​It was some months after HBO’s The Jinx aired in 2015 when I first spoke with John Lewin, the erudite deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who just put Robert Durst in jail forever. 

Lewin is a cold case specialist. No, make that a master, with a reputation for doggedness and laser focus, traits that were so clearly apparent in his successful Durst prosecution. 

Lewin laid out his strategy to me back then, explaining how he was going to show that  the 1982 disappearance and presumed murder of Durs'ts then-wife Kathie and the subsequent  dismemberment of the drifter Morris Black in 2001 were connected to Berman’s 2000 murder. 
   
Berman's was such a cold, fiendish murder. She had no idea what was about to happen when he put the gun up to the back of her head and fired. 

I remember back to November 2000, when I was working on my first Durst piece for People magazine and all of Kathie’s old friends said I had to find Susan Berman. She was the key, they said. I was working on a tight deadline and though I tried, I couldn’t find her then. But I remember the call that first week in January 2001,  when all I could hear was a woman screaming, “She’s dead! She’s dead!” It was Gilberte Najamy, one of Kathie’s friends. I called Joe Becerra, the NY State Police detective whose gut instinct working off a tip restarted the Durst saga in 1999, yet for some reason he's become a lost character in all this. Yes, he said, he was planning to go to LA to interview Berman but he just got off the phone with the police there. Susan Berman was dead.  

Lewin knew what he wanted to do, only it was complicated, he said. Relying on circumstantial evidence from one case is difficult enough to convict someone of murder. But connecting three cases? Lewin knew the challenge, and he met it. 

If there were awards for lawyers like there are for actors, he’d win several, hands down. 

But in convicting Durst for the Berman murder, he laid a roadmap for Westchester County District Attorney Miriam Rocah, with some of that asphalt coming my 2002 book A Deadly Secret.

Lewin and I discussed the book at length, and he was particularly interested in Kathie. It was the linchpin to his prosecution, he said, proving that Berman had to die because she knew the truth about Kathie’s demise. Berman was a central figure who served as Durst's spokeswoman in the weeks following Kathie's disappearance. She knew that Durst killed Kathie on a Sunday night, dismembered her body under the glare of a blue light seen by neighbors, and then drove down to southern New Jersey on a Tuesday to bury her remains in the Pine Barrens.  

Mike Struk, the imperfect New York City police detective who followed the trail to the Pine Barrens in 1982, pressed to charge Durst. But prosecutors didn't do circumstantial cases then. No body, no crime. 

But that didn't deter Lewin, who believed it and wanted to prove it. And he did just that during the trial. But proving Kathie’s murder doesn’t count in a LA courtroom. It will in Westchester County where Rocah, I'm  told, has been gathering her resources while awaiting a verdict in LA for a Durst prosecution in NY. An official announcement should come soon, I'm told. 

And that’s all Kathie’s family ever wanted. Justice. They’ve waited long enough, nearly 40 years, and they sort of got it in LA. 

Now, they want to see a final end to the Durst story once and for all.  

This story was first published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in April 2003. Jouhari's daughter Pilar was shot and killed in San Antonio in 2015. A former Army medic, Pilar's life changed forever when she was forced to leave Pennsylvania with her mom. 

