She had been reported missing by her husband, Robert Durst, now 57, a scion of a family that, like the Trumps and Rudins, has long held royal stature in New York's real estate world. 
 
 Mr. Durst told the police that he last saw his wife on a Sunday night boarding a train in Westchester, bound for their penthouse apartment in Manhattan. They had spent the weekend at their cottage in South Salem, he said, but his wife had headed back to the city, where medical school appointments awaited. 
 
 Mrs. Durst never made those appointments, and the mystery of the medical student with a gleaming smile who either abandoned or was denied a life of wealth and accomplishment captivated New York. Headlines trumpeted developments. Friends tried to retrace her steps. The police found three witnesses who said they thought they had seen or heard from Mrs. Durst in the 24 hours after she boarded the train. 
 
 But leads dwindled. Detectives retired. And though a photograph of Mrs. Durst remained on file with the New York Police Department Missing Persons Squad, the case languished. 
 
 Until Timothy Martin appeared. 
 
 After his arrest in the series of lewd acts, he told investigators a tale he said he had heard from others. Mrs. Durst, he said, never made it to Manhattan, according to people with direct knowledge of the investigation. She had been murdered, he said, and buried in Westchester. 
 
 Much of Mr. Martin's story did not check out. But the state police investigator who interviewed him, Joseph C. Becerra, and the Westchester district attorney, Jeanine F. Pirro, nonetheless decided that his story warranted a review of the Durst case. 
 
 ''And when we had a look back at the file,'' Ms. Pirro recalled, ''we said: 'My, my. Isn't this interesting.' '' 
 
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 Beginning with the odd facts and nagging questions found in the old case notes, investigators have explored gaps and discrepancies in the accounts of witnesses, and they have focused new scrutiny on whether Mr. Durst played a role in his wife's disappearance, law enforcement officials said. 
 
 Investigators have traveled coast to coast, talking to doormen in Manhattan and housekeepers in South Salem, and tracking leads not fully explored in 1982. 
 
 The last sightings of Mrs. Durst in Manhattan, which once served as the bedrock for police theories of her disappearance, now seem anything but ironclad, the officials said, and one of those eyewitnesses now says he was mistaken. 
 
 Investigators have also encountered intrigue and peculiarities. Two friends who had been given confidential financial records by Mrs. Durst for safekeeping, shortly before she vanished, have said the paperwork was stolen in burglaries. 
 
 And a close friend of Mr. Durst's, who had served as his spokeswoman after the disappearance, was found dead in a homicide in Los Angeles on Dec. 24, 2000, just as the police made plans to interview her. 
 
 But after more than a year of study, investigators still appear to have more questions than answers, conflicting evidence endures, and the city police still list the disappearance as a missing persons case. 
 
 ''The fact that we are actively involved in this case means we are looking for some resolution,'' Ms. Pirro said. ''What that resolution is we still don't know.' 
 
 Mr. Durst has declined to be interviewed by investigators on the advice of his lawyer, according to people involved in the case. Neither he nor his lawyer, Joel Cohen, would comment for this article. But he has repeatedly said he had no role in his wife's disappearance. 
 
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 Ms. Pirro does not call him a suspect. ''I am not ruling him in or ruling him out,'' she said. But people involved in the case said her office was intrigued by his official accounts and by evidence of turmoil in the Durst marriage. 
 
 The Hippie Life in Vermont 
 
 Robert and Kathie Durst met when she lived in a Durst-owned building in Manhattan. She was a bright and ambitious dental hygienist from Long Island, who went on to nursing and medical school. He was the athletic, droll, faintly reclusive oldest son of Seymour Durst, the patriarch of the Durst real estate empire. They married in 1972, moved to Vermont and opened a health food store called All Good Things. 
 
 ''They started out as two people who really cared for each other, living a hippie life in Vermont,'' said Eleanor Schwank, a friend of Mrs. Durst's. 
 
 Seymour Durst, however, did not like the idea of his son as a shopkeeper, relatives say, and persuaded him to return to New York to help expand a portfolio that included some of the city's best-known skyscrapers. 
 
