Millionaire guilty of murder
Property heir shot female friend ‘who helped cover up wife’s killing’
THE heir to a property dynasty who confessed he “killed them all” in a TV documentary has finally been found guilty of murdering his best friend.
Justice caught up with millionaire Robert Durst, 78, as he was convicted of the killing of Susan Berman, 55, nearly 21 years ago in December 2000.
Journalist Berman, one of his closest friends, was shot in the head at pointblank range at her LA home.
Prosecutors said her fate was sealed after she planned to tell police how she helped “narcissistic psychopath” Durst to cover up the 1982 killing of his wife Kathie Mccormack, a 29-yearold medical student.
Her body has never been found. Berman is said to have posed as Mccormack the night she vanished in a call to the dean of her medical college, saying she would be off sick the next day.
Durst killed 71-year-old Morris Black, his neighbour, in Texas in 2001 but he was cleared of murder in 2003 after claiming self-defence. Black’s head was not recovered to be used as evidence.
The Berman trial heard how Durst, now frail and using a wheelchair, was arrested after HBO show The Jinx showed him muttering: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
Prosecutors at the trial claimed that he killed Mccormack and planned to flee the country following the HBO documentary from 2015.
They also argued Durst dismembered Black and threw his remains into Galveston Bay.
The family of Durst’s wife has urged prosecutors to charge him with her murder, saying: “The justice system in Los Angeles has served the Berman family. It is now time for Westchester to do that for the Mccormack family.”
During the trial, California’s Deputy District Attorney John Lewin said of Durst: “Considering what he’s done, he got a lot more of a life than he was entitled to.”
Durst, who is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison with no possibility of parole, is due to be sentenced on October 18.