The Mysterious Millionaire

This story has it all, a madman Millionaire, a Mafia Princess, and a string of unsolved murders from coast to coast. In September 2001 a man and his boy are fishing in Galveston Texas. The boy looks in the water and there are bags floating and then he sees a human torso. He yells to his father that there is a body in the water. Police are called to the scene. The head is missing. There are three plastic bags. One contains two arms, one contains a leg, and one contains the torso.

Several clues are found among the grisly remains. There is a receipt from a hardware store where someone had purchased a drop cloth and a cheap bow saw. The was also an eviction notice from one Morris Black, a 71 year old handy man who seems to have vanished without a trace. The notice leads police to an apartment in a seedy part of Galveston. The police get a search warrant and go into the apartment and although the entire apartment had been apparently cleaned up so as not to yield even Morris Black's fingerprints, however they do find the remnants of blood everywhere. Outside the apartment in the garbage can they find a gun and ammunition.

Back inside the apartment a trail of blood leads to an apartment across from Blacks. In that apartment they find a paring knife and a drop cloth and blood in the sink. It is a very grisly scene. So they are certain they have found the crime scene. The apartment is rented to a middle aged woman named Dorothy Siner, one of the landlords oddest tenets. It is actually a man wearing women's clothing and a very cheap wig. She paid her rent several months in advance by money order, which for a fleabag place in Galveston is rather unusual. Claiming to be a deaf mute, Siner only communicates in writing. She was from out of town and the police are trying to find a connection, since there is no record of a Dorothy Siner anywhere in Galveston.

This gruesome mystery hit the Texas coast as hard as a hurricane. So exactly how did a hapless handyman wind up in bags in the ocean and how did the weird lady next door fit into the plot. Detectives pursue a new clue recovered from the scene. An optometrist appointment card leads police to a man named Robert Durst, known to his friends as Bobby. But oddly police cannot find records of anyone named Robert Durst anywhere in or around Galveston. They launch a nationwide search for Robert Durst and Dorothy Siner. They find a woman named Dorothy Siner who was shocked as she had never even been in Texas and didn't even know where Galveston was, and certainly never rented an apartment there.

But they do find a connection between Siner and Durst, one that goes back decades. They discover that Dorthy Siner went to school with Bobby Durst. They conclude that Dorthy Siner and Bobby Durst are one and the same person and for some unknown reason Robert Durst is going around posing as Dorothy Siner. Nine days after Morris Black's remains are found Robert Durst walks into the optometrist's office to pick up his glasses and the police pounce, arresting Durst and charging him with the murder of Morris Black. They set his bond at $300,000 which is high for any crime in Galveston including murder and figure that certainly a transient like Durst would not be able to come up with that kind of money. At this point they think he is just another weird drifter who happened to hack his neighbor up and put him in bags in the Galveston bay.

But things are not as they appear. Mr. Durst is able to get the bond posted the next day and disappears again. Sometime after that they find out who Bobby Durst really is. He is the son of a Billionaire from New York. Born in 1943, Robert Durst grew up in Scarsdale a posh suburb of New York and is the heir to a multimillion dollar fortune of one of Manhattan's wealthiest real estate barons. At the time, the influential and powerful Durst family owned at least 10 New York skyscrapers. Who in a million years would ever think that a multimillionaire, son of a real estate baron would be hanging out in a fleabag $300 a month apartment in Galveston dressed as a woman. After the Galveston police let Durst go free they discover this isn't the first time he has been accused of murder.

In the early 1970's Robert Durst was rising up the ranks in his family's thriving real estate business. He started out as a mid level executive managing buildings and collecting rent. On of his tenets was a pretty young girl named Kathy McCormick. She was blue collar from Long Island, he was wealthy from New York. They were taken by one another, dated for a while, and were subsequently married. She was described as a lot of fun, lovely and beautiful and someone who had a lot of spunk and a delight to be around. At first Bobby and Kathy seemed to be a perfect match. He was 29 and she was 19 when they were first introduced to each other. At this time in their lives there was a lot of Studio 54 and Elaine's and all the latest hot spots around town and they become the "it" couple around town.

There is a posh apartment in Manhattan and weekend home upstate. Kathy was absolutely swept off her feet and it is safe to say seduced by the lifestyle, politics and power of the rich and famous at her disposal. However after a few years, the picture perfect marriage begins to show some cracks. Robert had some peculiar habits. He would bark, yell, and scream. He was always smoking pot which seemed to be in his nature but this is the 70's. There was also some cocaine but pot was his passion. New York is accustomed to eccentric Millionaires and eccentric Millionaires can be prone to bad behavior. It wouldn't be long until Robert Durst would be up to his neck in some very dark and dangerous behavior.

After about 3 or 4 year Robert starts becoming violent with Kathy. First it is pushing which soon escalates to punching. During one Thanksgiving incident she is sitting on the couch and he asks her to get something for him. When she doesn't respond immediately he yanks her off the couch by the hair of her head. Once he had sent her to the hospital and was clearly afraid of him but at the same time she was always one who thought she could handle him herself. Kathy began to lead her own life. She didn't want to just be this rich guy's wife, she wanted to do her own thing. She enrolled in medical school but the more she became independent the less Robert liked it because he liked control and was now losing that control. Kathy went from dissatisfied to downright frightened. She told her best friend that if anything ever happened to her tell the police that it was Robert and not to let him get away with it. Then it happened.

In January 1982, Kathy went to a party by herself. Robert had called her and kept calling her demanding that she return home. At around 7:00 PM she puts on her coat, says goodbye to her friends walks out into the snowy evening and is never seen again. It wasn't until 5 days later that Robert Durst reports his wife missing. Hospitals and missing reports are checked with no success. It's as if she has vanished off the face of the earth. The police then learn that he is throwing out her personal items like her medical books. For all intents and purposes erasing her from his life. All of Kathy's friends believe that Robert has killed her and made her disappear. Although Robert is the prime suspect in his wife's disappearance there is little the authorities can do.

At first Robert speaks to the police about his wife's disappearance but then he lawyers up and has no further contact with them. He may be a murderer and he may be strange but he is not stupid. From that point on Robert Durst communicates only through an old friend named Susan Burman. They had a friendship that went back decades and was incredibly close with Robert, or Bobby as he was called in his younger days and she adored him and thought of him as her brother. She was always supportive of Bobby even after his wife went missing. Susan was a journalist but her biggest claim was being the daughter of a Mafia member Sam Burman. Sam Burman was Bugsy Segal's right hand man. He even did time in prison for Bugsy and to show his appreciation Bugsy gave him the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Susan spent a lot of time at the Flamingo hotel growing up. She knew everyone there and everyone knew her. She was treated like a Princess there and she was a Princess.. A Mafia Princess. Susan had written several books about life in the Mafia and had the kind of loyalty that only a Mafia Princess could have as she lived by the same code. There was nothing she wouldn't do for someone she was loyal to. She may have even helped Bobby Durst get away with murder. One of the weird things that happened was after Kathy disappeared a phone call was made to the Dean of the medical school Kathy was attending and claimed to be Kathy and saying that she wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be in for a while. Most don't believe that a grown woman who was nearing graduation from medical school would call in and say she had a tummy ache.

Most people believe that the person who made that phone call was Susan Burman. But this wasn't the only phone call that the police would look into. Bobby told the police that he was in Connecticut when Kathy disappeared but the police looked into the phone records and found that he had made a collect call to Ship Bottom New Jersey. Ship Bottom was familiar to investigators. It is virtually next door to the notorious body dump site used by the Mafia known as the Pine Barrens. The collect call was to Susan Burman. The police believe that Bobby has killed his wife and brought her body down somewhere around Ship Island New Jersey. But since there is no direct evidence and they still can't find her body there is little they can do and the case just goes away as does Bobby. Nobody know what Bobby Durst is is doing or even where he is at for the next ten years.

Bobby Durst has homes in Connecticut and New York City but he has disappeared for the past ten years. But in the 1990s, after his Father dies he resurfaces and tries to take the reins of the Family empire. But his Family will have none of it and it is clear they are as afraid of him as Kathy was. He is by far the black sheep of the family. He was very upset at his lackluster reception and an upset Bobby is a dangerous Bobby. So poor Bobby would have to do with the $3,000,000 a year his Family paid him to just go away. By this time the Kathy Durst missing person case is all but forgotten. But then, in the summer of 1999, Joe Becerra, a New York City Investigator gets a tip from a convict trying to get a reduced sentence breaths new life to it.

He tells the investigator that he knew of a Kathy Durst who was murdered back in 1982 by her husband and was buried under a shed at a lakeside home in South Salem. Unfortunately, the tip turns out to be bogus but Becerra was intrigued by the case because there are so many unanswered questions. So he takes it on as a pet project to try and find some of those answers. All of Kathy's friends are elated as finally someone is going to give this case the attention it deserved. The police get search warrants to search Bobby's old cottage and re-interview Kathy's old friends. Now they are looking for forensic evidence that is 20 years old. They also re-interview the people at the party where Kathy was last seen. They get new insight into her frame of mind at that time.

Kathy Durst had several drinks that night as well as 2 grams of coke. The host of the party tells Investigators that Kathy had several heated phone conversations with Bobby while she was at the party. According to the party goers the arguments seemed to be over finances. She was asking Bob for a couple of hundred thousand dollars to pay off her collage tuition. Bobby apparently didn't appreciate that as he was very tight with his money. Kathy even found herself having to borrow money from friends from time to time while married to him. While it is clear that Kathy enjoyed the money that came with the Durst name, it is clearer that she wanted out of her marriage with Bobby as the money and the perks just weren't worth it. The arguments between them were escalating right before her disappearance and were aided by the fuel of illicit drugs they were both using. Most of Kathy's friends believe that she came home that night looking for a fight and found one.. One she couldn't handle.

But what really happened that night remained a mystery. Now after 20 years the case was heating up once again. They are going to try to pin not only the disappearance but the murder of Kathy Durst on Bobby. But then the story ran nation wide about the reopening of the Durst case. Bobby Durst of course hears about this and calls down to Galveston Texas and rents a room in an apartment as a deaf mute woman named Dorothy Siner. The only person police haven't interviewed is Susan Burman and she seems ripe for a frank conversation. By this time Susan is out of work and broke. She would talk to her friends about buying a chicken and making it last for two weeks and things like that. So she starts hitting Bobby up for money even more that usual. He sends her $25,000 and then another $25,000. At the same time the police are wanting her to talk to them about the Kathy Durst case and it looked like she was getting ready to talk. She had scheduled interviews with both the New York Times and the NYPD. But alas it was not to be.

Susan told her friends that she had information that was going to blow the top off things. When asked repeatedly what she meant by that she would say no more. Her friends warned her to be careful, whatever she did. For years and years Susan's story had always been the same.. Bobby had nothing to do with Kathy's disappearance. She did in the end however tell one person that Bobby had in fact killed Kathy and when asked how she knew that she said because Bobby had told her. Unfortunately she never got the opportunity to tell her story to the police. On Christmas Eve 2000 a neighbor of Susan's heard her dogs barking and called the LAPD. They found her lifeless body face down in her bedroom with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. All of her friends say there is no way on earth Susan Burman let a stranger into her house that night. Her bedroom was all the way in the back of the house so she had to trust that person. Once again suspicion falls on Bobby Durst as he had the most to gain if she was really going to blow the top off things about Kathy's disappearance.

At first police have no way to connect Durst to the murder. Certainly there was nothing at the scene to connect him. But credit card records did put him in the area. They tracked Bobby from Eureka California to San Francisco where he rented a car and drove to LA the day Susan was killed. Coincidence, maybe or maybe not but Susan and Kathy's friends certainly don't think so. But once again police are foiled as Bobby is certainly not going to sit down with an investigator and have an open and honest conversation. It would take death and destruction in Galveston to get them back on track and a chance at finally nailing Bobby Durst.

In mid October 2001, an Investigators in the Morris Black case are reeling after letting there prime suspect slip through their fingers. Bobby Durst has disappeared once again which is characteristic of him. They search for him in Galveston, New York and have a national APB out for him all to no avail. It is apparent that when he wants to vanish he really does know how to get the job done. The story of the cross dressing millionaire who is a murder suspect hits the front page of newspapers nationwide. With no clear motive for the murder people across the country are beginning to wonder about their next door neighbors. The police finally get a break when a man calls in to report that his brother is renting to a woman who is clearly a man. The renter calls herself Diane Wining but the man thinks he knows his real name. As it turns out it is Bobby Durst and the police roll to the address. While Durst isn't there, they search the place and find a medallion that Susan had given him, red headed wigs, and computer equipment.

It is hard to know if Bobby really felt comfortable in women's clothing or if he was just trying to throw the police off his trail. Incredibly it worked whatever the reason, at least for a while. And no one knows what he was doing while he was gone. Seven weeks go by without a sign of Bobby Durst and it seems as if he may never resurface. Then just after Thanksgiving Investigators catch a break. In Hanover township Pennsylvania a security camera in an upscale Supermarket catches a suspicious looking man wondering around in their store. He goes to the medical supply section and picks up some band aids and takes one out and heads to the bathroom. When he comes out he has the band aid on his face. Then he heads over to the Deli section and picks up a chicken salad sandwich and heads out the door. He is stopped by security guards and they ask for ID. He hands them a driver's license with the name of Morris Black but with his social security number. When they run the social security number for warrants they get a hit. They then realize they have captured the elusive Bobby Durst and he is going to be headed to Galveston to stand trial for the murder of Morris Black.

How ironic it that after all his careful planning and with all his money Bobby Durst gets busted over a chicken salad sandwich because, it is speculated he is to cheap to order out. It seemed the jig was up but this twisted plot would turn out a lot different than anyone expected. When he was arrested Bobby Durst had shaved his head and eyebrows. Investigators begin to realize that this is an attempt to look more like the 71 year old Morris Black. He had rented a car under Morris Black's name which when searched yielded $37,000 in cash, two 38 caliber handguns and a bag of pot. He also had $500 cash in his pocket. Everyone is thinking that finally justice is about to be served and if they couldn't get him for his wife's disappearance or the murder of Susan Burman, surely a conviction for the murder of Morris Black would put a very dangerous man away for a very long time if not for life.

Four months after Morris Black's dismembered body washes up in Galveston Bay, Morris Black is ready to stand trial for his murder. The prosecutor had the chopped up body, all the bloody evidence from the crime scene, and they have the suspect who fled showing consciousness of guilt. The prosecutors think this is going to be a walk in the park. Prosecutors even tell Kathy's brother that this case is a slam dunk as far as the charges sticking. But with the kind of money that Bobby Durst has he can afford the absolute best of defense attorneys and they quickly realize that this may not be quite as easy as they first thought. Still they are extremely confident as are all of Susan and Kathy's friends. But at the last minute the prosecution decides that a little insurance would be in order and since they suspect that Morris black was shot in the back of the head as Susan Burman was and since they don't have a cause of death they should try to find Morris Black's head to prove that he was in fact shot.

So they sent a team of divers into Galveston Bay to locate Morris Black's severed head. A private Investigator is hired by the victims family to help in that mission. While dive teams scour the bay speculation swirls over the motive. Durst is only suspected in the murders of people he knew so why kill Morris Black, and exactly what was the relationship between Morris Black and Bobby Durst? Some people believe there had to be a connection between the two other believe it is simply coincidence. It is even speculated that Morris Black was part of the Italian or Jewish Mafia and was the one who helped Bobby dispose of Kathy's body and Bobby was taking care of loose ends as he did with Susan Burman. But no one knows for sure except Bobby Durst and he isn't talking. In late September 2003, the search for Morris Black's head comes up empty and the trial begins. In the defense opening statement they drop a bombshell. Durst will admit to killing Morris Black in self defense and will get on the stand and explain exactly how it happened. This trial was shaping up to be a dandy and everyone wanted a front row seat.

The prosecution starts off with a bang. They have the blood evidence and the implements used to cut up the body. What they don't have is the motive or a cause of death as they know virtually nothing about Morris Black. They prosecution claims that Morris Black suffered a vicious beating before being murdered. He had bruises all over what was found of his body and blood in his lungs. They lay out an absolute horrible scene especially the part about cutting up the body. By the time the prosecution rests the case looks like a lock. They had put on a strong case but the defense was about to put on a show that would change everything. Part of their tactic was to blame the victim and to turn Bobby Durst from a psycho killer into a nice guy. They also reminded the Jury that bobby Durst wasn't on trial for cutting up a body. They argue that Morris Black had a horrible temper and that Bobby Durst suffered from a mild form of Autism.

They then put Bobby Durst on the stand which was a stroke of genius. He was well educated, articulate and charming. He claims that on the day of the murder he came home and found Morris Black in his apartment looking for a fight and he had a gun and pulled it on Bobby. As Bobby tried to take it away from Morris they struggled over it and it went off accidentally went off hitting Morris in the face. He then states that since he knew he has been long suspected in his wife's disappearance and Susan Burman's murder he didn't think anyone would believe him so he decided to dispose of the body. As far as cutting up the body he only remembers swimming in a pool of blood. All in all he made one fine witness and did a heck of a job. The prosecutor could not rattle him on cross examination. Most court agree that if they were ever charged with murder they would want Bobby Durst as a witness for them as he is very convincing. After a long deliberation the Jury finds him not guilty.

The friends and relatives of Morris Black, Kathy Durst and Susan Burman are shell shocked. He got away with it again. He absolutely walks on water when it comes to legal problems. But the prosecution has some responsibility for this verdict. They didn't add in any lesser includeds such as second degree murder which the Jury might have compromised on. Most feel that if you put two eccentric guys in a room with a gun almost anything could happen including self defense. Bobby Durst spent less than three years in prison for evidence tampering, skipping bail, pot possassion, and shoplifting. He is now out and lives his life as a free man. In 2006, Bobby Durst legally severed all ties with his family and walked away with a $65,000,000 payout, plenty of money to keep him in new dresses. So if a strange looking older man dressed as a woman moves next door to you watch out.. It may be The Mysterious Millionaire.