Robert Durst lived most of his life as the wealthy, estranged eldest son of one of New York's leading real estate families. Three deaths came to define him. His first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, a medical student, vanished in January 1982 and has never been found. His close friend Susan Berman, a writer, was shot dead in her Los Angeles home in December 2000, weeks after New York investigators reopened his wife's case. His neighbor in Galveston, Texas, Morris Black, was killed in September 2001 while Durst was living there in disguise; Durst admitted killing him and cutting up the body, and a jury acquitted him of murder.
The legal record is unusual and has to be stated precisely. A Los Angeles jury found Durst guilty of the first-degree murder of Susan Berman on September 17, 2021, and he was sentenced to life without parole on October 14, 2021. He died on January 10, 2022, while his appeal was pending, and under California law the conviction was abated, or vacated. The verdict existed, but in law he died unconvicted. In New York, he was charged in October 2021 with the second-degree murder of Kathleen Durst and was indicted by a grand jury on November 1, 2021. He died before he could be tried. In Texas he was acquitted of murder in the killing of Morris Black. He was never finally convicted of any killing.
Durst was born on April 12, 1943, the eldest son of Seymour Durst, whose family firm, the Durst Organization, grew into one of New York City's major commercial landlords. Bloomberg described it in 2022 as managing about 15 million square feet of office and retail space in Manhattan and as a co-developer of One World Trade Center. He grew up in Scarsdale, in Westchester County.
His mother, Bernice, died when he was 7, after a fall from the roof of the family home. Accounts differ on what happened and on what he saw. Durst later said that he had watched her fall. His younger brother, Douglas, testified in 2021 that their mother fell from the roof when Douglas was 5 and Robert was 7, and that her death traumatized the family. The New York Times reporter Charles Bagli, writing in Los Angeles Magazine in 2019, described her as "slipping, or jumping" from the roof.
The two brothers, about 18 months apart, did not get along. Douglas told the Los Angeles jury that they had fought since childhood and that Robert treated him "miserably."
Durst earned an economics degree from Lehigh University in 1965, where he played lacrosse, according to the Associated Press. He entered a doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met Susan Berman, but dropped out and returned to New York in 1969. He went to work in the family business.
His place in the firm did not last. In the early 1990s his father chose Douglas, not Robert, to lead the company. The AP dates the decision to 1992; Bagli places it in late 1994, when Seymour and his brother David named Douglas the heir apparent. Robert felt betrayed, Bagli wrote, never returned to the office, and skipped his father's funeral in 1995. He later sued for his share of the family fortune. He received a settlement that Bloomberg put at $60 million and other reports at $65 million, and he cut ties with the family in the mid-2000s.
Kathleen McCormack, known as Kathie, came from a working-class family on Long Island, according to Bagli. She met Durst in 1971, and they married in 1973. She was about nine years younger than he was.
She did not stay in the role of a rich man's wife. She trained in nursing and then entered medical school in New York City. Bagli names the school as the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, with graduation set for June 1982; a 2018 appellate court decision refers to Mount Sinai. Her sisters told the court that becoming a doctor had been her lifelong goal, and that she was about two months from graduating when she vanished. Her family has described her as gifted and nurturing, someone who wanted to care for others. Her brother Jim McCormack later planned a foundation in her name to help aspiring doctors and nurses who faced financial barriers.
Her sisters said they spoke with her several times a month and were close to her. Friends and family have said the marriage was in trouble by the early 1980s and that she was preparing to divorce him. Douglas Durst testified that Kathie had told him she planned to leave Robert. Her brother Jim has said that Durst was physically and mentally abusive toward her. Bagli reported that over Christmas 1981 Durst pulled her out of a family gathering by her hair, and that she later went to Jacobi Hospital with bruises. Nick Chavin, a friend who was co-best man at the wedding, testified in 2017 that Kathie told him she was physically afraid of her husband. Durst denied abusing her. At his 2021 trial he said she had made up or exaggerated those stories.
Kathie Durst was last seen on Sunday, January 31, 1982. That evening she was at a dinner party in Newtown, Connecticut, and left after a call from her husband, according to the AP. The couple had a cottage in South Salem, in the Westchester County town of Lewisboro, and an apartment in Manhattan.
