Infamous ‘Person of Interest’ in Murder Case Spotted in Las Vegas

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ImageBy Cathy Scott

New York real estate baron Robert Durst, who has long been a person of interest in the 2000 murder of Mob daughter Susan Berman and in the 1982 disappearance of his wife first Kathleen Durst, has been seen in Las Vegas on three occasions.

Sin City is where Durst’s one-time best friend, Susan Berman, grew up Mob royalty as the spoiled daughter of Jewish mobster Davie Berman.

Durst was spotted by a patron just before Christmas at a Chinese restaurant on Paradise Road near the Las Vegas Strip, at a supermarket on the east side of the valley by a fellow shopper, and at another restaurant in the same vicinity, according to a restaurant host.

He’s tough to miss. Images of Durst wearing wire-rimmed glasses, with salt-and-pepper hair, have been broadcast on TruTV, Nancy Grace, Jane Velez Mitchell, CNN, and on all the national networks.

In 2000, as New York police reopened their investigation into the disappearance of Kathleen Durst, investigators had scheduled an interview with Susan Berman. Durst had reportedly fled New York for Galveston, where he lived in disguise as a mute woman.

Before Berman’s police interview was to take place, she was found in her Beverly Hills bungalow, dead from a gunshot wound to the back of her head. Her murder remains unsolved, but police have publicly said Durst, who had been visiting San Francisco where he owns a house, was in California at the time of Berman’s murder. LAPD homicide-robbery division publicly said Durst was a person of interest in Berman’s case.

Back in Texas, Durst was wanted for questioning when the remains of Durst’s next-door neighbor, senior citizen Morris Black, were discovered by a fisherman and his young son floating in Galveston Bay — except for poor Morris Black’s head, which never surfaced. Durst was eventually arrested and charged with Black’s murder. In court, he admitted to accidentally fatally shooting Black, and then chopping up the body, bagging the remains and dumping them in Galveston Bay.

Durst hired the best of the best when it came to his defense. Dick DeGuerin, who was named one of the top 100 criminal attorneys in the nation, used a self-defense strategy in court. Jurors bought it; they acquitted Durst of murder in 2003. He pleaded guilty the following year to jumping bond and evidence tampering. In a plea agreement, he received a sentence of five years in prison. With credit for time service, Durst was paroled in 2005.

He bought a high-end, five-family townhouse in Harlem in 2006. News reports indicated that nearby residents were unhappy with having Durst as a neighbor, especially after a real estate agent told a newspaper that Durst had mentioned renting out some of the property and moving himself into one of the family units.

So far, Clark County Assessor’s Office records don’t indicate that Durst has purchased property in the Las Vegas Valley — which begs the question. What is Robert Durst doing in Las Vegas?

A second edition of Scott’s book, Murder of a Mafia Daughter: The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Berman, is scheduled for re-release in May 2013.

Troubled Early Voting: It Oughta Be A Crime

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(Wikipedia Commons)

I cast my vote in Clark County on the second day of early voting. But it nearly didn’t happen. It went down like this:

I queued up outside a portable building, waiting for my turn at a voting booth. Once inside, a volunteer sitting at a computer took my ID, placed it next to his keyboard and began typing. He asked for my address. I told him and then said, “It’s on my ID.” He didn’t look up. Then he asked, “What’s the number on your house?” I recited it again.

“Have you moved recently?”

“No, not in 19 years,” I answered.

Then the bombshell came: “You’re registered under a different address.”

“No,” I told him, “I have never registered under any other address in Nevada.”

“Your address doesn’t match your ID,” he insisted.

“Then it’s not me,” I told him.

He didn’t respond. Instead, he put a plastic voting card in a little machine next to him, pulled it out and extended his hand for me to take it from him. I didn’t take it. I instead asked him, “Is this card for a person with my exact name? Otherwise, I’m voting under someone else’s name.”

He said it was probably a clerical error and that a different address was in the machine for me. I told him there was no way that could be me, and could another volunteer help him sort it out.

He turned around and whispered to a man who was helping other voters. The man scooted his chair over to the first volunteer’s computer to look me up. He turned his head and said to his fellow volunteer, “This isn’t her. I’ll cancel it.”

Meanwhile, two people wearing yellow stickers on their shirts that read “Observer” quietly looked on from their chairs against a nearby wall.

Then it went from bad to worse. After the second volunteer attempted to find me in the computer – I assume under my name – he said, “You already early voted.”