 By 1980, though, the marriage was dissolving, and Mrs. Durst hired a lawyer in 1981 and considered divorce. Court records in a subsequent proceeding over control of her estate show that she told friends and family that Robert Durst had beat her, and three weeks before she disappeared, she said he had punched her, forcing her to seek treatment. 
 
 Mr. Durst denied hitting his wife, asserting that she invented the assaults to increase a possible settlement. Longtime friends of the couple also said in interviews that they never saw Mrs. Durst with injuries. 
 
 But friends said it was clear that Mrs. Durst distrusted her husband. Two friends told investigators that she had given them confidential information about Durst holdings for safekeeping during her estrangement. Those files were later stolen from their homes in burglaries that occurred within a year of the disappearance. 
 
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 One friend, Kathy Traystman, said the file was taken from her dresser drawer at the same time that a stereo and jewelry were stolen. 
 
 The other, Gilberta Najamy, said her file was stolen when two boxes of items relating to the disappearance were taken from her home in Newtown, Conn. 
 
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 A Sudden Disappearance 
 
 On the evening of Sunday, Jan. 31, 1982, Mrs. Durst attended a party at Ms. Najamy's home. Ms. Najamy says she remembers that Mr. and Mrs. Durst argued on the phone that day, and then Mrs. Durst said something chilling before heading home in her Mercedes-Benz: ''Promise me, Gilberta, if something happens you will check it out. I am afraid of what Bobby will do.'' 
 
 Mr. Durst told the police in 1982 that when his wife arrived that night at their stone cottage overlooking Lake Truesdale, they shared a meal. Then he drove her to the 9:15 p.m. train at the Katonah station. After returning, he said, he had a drink with neighbors, and later called his Riverside Drive apartment, and said he spoke to his wife while she was watching the late news on television. 
 
 Law enforcement officials say that investigators, then and now, developed serious questions about Mr. Durst's account. In 1982, when the police interviewed Mr. Durst, a state trooper noted that any calls to Manhattan would be reflected in phone records for the South Salem house. But Mr. Durst said he had actually called from a pay phone while walking his dog. Investigators were skeptical because, they said, the nearest pay phone was several miles away, and the night was rainy and cold. 
 
 Mrs. Durst's family said at the time that Mr. Durst gave them a different account. He told them, the family said, that he had placed the call to Manhattan from a restaurant in South Salem. 
 
 In a second discrepancy noted by investigators in 1982, the neighbors in South Salem did not remember having had a drink with Mr. Durst. They remembered, though, seeing a blue light they had never seen before emanating from an earthen crawl space under his house the next night. 
 
 But in 1982 there were indications that Mrs. Durst had made it to Manhattan. Eddie Lopez, her building's elevator operator, told the police that he saw Mrs. Durst that night when he escorted a man to her apartment. She opened the door in her nightgown to let the man in, he said. The building superintendent also told the police he thought he had seen Mrs. Durst walking along West 76th Street the next morning. 
 
 ''At the time, one or two of them were believable that they had seen her,'' said Michael Struk, the detective, now retired, who led the 1982 investigation. 
 
 Also, Albert Kuperman, a dean at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which Mrs. Durst attended, told the police in 1982 that he had spoken to her on the phone that Monday when she called in sick. 
 
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 Consequently, detectives said they were confident Mrs. Durst had disappeared from Manhattan, not Westchester. So they never searched the South Salem house, a decision that some of Mrs. Durst's friends and relatives now view as a glaring oversight. ''There were always a lot of unanswered questions, but we had to move on because I did not have the luxury of working one case,'' said Mr. Struk, who has helped in the current investigation. 
 
 Perhaps the most significant development in the current investigation is the erosion of confidence in those eyewitness identifications, law enforcement officials said. The elevator operator now says he does not think it was Mrs. Durst he saw. And the superintendent, law enforcement officials say, only saw Mrs. Durst from behind and largely based his identification on his recognition of her beige coat. 
 
