The recent arrest in New Orleans and the HBO documentary The Jinx have put Robert Durst back in the headlines. Here, from the first reporter to access Durst’s NYPD files, is the authoritative account of a decades-long criminal odyssey—the very book found in Durst’s own apartment when it was searched by police. When medical student Kathie Durst vanished in 1982, she was married to Robert Durst, son of a New York real estate magnate. Kathie’s friends had reason to implicate her husband. They told police that Kathie lived in terror of Robert, and that she had uncovered incriminating financial evidence about him. But Durst’s secrets went even deeper. For decades, Kathie’s disappearance remained a mystery. Then in 2001, Durst, an heir to an empire valued at two billion dollars, was arrested for shoplifting in Pennsylvania. When the police brought him in, they discovered that he was a suspect in the murder of Texas drifter Morris Black, whose dismembered remains were found floating in Galveston Bay, and that Durst was also wanted for questioning in the killing of his friend, Susan Burman, in Los Angeles. Based on interviews with family, friends, and acquaintances of Durst, law enforcement, and others involved in the case, A Deadly Secret is a cross-country odyssey of stolen IDs and multiple identities that raises baffling questions about one of the country’s most prominent families—and one of its most elusive suspected killers.
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“A startling inside look at the politics of police work.”
— Westchester County Times
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Matt Birkbeck is an award-winning investigative journalist who has written for the New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, People, Boston magazine, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, Madness, and the Mob and the international bestseller A Beautiful Child, among other books.
David Harvard Lawrence XVII is an American television and film actor, voice talent, network radio host, internet entrepreneur, podcaster, demo producer, teacher, and author. He is best known for his role as the Puppetmaster on NBC’s sci-fi series Heroes. He was also the host of the David Lawrence Show and weekend Online Tonight, both nationally syndicated radio talk shows that revolved around pop culture and high-tech lifestyle. The “XVII” in his name was a way for Lawrence to distinguish himself from previous David Lawrences already registered with the Screen Actors Guild. At the time, he was the seventeenth David Lawrence listed on IMDB and appended the number to his name upon his own registry.