(Say what?)

“No, I didn’t,” I told him.

“Yes, you did. It says here you already voted.”

I told him that if the computer showed I voted, then someone else had cast a vote under my name because I had not yet voted. An “observer” began taking notes.

Then the second volunteer said the same shocking words he had said a few minutes earlier: “I’ll cancel it.”

Cancel it? Someone else may have voted under my name and now he’s canceling her vote or just her checking in? The problem is, whoever it was didn’t know it was in error.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How can you cancel it?”

“Ma’am, we’re canceling it. We can do that from here. Hang on a minute.” Then he said, “You were inactive. I’m activating it.” He went from saying I had already early voted to telling me I was inactive. Clark County doesn’t hold a presidential primary – they hold caucuses– so there was no primary election for me to vote in. But I hadn’t voted in the last local election because there were only a couple of measures on the ballot, plus I was out of town that Tuesday.

Next, the volunteer printed a label that matched my name and address, I signed it, and then he stuck a plastic card in the little machine next to me, removed it, handed it to me and said, “You have 10 minutes to vote before this card expires.”

I cast my ballot — quickly — for my favorite candidates. But I left with my mind swirling, wondering what the heck had just happened. Had someone with a name similar to mine – there are a couple in the Las Vegas Valley – voted when a volunteer messed up her name in the computer, just like what had happened to me, only she hadn’t noticed?

I didn’t trust electronic voting before, and now I trust it even less. And with news breaking today that Gov. Mitt Romney’s son invested in voting machines to be used in this presidential election makes me even queasier. It’s all a little too close for comfort.

I hope everybody else’s voting experience goes smoother – whether voting early or on election day. My experience was anything but.

NOTE: On the off chance the Clark County election office is curious, this happened on Sunday, Oct. 21, at the trailer in the parking lot of the Las Vegas Athletic Club on West Charleston Boulevard. Have fun sorting it out. My guess is the “observers” have already alerted the election office of the glitch.

The Crime Buff’s Guide to Outlaw Washington, DC

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By Cathy Scott (Reprinted from Publishers Marketplace)

It is no secret that Washington, D.C. has a storied history of crimes and misdemeanors, so much so that the national’s capitol is often referred to as the “District of Crime.”

Now, The Crime Buff’s Guide to Outlaw Washington, DC digs deep and outlines it all – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Told by novelist, journalist and true crime author Ron Franscell as a travelogue to crime in D.C., the book is a historical crime roadmap, from little-known offenses to the most infamous. Outlaw Washington, DC has come of age, technically speaking, with GPS coordinates for techno-type crime buffs.

For history and political buffs, one of the book’s four chapters is devoted to Abraham Lincoln’s murder at Ford’s Theatre. Franscell includes the escape route John Wilkes Booth took via horseback, with the help of a variety of accomplices along the way, as he fled the scene of the crime and went on the lam for 12 days. It’s a new

Lithograph of the Assassination of Abraham Lin...

Lithograph of Abraham Lincoln Assassination.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

look, backtracking Booth’s steps, ending when federal troops caught up with him.

Franscell’s easy style in his use of language makes for a lively and readable trek through time and place. From the grisly (a cannibalistic serial killer at the former St. John’s Orphanage) to political (the Watergate Hotel break-in at the National Democratic Headquarters), it’s a fascinating read.

As Franscell tells it in his introduction, “It will take you to places where our crime history took unexpected, momentous, macabre, or even whimsical turns.” Simply put, he says, “Place matters, even in crime.”

This is Franscell’s third installment of The Crime Buff’s Guide. This D.C. version is well worth picking up, whether you’re traveling to the capitol and want to take a different turn into the area’s legacy, or simply to read about the goings on in years past from a distance.

Little-known details peppered throughout the book are what readers of true crime long for. Now, tourists and adventurers alike can also take in this new brand of D.C. tour. Whatever their interests, they’re in for a treat – and they’re bound to learn something new.

Is Convicted Killer Joran Van der Sloot About to be a Father?

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Joran van der Sloot (Wikipedia Commons)

Say it isn’t so. Joran Van der Sloot has impregnated a woman?

If true, it appears the prison in Peru, where Van der Sloot is incarcerated, has been lax in its duties.

Van der Sloot confessed to the May 30, 2010 murder of Stephany Flores exactly five years to the day after American student Natalee Holloway disappeared during spring break  in Aruba, where Van der Sloot lived. He is serving a 28-year-sentence in the Peruvian prison for murdering Flores.

