Robert Durst (1943–) scion of wealth.

Robert Durst was raised in Scarsdale, New York, his father, Seymour, a prominent real estate investor, and his grandfather an east-European Jewish immigrant.

Robert watched his mother die jumping off the roof when he was seven.

He did a degree in business and economics at Lehigh University, and studied post-graduate economics at University of California, Los Angeles where he befriended Susan Berman, who was also a grandchild of an east-European Jewish immigrant. Her father was David Berman, a colleague of Bugsy Siegal in developing casinos in Las Vegas. Susan moved to New York to further her career as a writer, where she continued to see Robert.

In 1973 Robert married Kathie McCormack, until then a dental hygienist, who had been a tenant in one of the Durst-owned buildings. For a while they ran a health food store, All Good Things. Then Kathie did a nursing degree at Western Connecticut State College, and then a medical degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

In 1981 Berman published Easy Street, about being a Mafia princess.

By 1982 the Durst marriage was under stress: Kathie was struggling to complete her degree, while Robert was having an affair with Prudence Farrow (sister of Mia), and it was reported that Robert had beaten Katie.

Kathie mysteriously disappeared a few months before she was due to graduate, and Robert quickly threw out all Kathie’s things. Susan Berman stood by him while he was the prime suspect, however no body was found and there were no witnesses.

In 1994 when Seymour Durst decided that his successor would be his second son, Robert walked out of the offices of the family firm, and never returned, and never spoke to either of his brothers again. He traveled a lot within the States, and did a lot of pot. He was seen wearing wigs and false moustaches, and dressed as female.

He kept in touch with Susan Berman, and gave her several large cash gifts. In 2000, a New York State policeman re-opened the Kathie Durst murder case again with Robert as prime suspect. Before he contacted Berman to arrange an interview, she was shot in the back of the head, assassin style, by somebody she appeared to have let in.

In 2001 Durst was living as Dorothy Ciner in a cheap rooming house in Galveston, and sometimes as Diane Winn in New Orleans. Dorothy/Diane pretended to be a deaf mute so that her voice would not give her away.

Robert had arguments with a fellow resident, the cantankerous Morris Black. Four days after buying garbage bags and saws for cutting meat, Robert killed Black, cut off his head, arms and legs, cleaned both apartments and dumped the body parts in the river in the black garbage bags which also contained a magazine with a delivery sticker for Morris Black and a hardware receipt.

Arrested and released on bail, Durst ran. Sometimes he was male, and sometimes female. He was caught when he stole a sandwich and a newspaper in Pennsylvania although he had $500 cash in his pocket, and $37,000 in his car.

He hired a good lawyer, admitted killing and dismembering Black, but pleaded self-defense and was acquitted. He was convicted of bail jumping and evidence tampering, and sentenced to five years, and of carrying a gun across state lines while a fugitive, for an extra five and a half months.

He was paroled in 2005. He made an unauthorized trip to his and Black’s previous residence, and to a nearby mall where he encountered the judge from his murder trial. This was a violation of his terms of parole and he was returned to jail for another year.

The Robert Durst story was turned into the film, All Good Things.

• Bill Hewitt. “Resuming the Search: Police Reopen the Case of Kathie Durst, Who Vanished 18 Years Ago”. People, Dec 04, 2000. www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20133152,00.html
• ‘Blood and Money’. Maxim for Men. April 2002.
• Cathy Scott. Murder of a Mafia Daughter: The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Berman. Fort Lee, N.J.: Barricade Books, 2002.
• Matt Birkbeck. A Deadly Secret: The Strange Disappearance of Kathie Durst. New York: Berkley Books, 2002.
• Lisa DePaulo. “Jail Bait: Awaiting trial for murder in a Texas prison, real-estate scion Bobby Durst reaches out for support”. New York, Apr 15, 2002. http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/crimelaw/features/5895/
• Marion Collins. Without a Trace: Inside the Robert Durst Case. New York: St. Martin's, 2003.
• Anthony Bruno. “Robert Durst – Millionaire Murderer”. TruTV Crime Library. www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/classics/robert_durst/1.html.
• “Death and the millionaire drifter”. Dateline NBC, Aug 1, 2008. Transcript at: http://sys12-today.msnbc.msn.com/id/25955003/ns/dateline_nbc-crime_reports/page/3/
• Andrew Jarecki (dir). All Good Things. Scr: Marcus Hinchey & Marc Smerling, with Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Frank Langella. US 101 mins 2010.
• Charles V. Bagli & Kevin. “That’s Me on Screen, but I Still Didn’t Do It”. The New York Times, Nov 24, 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/movies/28durst.html.
• “Cross-dressing Convict Robert Durst Returns to New York”. New York, 2/4/11. http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/02/robert_durst_returns_to_new_yo.html.

