Robert Durst could have benefited from a comb and his gray sweatshirt had seen better days, but the murder suspect did what he was told and stared into the camera in the booking room at the Galveston, Texas, Police Department.

Click. Just like that it was done.

Fingerprints, mug shots, a phone call to New York, bail documents — in less than 24 hours the scruffy-looking man accused of cutting up his cranky 71-year-old neighbor and tossing the pieces in Galveston Bay was on his merry way.

Police were caught a bit by surprise Oct. 10 when Durst, 58, posted $300,000 bond and walked out the front door. But then they didn't know that the suspect who drove a 1998 Honda CRV and had no phone or television in his $300-a-month apartment was really a millionaire heir to a New York real estate development empire.

There was a lot detectives didn't know initially about the prime suspect in the gruesome slaying of Morris Black. They learned much more about Durst — mainly from newspaper clippings dating back to 1982 and by talking to investigators and reporters from coast to coast — after he skipped bail and skipped town on Oct. 16.

Durst is accused of killing neighbor Morris Black, above.

The problem is that each new tidbit of information that comes in is like a jigsaw puzzle piece that might or might not belong to three different puzzles.

Putting the pieces together

Besides the murder of Morris Black, investigators in New York and California have been looking for links between Durst and two other unsolved mysteries: the 1982 disappearance of Durst's wife, Kathleen, and the Dec. 24 killing of writer Susan Berman of Los Angeles, a longtime friend.

"I hope they find him and I hope they find him alive," said James McCormack, Kathleen's brother. "All we want is closure about whatever happened to Kathie so we can have a memorial service."

When she disappeared Jan. 31, 1982, Kathleen Durst was a 29-year-old medical student in her fourth year at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in Manhattan. Young, pretty and about to embark on a lucrative career, Kathleen had a promising future. But first she had to shed a somewhat dark past, her stormy nine-year marriage to Robert Durst.

Friends told police that she feared Durst, the eldest son of Manhattan skyscraper builder Seymour Durst, and urged them to suspect her husband if she met foul play.

Alleging physical abuse, Kathleen was in the process of ending the marriage when she was last seen. Robert Durst told police that he put her on a Metro North train to Manhattan and returned to their cottage in upstate New York alone on the evening of Jan. 31, 1982.

Police initially believed that Kathleen went missing in the city but have been seen in recent years searching a lake in the since-sold cottage upstate for clues to her whereabouts, according to published reports.

An informant's tip

The investigation got a jump start with a prison informant's tip last year. Although the vague tip turned out to be a bad one, a New York state police investigator and Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro were intrigued enough to dust off the old case file.

New York's tabloids reported that investigator Joseph Becerra had consulted prosecutors in an unrelated case in which murder was proven despite the absence of a body. He was also planning on re-interviewing Susan Berman, a 55-year-old writer who served as an unofficial spokesperson for Robert Durst briefly in the 1980s. Berman, however, was found slain execution-style in her Los Angeles home in December 2000.

Police have not publicly linked Durst to Berman's murder but Los Angeles detectives went to Galveston to conduct ballistics tests on a .9-mm handgun found in Durst's Honda. Berman was killed with a 9 mm but Los Angeles police won't say if Durst's gun was the one used to kill Berman, who sometimes wrote about growing up as the daughter of Las Vegas mobster Davie Berman.

Among the many questions Galveston police have is why Durst arrived there in April to begin with. Media interest in Kathleen's disappearance was rekindled with the death of Berman, but no one was actively looking to arrest Durst when he showed up in Galveston calling himself Dorothy Ciner, wearing a poorly fitting wig and a scarf and scribbled on a piece of paper that he (she) was mute.

Durst had expensive pads in New York, Dallas, San Francisco and California, yet he was living in a sparsely furnished apartment in a seedy side of Galveston using the name of a woman he went to high school with.

"We had no idea who he was. Here was a man living in a $300-a-month apartment, who didn't have a telephone and who wouldn't have looked out of place standing on the corner outside the Salvation Army," said Galveston police Lt. Michael Putnal.

Galveston police first started looking for Durst shortly after Sept. 30, when a 13-year-old boy who was fishing spotted a torso floating near the rocky shoreline of Galveston Bay. Police recovered garbage bags containing arms and legs and evidence leading them to a four-plex on Avenue K where both Morris Black and Robert Durst lived.

Police say neighbors reported regularly arguments between Durst and Black, who was described as a cantankerous man who feared he was being billed for other tenants' electricity usage. Although there was no obvious signs of a struggle, forensic investigators discovered traces of blood in both apartments and evidence that someone tried to remove blood from walls and floors.

On his trail

Police used forensic evidence recovered from the apartments to get an arrest warrant for Durst. They found him on Oct. 9 near a motel where he was registered under the name James Turss.

Durst was indicted for murder and bond jumping Oct. 16 and remains the subject of a nationwide manhunt. Since then, police have searched for him in Galveston homeless shelters, a New Orleans hospital lobby and a campground near a home he once owned in Eureka, California.

In an effort to force him out into the open, investigators even froze nearly $2 million in bank holdings.

The trail has also taken investigators to the New York doorstep of Debra Lee Charatan, a 44-year-old Manhattan real estate agency owner who — according to police — used a power of attorney form and an unexecuted marriage license to post Durst's bond.

"Clearly he was acting like a fugitive long before Morris Black was killed. He seemed like a strange character to begin with," said Putnal, the police lieutenant. "He was acting like he was running from the police long before Galveston had reason to take an interest in him. To me, that just adds to the level of suspicion in his involvement in the other crimes."

Galveston's wanted poster on Durst states that police believe he may be armed and dangerous and notes that he may be dressed as a woman to avoid detection.

In addition to the murder charge, Durst has other legal problems. Morris Black's sister filed a notice of intent to sue Durst over the killing on Oct. 29.