Now, not only does it look like Van der Sloot, a Dutch citizen, has free rein throughout the prison compound, but he’s enjoying conjugal visits.

A Dutch newspaper reported that Van der Sloot told a reporter during an interview that he is the father of an unborn baby after having conjugal visits with a Peruvian woman. But Van der Sloot’s lawyer, who confirmed that Van der Sloot has been granted unsupervised visits behind bars, called the report a rumor.

Pity the poor unborn child, if it is true. That would be a heavy burden to carry for life, having Van der Sloot for a father. Time will tell if the attorney’s denials are correct, that Van der Sloot did not get the young woman pregnant. A simple DNA test, if a child is born, could separate fact from fiction.

Double Book Event: Crime Writer Cathy Scott and Former Cop Debra Gauthier

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Oct. 8, 2012

LAS VEGAS – True crime author and journalist Cathy Scott and former Las Vegas police lieutenant-turned-author Debra Gauthier have joined forces after working the same crime scenes, with Scott as a newspaper reporter and Gauthier as a police officer.

In the 1990s, Scott arrived at the scenes of crimes as a reporter while Gauthier worked the scenes as an incident commander. In July 1985, Gauthier, as part of the raid team in a covert operation investigating racketeering, was the officer tasked with cuffing and taking notorious mobster “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein into custody and to the station for booking. “We went out really early in the morning with the SWAT team,” Gauthier recalled. “It was before these guys were even awake, 4:30 or 5 in the morning. We kicked the door, went in and took these guys out on warrants.”

In January 1997, Scott was assigned to Blitzstein’s murder story and was at the scene of the crime after he was killed execution style in his Las Vegas home. “Detectives wearing black dark suits — FBI agents — were on the scene,” Scott said. “We soon learned that the feds had been investigating Herbie and his Milano Family associates in a federal racketeering case titled ‘Operation Button-down.’ Only in Vegas.”

Now, Scott and Gauthier have put their stories on paper, Scott with her latest true crime book, THE MILLIONAIRE’S WIFE, about a hit-for-hire case and Gauthier with BRIGHT LIGHTS, DARK PLACES, her autobiographical account of life as a woman pioneer on a male-dominated police force before women worked the streets.

Meet and talk with the authors at their joint book signing this Saturday, October 13, 1-3 p.m., at Barnes and Noble Summerlin, 8915 W Charleston Boulevard, Las Vegas, 702-242-1987.

Reprinted from Online PR News.

Nevada’s Vanishing Mustangs

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Reprinted from Horseback Magazine.

Story and Photo By Cathy Scott

LAS VEGAS, (Horseback) – On a recent Friday, a van headed up a rural road in the center of a herd management area toward Southern Nevada’s Wheeler Pass. When a young red-and-white horse was spotted on the right, the driver stopped the van so everyone could step out and take a closer look.

The horse wasn’t alone. Soon, a red horse approached and stopped just short of the onlookers.

For many on the trek to Wheeler Pass, it was an extraordinary view and undeniable evidence that wild horses are fending on their own with no help from humans. As the van continued up the road toward the tiny town of Cold Creek, at the base of the Spring Mountains, nine wild horse bands were seen at both a distance and at close range grazing on the desert floor.

Once the van arrived at three ponds near Cold Creek, the VIPs gathered near the largest pond where the family bands of wild horses make their way across desert scrub and Joshua trees several times a day to drink from and play in the water.

After a 20-minute wait, a band of about 15 horses, including two or three foals,  trotted when they approached the water’s edge. A black stallion pranced and splashed as he made his way across the length of the pond. Another bowed down and submerged all but his head and neck.

By all counts, 300 horses and roughly 500 wild burros live on this land north of Mt. Charleston just 45 minutes from the Las Vegas Strip. “They have water at low elevations and they have feed,” said Arlene Gawne, who helped organize the outing to Wheeler Pass for attendees of the recent International Equine Conference for a trip to the field.

As the van slowly traveled down the hill back to Las Vegas, a band of horses was on a hillside, far from the road, grazing. This particular management area, one of the last in Southern Nevada, is a mix of desert and mountain habitats located on the northeastern flanks of the Spring Mountains. There, the herd lives in harmony among people, deer and elk.