  In March of 2015, amid the hoopla following the last episode of HBO's The Jinx, then-FBI director James Comey announced that he was ordering every FBI bureau in the U.S. to review its cold cases and check against the known locations of one Robert Durst amid suggestions that he may very well be a serial killer.
"I know that we are doing a number of things in different field offices to run down leads," said Comey. "That is one of the powers of the FBI. We're everywhere in the United States."
   Well, maybe not everywhere. 
  The truth is that with Durst locked up in Los Angeles awaiting the resumption of his trial this month for the murder of his friend Susan Berman, the press lost interest as did the FBI, which did very little, if anything, to follow up on Comey's grand statement, which followed claims I had long made regarding Durst and the possibility he was a serial killer.
   Of course, if you do the math you can say he already qualifies, having killed Morris Black (which he admitted) as well as Berman and his first wife Kathie Durst (both of which he's denied). But there are more. That, I'm certain of. (After all, the man knew how to expertly dismember a human body). 
    But the one case that's always bugged me is the one involving Karen Mitchell, a 16-year old girl who simply vanished from Eureka, Calif., in November 1997.  I reported on Mitchell in 2003 after visiting that beautiful wasteland known as Humbolt County. Known as the pot capital of the world, it made sense that Durst would live there given his lifelong love of marijuana. But its remoteness was also a lure. It's about five-hours north of San Francisco, and his home in nearby Trinidad was on the coast where the ocean views were simply stunning. 
   I was in Eureka back then and talked about Durst and Mitchell with the police chief, who told me about a witness who, months after Mitchell disappeared, had come in to tell a strange story. It was about spotting a girl that looked like Mitchell getting into a light blue, late model car with an older man. The witness provided a composite that was the spitting image of Robert Durst (right down to the wide-rim glasses). It was so exact the police believed that witness, Randy Gomes, had known Durst. They didn’t know how or why, but they were pretty sure he knew him.
     But they never thought to ask Gomes, who quickly took off for Idaho, where he remained for years. When he eventually returned to Humbolt County, it wasn't the FBI that tracked him down for questioning.  It was NBC's Dateline program. Gomes, I'm told, became an  emotional mess when approached in 2015 by the Dateline producer, who thought he was hiding a terrible secret.  Gomes made it through the interview (see above) certain of his identification of the man in the car. And it’s clear to me that the reason he was able to give the stark composite so long ago was because he did know Durst. He simply had to. 
  So combine that with some of the other circumstantial evidence - such as Durst spotted dressed in drag inside a shoe store that Mitchell's aunt had owned; that Mitchell worked at a local soup kitchen (a place favored by Durst); and that a worried Durst, believing he was going to be charged after I reported the Mitchell connection in 2003, was told by his defense team to put it aside and focus on the upcoming Morris Black trial - and that’s a lot to chew on.
   Now, a young documentary producer from the Eureka-area,  Joshua Griffin Diaz, has been poking around on Mitchell, and he’s adding to the list of interesting circumstantial evidence. Most notably, an interview with a “tech guy” who helped Durst with his computers places a young woman who looked “exactly” like Mitchell inside of Durst’s Trinidad home working for him as a domestic. That one rang all kinds of bells and whistles for me because Mitchell’s aunt, during her Dateline interview, said her niece often visited Trinidad. "Jen used to go to Trinidad on the bus," said Annie Casper. "I mean, they could have met. It's definitely a possibility." 
  That leads me back to Randy Gomes, who just a few months after his Dateline interview was arrested in Humbolt County for felony possession of a firearm as well as cultivating and selling marijuana. According to the police, Gomes ran a large pot farm and marijuana, you recall, was Durst’s favorite pastime.
​  So if there’s a Gomes connection to be had, you can start looking there, and then go catch up with that tech guy. 
   Can someone tell that to the FBI?

  For the New Year I'm breaking out of my self-imposed social media cocoon, something that was suggested long ago (why not speak to your audience, I'm told. It's easy, and they want to hear from you). I'm not sure about the last part, but given the interest in many of the subjects I've written about, and some news to share that goes with it, why not. 

  Starting with the news, a mention that I'll be on the Dr. Oz show on Jan. 9 to discuss Robert Durst and my book A Deadly Secret. Ellen Strauss, a close friend of Kathie Durst, also appears.

And speaking of Durst, we begin the blog revival with word today that his attorneys are admitting he authored the infamous and anonymous "cadaver letter" sent to the police back in 2000 alerting them to a dead body in a Beverly Hills home. Of course, the body was his good friend Susan Berman, who had been shot in the back of the head. And yes, we all knew years ago that Durst had written and sent the letter (and had killed Berman). But now on the eve of a five-month murder trial where he's facing forever in prison, Durst's attorneys thought for some reason it was a good idea to finally cop to the letter. And that tells me he's cooked. 
  I wasn't so sure before (I gave John Lewin, the prosecutor on the case, a 50/50 shot at a conviction). But the latest development tells me the odds on Durst beating a murder charge are not good, and I'm wondering if there's a plea deal in his future (Durst agrees to tell all about the murders of Berman, Kathie Durst, Morris Black and any others, like Karen Mitchell in Eureka, Calif., in exchange for a nice comfy prison hospital, where psychiatrists can probe his brain to see where the wiring went wrong). 
  That's probably more of a hope on my part than a possibility, given he has a $100 million to throw at his attorneys. But Durst seemed to be OK with the idea of a lush prison environment following his arrest in 2015, and perhaps the realization that he could be stuck in a maximum security cell under 23-hour lockdown is enough to consider the plea. Stay tuned. 

And speaking of staying tuned...will have news on the previously announced podcast for A Beautiful Child and Finding Sharon along with some more exciting news about that project. (If you haven't read Finding Sharon yet, I suggest you do so. Ties up all the loose ends of ABC, including the FBI's devastating interviews with Franklin Floyd, Sharon's true identity, Michael's fate, and the emotional headstone ceremony in 2017.
You can order Finding Sharon by clicking here.  
​ 
​Also, for those of you on Instagram, click on matthew.birkbeck and follow me there. Like I said, old dog new tricks. 

