off the juror. An investigation was

launched, and some of the visits between the two were tape-recorded

by sheriff’s deputies, but no evidence of jury tampering was found.

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