For those on the field trip, the sight of these animals living well was not lost on them. These horses are not dying of thirst or starvation as the BLM has said in the past. A New Yorker on the tour said she had always hoped to see wild horses in their natural habitat. And Virginia resident Jo-Claire Corcoran described the scene as “remarkable.”

If you want to see these wild horses living off the land in the high desert, as they have done since before people inhabited Southern Nevada, you’ll have to hurry. They may very well become creatures of the past if the federal government has its way.

Today, one horse or burro lives on roughly 1,600 football fields, yet the Bureau of Land Management’s plan to commandeer helicopter round-ups of these horses and burros, proposed to take place in 2012 and 2013, will leave just one horse or burro per 10,000 acres. That means the horses roaming free will be moved to small stalls and held indefinitely, with their fates unknown.

Gawne, however, says there is a possible ray of hope. The Spring Mountain Alliance – a volunteer non-profit group of concerned citizens, businesses and professionals — has proposed to the BLM a 3-year hold be put on its wild horse and burro removals in the Spring Mountains so the alliance can develop programs, at little or no cost to the government, including: wild horse and burrow tours on public lands that would boost Las Vegas tourism; contraceptives for old and young mares and jennies on the range’ and adding fences and viewing hides to protect ecologically sensitive areas. The alliance is a branch of America’s Wild Horse Alliance

Rhea Little has observed the horses for years. “Seeing these animals run free is natural,” said Little, a wild horse advocate who lives in Cold Creek, which lies at the edge of the Wheeler Pass Herd Management Area. “They’re not hurting anyone.”

Most of all, another Cold Creek resident said, “The horses are happy.”

If you’d like to help, join the Spring Mountain Alliance: SpringMountainAlliance.org, 702-216-2920.

Cathy Scott is the bestselling author of The Millionaire’s Wife and Pawprints of Katrina,  and is a close friend of Horseback Magazine

Tags: BLM, bureau of land management, death, helicopters, mustangs, Stampede, wild horsess

7th Anniversary – Pawprints of Katrina: Pets Saved and Lessons Learned

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Pawprints of Katrina

Book cover photo by Clay Myers, foreword by Ali MacGraw

On this, the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and while Hurricane Isaac continues pounding tropical rain on New Orelans and the Gulf Coast, it seems appropriate to share a sample chapter to the book Pawprints of Katrina. It’s heartwarming to see animals being rescued today with their people. It’s because of the Federal Animal Pets Act that what happened in the aftermath of Katrina never happens again.

 

By Cathy Scott

ON THE WATER’S EDGE, from a ramp leading from Interstate 10, I looked out on a vast span of still but deadly black water surrounding a New Orleans neighborhood. It was like a scene out of Waterworld, a postapocalyptic science fiction film. The off-ramp had been transformed into a boat launch. The silence was otherworldly.

Driving to the area that morning meant passing by one of the city’s oldest cemeteries not far from the French Quarter, with its aboveground nineteenth-century marble, brick-and-mortar, and stone tombs topped with Christian symbols of angels and crosses. The scene was eerie as the flooded tombs appeared to float in the watery sludge.

It was September 11, 2005. Parked on the ramp and sitting on the tailgate of his truck was Captain Scott Shields of the New York City Fire Department, famous for the courageous efforts of his search-and-rescue dog, Bear, at the World Trade Center. Captain Scott was with special boat teams deployed to the Gulf Coast region on behalf of the Bear Search and Rescue Foundation in memory of his dog, who, like many other working canines, passed away from health complications developed after searching Ground Zero following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Before we set out on a boat to look for stranded pets, the captain looked around at the team. Then he asked us to take a moment to remember those lost on 9/11. There, standing amidst the rubble of Hurricane Katrina with the black water just a few feet from us, we bowed our heads, and not a sound was heard. No cars. No lawnmowers. No birds. No planes. No trains. No voices. Not even the couple of dogs rescued and then tied with leashes to the off-ramp railing, awaiting transport, uttered a sound. It was as if, at that brief but somber point in time, they, too, acknowledged the loss of life. It was a poignant moment, observing those lost in the largest terrorist attack on American soil while we were in the thick of rescuing animals in the wake of the biggest natural disaster in U.S. history. The Crescent City was devoid of life, except for those of us out rescuing that day and, of course, the animals left behind.

Leaving in boats were team members Jeff Popowich, Ethan Gurney, and Mike Bzdewka and volunteers Ken Ray and Tracey Simmons. Volunteer veterinarian Debbie Rykoff stayed on the ramp to treat the pets brought in from the water.