 Dr. Kuperman, though, said in a recent interview that he still thought that the woman who called him was Mrs. Durst. ''It never occurred to me that it wasn't her,'' he said. 
 
 The Investigation Begins 
 
 Mr. Durst reported his wife missing at the 20th Precinct headquarters in Manhattan on Feb. 5, five days after he said he had seen her boarding the train. The case was assigned to Detective Struk, who had recently solved the murder of a violinist at the Metropolitan Opera. 
 
 Mr. Durst said he did not get in touch with the police earlier because occasionally the couple went days without contact. But investigators, both then and now, have tried to track how he spent that time. 
 
 Law enforcement officials said they were particularly interested in collect calls that were placed to Mr. Durst's office during this time from pay phones at the Jersey Shore, outside a self-service laundry and a motel. Mr. Durst was known to call his office collect, but investigators have not determined who placed those calls or whether Mr. Durst had gone to the shore. 
 
 In the days after his wife vanished, Mr. Durst posted a reward for help in finding her. Many friends recall him as anguished, and said they never considered that he might have had a role in her disappearance. ''Bobby didn't kill Kathie,'' said Nick Chavin, a close friend. ''He loved her.'' 
 
 At times, friends recalled, Mr. Durst speculated that his wife, an occasional cocaine user, might have been killed by a drug dealer. At one point, his lawyer took cocaine to detectives, saying it had been found in the apartment. At other times, as in a 1982 newspaper interview, Mr. Durst said his wife, unhappy with her life, might have just run away. ''I think Kathie's alive,'' he said. 
 
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 But the Family Differs 
 
 Mrs. Durst's family and friends had a darker view. In 1983, during a surrogate proceeding, her sister, Mary Hughes, said in an affidavit, ''that the questionable circumstances surrounding my sister's disappearance and her husband's behavior and reactions following this event strongly suggest that my sister may have been murdered, and that Robert Durst is either directly responsible for her death or privy to information concerning her disappearance.'' 
 
 She contended that Mr. Durst had refused to take a police lie detector test and had quickly disposed of some of his wife's possessions. 
 
 Mr. Durst's lawyer branded the allegations fiction. In his own affidavit, Mr. Durst said: ''I am not privy to any information concerning Kathie's disappearance which I have not disclosed to Kathie's family, to the Police Department and to those who, at my own expense, I have engaged to investigate her disappearance.'' 
 
 A decade later, Mr. Durst abruptly left the family business when it became clear that his younger brother, Douglas, would become the head of the company. He then largely dropped out of sight, although he keeps homes in New York and California. 
 
 Kathie Durst's family was overjoyed last year when investigators began taking another look at the case. ''This whole issue has been just below the surface for 20 years,'' said her brother, James McCormack. 
 
 Investigators with dogs have now repeatedly searched the South Salem house, and they removed a piece of an interior wall for testing. The searches were prompted by Mr. Martin's account, but investigators have declined to discuss the results in detail. Mr. Martin, who officials said was related by marriage to a former Durst housekeeper, ultimately pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child. He could not be reached for comment. Mr. Becerra would not comment on the matter. 
 
 Investigators have also refused to discuss why they sought to question Susan Berman, the friend of Mr. Durst's who was found murdered in her Los Angeles home just as they made plans to interview her. The murder remains unsolved, but Los Angeles detectives have said they do not see a connection between the cases. New York investigators have gone there to seek leads in their case and have reviewed information obtained from Ms. Berman's computer. 
 
 After 19 years, Ms. Pirro said investigators are still determined to solve the mystery. ''This woman was a vibrant young medical student,'' she said. ''For her to disappear off the face of the earth just doesn't make any sense.'' ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Andrew Blankstein, Robert Dean and Tracy Connor 
 
 The so-called secret witness in the Robert Durst case was revealed Wednesday to be an advertising executive who was introduced to him through a mutual friend — the woman Durst is accused of murdering. 
 
 Nick Chavin, 72, took the witness stand at a pretrial hearing and testified that he had met "Bobby" more than three decades ago through his pal, writer Susan Berman, and became such good friends that Durst was the co-best man at his wedding. 
 