Durst told the police that the two argued at the South Salem house and that he put her on a train to Manhattan that night. He reported her missing five days later, Bagli wrote. He told a detective in the days after that he had spoken to her by phone at the Manhattan apartment that night. At his trial in 2021 he admitted that this was a lie. "I wanted to convince him that Kathie had gotten back," he testified. He also said he had changed his mind many times about whether he actually saw her board the train, and that the answer was no.
Early investigators accepted his account. In January 2022 the Westchester County District Attorney, Miriam Rocah, released a 13-page report on what had gone wrong. It said police and prosecutors relied too heavily on Durst's version of events, searched New York City instead of Westchester, and kept to that theory even when there were "red flags." It found that Manhattan neighbors had said she once knocked on their window seeking protection from her husband, and that South Salem neighbors contradicted Durst's claim that he had stopped at their house for drinks after taking her to the station. The report also described questionable statements from Susan Berman suggesting that Kathie had run off with another man.
The next morning someone called the medical school, said she was Kathie and reported that she was sick. Albert Kuperman, an associate dean of the school, testified in a 2017 hearing about receiving that call. Los Angeles prosecutors later argued that the caller was Susan Berman, posing as Kathie at Durst's direction, to make it look as if Kathie had reached Manhattan. The defense said it could not be proven who made the call. No court decided the question; Durst's death ended both cases before it could be tested in New York.
Kathie Durst never returned. Her car and personal effects were gone, and no one heard from her again. Durst divorced her in 1990, claiming abandonment. In 2017, at her family's request, a Manhattan Surrogate's Court judge, Nora Anderson, declared her legally dead. In May 2018 the Appellate Division, First Department, set her date of death as January 31, 1982, the day she disappeared, finding clear and convincing evidence that this was the most probable date. The court noted that Durst had not submitted an affidavit to refute or explain the evidence. It found it would be "incomprehensible" that she would walk away from her studies so close to her goal.
Susan Berman was the daughter of David "Davie" Berman, a gangster and Las Vegas hotel operator who was a partner of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. Her mother, Gladys, had been a tap dancer. Bagli wrote that she grew up largely unaware of her father's criminal life; he was a doting parent, and her portrait hung near the reservation desk at the Flamingo. Her father died during surgery in Las Vegas in 1957, when she was 12, and her mother took her own life a year later. Berman was raised in boarding schools on a trust fund.
She met Durst at UCLA in the late 1960s and they became close friends. A friend later said Durst adored her. She studied at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, worked at the San Francisco Examiner and moved into magazine writing. She moved to New York in 1978 and wrote for New York magazine and Cosmopolitan. In 1981 she published a memoir, Easy Street: The True Story of a Mob Family, about growing up as Davie Berman's daughter. She later returned to Los Angeles to write screenplays.
Her personal life had hard turns. A marriage in 1984 ended within months. In 1987 she met a financial adviser, Paul Kaufman, whose two children, Sareb and Mella, moved into her Brentwood home; she became a mother figure to them. That relationship ended in 1992, her trust fund ran out and she lost the house. By 2000 she was in debt and could not pay her rent. Durst sent her two checks of $25,000 each that year.
After Kathie Durst disappeared, Berman acted as Durst's spokeswoman. Investigators later said she stage-managed his interviews with reporters, and she told police that Kathie used cocaine and that the disappearance was drug-related. Nick Chavin testified in 2017 that Berman told him on at least three occasions that Durst had killed Kathie, and that when he asked how she knew, she said, "He told me." These accounts were never tested against Durst in a New York court.
In 2000 the Westchester County District Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, reopened the investigation into Kathie Durst's disappearance, according to the AP. Pirro later said she felt a connection to Kathie: "She was in med school not long after I was in law school." Bagli reports that a New York State Police investigator, Joe Becerra, reopened the case in October 2000. Other accounts place the renewed attention in late 1999 or November 2000, when the reinvestigation became public. Investigators planned to interview Susan Berman.
Durst moved quickly. In December 2000 he married Debrah Lee Charatan, a New York real estate broker. Kathie's family later alleged in a lawsuit that Charatan married him to help him evade the authorities; she has never been charged with any crime, and her lawyers called the claims rumor and speculation.
Susan Berman was shot once in the back of the head in her rented house on Benedict Canyon Drive in Los Angeles in the days before Christmas 2000. There was no sign of a struggle, and the police believed she knew her killer. She was 55. On Christmas Eve, neighbors called the police after her three wire fox terriers were found running loose and her back door open, and officers found her body.