I stepped into a small, aluminum jon boat — stable and flat-bottomed — with Mike and Tracey, and we motored away from the freeway toward the nearby houses, maneuvering around felled trees, fallen street signs, water-logged cars, and whatever else was in the water. We boated out to a five-block area and stopped at Myrtle Street.

It was my first run of the day and Mike and Tracey’s second. Mike cut the engine, and we sat in the boat with silence all around us. “Watch this,” Tracey said as she started barking. “Woof, woof, woof.” The street lit up with the sounds of animals. We heard a cat meow from three blocks away. On Myrtle, a dog barked, and then we heard another cat. At the intersection, Mike stepped out of the boat to pull us past large debris and tree trunks, and then he jumped back in and continued motoring.

It was an older neighborhood of wooden row houses, and the water was just above the porches. We boated to the first house on the corner, where we’d heard a cat meow from inside. Mike stepped onto the porch, opened a window, and grabbed the cat. He put the cat in a pillowcase, because we didn’t have a carrier, and handed it to me as he got back in the boat. I set the cat next to me on the bench seat so he wouldn’t get wet from the polluted water on the floor of the boat.

Midway down the street, a dog barked from a backyard. We moved toward the narrow driveway on the side of the house and saw a gray Poodle mix on a car roof next to piled-high debris that used to be a garage. Mike got out and waded to the house next door while I stayed in the boat with the cat. I held onto a porch railing with one hand and petted the cat through the pillowcase with the other. Tracey stepped out and, wearing rubber hip waders, began making her way down the driveway. Halfway, she abruptly stopped and let out a moan.

“Are you okay?” I called out.

“No,” she hollered back. “Something’s in the water.” She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “I think it’s a body.”

“If it was a body, it would be floating,” I told her.

“It’s bubbling. It just moved,” she said, lifting her arms above her head.

I knew she was spooking herself even more, so I tried to change her focus. “Look around you, Tracey,” I said. “See the tree branches sticking out of the water? It’s just a tree trunk.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Positive,” I told her, not sure of anything at that point. “Just focus on the dog. Keep looking at the dog and step over the tree.” She slowly started moving again. It seemed like it took an eternity for her to reach the car. When she did, the dog jumped over the rubble behind him and into the murky water. Finally, she cornered him, plucked him from the muck, and carefully waded up the driveway and back to the boat. Tracey said she thought it might have been an alligator, because there were reports of sightings, but we doubted a gator could survive in that murky muck. The still-wet dog, who turned out to be a Cockapoo we later named Goofy, sat on my lap and didn’t move, even with the cat next to him. We got a second cat from next door, and then went to a few more houses on the street. Tracey followed Mike into one house, but she didn’t have a good feeling and turned around. When Mike emerged, he told us that five dogs had been tied in the yard, and it looked like they had all drowned when the water rose higher than their leashes could reach.

In silence, we motored away from Myrtle to Elder Street, to where a cat was walking on a rooftop. We called to him, but he walked even higher to the roof’s peak. The fence was down, and there was no way for us to climb up. He was out of reach, so we headed back to the boat ramp, hoping another team with more gear could get him.

That scene played out every day on rescue duty. So did the sight of animals who hadn’t made it. On the front of one house in Lakeview, spray-painted in black were the words “4 dead dogs on log chains in back yard.” The teams learned to celebrate the successes and not dwell on the animals we could no longer help. It was the same with the people who had died and whose bodies were floating in the water. There wasn’t anything left for us to do for them.

Because floodwater was steadily receding from neighborhoods throughout the city, rescue teams geared up for door-to-door searches on land where the waterline was dropping and for boat searches in areas where the water was still waist deep.

I HAD ARRIVED two days earlier, on September 9, 2005, when my plane landed in Jackson, Mississippi. By noon the next day, I was at Camp Tylertown, where an animal triage center had been set up. I immediately went to work on the fifty-acre grounds of the St. Francis Animal Sanctuary, a place that was alive with activity.

Assignments often lead journalists in their careers. Stories of the military have taken me to Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Panama. In the case of Katrina, instead of human strife, the plight of helpless animals took me to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf region. When the opportunity arose to travel to New Orleans, Biloxi, Waveland, and Gulfport to cover the largest animal rescue effort in history, I jumped at the chance. Within a day and a half, I was there, recording the events and stories of the displaced pets of Katrina.

To purchase PAWPRINTS OF KATRINA, click here.