Manhattan real estate heir and convicted killer Robert Durst who eluded justice for decades died Monday.
He was 78.
Durst, who until his arrest in 2015 in the execution-style murder of his close friend Susan Berman, had managed to escape punishment for the deaths of his first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, and an elderly Texas neighbor named Morris Black, whose body he admitted dismembering and dumping in Galveston Bay.
But Durst, who had pleaded not guilty to murdering Berman, was convicted last year of killing her two decades earlier and sentenced to life in prison. He had been arrested a day before the finale of an HBO documentary called “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” in which Durst appeared to confess that he “killed them all, of course.”
Born April 12, 1943, and raised in the swanky New York City suburb of Scarsdale, Durst was the eldest son of Seymour Durst, who ran the Durst Organization, one of the most powerful real estate empires in Manhattan. At the time of his death, Durst was said to be worth over $100 million.
When he was 7, Durst’s mother died after either falling or jumping from the roof of the family home — a tragedy he claimed to have witnessed.
His brother Douglas told The New York Times that Durst’s claim about having seen his mother’s demise was a lie. He also recounted how his brother had been diagnosed with mental problems and had repeatedly beat him and their two other siblings up.
“He would torture them more than he would torture me,” Douglas Durst said of his sister, Wendy, and brother Tom.
Before he joined the family business in 1969, Durst was briefly enrolled in a doctoral program at UCLA when he met Berman, who was the daughter of a well-known Las Vegas mob boss and became his lifelong friend.
Two years later, Durst met his first wife, who was a medical student at the time. Together they moved to his house in Vermont, where Durst had opened a health food store. But under pressure from his family, the young couple moved back to New York City and were married in 1973 on Durst’s 30th birthday.
Nine years later, Kathleen McCormack Durst disappeared, and suspicion quickly fell on her husband after he gave police conflicting accounts about when he last saw her and after investigators learned that she had been talking about a divorce. Her body was never found, and police could not pin the crime on Durst.
Meanwhile, Durst was at loggerheads with his family, an increasingly tense situation that turned into open warfare after Seymour Durst decided in 1992 to appoint Douglas Durst to run the organization. Durst responded by suing for his share of the family fortune.
Berman was found dead of a single shot to the head at her rented home on Dec. 24, 2000. This was a little over a month after word got out that the New York State Police had reopened its investigation into the disappearance of Durst’s wife.
Los Angeles police announced in February 2001 that their detectives were seeking to speak with Durst about Berman’s death, but they stopped short of calling him suspect. By then, Durst had fled to Galveston, Texas, and had taken to disguising himself as a woman to throw police off his trail.
Durst was arrested in October 2001 after garbage bags containing Black’s dismembered body parts were found floating in the water off Galveston. After he posted $300,000 bail, Durst took off and was re-arrested a month later at a Pennsylvania grocery store after he was caught trying to shoplift a chicken salad sandwich and other items, even though he had $500 cash in his pocket.
Durst was also reported to have stalked his brother Douglas while he was on the run.
Having been returned to Texas, Durst claimed that he killed Black in self-defense and was acquitted in November 2003.
Hollywood had already taken notice of the Durst drama and in December 2010 released a movie called “All Good Things,” starring Ryan Gosling as a Durst-like character whose wife suddenly disappears and who becomes a suspect in a series of murders. It was directed by Andrew Jarecki.
In 2015, HBO released its documentary about Durst, which Jarecki directed with Marc Smerling. And in March of that year, Durst was arrested at a Marriott Hotel in New Orleans and flown to Los Angeles, where he was formally charged with Berman’s murder.