An anonymous note mailed on December 23, 2000, had already reached the Beverly Hills Police Department. In block capitals it gave Berman's address and the word "CADAVER." The envelope misspelled the city as "Beverley." For years the note was the case's central clue. Detectives compared it with handwriting samples; an analyst at first pointed to her manager, who was cleared, and later named Durst as the probable writer. No one was charged for 14 years.
The case stalled until a document came to light through Berman's stepson. Sareb Kaufman found among her papers an envelope Durst had mailed to her in 1999. Its block lettering resembled the cadaver note, and it carried the same misspelling of Beverly Hills. The envelope was presented in the HBO series The Jinx in 2015, and the filmmakers confronted Durst with it. Detective Paul Coulter later said that comparing the cadaver note with other handwriting had made Durst the top suspect.
By late 2000 Durst was living in Galveston, Texas, under an assumed identity. Gary Cartwright of Texas Monthly reported in 2002 that in November 2000 he rented an apartment in a fourplex at 2213 Avenue K for about $300 a month, presenting himself to the landlord as a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner. (Houstonia magazine dates his arrival to April 2000.) The real Dorothy Ciner had attended Scarsdale High School with Durst and had never been to Galveston. He used other disguises too. At a local charity he appeared as a mute man in large taped glasses.
Morris Black moved into the apartment across the hall about two months later. He was 71, thin and wiry, and known around town in khaki shorts and hiking boots, spending long hours at the library. Relatives told Texas Monthly he had worked as a merchant seaman in the late 1940s or early 1950s. He never married and moved often. Acquaintances described him as quick to anger and suspicious of others; he had been convicted in South Carolina in 1997 of making a threat against an electric company over a small overcharge. He also handed out secondhand eyeglasses to people who could not afford them. At trial, prosecutors described him as abrasive but not violent; the defense portrayed him as volatile. According to the defense, the two became friends over a shared interest in guns.
According to Durst's own account, given at trial, on the night of September 28, 2001, he found Black in his apartment with a gun. They had argued recently. Durst said he struggled with Black for the weapon and it went off, striking Black in the head. He said he panicked, cut up the body with a bow saw and an axe, and put the remains in bags that he dumped in Galveston Bay.
On September 30, 2001, a 13-year-old boy fishing in the bay saw a torso in the water by the rocks. Police divers recovered bags holding the arms and legs. The head was never found. Investigators identified the remains as Black's and found bloodstains in both apartments and in the hallway between them. Prosecutors at trial argued that Durst shot Black to steal his identity, and that he went back for the head because it could identify the victim. The AP later reported the prosecution's view that Black had discovered who Durst really was.
Police arrested Durst in Galveston on October 9, 2001, while he was driving a silver Honda. A search of the car turned up a 9mm handgun, a small amount of marijuana and a bow saw. Bond was set at $300,000. His wife arranged it and he was released. When he failed to appear at his arraignment on October 16, prosecutors sought far higher bail, but he was already gone.
Durst drove east. Texas Monthly traced him to Mobile, Alabama, where he rented a car using Morris Black's expired South Carolina driver's license and Medicare card, and then to Atlantic City and to places from his past, including Lehigh University, his boyhood home in Scarsdale and the family property in Katonah, New York.
On November 30, 2001, at a Wegmans supermarket near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, he was caught shoplifting a chicken salad sandwich and a newspaper. He had shaved his head and eyebrows. He had $500 in his pocket, and a search of his rental car found about $37,000 in $100 bills, two .38-caliber revolvers, marijuana and Black's driver's license. He gave the police his real name. In jailhouse conversations later recorded in Texas and reported by the Houston Chronicle, he said he had carried a pistol while shoplifting so that he could shoot himself if caught.
The murder trial opened in Galveston in the fall of 2003 before State District Judge Susan Criss. The district attorney, Kurt Sistrunk, and prosecutor Joel Bennett faced a defense team led by the Houston lawyer Dick DeGuerin. Prosecutors argued the killing was deliberate. "You don't butcher somebody, put him in pieces, bag him up, dump him in the bay, because there's an accident," Bennett told the jury.
