Helping Durst was a drag!
Cross- dresser taught killer to use makeup
Crossdressing killer Robert Durst tried to pass himself off as a deaf, mute woman named Dorothy Ciner in Texas — but he wasn’t fooling his dragqueen friend.
“What stuck with me the most was the fact that he was just horrible in drag,” Clair Edward Schuler told The Post Tuesday from Galveston, Texas, where he first encountered the creepy millionaire some time in the late 1990s.
“He literally smeared blue eye shadow and red lipstick on and called it a day. He wore a nasty, ratty wig. I think he was just trying to be more inconspicuous than noticeable. It didn’t work.”
Durst ( inset) turned to Schuler, now 50, for fashion and makeup tips after the two met at Garza’s Kon Tiki bar, where Schuler performed drag under the name Cici Ryder.
“He was very, very introverted and very weird,” said Schuler, who was friends with Durst for a few months. “He just kind of took up more of a camaraderie with me because I was the older one. I was the dragqueen mom.”
Durst— who had fled to Galveston in 2000 and began dressing like a woman to avoid attention after prosecutors reopened the investigation into the disappearance of his first wife, Kathie, in 1982 — became obsessed with looking more feminine, Schuler recalled.
So the licensed cosmetologist taught Durst how to play up his killer babyblue eyes with brown eye shadow and to contour his cheeks to look less masculine.
Dressed as a woman and sipping vodka-cranberries, Durst became a wellknown figure at the drag-show bar— but not because of his sunny disposition.
“We knew he was a good tipper, so we paid a little more attention to him,” said Schuler. “He tipped us really well, like 10, 20 dollar bills when we were doing our shows.”
But shortly after their makeup lesson, Durst disappeared.
“I think he was too far gone by then with the murders and everything,” said Schuler, adding that Durst never mentioned his wife’s disappearance or Morris Black, the Galveston neighbor he killed and chopped up.
“Iwas like, ‘ Holy crap! That guy was sitting right here!’ ” Schuler said. “I’m afraid for myself right now, to tell you the truth.”
Durst was arrested in New Orleans last month on a warrant for a 2000 LA murder.