Frank Blunt (185? - ?)

On 18 January 1894 the Badger State Banner and the State News, both Wisconsin newspapers, carried the following:

'Anna Morris, alias Frank Blunt, the woman who has tried to be a man for the last fifteen years, was sentenced to the penitentiary for one year by Judge Gilson at Fond du Lac. She was arrested several months ago in Milwaukee charged with stealing $175 in Fond du Lac. It was then discovered that the prisoner was a woman, although she had worn masculine attire nearly all her life. A jury convicted her of larceny and a motion for a new trial was overruled. After the sentence had been passed, Gertrude Field, a woman who claimed to have married the prisoner in Eau Claire, fell upon the neck of the prisoner and wept for half an hour. This woman has furnished all the money for Blunt's defense and now proposes to carry the case to the Supreme Court.'

• Jonathan Katz. Gay American History: Lesbians And Gay Men In The U.S.A. New York: Crowell 1976. New York: A Discus Book.1978: 352.  Online.
• Michael Lesy: Wisconsin Death Trip. Pantheon Books, 1973 under 1894.

Ray Bourbon (?1892 – 1971) performer.

Born possibly as Hal Wadell in Texarkana, Texas in 1892, or as Ramon Icarez near Chihuahua, Texas in 1898, Ray Bourbon enjoyed embellishing his life story. He claimed that his first lover was the ranch foreman who was subsequently murdered, that Pancho Villa helped his mother at this time, and that he ran guns (in drag) for Pancho Villa, as the mysterious ‘La Senora Diablo’, that he was the illegitimate son of Franz Joseph of Austria and Louisa Bourbon, and that he was a student at the Tulane Medical School in New Orleans.

It does seem that he was in England in 1913 and managed to get small roles in shows in Music Hall. He returned to the US in 1917, and began using the name Ray or Rae Bourbon. He married for the first time, and a son was born in 1918.

Ray may have won a Photoplay contest resulting in work at a Hollywood studio. He had cameos in a variety of silent films, including as the stuntman for Estelle Taylor and a stand in for Clara Bow. He has been identified in some of the Rudolph Valentino pictures, and played an old woman in Pola Negri’s Bella Donna, 1923. As Ramon Icarez he was a ‘fire dancer’ at the opening of the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1923.

In the mid-1920s he was working with Bert Sherry and later toured with the Martin Sisters. By 1932 he was working fulltime as a female impersonator. His performance at Tait’s in San Francisco in 1933 was being broadcast live when the club was raided by the police. He was one of the big names of the Pansy Craze of the last years of Prohibition. He had a small role as a dancer in the film Golddiggers of 1937. He worked at Finocchio’s drag nightclub in San Francisco, and with Mae West in her shows Catherine was Great, 1944, and Diamond Lil, 1948.

After arraignment, 1956  Beverly Hills

In 1956 Rae claimed he had approached Johns Hopkins Hospital to have had a sex change, but was told that it was impossible. He then went to Dr Emerick Szekely, a Hungarian refugee from the Nazis living in Juarez, who had performed the operation. Rae at different times claimed that she had had the operation to avoid cancer, and to avoid local laws against cross-dressing. However he still stood to urinate, and off-stage still lived as man. In a club in West Hollywood in 1956, Rae was billed as ‘not a female impersonator’, and was charged and convicted of impersonating a female.