Durst testified for nearly four days. He described the struggle over the gun and how he dismembered the body. At the defense's request, the jury was asked to consider only murder, not a lesser charge such as manslaughter. After nearly six weeks of testimony and deliberations over parts of five days, the jury found him not guilty of murder on November 11, 2003. Durst, then 60, stood with his mouth slightly open as the verdict was read, hugged his lawyers and said, "Thank you so much." DeGuerin praised the jurors for looking at the case for what the charge was. Judge Criss said in 2015 that she did not think prosecutors had been adequately prepared to face Durst's large defense team.
The acquittal settled the murder charge only. In 2004 Durst pleaded guilty to bail jumping and evidence tampering, the second count covering the dismemberment of Black's body. He received five years, with credit for time served. Judge Criss, who had been removed from the case hours before the plea after the defense accused her of bias, said she would have rejected the deal as "too light." He was also prosecuted federally in Pennsylvania for having guns while under indictment and a fugitive, and the AP reported that he pleaded guilty in that case in 2004. He was paroled in Texas in 2005.
In the years that followed he lived in Houston and elsewhere. The settlement with his family left him with tens of millions of dollars.
In 2010 the director Andrew Jarecki released All Good Things, a feature film loosely based on Durst's life, with Ryan Gosling playing a fictionalized version of him. In commentary recorded for the film's DVD, Durst said it was "very, very, very close" to what had happened. He then agreed to cooperate with a documentary by Jarecki, against the advice of his lawyers and friends, and sat for several long on-camera interviews.
The result was The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, a six-part HBO documentary series that aired in early 2015. In a final interview, Jarecki showed Durst the envelope next to the cadaver note. Durst agreed that both misspelled Beverly Hills and that the writing looked very similar, but denied writing the cadaver note. "I wrote this one but I did not write the cadaver one," he said. He said that whoever sent the note had been "taking a big risk."
After the interview, Durst went to a bathroom with his microphone still on. The final episode, broadcast on Sunday, March 15, 2015, closed with the recording. As aired, he said: "There it is. You're caught!" and then, "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course."
The recording became the most quoted moment in the case, and also one of its most disputed. Jarecki said on CBS that an editor found the audio many months after it was recorded, while the series was being finished. In 2019, The New York Times reported that transcripts of the raw footage filed in the Los Angeles case showed the remarks in a different order from the broadcast: the editors had taken the two sentences from different parts of a longer stretch of muttering. According to that report, the filmmakers said they had placed "killed them all" last for dramatic effect and that about 10 seconds separated the lines. Bloomberg noted that a 2018 hearing had found the statements in the raw audio in a different order from the documentary. When prosecutors played the audio to the jury in March 2020, the City News Service reported that it began with "There it is, you're caught" and that he later said "Killed them all, of course" and "What a disaster" before leaving the bathroom. Durst said his words had been misheard. Journalists also questioned how the series ordered other events; the Columbia Journalism Review noted in 2015 that the finale appeared to reverse the order of a 2013 arrest and the last interview.
On Saturday, March 14, 2015, the night before the final episode aired, the FBI found Durst at a hotel in New Orleans, where he had registered under the name Everette Ward. Los Angeles police said he was arrested on a murder warrant because of concern that he would leave the country; federal agents believed he might be heading for Cuba. He had a .38-caliber revolver, a latex mask, more than $40,000 in cash and a small amount of marijuana. After his arrest, a package containing $117,000 in cash arrived for "Everette Ward."
A Los Angeles police official told the Los Angeles Times that the arrest had nothing to do with the series. The filmmakers said they had shared evidence with the police before the broadcast. On Monday, March 16, Los Angeles County prosecutors filed a first-degree murder charge accusing Durst, then 71, of lying in wait with a gun and murdering a witness. Those special circumstances made a death sentence possible if prosecutors chose to seek one. Durst agreed in a New Orleans court to be sent to Los Angeles. "Yes, I signed that," he told the judge. DeGuerin said Durst "didn't kill Susan Berman" and was ready to go to trial.
Louisiana first held him on state weapons charges, and the case moved to federal court. On February 3, 2016, Durst pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt to illegally carrying the revolver as a convicted felon, and agreed to a sentence of 85 months. He forfeited the $117,000. In November 2016 he was flown to Los Angeles and pleaded not guilty to murder. "I did not kill Susan Berman," he said in court that year.
