Shocked she ‘dated somebody like that’
Linda Walker Zevallos says slaying suspect was ‘showing his nice side.’
HOUSTON — New pieces of the Robert Durst puzzle have come from Linda Walker Zevallos of Dallas, a divorcee once courted by the real estate heir.
Zevallos said that in 2008 when she learned Los Angeles police were investigating Durst’s involvement in the 2000 slaying of Susan Berman, she provided them with a letter Durst had sent her earlier that year. Prosecutors last month charged Durst in the killing of Berman, who was a close friend from their days at UCLA.
A key piece of evidence cited in their warrants is writing on a letter sent to Beverly Hills police at the time saying a cadaver was in Berman’s home — writing that appears similar to a letter Durst mailed to Berman before her death.
Zevallos said Durst told her in August 2000 that he planned to visit Berman, months before the writer was found shot in her Benedict Canyon home.
This is Zevallos’ conversation with The Times: How did you meet Robert Durst?
I went with some newspaper friends to the national newspaper convention in New York, and I was returning from New York when he sat right next to me. What did he tell you about himself ?
He said he was a labor lawyer with two daughters who went to Harvard, were lawyers and lived in Geneva [Switzerland].
On the plane he did tell me that a friend of his wife was missing. I sort of shrugged. Then he told me that again. When he said it again I asked, “Well, where did she go?” and he said, “They don’t know.” What happened after you arrived in Dallas?
When I got my stuff together and got off the plane, he was standing there waiting for me. He said, “Would you like to go out some time?” I wasn’t sure .… The next day I get probably $500 worth of orchids. They were from San Francisco.
They were beautiful. They had his card with it. So he called you a couple times after that and you agreed to have lunch with him?
He asked me to lunch across the street from where he lived. I met him at his apartment and walked across the street to Eatzi’s [restaurant].
He said he once owned a health food store in Vermont and he told me the name: All Good Things.
I said something about him being a labor lawyer and he said, “Well, I really work in real estate and my father had buildings, highrises in Times Square.”
He wasn’t smoking marijuana. He wasn’t drinking too much. He was nice.
He was putting on his nice side. Did anything else odd happen when you were going out?
He asked me [one night at dinner] what I was going to have.
I said the sea bass, and he said, “Well you can’t have that, that’s what I’m going to have.” I said, “Well I don’t care,” and he kicked me under the table. We didn’t say anything, we just sat there. I was mad and he was mad and I thought, “This is going to be a long night.” He got over it and it ended up being a nice night. He changed his order.
It wasn’t like we were going to share food.
He sent the letter the next day by courier.
He called and said, “Did you get the letter? Did he hand it to you?”
He was mad because he wanted [the courier] to hand it to me.
In the letter he talked about how it must be difficult what you’re going through being head of household. He used to say I [Durst] should really be married, financially, he was very focused on that — head of household.
I was going to Cape Cod with some newspaper friends. He asked me to call him from Cape Cod, he had his number and asked me to save time for him in August. He ended it with “Your friend, Bob.” What happened to that letter?
I had thrown this letter in with some pictures and with all that was going on in Galveston [Texas, where Durst stood trial in 2001, accused of murdering his neighbor], I didn’t know where the letter was so I didn’t call investigators. It wasn’t until several years later that I found it — we were going through pictures. I just put it in a drawer in my bedroom.
I ran across a report about the “cadaver” letter [sent to Beverly Hills police after Berman’s slaying] that said it was written in green ink. I thought, “Oh, I have to go look at the letter and see if it was in green ink.” And there it was — green ink.
So I called [Los Angeles police Det.] Paul Coulter and said I knew Bob in Dallas years ago and had this letter. He got mad at first and said, “Well why haven’t you contacted me before?” and wanted me to send him the letter. So I did. When was that? About 2008. I was just shocked that I had gone out with somebody like that.
Did he ever talk about Susan Berman?
We were walking one day and he got a call. He says, “I’ve got a friend, Susan Berman, she wrote these books — one of them is ‘Easy Street.’ ” He said she lives in L.A. and they were friends from college, from UCLA.
He said her father was in the mafia, the Jewish mafia. He said that she was having some problems and that he needed to go to L.A. and see her. When was that? August 2000.