Rae was also charged with female impersonation in Seattle, El Paso and New Orleans in the next few years. However in Miami she was arrested for impersonating a man.

In the mid-1960s he toured with the Jewel Box Revue. He released dozens of LPs, probably more than any other female impersonator. He toured more than other female impersonators, and for many gay men in the US at that time, Ray Bourbon was the only drag act that they ever saw.

In 1967 his car caught fire in Texas. Rae saved his dogs, and lodged them with Blount’s Pat-A-Zoo. Rae couldn’t pay the bill and A.D. Blount sold them for medical research. Rae was upset by this and wrote to the Governor of Texas and the newspapers about it. In December 1968, two young acquaintances drove Rae’s car to Texas using his money, and, while roughing him up, one of them killed Blount. The two young men were convicted of murder with malice, and Rae, accused of paying the men to kill Blount, was convicted of accomplice to murder. Rae was 75 and in ill health: he had a serious heart attack while awaiting trial. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.


He accidentally escaped once when a door was left open, but merely went to sleep around the corner. He obtained a typewriter from his lawyer, and started writing his memoirs. He wrote 300 pages before dying of leukemia complicated by a heart condition.

He was married twice to women, and fathered a son. He had both male and female lovers, and was said to fancy young men, but never referred to himself as gay or bisexual.

• “Female Impersonator Gets Sex Operation in Juarez”. El Paso Herald-Post. May 23, 1956. Online at: www.queermusicheritage.us/drag-bourbon3.html.
• George Capozi Jr. ‘Female Impersonator Needn’t Fake Again – Says Surgery Made Him a Her’. New York Journal America. May 28, 1956. On the back of the LP sleeve to Let Me Tell You About My Operation. Online at www.coolcatdaddy.com/bourbon-doc-operat-ja.jpg.
• Rob Cole. “Death in prison for the queen of them all”. The Advocate. November 11-24, 1970. Online at: www.queermusicheritage.us/drag-bourbon6.html.
• “Jail ‘escape’ bitter irony; Bourbon wishes he’d been shot”. The Advocate. Dec 23-jan5, 1971. Online at: www.queermusicheritage.us/drag-bourbon6.html.
• “Rae Bourbon dead of leukemia at 78”. The Advocate. August 18-31, 1971. Online at: http://www.queermusicheritage.us/drag-bourbon6.html.
• Dick Leitsch. “The Life of Rae Bourbon: ‘One Man’s Meat is Another Man’s Cigar!’ “. Gay. September 13, 1971.
• Rae Bourbon. The Autobiography. Unpublished. 300 pp 1971. Summary at: www.coolcatdaddy.com/bourbon-autobiography.html.
• Don Romesburg. Ray Bourbon : a queer sort of biography. PhD University of Colorado. 2000.
• Randy A. Riddle. Don't Call Me Madam: The Life And Work Of Ray Bourbon. www.coolcatdaddy.com/bourbon.html.  Includes discography, and a list of possible films.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 86, 89.
• “Ray Bourbon” in “Pansy Craze”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pansy_Craze#Ray_Bourbon.

Frank Spisak (1951 - 2011) factory worker, serial killer, inmate.

Frank was the son of a factory worker in Cleveland, Ohio, who moved home because too many blacks had moved into the area. He had childhood fantasies of being a woman.  He married at 22, and they had one daughter. He read constantly on Hitler and the Nazis and his wife tried to ignore the issue. He worked in various factory jobs.

At 25 he suffered a head injury in a car accident. In 1977, he started dressing as female. As Frankie Ann, Spisak received treatment from the Gender Dysphoria clinic at Cleveland Metropolitan Hospital, lived as female full-time, changed her ID, saw a psychologist and started taking female hormones. She was also saving for surgery. She was fired from her factory job after turning up as female. Frankie Ann found employment with a maker of eyeglasses until found not to be a woman. She tried prostitution until charged with solicitation, and briefly worked as a Kelly Girl temp. When she brought a trans woman home for sex, her wife and daughter moved out.