The prosecutor was Deputy District Attorney John Lewin, with Habib Balian. The judge was Mark E. Windham of the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
In February 2017 Nick Chavin, an advertising executive who had known both Durst and Berman for decades, testified at a special pretrial examination. His identity had been kept from the defense until shortly before, because prosecutors said they feared for his safety. Chavin said that in late December 2014, after dinner in New York, he reminded Durst that he had wanted to talk about Berman. He quoted Durst as saying, "It was her or me. I had no choice." When Chavin asked about Kathie, Durst said nothing and walked away. Under cross-examination, Chavin denied inventing the account: "I didn't ever come up with a story." He said he still felt a bond with Durst: "It sounds ridiculous, but yes."
At a 2018 hearing Windham heard from two friends of Kathie Durst, two former New York Post reporters who had interviewed Durst in the 1980s, and others. He ordered Durst to stand trial. Emily Altman, the wife of Durst's longtime lawyer Stewart Altman, testified before trial that Durst told her he had stayed at the Beverly Hilton, less than three miles from Berman's home, around the time she died. Durst was charged only with Berman's death, but at trial prosecutors were allowed to present evidence about Kathie's disappearance and Morris Black's killing.
The trial opened in early March 2020. Lewin told the jury in his opening that Durst killed his wife and then killed Berman because she knew. DeGuerin told the jury that Durst had not killed Berman and did not know who had, that he found her body and panicked, and that he sent the cadaver note so she would be found. Before trial the defense had conceded in a filing, for the first time, that Durst wrote the note; DeGuerin said this was not an admission of murder. Within days the Covid-19 pandemic forced the court to stop.
The jury waited 14 months. The trial resumed on May 17, 2021, in a larger courtroom in Inglewood to allow distancing. Windham questioned the jurors about whether they could serve another four to five months and dismissed one. The defense asked repeatedly for a mistrial, arguing that the long pause had damaged Durst's right to a fair trial and that his health, including bladder cancer, required hospital care. Windham refused each request. Lewin argued that the health requests were a way to end the trial.
The prosecution called dozens of witnesses. Douglas Durst testified in June 2021, reluctantly and only under threat of a subpoena. He had not seen his brother in about 20 years. He described a childhood of conflict and recalled how Robert told him, in a "very neutral" tone, that Kathie had vanished. He said he still feared for his life. "He'd like to murder me," he told the jury, and he had come to California with a security team.
Chavin's account was put before the jury. Prosecutors also said Durst had twice shown up outside Douglas's home in 2008, once wearing a ski mask. Prosecutors argued that Berman had begun to press Durst for money and was preparing to tell investigators what she knew.
Durst testified for about three weeks, starting on August 9, 2021. He told the jury that he did not kill Berman or his wife. For the first time he admitted that he had been in Los Angeles at the time of Berman's death and that he wrote the cadaver note.
His account was that he came to her house a few days before Christmas for a planned visit, let himself in with a key she had given him and found her dead on a bedroom floor. "I did a double take when I saw Susan," he said. He said he could not call 911 because the cordless phone was dead, that he left when he heard neighbors, and that he wrote to the police instead so she would be found without anyone knowing he had been there. "I have difficulty believing it myself," he said. He also said, "It's very difficult to believe, to accept, that I wrote the letter and did not kill Susan Berman." He denied that she had been blackmailing him: "I had no reason to kill Susan Berman."
Lewin's cross-examination was long. Durst admitted he had lied under oath before. "I did not kill Susan Berman. But if I had, I would lie about it," he said. Asked why jurors should believe him, he said, "Because what I'm saying is mostly the truth." Windham later called the cross-examination "devastating."
Closing arguments were given on September 8, 2021. The jury deliberated for about seven hours over several days (the AP reported three days, Courthouse News four days and seven and a half hours). On Friday, September 17, 2021, it found Durst guilty of first-degree murder and found true the special circumstances of lying in wait and killing a witness, along with the use of a firearm. Durst was not in court: he was isolated in jail after exposure to someone with Covid-19, and Windham took the verdict over the defense's objection. Windham called it "the most extraordinary trial I have ever had, ever seen or even heard about."
Lewin said that jurors he spoke to afterward told him they believed Durst had killed his wife and had murdered both Berman and Black. "He killed his wife and then he had to keep killing to cover it up," Lewin said. The jurors' views on Kathie Durst and Morris Black were not part of the verdict and had no legal effect. Defense lawyer David Chesnoff said the defense believed there was "substantial reasonable doubt" and would appeal.
