Free A Deadly Secret: The Story of Robert Durst by Matt Birkbeck Page A

She said Bobby had falsified his income tax statements and she was going to use this to get her settlement.”
    “What settlement?”
    “Her divorce settlement. She hired an attorney and was planning to file for divorce.”
    “You’re telling me that your sister was filing for a divorce?”
    “Yeah, she gave me a folder and told me to send it with Purolator Courier. It went to her first lawyer, but nothing came of it. Kathie said the lawyer was bought off by Bobby, so she hired another attorney.”
    “Who was the first attorney?”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “Who was the second attorney?”
    “Her name is Dale Ragus.”
    “When did your sister serve Bobby with papers?”
    “She didn’t,” said Jim. “She was planning to, but never did. She should have. That guy has some problems.”
    “What kind of problems?”
    “Aside from the violence? He’s loaded, right? Has more money than God, yet he has this thing for shoplifting. He just takes stuff. Remember that last transit strike? Kathie told me Bobby would go down to the lobby of their building and take the tenants’ bicycles. He’d just take them downtown to work and leave them there. I think it’s all that pot he smokes.”
    “How much?”
    “At least several joints a day. He’s addicted to the stuff.”
    —
    That same morning, some thirty miles to the northeast of Manhattan in Fairfield County, Connecticut, Eleanor Schwank was desperately trying to get her two children through breakfast and off to school when she received a call from Gilberte Najamy, who was beside herself.
    “Did you see the paper? Did you see the paper?” screamed Gilberte.
    “No,” said Eleanor.
    “Go get the
Daily News
! She’s on the front page! Bobby is offering a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward!”
    “What? Who’s in the paper?”
    “It’s Kathie, it’s Kathie!”
    Eleanor asked Gilberte to read her the story.
    “It says that Bobby went to the police on Friday and that she was last seen in Manhattan on Monday, February first. An elevator guy saw her after she called in sick to her school.”
    “Where, what elevator guy saw her?”
    “Riverside Drive, the penthouse. He took her up.”
    “And Bobby went to the police? Where?”
    “The Twentieth Precinct, Detective Michael Struk is investigating. They’re saying it’s a missing-persons case. It says Bobby’s offering a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward to find her!”
    “No, no, no!” said Eleanor, who then hung up the phone, ran out of her house with her two children, dropped them off at school, then stopped by a grocery store for copies of the
News
and
Post
. She raced home and called Gilberte.
    Eleanor, like Gilberte, had met Kathie Durst while studying nursing at Western Connecticut State College in Danbury. Eleanor was ten years older than her friends and married, with two small children. Over the past week Eleanor, Gilberte, and two other friends, Kathy Traystman and Ellen Strauss, had spoken every day on the phone, hoping for some news of Kathie.
    Now Eleanor held the papers out in front of her.
    “How did they get these photos of Kathie?”
    “I got them,” said Gilberte, who told Eleanor she had traveled into Manhattan on Monday with pictures of Kathie and visited the
News
and the
Post
, hoping they might publish her photograph somewhere in the paper.
    Gilberte said she had no idea Kathie’s smiling face would be on page one.
    Eleanor was equally surprised, not that the photos were on page one but that Gilberte had gone into New York the day before without telling her.
    Gilberte had other secrets about her friend Kathie Durst; some she knew she could never reveal to Eleanor, others she was ready to disclose.
    “Eleanor, I went to the house.”
    “What house?”
    “South Salem. I broke in Sunday night. I threw a rock through the side door, broke the window, and let myself in.”
    “No, you didn’t do that. Please don’t tell me you did that.”
    Gilberte described, in detail, how she had