Robert Durst murder cases

Robert Alan Durst (1943–2022), an heir to the Durst Organization real estate fortune, was linked across four decades to the deaths of three people: his first wife, Kathleen "Kathie" McCormack, who disappeared in 1982; his longtime friend Susan Berman, killed in 2000; and his neighbor Morris Black, killed in 2001. A Los Angeles jury convicted Durst of Berman's murder in 2021, but that conviction was automatically vacated after he died in January 2022 while his appeal was pending; the Black case had ended in a 2003 acquittal, and Durst was charged with McCormack's murder in October 2021 but died before he could be tried.

McCormack, a fourth-year medical student, was last seen by anyone other than Durst on the evening of January 31, 1982, at a dinner party in Newtown, Connecticut, hosted by her friend Gilberte Najamy. She had been treated for facial bruising three weeks earlier and told a friend that Durst had beaten her, though she did not press charges. Durst reported her missing days later and gave shifting accounts of their last contact. New York State Police quietly reopened the case in 1999 and searched the South Salem, New York cottage where she lived; the reopened investigation became public in November 2000. McCormack was declared legally dead in 2017, and her disappearance was reclassified as a murder in 2021. Durst was charged with her killing on October 22, 2021, but died before the case reached trial.

Berman, the daughter of a Las Vegas organized-crime figure, had provided Durst's alibi after McCormack's disappearance. On December 24, 2000, weeks after the McCormack investigation became public, neighbors alerted police after finding her door open and a dog loose, and Berman was found murdered in her home in the Benedict Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. Investigators also received an anonymous letter, postmarked the day before her body was found, giving Berman's address and the word "cadaver"; in a 2019 court filing, Durst's lawyers admitted he had written it. The case stalled until the 2015 HBO documentary series The Jinx surfaced an earlier 1999 letter from Durst to Berman containing the same misspelling of "Beverly Hills." FBI agents arrested Durst in New Orleans on March 14, 2015, days after a Los Angeles judge signed a first-degree murder warrant against him. Following a trial repeatedly delayed by his health and the COVID-19 pandemic, a Los Angeles jury convicted Durst of first-degree murder on September 17, 2021, and on October 14, 2021, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Black, a 71-year-old neighbor of Durst's in Galveston, Texas, was killed in 2001; his dismembered remains were found floating in Galveston Bay on October 9, 2001, the day Durst was arrested. Durst, who had been living in Galveston disguised as a woman, testified that Black grabbed his pistol and was shot during a struggle, and that he dismembered the body afterward before disposing of the remains in Galveston Bay. With Black's head never recovered, prosecutors lacked forensic evidence to contest the self-defense account, and a jury acquitted Durst of murder on November 11, 2003. He separately pleaded guilty in December 2004 to bail jumping and evidence tampering for dismembering the body.

Durst died on January 10, 2022. Because his appeal of the Berman conviction was still pending, the conviction was automatically vacated upon his death. The McCormack murder charge, filed less than three months earlier, was never brought to trial.