Durst was sentenced on October 14, 2021. He was 78, gravely ill, and wheeled into court in jail clothing. He coughed hard during the hearing and pulled down his mask to gasp for air. Windham denied a motion for a new trial, saying the prosecution had proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and imposed the mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Of the defense's 15 alleged errors, he remarked, "You said the court erred so many times it made me feel self-conscious."
Sareb Kaufman, Berman's stepson, spoke for her family and described losing her as "a daily, soul consuming and crushing experience." Kathie Durst's family was not allowed to make statements at the hearing, and their lawyer said they would not attend. Lewin called Durst a "narcissistic psychopath." A notice of appeal was filed. Two days after sentencing, Durst was taken to a hospital with Covid-19 and was put on a ventilator.
On October 19, 2021, New York State Police Investigator Joseph Becerra filed a one-page felony complaint in Lewisboro Town Court charging Durst with the second-degree murder of Kathleen Durst. It was the first time he had been charged in her case. Rocah had started a cold case unit after taking office in January 2021 and had empaneled a grand jury. On November 1, 2021, the grand jury returned an indictment for second-degree murder, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Rocah called it a "huge step forward" for Kathie Durst and for victims of domestic violence. Durst was never arraigned in New York. He remained in California custody, moved to a prison hospital after his Covid treatment. His lawyer Chip Lewis said of his health, "Not sure he will make it."
Robert Durst died on January 10, 2022, aged 78, at a hospital in Stockton, California, outside the state prison medical facility where he was held. His lawyer said the cause was natural and linked to several health problems; Bloomberg, citing The New York Times, reported cardiac arrest.
In New York, Rocah said: "After 40 years spent seeking justice for her death, I know how upsetting this news must be for Kathleen Durst's family." Douglas Durst issued a statement: "Bob lived a sad, painful and tragic life. We hope his death brings some closure to those he hurt."
Durst died before his appeal could be heard. Under California law, a conviction is abated, or vacated, if the defendant dies while it is still under appeal, because it never became final. DeGuerin described it as basic law: if a conviction is not final when the defendant dies, it never will be. The Berman verdict was abated, and in law Durst died without a conviction for her death. The Westchester indictment also ended with his death.
Lewin said the outcome changed the legal record but not what the jury had found. "Durst will not stand convicted of murder," he said, and "the only reason for that is because he died." He added that any suggestion that the abatement lessened Durst's responsibility was "absurd."
On January 19, 2022, Rocah released her office's report on the decades of delay in Kathie Durst's case, describing "missed opportunities" and "tunnel vision" in the original investigation. Kathie's family, who were not invited to the press conference, were angry. Their lawyer, Robert Abrams, said there was "absolutely no doubt that Robert Durst murdered Kathie," accused others of helping Durst avoid prosecution and called for Rocah to resign.
On January 31, 2022, the 40th anniversary of her disappearance, Kathie's siblings filed a wrongful death suit in federal court in White Plains against Debrah Lee Charatan as the nominated executor of Durst's estate. They alleged that Durst killed Kathie at South Salem on January 31, 1982, and that Charatan had helped him avoid justice; they sought more than $100 million. An earlier suit filed in state court in 2019 had been dismissed as too late, with a note that it could be revived if Durst faced criminal charges. Charatan's lawyer called the new allegations "more suitable for a work of fiction."
On March 31, 2023, U.S. District Judge Kenneth M. Karas denied the estate's motion to dismiss the case, Bamonte v. Charatan. The ruling was procedural. Karas held that the court had jurisdiction, that the claim was timely because New York law allows a wrongful death suit within a year after related criminal proceedings end, and that the abatement doctrine did not prevent the suit because Durst had never been convicted of Kathie's death. He made no finding on whether Durst killed her. The opinion records that the plaintiffs acknowledged Durst was never convicted of murdering her. Carol Bamonte, Kathie's sister and the estate's administrator, died in January 2023, and her siblings took her place. In a later ruling, reported by News 12, the court granted summary judgment for the estate and dismissed the suit, finding the plaintiffs had not shown the financial loss to Kathie's mother that New York wrongful death law requires, while calling Kathie's loss "devastating to her mother and siblings."
Kathie Durst's remains have never been found. Her brother Jim has said the only part of the case still missing for him is her remains.
