NY EYES ON DURST
Jury probes wife Kathie’s ’82 vanish
Westchester County prosecutors will impanel a grand jury in the coming weeks to hear evidence against Robert Durst in the 1982 disappearance of his first wife, reports say.
Durst, 78, the eccentric millionaire scion of The Durst Organization, one of the Big Apple’s wealthiest real-estate empires, has long been suspected in Kathie Durst’s disappearance and death.
He has never been charged in the case despite various cold-case investigations.
Westchester District Attorney Mimi Rocah announced in May that she had reopened the case into Kathie’s disappearance and decided in recent days to convene a grand jury, sources told The Associated Press.
News 12 Westchester first reported on the grand-jury development.
Durst remains in a Los Angeles jail following his first-degree murder conviction in September for the 2000 slaying of Susan Berman, a close friend who was reportedly about to blow the whistle on his role in Kathie’s death.
Durst faces the possibility of a life sentence in Berman’s death when he goes before a California judge on Thursday.
“He’s a narcissistic psychopath,” LA Deputy DA John Lewin said after Durst’s conviction. “He killed his wife, and then he had to keep killing to cover it up.”
Durst was also tried for killing and chopping up neighbor Morris Black in Galveston, Texas, but was acquitted after claiming self-defense.
Kathie was 29 when she went missing from the couple’s South Salem home near the Connecticut border on Jan. 31, 1982.
Durst claimed he drove his wife to the train station and later spoke to her on the phone.
In the 2015 HBO documentary miniseries “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” the ailing Durst admitted he made up those details about Kathie, saying he was “hoping that would just make everything go away.”
Durst divorced Kathie in 1990, claiming abandonment.
Her body has never been found, and her family had her declared legally dead in 2017.
The Westchester County DA’s Office did not respond to a request for comment from The Post on Sunday.