Robert Durst Biography | Robert Durst | Who is Robert Durst?
Robert Alan Durst (born April 12, 1943) is an American real estate heir, the son of New York City mogul Seymour Durst, and the elder brother of Douglas Durst, head of the Durst Organization.
He is suspected of having murdered three individuals in different states: Kathleen McCormack Durst, his first wife, who disappeared in New York in 1982; Susan Berman, his longtime friend, who was killed in California in 2000; and his neighbor, Morris Black, who was killed in Texas in 2001.
Durst was the subject of a multi-state manhunt and was ultimately convicted of dismembering Black but acquitted of his murder. On March 14, 2015, Durst was arrested in New Orleans on a first-degree murder warrant signed by a Los Angeles judge in relation to the Berman killing.
On November 4, 2016, he was transferred to California and soon after was arraigned in Los Angeles on first-degree murder charges. A preliminary hearing was initially scheduled for October 2017 but was postponed to April 2018 and concluded on October 2018 with Los Angeles County Superior Judge Mark Windham ruling there was enough evidence to try Durst for the shooting of Berman.
On January 16, 2019, Judge Windham scheduled the trial to begin on September 3, 2019. At the same time, the judge ruled that prosecutors can present evidence involving the Black murder.
Prosecutors will try to connect Berman’s death with Kathleen’s disappearance, which they want to show as the foundation for the motive for Berman’s slaying. In his ruling that prosecutors could use evidence from the Texas case, Judge Windham said the killings of Black and Berman seemed “to be intertwined.”
The murder charge against Durst includes the special circumstance allegations of lying in wait and killing a witness to a crime. There is also an allegation that he used a handgun to carry out the murder.
In May 2019, a motion filed by Durst’s attorneys claimed two handwriting samples (the anonymous “cadaver note” from 2000 informing LA Police that Berman’s body could be found at her house, and a letter in 1999 from Durst to Berman), as was other evidence from his 2015 arrest at his hotel in New Orleans, were illegally obtained.
Durst’s lawyers also claim there was a Fourth Amendment violation that would exclude the New Orleans evidence and that the search of his hotel room was unlawful.
On May 8, 2019, LA County prosecutors filed an affidavit replying to the motion. LA County Prosecutor John Lewin said Durst is creating an elaborate conspiracy theory between the producers of the HBO documentary miniseries The Jinx, law enforcement officers, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, to make the “Defendant incriminate himself and to time his arrest to maximize media attention and ratings.
However, Defendant completely fails to acknowledge the most relevant fact leading to his arrest and the subsequent search of his hotel room and damning interview – law enforcement was on notice that Defendant was actively preparing to flee the country right after crucial evidence connecting him to Susan’s (Berman) murder was widely publicized on national television.
When viewed in this context, it is readily apparent that the actions taken by law enforcement were more than reasonable – they were absolutely necessary to prevent a murderer, who had already avoided apprehension for more than 30 years, from fleeing the country and evading justice.”
On May 17, 2019, LA County Judge Mark Windham granted Durst’s defense team a four-month postponement of his murder trial. The trial now has a new start date of January 13, 2020. The delay was granted after defense lawyers raised concerns about the volume of evidence in the case and conflicts with attorney schedules.
Robert Durst Age| How old is Robert Durst?
Robert Alan Durst is an American real estate heir, the son of New York City mogul Seymour Durst, and the elder brother of Douglas Durst, head of the Durst Organization.
Robert is 76 years old as of 2019. He was born on 12 April 1943, in New York City, New York, United States
Parents, Siblings |Early life
One of four children, Robert Durst grew up in Scarsdale, New York, in a Jewish family. He is the son of real estate investor Seymour Durst and his wife Bernice Herstein.
His siblings are Douglas, Tommy, and Wendy. Durst’s paternal grandfather, Joseph Durst, a Jewish tailor when he emigrated from Austria-Hungary in 1902, eventually became a very successful real estate manager and developer, founding the Durst Organization in 1927. Seymour Durst became head of the family business in 1974 upon his father’s death.
When Robert was seven, his mother died as a result of a fall from the family’s Scarsdale home; he later claimed that moments before her death, his father walked him to a window from which he could see her standing on the roof.
In a March 2015 New York Times interview, however, his brother Douglas denied this. As children, Robert and Douglas underwent counseling for sibling rivalry; a 1953 psychiatrist’s report on 10-year-old Robert mentioned “personality decomposition and possibly even schizophrenia”.
Durst attended Scarsdale High School, where classmates described him as a loner. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1965 from Lehigh University, where he was a member of the varsity lacrosse team and the business manager of The Brown and White student newspaper.
He enrolled in a doctoral program at UCLA later that year, where he met Susan Berman, but eventually withdrew from the school and returned to New York in 1969.
Durst went on to become a real estate developer in his father’s business; however, it was his brother Douglas who was appointed, in 1992, to run the family business. The appointment caused a rift between Robert and his family, estranging him from them.
Who is Robert Durst Wife? | Who is Robert Durst Married to?
On April 12, 1973 – Durst’s 30th birthday – he married Kathleen McCormack. Durst divorced her in 1990, eight years after her disappearance, claiming spousal abandonment.
On December 11, 2000, shortly before the Berman killing, Durst married Debrah Lee Charatan. According to The New York Times, the couple briefly shared a Fifth Avenue apartment in 1990 but “have never lived together as husband and wife”.
Durst once told his sister that it was “a marriage of convenience”; “I wanted Debbie to be able to receive my inheritance, and I intended to kill myself,” Durst said in a 2005 deposition. Charatan currently lives with one of Durst’s lawyers, Steven I. Holm.
