Susan Berman was born Susan Jane Berman in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 18, 1945, the only child of Betty Ewald and David "Davie" Berman, a Jewish-American organized-crime figure who took over Las Vegas's Flamingo Hotel after the 1947 killing of Bugsy Siegel. Berman grew up in Las Vegas and then in Hollywood, California. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1967 — where she met Robert Durst, an heir to a New York real-estate fortune — and a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969.
Berman became a journalist and author, writing for outlets including the San Francisco Examiner, New York magazine, Cosmopolitan, and Family Circle. Her 1981 memoir, Easy Street: The True Story of a Mob Family, recounted her life as the daughter of a mobster; its film rights sold for $350,000, though no movie was produced. She also wrote Driver, Give a Soldier a Lift!, Fly Away Home, Spiderweb, and Lady Las Vegas, and at the time of her death was developing a television project titled Sin City for Showtime with attorney Kevin Norte.
Berman stayed close to Durst for decades after they met at UCLA. She later became a confidante of Durst's first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, whom Berman came to know after moving to New York; McCormack Durst disappeared in 1982, and Berman provided a deposition in the case that year. Accounts of the case have reported that Berman acted as a media spokesperson for Durst and is believed to have helped provide him with a public alibi. She received two $25,000 checks from Durst in the months before her death and last wrote to him on November 5, 2000. Earlier that year, New York State Police, at the request of then-Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, had reopened the investigation into Kathleen McCormack Durst's disappearance; Berman was killed weeks after that reopened investigation was made public.
Berman was found shot to death, execution style, with a 9mm handgun in her rented home in the Benedict Canyon area of Los Angeles. Her body was discovered on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2000, and she was presumed to have been dead for at least a day. A typewritten letter mailed from New York on January 9, 2001, to a West Los Angeles police station and titled "Possible motive for Susan Berman murder" stated that Berman had suspected Durst was involved in his first wife's disappearance and said Durst had planned to visit her in late December 2000.
The case went unsolved for more than a decade. On March 14, 2015, Durst was arrested in New Orleans on a first-degree murder warrant issued out of Los Angeles, and the arrest was reported to be connected to Berman's killing. Days later, then-Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey said Durst could face the death penalty under special circumstances of murder of a witness and lying in wait. Durst was transferred to California and arraigned in November 2016. He was convicted of Berman's murder on September 17, 2021, and was sentenced to life in prison several weeks later. Durst died in prison about four months after his conviction. Berman is interred at Home of Peace Memorial Park in East Los Angeles.
OVERTURNEDListen
