Robert Durst
Robert Alan Durst was an American convicted murderer, suspected serial killer and real estate heir. The eldest son of New York City real estate magnate Seymour Durst, he garnered attention as a suspect in the unsolved 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen "Kathie" McCormack; the 2000 murder of his longtime friend, Susan Berman; and the 2001 killing of neighbor Morris Black.
Acquitted of murdering Black in 2003, Durst did not face further legal action until his participation in the 2015 documentary miniseries The Jinx led to him being charged with Berman's murder. Durst was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. He was also charged with McCormack's murder shortly after his sentencing but died in 2022 before a trial could begin. Durst's conviction for Berman's murder was automatically vacated upon his death because his appeal was still pending.
Early life
Robert Alan Durst was born in New York City on April 12, 1943, and grew up in Scarsdale, New York. He was the eldest son of real estate magnate Seymour Durst and his wife, Bernice Herstein. His paternal grandfather, Joseph Durst, originally a Jewish tailor from Austria-Hungary, immigrated to the United States in 1902 and eventually became a real estate manager and developer, founding the Durst Organization in 1927. His three younger siblings were Douglas, Tommy and Wendy Durst.When Durst was seven years old, his mother died by suicide after jumping from the roof of the family's Scarsdale home. He later claimed to have witnessed the act, asserting that moments before her death, his father walked him to a window from which he could see her standing on the roof. However, in a March 2015 New York Times interview, Durst's brother Douglas denied that he had witnessed the suicide. As children, Robert and Douglas underwent counseling for sibling rivalry; a 1953 psychiatrist's report on Durst, then ten years old, mentioned "personality decomposition and possibly even schizophrenia."
Durst attended Scarsdale High School, where classmates described him as a loner. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1965 from Lehigh University, where he was a member of the varsity lacrosse team and the business manager of the student newspaper, The Brown and White. Later that year, Durst enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met Susan Berman, but eventually withdrew from the school and returned to New York in 1969.
Durst opened a small health-food store in Vermont in the early 1970s. He closed the store in 1973, when his father convinced him to return to New York and work in the Durst Organization. In 1992, due to Durst's erratic conduct, his father broke with tradition and appointed his second son, Douglas, to take over the company. As the firstborn, Durst felt entitled to run the company despite his disdain for it and accused Douglas of stealing what was rightfully owed to him. This resulted in Robert's estrangement from the rest of his family. He eventually sued for his share of the fortune, and was bought out of the family trust for $65 million in 2006.
Capital crimes for which Durst was investigated
For almost his entire adult life, Durst was the subject of investigation and speculation concerning three alleged crimes: the 1982 disappearance of his wife, Kathleen "Kathie" McCormack; the 2000 murder of his longtime friend, Susan Berman; and the 2001 death of his neighbor, Morris Black. Durst was ultimately tried and acquitted for murder in the Black case but was later convicted in the Berman case.Disappearance of Kathleen McCormack Durst
In late 1971, Durst met dental hygienist Kathleen McCormack. After two dates, he invited her to move into his home in Vermont, which she did in January 1972. After his father pressured him to return to New York to work at the Durst Organization, the couple moved to Manhattan, where they married on April 12, 1973.At the time of her disappearance, McCormack was a medical student in her fourth and final year at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, hoping to become a pediatrician—she was only a few months short of earning her degree. She was last seen by someone other than Durst on the evening of January 31, 1982, when she appeared unexpectedly at a dinner party, thrown by her friend Gilberte Najamy in Newtown, Connecticut. Najamy noticed that McCormack seemed upset and was wearing red sweatpants, which Najamy found odd, as she never dressed so casually in public. After receiving a phone call from her husband, McCormack left for her cottage in South Salem, New York.
Although the couple was known to have fought that evening, Durst initially maintained that he had placed his wife on a commuter train to New York City at Katonah rail station, had a drink with a neighbor and spoken to his wife at their Manhattan apartment by telephone later that evening. "That's what I told police," he later said. "I was hoping that would just make everything go away." Durst subsequently admitted he just went home and went to bed.