     IT was over two years ago, in March 2016, when I finally met Megan DuFresne. It was for the taping of the Investigation Discovery "20/20 on ID" program, "The Mysterious Life of Sharon Marshall," and I flew down to New Orleans to meet with Megan and her mom Mary. I explain in my new book FINDING SHARON how Mary and I found each other, which was back in 2005. So this was a long time coming. And as you can see in the photo above, with (from left) Mary, Megan, me and Jenny Fisher, we were all pretty thrilled to finally meet in person. A year later we would all get together again in Oklahoma to change the gravestone of Megan's biological mother, who for years we knew as Sharon Marshall but whose real name was Suzanne Sevakis (Megan was the newborn baby given up for adoption in 1989 after Sharon and Floyd, now Tonya and Clarence and married, fled Florida on their way to Tulsa).
    These were events (learning Sharon's true identity, finally meeting Megan, changing the gravestone, etc) that for a long time I never dreamed would happen. But they did, and to find out how you'll have to read the new book. Suffice to say this was years in the making, and what made it happen were all of you who read A Beautiful Child.
  The story of Sharon Marshall captured so many hearts, and produced so many tears. It was you, the reader, who over the years kept her story alive with all of your emails, questions, postings here and on other websites. And that interest and devotion lead the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the FBI to do the impossible - find Sharon's true identity.
     So, to all of you, I want to say thank you. 
    This is my sixth book, and as a sequel FINDING SHARON tells another remarkable story, so I hope you all spread the word about this new work (and this blog post). There were many lows covering this story over the years. There were also many highs. And as you can see in the photo above, some of those highs were great. 

During my time as a correspondent for People Magazine my NY bureau chief Maria Eftimiades would call with an assignment. It wasn't really "do you want to do this story," but more like a command from above (she once talked me into surveilling Jerry Seinfeld's apartment on a Christmas Day because he was getting married. Saying no was not an option, but it did come with the promise of a nice bonus).
I received one of those many calls from Maria in October 2000. This one was about Robert Durst, the heir to a NY real estate fortune who was under investigation, again, for the disappearance of his first wife Kathie. The five-page story (long by People standards) ran on Dec. 5, 2000. A month later, I received a call from a screaming, crying source saying that Susan Berman, a friend of Durst's, had been murdered in Los Angeles. Thus began my 17-year journey with the Durst story. It was Maria who suggested I do a book (my first), and she even connected me with her agent. A Deadly Secret was first published in hardcover in 2002, and then in paperback in 2003, and republished again in 2015 following the airing of HBO's The Jinx.  
​Thanks to the access I had to Kathie's family and friends and the NYPD files, A Deadly Secret became the bible of the Durst case, read by the various law enforcement agencies that have investigated Durst, Hollywood types (The Jinx's Andrew Jarecki, who I first sat down with in 2005), and by Durst himself, who had two copies in his Houston condo when he was arrested in 2015. 
The film version of A Deadly Secret will air on Lifetime on Saturday, Nov. 4.  Bettina Gilois wrote the screenplay and it stars Katharine McPhee and Daniel Gillies. It centers on the Kathie/Robert Durst relationship and follows two police investigations and...won't say any more. 

​BROKEN ARROW - We said goodbye to Sharon Marshall in June. Her name here in Oklahoma had been "Tonya," and that was what was on her tombstone. But I always referred to her as Sharon.  It was the name she had used during her high school years at Forest Park, Georgia in the 1980s when she was at her best. Of course, even that name was a fraud, stolen from somewhere like the other names she had been given by the man who had taken her as a child. 

I first visited Broken Arrow, Oklahoma in 2003, and it was then when I saw the tombstone that said "Tonya." I had already spent nearly a year doing my research and interviews for what would become A Beautiful Child, and seeing the gravesite here in Broken Arrow with only a first name, and a stolen one at that, left me with a very unsettled feeling. By that time, having visited Florida and Georgia first, I knew Tonya as Sharon Marshall, and throughout the years that's what I always called her. 

On June 3, we said goodbye to Sharon, and unveiled a new tombstone with her real name, Suzanne Sevakis. How that came about, the discovery of her real name, and the new friends and family found since the publication of A Beautiful Child, will be told as part of the new book, now scheduled for 2018. Will keep you posted.