But in 1979 the Nazi Frank took over. He collected Nazi memorablia, and played Hitler’s speeches on his stereo. He was stockpiling guns and ammunition. He was also dating a black female prostitute. In February 1982 he found a black preacher in the next stall in the men’s toilet at the Cleveland State University Library and shot him dead. In June he shot a black man at a train station, who survived. In August he returned to to CSU and shot at a female student in the ladies room but missed. He became paranoid about a maintenance worker at CSU who might identify him, and so shot him dead, again in the men’s toilets. The next night he killed a young man waiting at a bus stop.

A week later he got drunk and shot his gun out of the window of his house. For this he was arrested, but was allowed to post bond. An anonymous phone call suggested to the police that they re-examine the guns that they had taken from Spisak’s house, and they were found to match those used in the killings.

Once arrested he admitted the murders, grew a Hitler-style mustache and carried a copy of Mein Kampf. At his 1983 trial, his attorney presented him as crazy but he was not found to be ‘legally insane’. He declared that he was under orders from God, and that Jews were to blame for his transvestite episodes, having seized control of his mind. The jury quickly found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

In jail, Spisak lobbied for a sex change, filed a lawsuit to force the state to refer to him as a woman, and appealed the death sentence. In 2006 the appeal court ruled that he had not received a fair defense and struck down his death sentence. In 2010, this was reversed.

He was executed 17 February 2011. He had been 27 years on death row.

• “Brief of Respondent for Smith v Spisak, 08-724”. www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/briefs/pdfs/07-08/08-724_Respondent.pdf.
• “Frank Spisak”. Serial Killer Central. Oct 11 2004. www.skcentral.com/articles.php?article_id=131.
• Jared Klaus. “Cheating Death: A cross-dressing Nazi murdered a prosecutor's dad 25 years ago. He's back”. Cleveland Scene. Dec 06, 2006. http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/cheating-death/Content?oid=1497024.

Evgenii Fedorovich M. (1898 - ?) Soviet agent.

Evgeniia Fedorovna M. was expelled from school for refusing to wear a skirt. Her father accommodated her by educating her at home and she wrote the external gymnasium examinations. She was orphaned in 1915 and from then presented as male.

Evgenii worked for the Cheka during the Revolution as a political instructor, took part in searches of monasteries, and in operations against bandits in the southern provinces. During this time he also got his identity papers changed to male.

In 1922, the Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie (GPU, the successor of the Cheka) posted him to a provincial town, and he courted and officially married “S”, a female postal worker. Initially “S” did not doubt that Evgenii was a man, but rumours reached her and Evgenii admitted as much to her. Local authorities charged him with a ‘crime against nature’. However the Commissariat for Justice recognized the marriage as legal because it was ‘concluded by mutual consent’.

“S” had an affair and a child with a co-worker, which Evgenii legally adopted. However in 1925 the GPU regiment was transferred to Moscow. Evgenii abandoned his wife and child to follow, but was fired after arrival.

He didn’t adapt to civilian life. He started drinking, was promiscuous with woman, and took a second wife. In 1926 he was arrested for impersonating bureaucrats and party members for profit, and for disorderly conduct.

This led to his being examined by Dr Edelshtein of the Moscow Health Department’s Bureau for the Study of the Personality of the Criminal and Criminality. Throughout all this, Evgenii maintained his presentation as male. Edelshtein did not attempt a “cure”, but did get him to write a short autobiography that was included in the author’s article in Prestupnik i prestupnost.

• Evgeniia Fedorovna M. “History of my Illness” presented in Edelshtein.
• A.O. Edelshtein. “K klinike transvestitizma”. Prestupnik i prestupnost: Sbornik 2 1927: 273-82.
• Dan Healey. "Evgeniia/Evgenii: Queer Case Histories in the First Years of Soviet Power," Gender & History 1 1997: 83-106.
• Dan Healey. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press xvi, 392 pp 2001: 50, 57-8,68-72, 130,308n14.