Durst traveled and lived under dozens of aliases over the years, using different identities to buy cars, rent apartments, and open credit card accounts. “He had a scanner, copier, and a laminating machine,” a former office employee of Durst told Newsweek.
“What I didn’t realize is that I unwittingly saw what would have allowed Robert Durst to make a fake driver’s license.” Durst was also “a prolific user of private mailboxes,” and apparently conducted business under a number of canine-themed names: Woofing LLC, WoofWoof LLC, and Igor-Fayette Inc.
In the early 1980s, Durst owned a series of seven Alaskan Malamutes each named Igor, which according to his brother Douglas all died under mysterious circumstances. In December 2014, prior to the airing of The Jinx, Douglas told The New York Times that, “In retrospect, I now believe he was practicing killing and disposing of his wife with those dogs.”
Durst was once recorded saying he wanted to “Igor” Douglas. Durst, however, has disputed the notion that he owned seven dogs named Igor; he owned three, he said, one that was run over and another that died in surgery after eating an apple core, “before the Igor that lasted forever.”
In late 1981, while Durst was still married to McCormack, he was nearing the end of a three-year affair with Prudence Farrow, who was also married at the time.
A few months before McCormack’s disappearance in January 1982, Farrow called her and asked that she give him up, as friends said she wanted him all to herself.
After Durst’s acquittal of murdering Black in 2003, Farrow contacted law enforcement authorities with concerns for her safety, as she said Durst was angry with her for terminating their relationship three days before McCormack disappeared.
Durst has had a number of significant medical issues since 2015, including major surgeries for esophageal cancer, having a shunt installed in his brain for hydrocephalus, and cervical spinal fusion.
When arrested in New Orleans in 2015, he was found in possession of a variety of drugs including sleep aid melatonin, a muscle relaxant, and medications for high blood pressure, blood flow, and acid reflux.
Net Worth in 2019
Financial status and residences
In mid-2002, Durst signed over a power of attorney to his wife Charatan, a real estate investor, and it is believed their holdings remain closely intermingled. In 2006, Durst gave Charatan around $20 million of his $65 million trust settlement.
In 2011, Durst purchased a $1.75 million townhouse on Lenox Avenue in Harlem. A source close to his estranged family confirmed that he was living there at least some of the time, and they were keeping him under surveillance.
Durst also owns three condominiums in a multi-story complex in Houston, and after filing suit, received a $200,000 settlement in 2006 from a Houston developer who refused to let him move into a unit newly purchased by his wife, which she had then immediately resold to Durst for $10.
At the time of Berman’s murder in Los Angeles, Durst had just sold a home in Trinidad, California, but maintained an office in Eureka while renting in nearby Big Lagoon.
Media have variously reported Durst’s financial status as “real estate baron”, “rich scion”, “millionaire”, “multimillionaire”, and “billionaire”. The Durst family’s real estate holdings are worth more than $4 billion, but his brother Douglas was in control of the company beginning in 1994, shortly before their father’s death.
From about 1994 to 2006, Robert waged a legal campaign to gain greater control of the family trust and fortune. During that time he received $2 million a year from the trust. In 2006 the case was settled, with Durst giving up any interest in his family’s properties and trusts in exchange for a one-time payment of about $65 million.
It is unknown how much of that went to legal fees and taxes. Durst was still active in real estate; he reportedly sold two properties in 2014 for $21.15 million after purchasing them in 2011 for $8.65 million. At the time of his 2015 arrest, the FBI estimated Durst’s net worth at approximately $100 million; The New York Times estimated his net worth at $110 million.
On May 1, 2015, the New York Post reported that Douglas had settled litigation against Jinx filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, has confirmed that Robert was the source of videotaped depositions that appeared in the documentary.
Robert’s disclosure apparently violated the terms of his 2006 agreement with the Durst family, which had dispersed to him a lump sum of family trust assets.
Although it was unclear whether Jarecki confirmed Robert as his source—The New York Times reported on March 2015 that Jarecki was given “unrestricted access” to Robert’s personal records, including the videotaped material—the settlement paves the way for Douglas to reclaim as much as $74 million of his brother’s assets, effectively freezing those assets pending court judgment.
This could affect Robert’s ability to pay for high-caliber legal representation without tapping into real estate or other investments. The Post reported that Douglas was “mulling his next move”.
In November 2015, nearly 34 years after her disappearance, McCormack’s three sisters and 101-year-old mother sued Durst for $100 million, citing his apparent role in her murder and his denial to her family of the “right to sepulcher”, a New York law that grants immediate relatives access to a deceased person’s body and the opportunity to determine appropriate burial.
If successful, the lawsuit could deprive Durst of most or all of his inherited fortune.McCormack’s brother James had attempted in October 2015 to file a wrongful death suit against Durst on behalf of his mother but was challenged by one of his sisters, who holds her mother’s power of attorney.
DeGuerin said that “there is no evidence that Robert Durst had anything to do with Kathleen’s disappearance. Anybody can file a lawsuit, but eventually, they’ll have to come with evidence.” On December 7, 2015, the same family members filed a suit asking the court to freeze Durst’s assets.
The family’s attorney, Robert Abrams, called Durst the “poster child” for why courts block defendants from disposing of assets while civil lawsuits are pending.
In July 2016, the McCormack family asked the Surrogate’s Court in Manhattan to “declare that Kathie died on January 31, 1982, when she was murdered by her husband, Robert Durst” so the sepulcher lawsuit can proceed.