Real estate heir Robert Durst is GUILTY of murder over 2000 shooting of confidante Susan Berman

Real estate heir Robert Durst has been found guilty of the 2000 murder of a confidante who threatened to retract her alibi over the 1982 killing of his wife. 

He wasn’t present when the Los Angeles jury reached a verdict Friday in the lengthy murder trial of New York real estate heir. Jurors deliberated about seven hours over three days.

Durst, 78, is in isolation after his driver tested positive for Covid and now faces life in prison.   

He appeared in a Los Angeles court earlier this month in a wheelchair in his current gaunt and ailing state. He pleaded not guilty to murder in the point-blank shooting of his best friend, Susan Berman, at her Los Angeles home in December 2000.   

Prosecutors said Durst silenced Berman to prevent her from telling police what she knew about the disappearance and suspected killing of Durst’s Kathleen McCormack, who vanished in New York in 1982, and who he is suspected of killing. 

Durst testified he didn’t kill his wife or Berman and doesn’t know who did, though he said he’d have lied any way had he murdered either woman. 

Prosecutors also said he would have gotten away with Burman’s murder if filmmakers had not unearthed a damning letter that had identical handwriting to the infamous cadaver note, a prosecutor said Thursday in the New York real estate heir’s trial. 

Durst testified that he lied for decades about sending police the note, directing them to the dead body of Berman, because he feared it would implicate him in the killing.

It was so hard to fathom that Susan Berman’s killer was not the same person who sent police a note directing them to her ‘cadaver’ that Durst even questioned the plausibility of that explanation. 

In closing arguments at the New York real estate heir’s trial earlier this month, prosecutors said that an anonymous note directing police to the lifeless body of Berman was the ‘smoking gun’ in the case against him. 

While filming the documentary The Jinx: The Life And Deaths Of Robert Durst, filmmakers discovered an envelope Durst sent Berman a year earlier. The handwriting was identical to the note sent to police after Berman’s death – and Beverly Hills was misspelled as ‘Beverley’ on both.

‘You can ignore everything else in this case,’ Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian said. 

He added: ‘If we spent one day trying this … here’s what you’d have: You’d have a note sent by the killer that only the killer could have written that the defendant has admitted that the killer wrote. And the defendant has stipulated, “I wrote the cadaver note and envelope that only the killer could have written”.’ 

But Durst had long denied writing the anonymous cadaver note, although he conceded at trial that he sent it after finding her dead body in her Los Angeles home in December 2000. 

He testified that he wanted police to find her but didn’t want anyone to know he had been in her house because he feared he would be suspected of killing her. 

Balian scoffed at that explanation, describing it as chapter 5 in what he called Durst’s playbook to get away with murder: Changing his story when necessary.

While giving his testimony at trial on September 9, Durst had acknowledged on the witness stand that even he had difficulty imagining he could have written the note without killing Berman.

‘It’s very difficult to believe, to accept, that I wrote the letter and did not kill Susan Berman,’ Durst testified.

Balian said it was one of the truest things Durst said amid a ton of lies.

However, in giving closing arguments in Durst’s defense, he said he is a sick, old, defenseless man who is demonized by prosecutors determined to cover up a lack of evidence against him, despite acknowledging that he penned the note.

His attorney Dick DeGuerin told jurors not to be swayed by ghastly images of the body Durst dismembered in Texas and tossed out to sea, saying it was only meant to make them hate him.

He was acquitted of murder in the 2001 killing of his neighbor Morris Black in Texas, after insisting he’d only shot and dismembered Black in self-defense after being attacked by him. 

DeGuerin conceded his client did look ‘really bad’ after nearly three weeks of testimony, including nine days of punishing cross-examination that exposed several lies. He accused the prosecutor of ‘beating up on a sick, old man who can’t defend himself’.

 ‘I wouldn’t blame you after hearing what you’ve heard if you hate Bob Durst and believe he’s a liar,’ DeGuerin said in Los Angeles Superior Court. ‘Making Bob Durst a liar does not make him a killer.’ 

Yet during his many days on the stand Durst said he had lied under oath and would lie to get out of trouble. 

DeGuerin said prosecutors failed to prove how, when and where Kathie Durst was killed, though he said circumstantial evidence indicates she is probably dead. She was officially declared dead in 2017. Her body has never been found and no one has been charged with a crime in connection with her disappearance.   

Durst said he put his wife on a train bound for New York City after a weekend at their lakeside home in Westchester County and never saw or heard from her again. He has admitted lying about having cocktails with neighbors that night and speaking with his wife over the phone after she reached their Manhattan penthouse.

The defense claims there is no credible evidence to support the prosecution theory that Berman had impersonated Kathie the next day to phone in sick at the medical school she attended. 

Prosecutors said the call made it appear Kathie was alive after she was last seen by her husband. 

She is believed to have suffered domestic violence at Durst’s hands, with investigators speculating that he killed the medical student after she tried to leave him.  

‘If you remove the emotions that the prosecution has played upon that Bob Durst is a bad guy and Bob Durst lies and that Bob Durst will lie about anything and look at what the evidence or lack of evidence is, then you see there’s no evidence,’ DeGuerin said. 

His attorney compared the situation to asking the trick question: ‘Have you quit beating your wife?’

‘What’s a good answer to that?’ DeGuerin said.

‘The problem is the false premise: beating your wife. If you had killed Susan, would you tell us?’ It’s a false premise.’

Although Durst is only on trial in Berman’s killing, prosecutors presented evidence he killed his wife to provide the motive for killing Berman, who was a key witness. Several of Berman’s friends testified she either told them Durst admitted killing his wife or she helped cover his tracks.

Prosecutors have also introduced evidence from a Galveston, Texas, trial in which Durst was acquitted of murder.

DeGuerin successfully defended Durst in the 2001 killing of Morris Black. Durst testified that Black pulled a gun on him and was shot during a struggle for the weapon. He was convicted of disposing of evidence for chopping up Black’s body and dumping it in Galveston Bay.

DeGuerin accused prosecutors of trying to inflame the jury by dredging up the Texas case, particularly displaying gruesome images of body parts that washed ashore.

‘The prosecution is trying to get a do-over of that trial,’ DeGuerin said.