McCormack and Najamy were scheduled to meet the next day at The Lion's Gate, a Manhattan pub. When McCormack failed to appear, Najamy grew concerned and repeatedly called police over the course of several days. Later that week, Durst reported his wife missing. Both a doorman and the building superintendent at the couple's apartment on Riverside Drive claimed to have seen McCormack at the building on February 1, the day after she was last indisputably seen. However, the doorman admitted he had only seen her from behind and from half a block away, and thus could not be certain that it was her. A private investigator hired by Durst's lawyer later reported that the doorman said he had not seen McCormack arrive at all, and might not have been working the night she disappeared. Only three weeks after Durst had reported his wife missing, the superintendent on Riverside Drive found some of her possessions in the building's trash compactor.
Three weeks before her disappearance, McCormack had been treated at the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx for facial bruises. She told a friend that Durst had beaten her, but did not press charges over the incident. McCormack asked Durst for a $250,000 divorce settlement. Instead, he cancelled her credit card, removed her name from a joint bank account and refused to pay her medical school tuition. At the time of McCormack's disappearance, Durst had been dating Mia Farrow's younger sister Prudence for three years and was living in a separate apartment. He initially offered a $100,000 reward for his wife's return, then reduced the reward to $15,000. When one of McCormack's friends and her sister learned that she had been reported missing, they broke into her South Salem cottage, hoping to find her. Instead, they discovered the residence ransacked, McCormack's mail unopened and her belongings in the trash.
Investigation and aftermath
After McCormack's disappearance, the New York City Police Department stated that Durst had claimed to have last spoken to her when she called him from the Riverside Drive apartment. He maintained that the last time he had seen her was at Katonah station, where she was planning to board a 9:15pm train to Manhattan. He also claimed that on February 4, the supervisor at McCormack's medical school telephoned him to say she had been absent from class all week after calling in sick on February 1. Whether McCormack herself had made that call is unknown.Durst divorced McCormack eight years after her disappearance, claiming spousal abandonment. In 2016, McCormack's family asked to have her declared legally dead, a request that was granted the following year. Her mother, Ann McCormack, attempted to sue Durst for $100 million, alleging that he had killed her daughter and deprived her parents of the right to bury her. McCormack's parents have since died. Her younger sister, Mary McCormack Hughes, also believes that Durst murdered her. The New York State Police quietly reopened the criminal investigation into McCormack's disappearance in 1999, searching the South Salem cottage for the first time. The investigation became public in November 2000.
In August 2019, a wrongful death lawsuit against Durst, filed by another of McCormack's sisters, Carol Bamonte, was dismissed on the grounds that she had waited too long to sue. In 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals had revised the date of McCormack's death to match the date she disappeared in January 1982. On May 17, 2021, during Durst's trial for Berman's murder, Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocah announced that McCormack's disappearance had been reclassified as murder and would be reinvestigated. In October 2021, shortly after Durst's first-degree murder conviction in the Berman case, Westchester County prosecutors announced they would empanel a grand jury to explore charges against Durst in the McCormack case. He was officially charged with her murder on October 22, 2021.
Murder of Susan Berman
, a longtime friend of Durst's who had facilitated his public alibi after McCormack's disappearance, was the daughter of David Berman, a major Jewish-American organized crime figure who dominated illegal gambling in Depression-era Minneapolis and later took over the Flamingo Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. On December 24, 2000, Berman was found murdered execution-style in her home in the Benedict Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles after her neighbors called police to report that her door was open and one of her dogs was loose.Several days after the discovery, a letter addressed to the Beverly Hills Police Department, postmarked December 23, contained Berman's address and the word "cadaver." On the envelope, "Beverly" was misspelled as "Beverley." Durst is known to have been in Northern California days before Berman's death and to have flown to New York from San Francisco the night before her body was discovered. Berman had recently received $50,000 from Durst in two payments. Although he confirmed to the Los Angeles Police Department that he had sent Berman $25,000, and faxed investigators a copy of her 1982 deposition regarding his missing wife, he declined to be further questioned about the murder.
Durst claimed in a 2005 deposition that Berman called him shortly before her death to inform him that the LAPD wanted to interview her about McCormack's disappearance. A study of case notes by The Guardian cast doubt on whether the LAPD had made such a call, or whether then-Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro had scheduled an interview with Berman at all. After being tipped off by his sister Wendy that the McCormack investigation had been reopened, Durst went into hiding and moved to Galveston, Texas, disguising himself as a mute woman to avoid police inquiries. Berman biographer Cathy Scott has asserted that Durst killed her because she had incriminating knowledge about his wife's disappearance.