A New York billionaire vanishes from high society. A strange woman moves into a $300-a-month Galveston apartment. She never speaks. She wears a cheap wig. And across the hall lives a man who will never leave that building alive.

The four-unit apartment building at 2213 Avenue K looks like nothing special. A weathered 1930s bungalow on a quiet Galveston street lined with cottonwoods and palms, halfway between the Gulf of Mexico and Galveston Bay. The historic St. Joseph Church, built by German Catholic immigrants in 1860, stands at the corner. Rent runs cheap. The neighbors keep to themselves.

In November 2000, a new tenant moved into Apartment #2.

She called herself Dorothy Ciner. She paid $300 a month in cash. She communicated with her landlord, Klaus Dillman, exclusively through handwritten notes, claiming a throat condition made her mute. She wore glasses held together with tape and a wig that didn’t quite fit right.

Something about Dorothy wasn’t quite right.

Standing 5’7″ and flat-chested, the new tenant was spotted at local drag bars around the island. A Galveston drag performer named Claire Schuler thought Dorothy was “an older divorcee coming to terms with his sexuality.” The local verdict was blunt: she became known as “the ugliest drag queen on the island.”

On one memorable occasion, she reportedly ignited her wig while lighting a cigarette at a bar.

The landlord noticed something odd. Dorothy’s apartment usually seemed unoccupied, but she had a male friend who stayed from time to time. The friend introduced himself as Robert Durst.

The Real Estate Heir Who Watched His Mother Fall

Robert Alan Durst was born April 12, 1943, into one of New York’s most powerful real estate dynasties. His grandfather Joseph founded The Durst Organization in the early twentieth century. By 2020, the family controlled more than 16 million square feet of prime real estate in New York and Philadelphia, including a 10% stake in One World Trade Center. Forbes estimated the family fortune at $8.1 billion.

Robert was the eldest son, heir apparent to an empire.

But his life was shadowed by death from the very beginning. At age seven, young Robert reportedly watched his mother Bernice fall — or jump — from the roof of the family’s Scarsdale, New York home. The image would haunt him. Those who knew him said he was never the same.

In 1973, he married a dental hygienist named Kathleen McCormack. Friends described the marriage as increasingly volatile, possibly violent. Then, on January 31, 1982, Kathleen vanished. Durst claimed he drove her to a train station. She was 29 years old. She was never seen again.

For nearly two decades, the case went cold. Robert was estranged from his family, eventually bought out of his stake in the company for $65 million. He drifted. He remarried in secret to a New York real estate broker named Debrah Charatan.

Then in 2000, everything changed.

Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro reopened Kathleen’s disappearance as a homicide investigation. Suddenly, after 18 years, police were asking questions again. They wanted to talk to Robert Durst.

Almost immediately, another woman in Durst’s orbit turned up dead.

The Execution of Susan Berman

Susan Berman was the daughter of a Las Vegas mob boss. She’d known Durst since their UCLA days in the 1960s, and she’d stood by him through every scandal. When Kathleen disappeared, Susan had served as his unofficial spokesperson. Some investigators believed she knew more — that she may have helped fabricate an alibi.

On December 23, 2000, Susan Berman was found shot execution-style in her Los Angeles home. A single bullet to the back of the head.

The day before her body was discovered, Los Angeles police received an anonymous note. Block letters. No return address. The note contained only the word “CADAVER” and Berman’s address, with “Beverly” misspelled as “Beverley.”

Investigators had questions for Robert Durst. But Robert Durst had vanished.

The multimillionaire heir to a New York real estate empire — a man who simultaneously maintained a $3,800-a-month luxury apartment in Dallas, along with homes in Manhattan, Connecticut, San Francisco, and Northern California — had disappeared into thin air.

Hiding in Plain Sight

He’d chosen the last place anyone would think to look for a New York billionaire: a roach-infested fourplex in Galveston, Texas.

The disguise was absurd. The cheap wig. The taped-together glasses. The women’s clothing on a flat-chested man. The elaborate pretense of being mute. Durst would put the wig on when leaving his apartment and remove it a few blocks away.

Why Galveston? Perhaps because it was a place where eccentrics went unnoticed. A faded Victorian resort town with a seedy underbelly, still rebuilding from Hurricane Ike and carrying the weight of its own ghosts — the Great Storm of 1900 had killed up to 12,000 people, leaving mass graves scattered beneath the streets.

One more strange person wouldn’t raise alarms.

But Durst wasn’t alone at 2213 Avenue K.

Across the hall, in Apartment #1, lived a 71-year-old drifter named Morris Black.

The Neighbor

Morris “Jack” Julius Black was born October 21, 1929, in Malden, Massachusetts. He’d contracted polio as a child and walked with a permanent limp. Those who knew him described him as “cranky and confrontational” — a loner who kept people at arm’s length.

But Black had a charitable streak. He bought discount reading glasses in bulk and donated them to the Jesse Tree homeless shelter downtown. He had $140,000 in savings. He was getting by.

When the strange mute woman moved in across the hall, something unexpected happened: Morris Black and Dorothy Ciner became friends. They watched television together. They went target shooting. Black had a key to Dorothy’s apartment.

And at some point, Morris Black started figuring out that Dorothy Ciner wasn’t who she claimed to be.

The relationship soured. Black became aggressive, confrontational. According to what Durst would later testify, Black was becoming a problem — a loose end.

September 28, 2001

The nation was still reeling. Just seventeen days earlier, two planes had struck the World Trade Center. America was consumed by grief, terror, and the drumbeat toward war.

No one was paying attention to a shabby apartment building on Avenue K in Galveston, Texas.

What happened inside Apartment #2 that day would remain disputed in a courtroom. What happened afterward is not in dispute — because Robert Durst would eventually confess to every detail.

And what he described is the stuff of nightmares.

Coming in Part 2: “Blood, Bone, and the Bay” — A body is discovered floating in Galveston Bay, methodically dismembered with surgical precision. The head is missing. And inside the garbage bags, investigators find a receipt that leads them to the ugliest drag queen on the island.