Nearly 20 years ago in a remote California town the millionaire once called home, Karen Mitchell disappeared. Now, as he sits behind bars after the revelations of The Jinx, her family speaks out on the search for their missing daughter

Long before he became a fixture of tabloid headlines and faced murder charges in two separate cases, Robert Durst bought a house in Trinidad, California. It was still standing there when I visited recently, a blue three-story clapboard structure with floor-to-ceiling windows on most of its sides. The windows afford views of the rugged coastline that surround this tiny town, where the population has never exceeded much more than 400 people.

The house is quite exposed, which isn’t Durst’s preferred state. He is a man who likes disguises and hiding; when he was arrested a few weeks ago in New Orleans, he had a rubber mask and fake identification on him. The eccentric millionaire has gone to great lengths over the years to conceal his activities. His ability to hide complicated the investigations in the three worst crimes he has often been accused of committing: the disappearance of his wife Kathie Durst in 1982 and the murders of his friends Susan Berman in 2000 and Morris Black in 2001.

Durst has never been charged in his wife’s disappearance; was acquitted by reason of self-defence in Black’s death; and was charged last month in Berman’s death. (Durst is currently in New Orleans, held on local gun and drug possession charges which are interfering with his extradition to California. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)

Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx, the HBO investigative documentary which appears to have, at least in part, spurred authorities to bring those charges, made great dramatic use of the opacity of Durst’s life. His on-camera interviews were compelling because his answers, often delivered with a curious blankness, only managed to raise more questions about his activities.

The attention around Durst’s sudden arrest made it seem like some firm answers would finally be forthcoming. But within days there were still more questions, many of them taking as their subject just what, exactly, Durst was up to here in this remote town. And those questions have pulled one family’s 18-year agony into the Durst media frenzy, on threads so thin it is unclear if they promise the family any real resolution.

That family is looking for their daughter, their sister, their niece. Her name was – is – Karen Mitchell.

Just a footnote in a strange case

The case of Karen Mitchell, at left with her mother and brother, has remained a footnote in Robert Durst’s story. Photograph: Courtesy of Mary Casper

The Jinx itself mentions Trinidad, and Durst’s life there, only once: as the place where Durst picked up his car and perhaps drove the 650 miles south to Susan Berman’s house in Los Angeles around the time she was murdered. At the time, December 2000, he had just sold the house.

And I could find only one person in Trinidad last month who would still admit to knowledge of Durst. A business manager told me she’d never met him herself but had had a friend who knew him.

“She’s dead,” this woman said of her friend. And though I could swear my expression did not change, the woman hastened to add: “But he didn’t kill her.” She told me there were others in Trinidad who had been friends with Durst, but “whether or not they’d admit it now is another story”.

But if they are still there, those friends may soon find themselves forced to talk. Because within days of his high-profile arrest in New Orleans in March, the police department in Eureka, California, about 20 miles south of Trinidad, said it was interested in speaking to Durst about Mitchell, who disappeared while walking to work in November 1997.

The chief of Eureka police, Andrew Mills, was quick to tamp down expectations. “It’s just as a potential possibility,” he told the local paper on 17 March. “I don’t want to call it a lead. In my opinion we need to be very careful not to overreach, because it creates false expectations.”

Mitchell was five days short of 17 years old when she disappeared from Eureka. Her case was never quite a national story, but it shook the area. Investigators have never quite figured out what happened to her; she just walked away from her aunt’s shoe store one afternoon, headed for a job, and that was it.

Journalists, private investigators and psychics have speculated on connections between Mitchell and Durst.

Chief among them is a man named Matt Birkbeck, who has been following Durst for years and wrote a book about him called A Deadly Secret, which was released in February as the Jinx aired on HBO.

Birkbeck has constructed a web connecting Karen to Durst, but it’s speculative, and fragile. He writes in A Deadly Secret that there are credit card records putting Durst in Eureka the day Mitchell disappeared; he notes that Karen was thought to have volunteered at a homeless shelter that Durst may have frequented. Most critically, Birkbeck argues that Durst resembles a composite sketch provided to police some time after Mitchell disappeared. The sketch was drawn up by police from the account of a man who said he thought he saw someone force a girl matching Karen’s description into a car.

The book, the documentary and Durst’s arrest were enough to arouse interest at the Eureka police department. Reports in the local Eureka paper say they have revived her missing persons’ file, and the investigation is newly active. (The chief of the Eureka police department did not return repeated requests for comment.)

So far, Karen Mitchell is just another footnote in the strange Durst case, or at least she is to the hordes who have followed his exploits closely over the years.

For her family, she’s something else entirely: a person.

‘She probably is pretty pissed’

Karen Mitchell didn’t enjoy having her picture taken, her mother said. Photograph: Courtesy of Mary Casper

Karen Mitchell hated having her picture taken, her mother, Mary Casper, told me over coffee in San Francisco, with Karen’s brother, James, sitting beside her. In the few pictures the family has, Karen is always looking off to the side, her expression not surly exactly, but with lips pursed in a thin, reluctant line.

But every missing person becomes a creature of photographs, the ones on the poster and on the website family or friends set up in hopes that they will return.

