The murdering multi-millionaire
Robert Durst the enigmatic star of his own macabre real-life soap opera
I did not murder my best friend. I did dismember him. Robert Durst
Robert Durst, who has died aged 78, was the American heir to a billiondollar property fortune before becoming the suspect in three murder cases.
As the central figure in a television documentary series screened in 2015, Durst was seen being presented with handwritten evidence linking him to the murder of his close friend Susan Berman in 2000.
Moments later, while remaining outwardly calm, Durst visited the lavatory where, apparently unaware he was still wearing a microphone, he muttered: “There it is. You’re caught,” adding: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
Throughout the bizarre twists and turns of his case, Durst remained the enigmatic star of his own macabre real-life soap opera.
Arrested in 2001 for the murder and dismemberment of an elderly neighbour in Galveston, Texas, Durst — who had been living in a rundown rented room disguised as a mute woman — was told by a detective that bail had been set at six figures. “Do you have $250,000?” the officer asked.
“Well, not on me,” Durst responded calmly, before making a telephone call to arrange delivery of the cash.
Durst belonged to one of New York’s wealthiest families, a dynasty responsible for much of Manhattan’s world-famous skyline. As well as the murder of Susan Berman, he was also suspected of having murdered his wife Kathie in 1982. But when he decided to tell his side of the bizarre story in The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, he made his fatal move when he apparently mumbled his confession to murder during a lavatory break in the middle of filming. Hours before the final episode was broadcast, Durst was arrested by FBI agents in a New Orleans hotel and extradited to California to face a first-degree murder charge.
Week by week for six weeks viewers had been drip-fed clues allowing them to turn detective in a real-life crime. The director Andrew Jarecki deliberately kept viewers guessing as to what Durst might reveal or what other new evidence he had discovered.
It was also, as The Daily Telegraph noted, a fascinating study of Durst himself. “The multi-millionaire came across as part arrogant, part humble; part creepy, part endearing, one minute coldly discussing his gruesome hacking of a human body, the next discussing the tragedies of his ‘poor little rich boy’ childhood with watery eyes,” its critic wrote.
The series also drew on previously unscreened video footage of Durst’s trial in 2003 at which he was acquitted of murdering a neighbour, Morris Black, 71, after jurors believed his claim the shooting occurred during a struggle over a gun and amounted to self defence.
“I did not murder my best friend. I did dismember him,” Durst testified matter of factly, recounting almost casually how he used two bow saws, a paring knife and an axe to butcher Black’s body before packing the torso into a cheap suitcase and the limbs into bin bags.
Durst was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for dismembering Black’s body (the head has never been found) but served less than three, including time he had already served, and was released on parole in 2005.
Durst denied any involvement in his wife Kathie’s unsolved disappearance in 1982 or the murder of his confidante Susan Berman, found shot dead at her home in Los Angeles 18 years later, on Christmas Eve 2000. But in one of the series’ many dramatic moments, Durst conceded he was “complicit in Kathie’s no longer being here”, while insisting he knew nothing of what happened to her.
On the eve of the final episode of the television documentary about him in the spring of 2015, Durst was arrested for the murder of Susan Berman in his room at a New Orleans hotel where he had registered under the alias Everette Ward.
FBI agents also recovered a loaded Smith and Wesson.38 revolver, a realistic mask, and more than $40,000 in cash. After pleading guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm, Durst, then 73, was sentenced to seven years in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release.
The eldest of four children, Robert Alan Durst was born on April 12, 1943 in New York. His father, the Manhattan property magnate
Seymour Durst, had inherited the Durst Organisation from his father, a tailor who had arrived in America from Austria-Hungary in 1902 with $3 to his name. The business grew to become on of the wealthiest property developers in Manhattan, with holdings including skyscrapers on Third Avenue, 42nd Street, Times Square and, latterly, One World Trade Centre.
In 1950 Robert’s mother committed suicide by jumping off the roof of their mansion in Scarsdale, an event he claimed to have witnessed (although his siblings disputed this). At the funeral he tried to prevent the coffin being lowered into the grave, yelling “get Mommy out of the box”, and thereafter repeatedly ran away from school and home. Classmates at Scarsdale High School described him as a loner.
Graduating with a degree in economics from Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, in 1965, Durst enrolled in a doctoral programme at UCLA where he met Berman, but withdrew and in 1969 returned to New York.
He joined his father’s firm, but became estranged from the Durst clan when his younger brother Douglas was appointed to run the family business, estimated to be worth around $880 million.
In 1972 he married Kathleen McCormack, a dental hygienist from Long Island, moved to Vermont with his new wife and opened a small health food store, All Good Things.
The name became the title of a 2010 film based on Durst, starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst and directed by Andrew Jarecki.
His wife’s family recalled Durst as unfriendly and socially awkward. “I don’t get along with most people. Most people don’t get along with me,” he acknowledged in The Jinx. At his trial in 2003, psychologists said Durst had Asperger syndrome, a highfunctioning form of autism whose traits include social awkwardness, inappropriate reaction to stress and emotional detachment.
But friends of his disappeared wife claimed she had been frightened of her husband, before she vanished from their marital home in Salem, upstate New York, to which she and
Durst had moved after he reluctantly agreed to his father’s calls to return to the Durst Organisation in Manhattan. He admitted he forced his wife to get an abortion in 1976 — because, he said, he did not want children for fear that he would be “a jinx” to them — and by 1981 their marriage had descended into “half arguments, fighting, slapping, pushing, wrestling”.
By the time his wife disappeared the following year, they had been living apart and Durst was dating Prudence Farrow, the sister of the actress Mia Farrow and the inspiration for the Beatles’ song Dear Prudence.
After his wife’s disappearance, Durst continued to work for the family firm, but in 1994 he left home. Over the next six years he moved around the US, living some of the time under pseudonyms and using stolen social security numbers. In December 2000 he married Debrah Charatan, but they lived together for only nine months before he left for Galveston.
After his release from jail in 2005 he divided his time between homes in Houston, Los Angeles and Harlem, living on $65 million gained in a settlement with his family.
He stayed out of the public eye, except for an incident in a Houston pharmacy in 2014 when he collected a prescription, urinated on the cash register and a rack of sweets then walked out. He pleaded no contest to charges of indecent exposure and criminal mischief and was fined $500.
In September 2021, at the end of a trial that had been delayed by Covid, Durst was convicted of murdering Susan Berman and sentenced to life; the court found he had shot her because she was willing to tell police about her role in helping him to construct an alibi for Kathie’s killing in 1982.
The following month Durst was charged with Kathie’s murder, and he died in prison while awaiting trial.