 Durst, 73, a scion of a massive real estate empire, is charged with murdering Berman in Los Angeles in 2000. Prosecutors claim that he was worried that she would implicate him in the death of his first wife, Kathie, who vanished in 1982. Durst denies killing either woman. 
 
 Chavin — who told the New York Times in 2001 that "Bobby didn't kill Kathie" — testified Wednesday that Kathie told him that she was physically afraid of her husband. 
 
 Durst, meanwhile, described Kathie as "impossible," Chavin testified. 
 
 "It was always a strange relationship," he said, adding that Durst said he had an open marriage and would go to bars with Chavin hoping to meet women. 
 
 Related: Durst Hearing Focuses on Mystery of 1982 Phone Call 
 
 Chavin also testified about Durst's close relationship with Berman, saying there was nothing she would not have done for him. 
 
 Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney John Lewin asked Chavin whether he ever discussed with Berman whether Durst might have been involved in his wife's disappearance, but the defense objected to the question. 
 
 Chavin, who arrived in court with two armed security guards, is back on the stand Thursday for what's expected to be the final day of the hearing. Prosecutors requested the hearing to get early testimony from several witnesses who they said were in danger of falling ill or dying or were scared that Durst could harm them — even though he is serving a seven-year sentence on a gun possession charge. 
 
 Chavin's identity was not revealed until he took the stand. 
 
 Earlier, the judge heard from a woman who worked for Chavin, met Durst through him in 2002 and became what she called his "closest friend." 
 
 Susan Giordano testified that she visited Durst in Texas while he was jailed for the 2001 death and dismemberment of his elderly neighbor, Morris Black. 
 
 She also said that, over time, Durst gave her $350,000 in gifts and loans — of which she repaid $2,000 — and that at one point she discussed with Durst and his lawyers the possibility of getting money from him for the rest of her life. 
 
 She said that although she and Durst had a platonic relationship, they talked about having a "love nest," and she said she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. 
 
 Related: The Millionaire Drifter Who Can't Run From His Past 
 
 Giordano was called to the stand because she had stored boxes full of Durst's personal papers — and allowed producers of the HBO program "The Jinx" to go through them before they were seized by police in 2015. 
 
 The defense claims that the contents of the boxes were privileged and should not be used as evidence at Durst's trial, but prosecutors contend that Durst waived that privilege when he gave "The Jinx" producers access. 
 
 "The Jinx" examined Durst's ties to his wife's disappearance and Berman's death, as well as the 2001 death and dismemberment of Black. The series ended with Durst blurting out on a hot microphone that he "killed them all." ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.
– The bizarre story of Robert Durst took a new turn this week as the much-talked-about "secret witness" emerged with details on Durst's first marriage. Per NBC News, 72-year-old Nick Chavin showed up at the real estate heir's pretrial hearing for his murder case Wednesday—through a back door for security reasons, CBS News reports—saying he was once extremely close to the man he calls "Bobby" and that they were introduced through writer Susan Berman, the woman Durst is accused of killing. Chavin, who said he considered Durst one of his best friends, shed some light on Durst's marriage to Kathie Durst, who disappeared in 1982 (and whom Durst is also suspected of killing). Prosecutors think Berman was murdered because Durst feared she'd link him to Kathie's death. Chavin, who told the New York Times in 2001 that Durst hadn't killed Kathie, offered testimony in a somewhat different tone Wednesday, noting Kathie had confided in him she feared Durst (though she'd never said Durst had hurt her) and that her husband was "impossible," the Los Angeles Times reports. Chavin described the Dursts' marriage as "strange," per NBC, noting Durst told him it was an open relationship and would go with Chavin to clubs looking to hook up. CBS notes Chavin's testimony was part of a "rare proceeding" in which testimony is gathered from older witnesses who might not live till the trial, as well as witnesses who fear for their safety. A woman named Susan Giordano also testified, per NBC, claiming she'd become Durst's "closest friend" after meeting in 2002 and had wanted to spend her life with him. (Durst says he was on meth during The Jinx filming.)