In the first episode of The Jinx, Galveston police detective Cody Cazalas, responsible for investigating the murder of real-estate heir Robert Durst’s elderly neighbor, Morris Black, says that he does not believe Durst kills just for the fun of it. “But if you back him into a corner,” he says, he will kill you.
Now a 2003 report unearthed by the Daily News suggests there might be a much darker side to Durst’s story. If the report’s findings prove true, it indicates that Durst may have not only targeted his enemies with lethal violence, but innocent transients and sex workers as well.
The 2003 report, compiled by an investigator for the San Francisco District Attorney’s office named John Bradley, attempts to draw connections between the cross-dressing murder suspect and two teenage girls, Kristen Modafferi and Karen Mitchell, who went missing five months apart in northern California in 1997. When Bradley went to talk to a woman named Sheli Currier, a suspected friend of Mitchell’s, she told him Durst — whom she recognized in a photo — frequented homeless shelters in the Bay Area and frequently solicited prostitutes.
“Allegedly, he told his present wife, Debrah Charatan, the only time he had sexual relations since his first wife disappeared in 1982 was with prostitutes,” the report reads. “[Currier] suggested he often offered her money for sex. She said it was never enough money and there was something about him that she did not like.”
Bradley also indicated in his report that Durst may have rented an apartment near the Eureka homeless shelter around the time the girls disappeared. Durst’s lawyers say he had nothing to do with their disappearances.
