Robert Durst, who left behind a trail of corpses and the mystery of a body never found, died Monday of cardiac arrest at age 78.
His lawyer told The New York Times he died at a hospital in Stockton, California.
In 2000, Durst was convicted of the murder of a friend, who prosecutors said he killed to cover up the slaying of his wife nearly two decades earlier. Durst, prosecutors contended — and jurors believed — shot Susan Berman to keep her from talking to authorities.
The wheels of justice finally caught up to Durst in 2021, when he was convicted Sept. 17 in the Dec. 23, 2000, killing of Berman. Authorities contended Durst killed his wife, Kathie, in 1982. Her body was never found, and Durst took whatever knowledge he had of the crime to his grave.
“Susan Berman was a witness to a crime and was intentionally killed,” the jury forewoman said when announcing the guilty verdict against Durst.
The Westchester County district attorney announced Oct. 2 it had charged Durst in Kathie McCormack Durst’s killing.
On Oct. 14, Durst was sentenced to life in prison, with Deputy District Attorney John Lewin calling Durst as a “narcissistic psychopath.
“He’s 78 years old,” Lewin said. “He’s been walking around for a long time. He had a lot more of a life ... Kathie didn’t make 30. On balance, considering what he’s done, he got a lot more of a life than he was entitled to.”
The New York real estate scion became notorious nationally in 2015 when HBO aired “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” a six-part documentary that detailed his wife’s disappearance, Berman’s execution-style shooting and Durst’s killing and dismembering of a Texas man in 2001.
Durst was born in New York City, the eldest of four children of real estate magnate Seymour Durst and his socialite wife Bernice Herstein, who died in a fall when Robert was 7. He grew up in swanky Scarsdale in Westchester County.
He originally passed on the family business, opening a health food store, All Good Things, in Vermont in the early 1970s. He closed it in 1973, when his father convinced him to come back to the city and work for the Durst Organization. But he was stepped over when Seymour selected Robert’s brother Douglas to run the company.
Robert met Kathleen McCormack in Vermont, and they married in New York on April 12, 1973, Robert’s 30th birthday. Durst and his wife lived in South Salem, Westchester County, when she was last seen alive in 1982. Three weeks before she vanished, Kathy was treated at a Bronx hospital for facial bruises. She told a friend Robert had hit her but declined to press charges.
Eight years after Kathie vanished, he divorced her, citing abandonment. At her family’s request, Kathie was declared legally dead in 2017.
Her fate remained a mystery, with the theory being that Durst killed her and disposed of her body in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.
One person who might have known what happened was Berman. She was a longtime friend of Durst who helped provide him for an alibi for the time Kathie vanished. When authorities began probing the case in 2000, she was a loose end too dangerous for Durst to dismiss.
On Dec. 23, 2000, he went to the L.A.-area home of his longtime ally — the daughter of mobster David Berman, a partner-in-crime of Bugsy Siegel — and pumped a slug in the back of her head.
It would take two decades for Durst to pay for that crime, which gave him time to kill Morris Black in Texas in 2001. Black was a neighbor of Durst’s, until his body parts were discovered in Galveston Bay.
Durst claimed the shooting was self-defense and was acquitted of homicide. He was convicted of dismembering the corpse — doing such a good job with a knife, two saws and an ax that Black’s head was never found.
As a criminal, he seemed to be leading a charmed life, until HBO’s “The Jinx” changed his luck. Durst seemed eager to tell his version of the truth, speaking with director Andrew Jarecki. But the story didn’t portray Durst in the light he’d hoped.
On March 14, 2015, the day before the last episode aired, Durst was arrested and charged with Berman’s murder.
In the series, Berman’s stepson gives the documentarians an envelope Durst sent to his mother, with the handwriting matching that of an anonymous letter sent to police to alert them to Berman’s murder. Both letters also misspelled “Beverly Hills” as “Beverley Hills.”
Confronted with the letters, Durst asked the filmmakers for another interview. After the interview ended, Durst went to the bathroom unaware that his microphone was still recording. In a rambling, off-camera diatribe to himself, he closed with, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
Little did he know he was writing his own epitaph.
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