LOS ANGELES — A jury on Friday found Robert Durst guilty of murdering Susan Berman, finding true the prosecution’s case that the heir to one of Manhattan’s most famed real estate empires put a bullet in the back of his best friend’s head to keep her from telling the police about the death of his wife nearly two decades earlier.
Durst was not in the courtroom Friday, after it was revealed he had been exposed to someone who had tested positive for COVID-19. After a five-month trial that included an 11-week presentation from prosecutors and 15 days of testimony from Durst himself, the jurors deliberated for just eight hours over a span of three days.
To prove their theory of why Durst killed Berman, L.A. County prosecutors spent weeks trying to convince the jury that Durst also killed his wife, Kathie Durst, who disappeared in New York in 1982.
While the trial ostensibly centered around the murder of Berman, who was found in her Benedict Canyon home, blood pooling around her head, on Christmas Eve in 2000, it became a probing account of Durst’s entire life, one characterized by enormous wealth, strained relationships with family and a curious pattern of those closest to him turning up missing or dead.
For five months, jurors in an Inglewood courtroom heard testimony from prosecution witnesses, watched hours of Durst’s recorded interviews with law enforcement and filmmakers, scrutinized yellowing documents and, finally, heard from Durst himself.
Durst, 78, testified that he flew to California in 2000, intending to spend time with Berman, whom he had met at UCLA in the 1960s. He let himself into her Benedict Canyon home with a spare key, he said.
“I did a double take. I saw Susan lying on the floor,” he testified. “I shouted ‘Susan!’ a couple of times, then I quickly ran to the bedroom where she was. Her eyes were closed.”
Unable to reach the police with Berman’s landline, Durst said he drove to a payphone on Sunset Boulevard. He wavered, not wanting the police to recognize his voice, and decided instead to mail a letter to the Beverly Hills Police Department, telling them a “cadaver” was inside Berman’s home, he testified.
Prosecutors argued this account defies logic. The only person with a motive to kill Berman, the only person with the ability to get inside Berman’s home without a struggle, was Durst, Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian argued last week to the jury.
The prosecution sought to prove that nearly 19 years before she was killed, Berman had helped Durst cover up the death of his wife. By his own admission, Durst had abused Kathie, physically and emotionally. Prosecutors argued that Durst killed his wife inside their home in South Salem, a town in New York’s Westchester County, in 1982. The next day, a woman called a dean at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where Kathie was studying to become a doctor.
The caller identified herself as Kathie and told the dean she was too ill to come to class. That caller, the prosecution argued, was Berman.
The son of a notorious Las Vegas gangster, Berman had been raised to value loyalty above all else, friends testified. She held Durst’s secret for years, the prosecution argued, but as they slid by, as Berman’s writing career foundered and her finances grew increasingly bleak, she began leaning on her old friend for money.
Durst saw his friend in a new light in 2000, when New York authorities reopened the dormant investigation into his wife’s disappearance, the prosecution argued. Berman told Durst she’d been contacted by the police. They wanted to talk about Kathie.
“That was the moment Susan Berman sealed her fate,” Balian told the jury.
On the last day of her life, Berman would have opened the door to her old friend, Balian said. Her home reflected the grim state of the end of her life: a mattress on a bare concrete floor, towels over the windows. Durst would have waited until Berman turned her back to him, Balian said, then put his gun within an inch from the back of her head and pulled the trigger.