In the first, blurry 48 hours after Karen disappeared in 1997, her daughter’s potential anger was all Casper could think about. As she and a family friend drove the 650 miles from Los Angeles to Eureka, they put those posters up at every rest stop.

“Oh, well, you better frickin’ call me,” Casper says she would tell Karen, in her head, as she taped them up.

When Karen’s name was all over the press a few weeks ago, Casper kept thinking how annoyed she’d be. “She probably is pretty pissed,” Casper said, shaking her head and smiling as a tear escaped.

Casper gave birth to Karen’s brother James at 16, and Karen at 18. She divorced their father early on and mostly raised them as a single, working mother. For years, the three bounced around Orange County, California, close to Mary’s large extended family. As a small child, Karen was the shy one; James was more gregarious.

But by the time she was 13, Karen had become feisty, argumentative, with a strong independent streak. Her particular obsession was the environment. She was the kind of girl who owned a worm farm, who was evangelical about composting. She did not care about clothes and rarely wore makeup; her uniform was jeans and a t-shirt and occasionally, a hemp necklace. She liked the Smashing Pumpkins and REM.

These qualities were not unusual in anyone who grew up in the grunge-y alternative 1990s. But they made Karen something of a square peg in Long Beach, the suburb of Los Angeles where she and her mother were living as she entered high school. She began to act out a bit. Mary, meanwhile, was working a lot. The situation was not ideal.

At some point in 1994 or 1995 – no one seems to remember the precise date – Mary’s brother Bill and his wife Annie suggested that Karen come and live with them in Eureka. Mary describes the decision to send her up there as “organic”. Bill and Annie had three sons of their own, but they were all on their way out of the house. And the house they had, about a ten minute drive from Eureka proper, down several country roads, is enveloped by leafy ferns and trees. It was the perfect setting for a budding environmentalist.

A detective says he still has ‘sleepless nights’ over the case.

Bill and Annie Casper did not comment directly for this article, but by all accounts Karen settled in well with them. She was a good student. She was neither popular nor an outcast. Karen had friends, and was well-liked by her own circle, a student a couple of years ahead of her at Eureka high school told me. Her crowd was the sort of granola-hippie dreadlocked types who were common in high schools across North America in the late 1990s.

“The word I would use is ... alternative,” the fellow student said.

By the fall of 1997, Karen was growing tired of high school and the town. Mary Casper said she was planning to finish high school within a semester, and was talking about applying to Humboldt State University. She seemed to have a vague idea of studying political science or, perhaps, law.

On the morning of November 25, 1997, Karen chatted with her mom on the phone about college financial aid applications. It was a Tuesday, but Karen was off school for Thanksgiving break. She still had to get to her job at a daycare in town, though. So she rode into Eureka with her aunt and hung out at the shoe store Annie owned for a little while before setting off on foot to the daycare. She walked north on a street that in Eureka is sometimes referred to as Broadway, but which is really a stretch of US 101 that runs through the town.

With the exception of that one eyewitness who gave the composite sketch, no one has ever reported seeing or hearing from Karen Mitchell again. She had money in a savings account that she had never touched. She had a plane ticket home to southern California for Christmas.

Annie Casper realized Karen was missing when she went to pick her up from the daycare about three hours later and learned Karen had never made it there. Annie called Mary to ask if she’d heard from Karen. Soon thereafter, Mary found herself in that surreal drive up the coast. She stayed in Eureka six months.

There were searches, dogs, leads, a hotline, an information center, but nothing led to Karen. Eventually, the center closed. Eventually, Mary went home. She and James have now been waiting for longer than Karen was in their lives – more than 17 years – for some kind of answer about what happened to her.

‘Places a person could disappear into’



Trinidad and Eureka are both in Humboldt County, a part of California known as a stronghold of the marijuana production industry. The region is filled with redwoods and greenery and beaches of light-colored sand punctuated by dark, jagged rocks. It is famously liberal, attracting itinerants and Vietnam veterans and sundry sorts of dissenters from the American mainstream since the tumultuous 1960s. A common nickname for the area is the “lost coast”.



The area is known as a place to hide – the novelist Denis Johnson once wrote of these towns that they were “places a person could disappear into” – and undoubtedly that was part of what attracted Durst here. He has often professed his love for marijuana. (Police found 5 ounces of it in Durst’s New Orleans hotel room when they caught him on the run in March.) He’s also got a reputation for enjoying the company of transients, of the down-and-out. In reports of Durst’s life in Galveston from the Morris Black trial, one journalist described him as “communing with the bums in the downtown alleys and on the street corners”.

What is Robert Durst still hiding? Read more

The Guardian’s reporting of Durst’s more recent activities in Houston found him travelling around with “bodyguards”. And an investigator with the San Francisco DA’s office found at least one woman among the transients of Humboldt County who said she recognized Durst.

By the late 1990s, Durst clearly thought of the area as a kind of home. According to a 2001 interview with Diane Bueche, a friend who sold him his house, he was there 50% to 60% of the time. He also maintained an office in Eureka. He once filled out a lease application with the lie that he had been a “chief botanist” for a Eureka lumber company for 15 years.

