Durst’s transfer to a Los Angeles-area prison is approved
Robert Durst, the real estate scion charged with shooting a confidante in the back of the head in her Los Angeles home 16 years ago, is headed to the same federal prison that once held crime boss Al Capone, former Harvard professor and LSD advocate Timothy Leary, and mass murderer Charles Manson.
Durst, 73, who has been held in New Orleans on unrelated gun charges for more than a year, will be transferred to the minimum-security federal prison at Terminal Island, outside Los Angeles, where he will await formal arraignment by Aug. 18 on murder charges in the killing of his confidante, Susan Berman.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles contend that Durst killed Berman shortly before Christmas 2000 so that she would not reveal what she knew about his role in the sudden disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen, 18 years earlier.
At the time, authorities in New York had reopened the investigation into Kathleen Durst’s disappearance, prompting Robert Durst to flee New York.
During a 16-minute hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, Durst, appearing frail and shrunken in an orange jump suit, told Judge Kirk Engelhardt that he had been “wanting to get to Los Angeles for almost a year to enter my not-guilty plea.”
Engelhardt approved a defense motion that Durst be sent to Terminal Island. The judge also approved a prior plea bargain arrangement, in which Durst was sentenced to 85 months in prison for illegally possessing a .38-caliber revolver. Durst was assessed a $5,000 fine.
Durst’s lawyer, Dick DeGuerin of Houston, said Terminal Island “has the facilities to take care of a 73-year-old man” with various health issues.
“He didn’t kill Susan Berman,” said DeGuerin, the lead lawyer in what has become a formidable defense team of lawyers from Houston, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
For more than two years, John Lewin, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County, has been building a circumstantial case against Durst that ties together Berman’s unsolved murder and Kathleen Durst’s disappearance.
After the arraignment in August, Robert Durst will for the first time get a look at the prosecution’s case, through discovery. That will almost certainly lead to a protracted period of wrangling over the evidence, which includes handwriting analysis, filmed interviews with Durst and testimony from friends and relatives.
Durst had been active in New York in the family real estate business until 1994, when his father and his uncle turned the reins of the empire over to his younger brother, Douglas Durst.
In 2003, Robert Durst, who had moved to Houston, was acquitted of murder charges in Galveston, despite admitting in court that he had carved up the body of a neighbor and thrown the body parts into Galveston Bay.
Durst has been fodder for books, television specials, and dramatic and documentary movies, including the HBO documentary miniseries, “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.”