HBO returned to the story in April 2024 with The Jinx: Part Two, a follow-up series covering Durst's arrest, the prosecution, recorded prison calls and the Los Angeles trial, including Chavin's decision to cooperate after his wife contacted the prosecutor.
Kathleen Durst. Durst was charged with her murder and indicted, but never tried. No court has found that he killed her. The Los Angeles jurors' reported belief that he did was not a legal finding, and the 2023 federal ruling decided only that her family's lawsuit could proceed. Who made the call to the medical school on February 1, 1982, was argued by prosecutors (Berman) and disputed by the defense.
Morris Black. Durst admitted the killing and the dismemberment. A jury found him not guilty of murder after he claimed self-defense and an accident. Los Angeles prosecutors later argued he killed Black to protect his hidden identity; that theory was never the basis of any conviction.
The bathroom recording. The broadcast version of the "killed them all" remarks was edited and reordered, according to The New York Times and a 2018 court hearing. Durst said he was misheard. The jury heard the raw audio.
Where he lived in 2000. Texas Monthly says he rented in Galveston in November 2000; Houstonia says he arrived in April 2000.
Other cases. In March 2015, after the arrest, CBS News reported that investigators had reportedly looked at whether Durst was connected to the 1997 disappearances of an 18-year-old woman in San Francisco and a 16-year-old girl in Eureka, California. Oakland police said on March 18, 2015, that they had no evidence that Durst was involved in the San Francisco disappearance. He was never charged in either case, and no official finding linked him to them.
April 12, 1943: Robert Alan Durst is born in New York, eldest son of Seymour Durst.
About 1950: His mother, Bernice, dies in a fall from the roof of the family home in Scarsdale; he is 7.
1965: Graduates from Lehigh University.
Late 1960s: Meets Susan Berman at UCLA.
1971: Meets Kathleen McCormack; they marry in 1973.
January 31, 1982: Kathie Durst is last seen; Durst says he put her on a train to Manhattan.
1990: Durst divorces her, claiming abandonment.
1992 or 1994: His father names Douglas Durst to lead the Durst Organization.
2000: Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro reopens the Kathie Durst case.
November 2000: Durst rents an apartment in Galveston posing as a mute woman (Texas Monthly).
December 2000: Durst marries Debrah Lee Charatan.
December 23 and 24, 2000: The cadaver note is mailed; Susan Berman is found shot dead in her Los Angeles home.
September 28, 2001: Morris Black is killed in Galveston, by Durst's account during a struggle.
September 30, 2001: Black's remains are found in Galveston Bay.
October 9, 2001: Durst is arrested in Galveston, posts bail and flees.
November 30, 2001: Arrested for shoplifting near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
November 11, 2003: Acquitted of murdering Morris Black.
2004: Pleads guilty to bail jumping and evidence tampering; paroled in 2005.
2010: All Good Things is released; Durst contacts Andrew Jarecki.
December 2014: Durst tells Nick Chavin, by Chavin's account, "It was her or me."
March 14, 2015: Arrested by the FBI in New Orleans.
March 15, 2015: Final episode of The Jinx airs.
March 16, 2015: Los Angeles prosecutors charge him with first-degree murder.
February 3, 2016: Pleads guilty to a federal weapons charge; 85 months.
November 2016: Sent to Los Angeles; pleads not guilty.
March 2017: Kathie Durst is declared legally dead.
May 24, 2018: Appellate court sets her date of death as January 31, 1982.
March 2020: Los Angeles trial opens and is halted by the pandemic.
May 17, 2021: Trial resumes in Inglewood.
August 2021: Durst testifies and admits writing the cadaver note.
September 17, 2021: Jury finds him guilty of first-degree murder.
October 14, 2021: Sentenced to life without parole.
October 19, 2021: Charged in Westchester County with second-degree murder of Kathleen Durst.
November 1, 2021: Indicted by a Westchester grand jury.
January 10, 2022: Dies in Stockton, California; the Berman conviction is abated because his appeal was pending.
January 19, 2022: Westchester DA releases report on the Kathie Durst investigation.
January 31, 2022: Kathie's family sues Durst's estate.
March 31, 2023: Federal judge denies the estate's motion to dismiss the family's suit.
April 21, 2024: The Jinx: Part Two premieres on HBO.