Robert Durst charged with 1982 murder of wife Kathie Durst

Robert Durst has been charged in the death of his wife Kathleen McCormack Durst, nearly 40 years after her disappearance and just days after the multimillionaire real estate heir was sentenced to life in prison for killing a friend.

The 78-year-old, who has been suspected in a string of killings across the US over four decades, is accused of second-degree murder. McCormack, then 29, disappeared on 31 January 1982, and her body was never found. A New York state police investigator filed the complaint Tuesday, shortly after a grand jury in Westchester county started hearing testimony in the case.

“The Westchester county district attorney’s office can confirm that a complaint charging Robert Durst with the murder of Kathleen Durst was filed in Lewisboro town court on 19 October 2021. We have no further comment at this time,” the office said in a statement on Friday.

The charge comes six years after the documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst brought the multimillionaire into the spotlight. The series chronicled McCormack’s disappearance, the murder of Susan Berman in 2000, and the 2001 death of a neighbor in Texas, where Durst was hiding out, disguised as a deaf-mute woman. In the final episode of the series, he appeared to confess to the killings, saying to himself, “What the hell did I do? … Killed them all, of course.”

A Los Angeles jury recently found Durst guilty of the murder of Berman, his best friend and confidant, and the charges in his wife’s disappearance were widely anticipated.

The felony complaint filed against Durst in Lewisboro cites evidence in the files of the Westchester district attorney, the New York state police and the Los Angeles district attorney, and “conversations with numerous witnesses and observations of defendants, recorded interviews and observations of Mr Durst’s recorded interviews and court testimony in related proceedings”.

The Westchester county grand jury recently started hearing witness testimony, a person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press this week, a process that’s expected to take several weeks and could produce an indictment.

Last week, Durst was sentenced to life in prison for the Berman killing. Prosecutors argued that he had shot Berman at point-blank range in her home because she was prepared to tell police how she helped cover up the killing of McCormack. Berman, who had reportedly told friends she had provided Durst with a false alibi, likely did not know she was covering up a murder, prosecutors said last week, and had instead been trying to help her friend.

After Berman’s murder, Durst went into hiding in Galveston, where the heir tried to pass himself off as a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner. But Morris Black, Durst’s neighbor, did not buy the disguise and he was shot and dismembered, prosecutors said. Durst argued he had killed Black in self-defense, and he was acquitted.

Durst, who has numerous medical problems, sat in a wheelchair throughout last week’s sentencing hearing and has since has been hospitalized and placed on a ventilator after testing positive for Covid-19, one of his lawyers said.

At last week’s hearing, Berman’s relatives pleaded with Durst to tell the McCormack family where he buried his first wife’s body.

“Any hope of any kind of redemption you can find is in letting them know where to find Kathie,” said Sareb Kaufman, Berman’s stepson.

McCormack was declared legally dead in 2017 at the request of her family. Durst divorced McCormack in 1990, citing abandonment, and had never been charged in connection with her disappearance despite multiple efforts over the years to close the case. In 1999, authorities reopened the case, searching a lake and the couple’s home.

Durst has denied killing McCormack. After her medical school called to report that she hadn’t been going to class, Durst said he figured she was “out someplace having fun” and suggested that drug use could have been to blame.

“It hadn’t occurred to me that anything had happened to her,” Durst testified in August. “It was more like: what had Kathie done to Kathie?”