___________________________________________________________________________________

At almost the same time, 1923, Frances Carrick in the US had her marriage recognized in that her husband was not allowed to testify.

Whatever happened to ... Frances Carrick (1890 -?).

Fred G. Thompson was born in Columbus, Ohio. At age thirteen, his father kicked him out, and he went to Chicago, started living as female and took a job as a chambermaid. Later Frances used her high soprano voice and became a singer in a cabaret.

'Once I tried to be a boy and put on male clothing. The men would not believe me and told me to go home and put on proper clothes and not try to masquerade around.'

In 1912 Frances married Frank Carrick, a chauffeur, in Crown Point, Indiana. The two of them were arrested on suspicion that there was something amiss in their relationship, but they were able to produce a valid marriage license and so were let go.

Frances as Fred later married a female, Marie Clark, and they attempted farming on five acres outside Chicago, but the task was beyond her. She also dressed as a man whilst helping her family during the big floods in Ohio in 1913. Frank, Frances as Frances and Marie ended up all living together.

In 1923, a Richard Tesmer was shot and killed by a woman assailant in a brown dress, with a male companion, while putting his car away. His wife was able to get a view of the woman’s face from the discharge of the pistol. She declared that it was a grin that she would know anywhere. The police after trying several female suspects, some of whom had been identified by Mrs Tesmer, ran out of clues, and then they got a tip to check out a 'female impersonator'.

When arrested in the middle of the night, Frances dressed in a frock to be taken to be identified by Mrs Tesmer and then to the police station. She was examined by a male and a female physician, and then moved to the men’s ward. The police searched her apartment and arrested her husband. But they could not find a single brown dress. The neighbors refused to believe that Frances was a man, or that she would use a gun. The only odd thing about her was that she needed to shave. Frank, who had a drug habit, cracked after two days, but rambled on about nonsense. He was transferred to the Psychopathic Hospital. Frances gave interviews to female visitors who wanted her opinions on being a woman. The newspapers ran photographs of her as male and as female.

She was charged as ‘Fred Thompson’ and was not allowed to appear at the trial in proper female clothing. The widow identified her as the bandit, but the defense counsel was able to concentrate on the fact that the widow described the assailant's eyes as 'blue' while the defendant's were gray. Her major defense was her performance under cross examination when she broke down and cried while insisting that she had been at home on the night in question, sick from drinking cheap moonshine. The judge addressed her as ‘lady’. Her husband took the stand to testify for the defense, but had to stand down following the State’s objection that a husband cannot testify for his wife. The jury acquitted her after two hours. Frances was surrounded by women who embraced her.

With her new notoriety, she was engaged to appear in vaudeville as 'the Smiling Bandit Queen'. But the police stopped the show. She applied for an injunction, this time appearing in court in proper female attire. The application was denied.


The Tesmer murder was never solved.


*Not Fred Thompson the Republican Senator, nor the rower nor the silent movie actor.

• C. J. Bulliet. Venus Castina: Famous Female Impersonators Celestial and Human. New York: Covici 308 pp 1928. New York: Bonanza Books. 1956: 234-8.
• C.J.S. Thompson. The Mysteries of Sex: Women Who Posed as Men and Men Who Impersonated Women London: Hutchinson. 1938. New York: Causeway Books 256 pp 8 plates1974. New York: Dorset Press, 1993: chp XXVI.
• Jonathan Ned Katz. Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. 1983, Carrol & Graf Publishers, Inc. 1994: 407-8.
• Michael Lesy. Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties. New York: W.W. Norton 2006: 157-167.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Both the defense and the prosecution cases appear rather flimsy. The crime was committed with a male companion, but there was no co-defendant. It is very difficult to identify someone by the discharge of a pistol. See the alternate opening on the American Gangster DVD for an example. There is no way that anyone could identify colours by such a light. Also what was the supposed motive?

What an amazing legal precedent that was never reused. The State of Illinois recognized the marriage of Frank and Frances.