In 2001, Durst was on the run from murder charges in the death of Morris Black when a campground manager in nearby Salyer claimed to have spotted him. Bueche, who died in 2002, owned that campground.

But all the things that seemed to make the area attractive to Durst are exactly what seem to have stymied the search for Karen Mitchell. In an area marked by a private, transient population, there have long been rumors or spottings of her. At school, a former classmate told the Guardian, many of Karen’s classmates believed she had simply run away.

Although her mother and brother, James, don’t really believe she ran away, there is something patently more appealing about the possibility that she is alive somewhere, simply hiding, than the idea that she is dead.

“For a long time it was: ‘I’m not chasing a body,’” Mary said, “‘I’m chasing a person.’”

But those leads can have their own heartbreak: One involved two sisters who, seeing Mary on the Sally Jessy Raphael show, called in to say that they’d been asked for money by a girl answering to Karen’s description in Tempe, Arizona.

So the family went to Tempe. It was the summer of 2001. They stayed at a motel, and they went out and talked to the large transient population that was then in that city. They told the motel manager why they were there. They showed Karen’s picture everywhere. They interviewed local kids, who did say they’d seen someone who looked like her.

And then one day while they were out, Mary said, “we got a phone call from the motel manager, and he says: ‘I think Karen’s here.’” They rushed back to the hotel. “I couldn’t breathe the whole time,” Mary said. James said he was “almost fainting”.

The hotel manager insisted they call police. When they came, the officers were the ones who knocked on the door of the motel room while Mary and James waited in the parking lot. They saw the door open; they saw the police officers talking with someone inside. And then the girl stepped out. It wasn’t Karen.

“She walked by right everybody and she walked right up to me and said: ‘I’m so sorry,’” Mary said. And then, the girl who wasn’t Karen hugged her.

‘She looks like she could be one of mine’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert Durst is transported from Orleans Parish Criminal District Court to the Orleans Parish Prison after his arraignment in New Orleans. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

For a long time, the lead investigator in the disappearance of Karen Mitchell in Eureka was a detective named Dave Parris. He was eventually made the chief of the Eureka Police department, then moved on to county coroner, a position from which he retired last year.

The Guardian could not reach Parris for comment on this article, but over the years he has given many interviews on the case where he has said that he is convinced Karen met with some kind of foul play.

“I’ve spent so many sleepless nights just thinking about what I missed, what hasn’t been reported, the leads I had,” he told the Eureka Times-Standard in 2012. “How could I not think about it? This was a young, bright and intelligent girl with a bright path in front of her.”

More recently, he told an ABC affiliate that he had never believed Durst was involved with Mitchell’s disappearance because he couldn’t place him in California at the time. But Parris had other leads. In 1999, a man named Wayne Adam Ford walked into the Humboldt County Sherriff’s office with a woman’s breast in his pocket. He subsequently confessed to the murders and dismemberments of four women in the area, all of them transients and sex workers.

Mary Casper said she was told Parris gave Ford a polygraph test, which he passed. In fact, Mary said, she heard Ford told investigators he was actually sorry that he could not help with more information about Karen.

That secondhand conversation was not enough, though. On the chance that it might change his answers, Mary decided to go see Ford at the southern California prison where he was being held in the summer of 2000. Her sisters went with her. She held up a photograph of Karen to the glass and asked him if he’d killed her daughter. “That’s another surreal moment in my life,” she said, staring at a serial killer, hoping her mere presence there might move him to share some crucial fact that would take her to Karen.

Instead, according to Mary, Ford replied, “she looks like she could be one of mine.”

Ford was after something else. He wanted Mary to write to him, and implied that an extended communication would get her more information. She thought about it, about getting a post office box. But then she decided against it.

“You decided against being pen pals with a serial killer?” James asked, his tone incredulous, when we talked about this episode.

“I’ll do whatever I can to help the police,” Mary said. She thought perhaps “a mother’s plea” might spark some human feeling in someone, give them reason to say more.

“I feel the same way about Durst,” she added.

Both Mary and James Casper acknowledged the link to Durst is speculative, but they welcome the renewed interest his arrest brings to her disappearance. They told the Guardian that investigators have asked them not to comment specifically on the status of the investigation, but they have been in touch with the FBI and the Eureka police department.

“We haven’t been able to rule him out,” Mary said. From her gut, she says, it’s a “50/50 chance”. They have certainly been in touch with the authorities as things have heated up on Karen’s case again. But: “They’re not gonna tell me a lot either,” Mary said.

We talk about the obvious issue of closure, and now, nearly 20 years later, both Mary and James are ambivalent.

People often think that the family must be desperate for answers. But “I don’t know if I do or not,” James says. “Unless it’s a good closure.” He pauses. “You know, there’s still that small chance she did go to the Peace Corps or she will come back some day,” he says.

“Part of me wants to know, and part of me doesn’t,” Mary adds a little later. Because: “We can’t have both. We can’t have closure without details.”

• To contact the Eureka police department with information about Karen Mitchell, call (707) 441-4300