The story of millionaire Robert Durst is something out of a movie. So much so that there is more than one feat (the most recent, starring Ryan Gosling, 11 years ago), as well as books and documentaries. But the mystery about his true personality remains. This week, Robert returned to American justice, this time to answer for the death of his best friend, Susan Berman. Susan was murdered with a shot to the head in 2001 in Los Angeles, and Robert was quickly named as the main interest and main suspect. But how the police finally got to him, after decades of getting rid of more than one murder charge (including his wife and a neighbor), thanks to the film All Good Things, by Andrew Jarecki and – mainly – the HBO documentary The Jinx, which is available on the HBO Max platform. Not even an original Hollywood script could invent as many twists and turns as there are in Robert Durst’s life.

Death entered Robert’s life, tragically, from childhood

Robert Durst comes from one of the richest families in New York, the owner of a real estate empire that has led to a life of more than seven decades without financial worries.

Robert’s life, as recounted in All Good Things, was marked by mystery, tragedy, and violence. His mother killed herself in front of him when he was just 7 years old. She was on the roof of the house and her father made him watch.

The boy’s behavior, always introverted, seems to have been treated without concern by his family, even after being diagnosed with schizophrenia.

He met young Kathleen McCormack in 1971 and the two quickly fell in love. The marriage, two years later, was marked by ups and downs, thanks to Robert’s unstable temperament. There was domestic violence and Kathie even looked for lawyers to deal with the divorce. Robert not only refused the amount she asked for in the agreement, but he canceled the credit card, froze the joint account, and stopped paying for the woman’s medical school tuition. With that, the couple met again, however, on the night of January 31, 1982, she was seen for the last time.

Reports of what happened are confusing, and without a body in particular to base any conclusions on. Almost 40 years later, even with all the evidence pointing to a crime of passion, it is still officially treated as a disappearance. Therefore, it was not possible, no matter how hard friends and family tried, to prove any further involvement by Robert.

If you think this is the most bizarre case in Robert’s life, then sit down, because it hasn’t even started.

Arrested and acquitted for killing and dismembering a neighbor

Eighteen years later, when pieces of a man’s body were located in Galveston Bay, Texas, the investigation led to an apartment rented by an alleged woman who, in a surprising twist, was Robert Durst himself in disguise. He was arrested, posted bail, and disappeared for weeks, being arrested for stealing a sandwich (even though he had thousands of dollars on him). To the great shock, at the trial, he was acquitted as self-defense, almost a joke for justice in Texas.

Free for the second time, a year later Robert Durst’s name returned to the criminal pages when his best friend, closest partner during Kathie’s disappearance, Susan Berman, was found dead in Los Angeles.

Susan was executed in her home, on Christmas Eve, in 2001. The police reached her body after receiving an anonymous tip in the mail, with a spelling error and warning that she would have a “corpse” in the house. Investigators could see that Robert was in California (but not in Los Angeles).

The ongoing investigations into Susan’s death seemed to be going nowhere. But Hollywood got in the way of the millionaire.

The documentary, “What the hell did I do?”

In 2010, director Andrew Janecki, who was familiar with the case, released the film All Good Things with Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, reigniting curiosity around Robert’s story. As recorded in the documentary The Jinx, by the same director, Robert sought him out because he liked the film and wanted to talk to him about the crimes. Until then, he had always avoided the press.

The three crimes are remembered in six episodes, and Robert gives evasive answers about them all. However, in the 5th episode, Susan’s stepson comes across a letter that he had never seen before, a letter from Robert to his friend, where it is possible to see the similarity in spelling with that of the anonymous note about the murder, including the grammatical error. Andrew confronts Robert about this, who, apparently forgetting he had the microphone, walks away and confesses to himself that he “killed them all”.

The court accepted the documentary as evidence and in 2015 the millionaire was arrested again, now to be tried for the death of Susan Berman, for which Robert gave testimony this week in New York. In March 2021, the status of Kathleen McCormack Durst’s disappearance also changed. It is now also classified as murder and will be investigated again.

The documentary The Jinx is available on the HBO Max platform. It is well worth reviewing.

Continuation in 2024

Edited April 2024

Robert Durst died on January 10, 2022, at age 78, in prison in California, serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Although the coroner said it was “natural causes,” it was likely a result of Covid-19, which he had been infected with three months earlier. Durst was also being treated for bladder cancer.

Famously, it was thanks to the documentary, shown in 2015, that the police arrested the millionaire for the murder of his friend, Susan Berman, in 2000. However, even with the recording saying “I killed them all”, he insisted he was innocent, but, because the crime took place in Los Angeles, he was transferred to California where – in very fragile health – he went on trial. His defense made requests for annulment, insisting that the documentary edited his lines and that he was too ill to be able to defend himself.

Time “helped” and hindered the killer. Due to the pandemic, the trial that began in March 2020 was suspended for more than a year. Bladder cancer was diagnosed in 2021 and it was from then on that his legal team began to insist on a mistrial, but the judge denied it, resuming the process in May 2021.

As always strangely arrogant, even when ill, Robert Durst insisted on testifying in his own defense, but over nine days of questioning he ended up incriminating himself even further, being caught in perjury five times during the trial. In just seven hours, the jury convicted him of murder.

Durst’s frailty was blatant, with little strength to speak and always hunched over in a wheelchair. