The Mammoth Book of Celebrity Murders (13 page)

Dan Allingham’s team tried to appeal to the humanity of the jury – everybody can make a little mistake from time to time, but no one would expect the result to be death. Leonard
Levine explained that his client thought that the production team might be convicted for the illegal hiring of the children, but that he would never have done it if he had thought there was any
danger at all.

In terms of the children being hired George Folsey seemed to have gathered the most bad press, his reported conversations with Donna Schuman making him seem totally guilty, not just of the
hiring but of joking about the nature of the explosives. With potentially the worst case to answer Harland Braun used his closing speech to attack Schuman, claiming that she was psychologically
imbalanced and was keen to see someone convicted because she herself felt some sense of guilt.

The prosecution were to have the last word before the jurors would be asked to retire in order to consider the verdict. D’Agostino took to the floor once more and in a scene more
reminiscent of a courtroom drama started to deliver a badly calculated and highly dramatic scene of her own. Walking so that she was directly in front of the jury, D’Agostino held out a
potato in one hand and a straw in the other. She then pushed the straw into the potato before saying, “If a straw can do that to a potato, imagine what a piece of bamboo can do to a
helicopter’s rotor blades.” With that she handed the potato to a juror and sat down.

The jury may have been confused by this last-chance antic of the prosecution but it made great copy for the headlines. As the reporters went back to their offices to write the last report before
the verdict, the Judge dismissed the jury and asked that they make their verdicts accordingly.

The jury went away and deliberated the details of what they had heard over the course of the long trial. On 29 May 1987, the jury had concluded its decision making and was ready to tell the
world. The world’s associated press gathered like flies on the dead and impatiently sat while the verdicts emerged.

The verdicts were first passed to Judge Boren who then passed the details to the court clerk in order that they could be announced.

She began, “We the jury in the above-titled action find the defendant John Landis not guilty of involuntary manslaughter.” And for each and every count the same verdict had been
agreed. There was a stunned silence in the court; D’Agostino looked visibly shocked. She then shook her head making it clear to all she was disgusted by the outcome.

Landis’ wife, Deborah, hugged each juror in turn, tears of joy streaming down her cheeks, the pressure finally over.

Both Landis and D’Agostino immediately went on a round of television talk shows. D’Agostino made it clear that she felt Landis walked free because the jury were in awe of his
celebrity status. During one show the jury foreperson rang in to dispute the claim that they had let Landis off because he was famous, claiming the majority of the jurors had not heard of him
before the trial.

In a poll taken at the time it appeared that most Americans thought Landis guilty of manslaughter, but the twelve Americans who counted most did not.

Robert Allen Durst, a rich New York real estate heir, became America’s first billion dollar fugitive after jumping bail while awaiting trial for the murder of Morris
Black. This, however, was just one startling event in the life of Durst who had over the previous 20 years had other brushes with the law and lived a very peculiar lifestyle.

Durst was born into privilege, his grandfather Joseph Durst having built a fortune out of developing real estate in the New York area. On his death the business was passed on to his son Seymour,
Durst’s father, and he continued to build the empire into a multi-billion-dollar concern called the Durst Organization. Durst’s earlier life, along with his siblings, was one of luxury,
being brought up in plush surroundings and wanting for nothing. He lived in the upper-crust surroundings of Scarsdale, New York and attended Scarsdale High School, before completing his
undergraduate degree at Lehigh University. In contrast to Durst’s obvious good fortune at being born into wealth, an episode in his earlier life was to shake him to the core and cause him no
end of psychiatric problems, which some think explain his behaviour in later life. At the tender age of seven Durst witnessed his mother’s suicide at the family home in Scarsdale when she
threw herself off the roof of the mansion. This terrible trauma caused the young Durst to endure many hours of counselling, during which the doctors revealed that he had a deep-seated anger which
if left untreated had the potential to turn into schizophrenia. After a while Durst was able to move on with his life and after completing his undergraduate studies at Lehigh went on to UCLA to
conclude his graduate training. Friends from those days reveal a strange personality, quite intense and prone to outbursts of anger if provoked; he was also a habitual marijuana smoker. The extent
of Durst’s ability to be angry became more apparent when it was time for him to join the world of work. As the older brother he expected that it would be he who would ascend to the top job in
his father’s business and was taken aback when his father announced that it would be his younger brother Douglas who would now head the operation. In a fit of anger Durst walked out of the
building, out of the business and never returned – he was not about to play second fiddle to anyone. His anger had got the better of him and it could have proven a costly mistake –
alienating himself from his family could have cut him off from his inheritance.

As a prominent New York family the name Durst was as well known in its heyday as the name of Trump in the 1980s and 1990s and as such their activities were widely reported in the press. It is
not therefore surprising that Durst felt humiliated when news of his brother’s appointment became public knowledge.

For all of Durst’s quirkiness he was never short of beautiful women to accompany him on his busy social schedule – he would think nothing of jumping on a plane and jetting off to
Europe, Asia or anywhere he wanted, all in the name of fun. And his fun always included a diet of marijuana. In the 1970s he frequented New York’s well-known celebrity disco, Studio 54,
although he was never quite comfortable in such public surroundings. He never really acquired a pure playboy persona being equally interested in sculpture and architecture. He counted amongst
others in his social circle Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Mia Farrow’s younger sister, Prudence, who he dated for a while, and John Lennon, with whom he enjoyed primal scream therapy, at the time
the latest innovation in handling anger and fear. Eventually Durst married a young woman who he met in one of his offices. Kathleen McCormack was a fourth-year medical student when she called into
a Durst Organization administrative office to pay the rent which was due on her apartment, one of a number in a building which was owned by Durst. They got to know each other and initially Kathleen
quite liked the eccentric charms exuded by Durst, but by the time they had been married a while these eccentricities were to wear thin.

Once they were married McCormack graduated as a nurse and decided she would pursue her dream of becoming a paediatrician. Her time now was spent studying for her chosen career, a situation which
Durst was not always sympathetic towards – they were after all well off and neither in reality had to work. But unlike Durst McCormack did not come from a monied background, she was the
product of a middle-class Irish Catholic family from New Jersey and her work ethic was strong.

In line with their wealth and status the newly married couple maintained three homes in the New York City area: an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, another on the Upper East Side
and a plush house in the small Westchester county town of South Salem. Durst was a man who seemed intent on moving about and lived at the three addresses in equal measure, which meant that much of
their time was spent apart, often not seeing each other for days at a time. For McCormack this was not necessarily a bad thing as their marriage had deteriorated to the point where Durst’s
anger would often boil over and result in violence – she had visited the hospital on more than one occasion to have bruises looked at. Although to some extent McCormack lived in denial of her
husband’s temper she did not hide his behaviour from her friends, who had come to despise him for it. Many of them pleaded with her to flee the family home before anything terrible happened
and although she was now considering her options, she had signed a very biased prenuptial agreement which would have left her with not more than she arrived with, and she was not about to let him
get away with that.

Over time Durst apparently felt that he was losing control over his wife and became more preoccupied with her whereabouts. A friend of McCormack’s, Gilberte Najamy, threw a party one
evening in January 1982 at her apartment in Manhattan, which McCormack attended. Not long after she arrived Durst called on the telephone and demanded that she return home. She explained to Najamy
that she had to leave because her husband was upset and added prophetically, “I’m afraid of what Bobby will do.”

She was never seen again. Four days later Durst walked into the 20th precinct on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and reported that his wife was missing. Suspicion was immediately aroused when
it was noted that Durst had waited four days before calling in the authorities, a point he was able to explain away as being down to their multi-location existence which often meant they did not
come across each other for days on end. Durst admitted that they had argued and that during this time McCormack had consumed a bottle of wine before he took her to the Katonah New York train
station, where she had taken the 9.15 p.m. train back into the city – he had not seen or heard from her since. The police were concerned that she had not been in contact but were equally
perplexed by Durst’s calm behaviour, which seemed very strange for someone reporting his wife missing.

Witnesses came forward and claimed to have seen McCormack at the Upper West Side apartment the day after the party, and a woman who identified herself as Kathleen called in to the Dean’s
office of the Albert Einstein School of Medicine that day to say she was sick and unable to attend classes.

A week later Durst announced in the
New York Post
that he was offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of his wife. McCormack’s friends however found
this ploy to be nothing short of a diversion – as far as they were concerned Durst had done something quite horrible and this was just a ruse to cover up his activity. Between them they
calculated McCormack’s movements on the night of the party. Given the train schedules they reckoned that McCormack would have had no more than forty minutes to drink the wine if she had
managed to get the 9.15 p.m. train back into the city. The police were aware of the anomaly but were unable to find any other evidence which might point to Durst’s guilt. Although the file on
McCormack remained open, with no further evidence presenting itself, and with the absence of a body, the police could do nothing about it, however much they suspected Durst of foul play. Meanwhile
McCormack’s friends collated information and maintained files in the hope of uncovering the truth, and never allowed her disappearance to be forgotten. In another twist to the disappearance
Najamy and another friend, Kathy Traytsman, were both burgled and the contents of those files were taken, presumably to ensure nothing could emerge which might incriminate the perpetrator of the
disappearance. Najamy however became fixated on McCormack’s disappearance and it pushed her into a deep depression which forced her into alcoholism.

The papers reported the disappearance and the details regarding the reward but were also keen to discuss the mystery. The finger of guilt was pointing straight at Durst but he seemed able to
live with the innuendo which surrounded his wife’s demise. He never passed comment and seemed keen to let the past just fade away. It was noted that Durst simply got on with his life, dating
new women, travelling the world and living the good life. Nearly 19 years after McCormack’s disappearance Durst married his second wife, Deborah Charatan, a prosperous real estate broker.

It was long not though before scandal once more surrounded the wealthy Durst. Just days after he was married to Charatan one of his closest friends, Susan Berman, aged 55, was found dead at her
Los Angeles home. She had been discovered in a pool of blood with a bullet hole in the back of her head. They had been friends since their days at UCLA and shared a deep common bond – Berman
had seen her mother commit suicide too. The murder was initially thought to have been a gangland hit as Berman was the daughter of Davie Berman, partner of the legendary mobster, Bugsy Seigel, and
an associate of the Jewish mob boss, Meyer Lansky. Berman was a writer who had already published two books about her father’s interests in Las Vegas, but neither had sold well and neither
particularly gave away any big secrets – children of the mob never got to know any of the details. The police therefore concluded that it was unlikely Berman had been killed to avoid any
embarrassing exposés. Besides, she had been shot from behind and there was no sign of forced entry into the apartment. It was therefore concluded that Berman knew the killer well enough to
let them into the apartment and also felt comfortable enough with the person to turn her back on them.

Berman did not enjoy the security of a wealthy background – her father’s involvement with the mob had not left his family great wealth. With her books not selling well Berman was
living on the breadline and she frequently ran out of money, unable to pay bills and needing to borrow off friends, promising to settle up when she was on a more even keel. In 2000 her old car
finally gave up the ghost and she wrote to Durst requesting a $7,000 dollar loan for a replacement car. She had reason to believe he would respond positively – apart from their close
friendship it was Durst who had given her away at her own wedding. It was four months before she finally received a reply – inside was a cheque for $25,000 and a brief note to say it was a
gift not a loan.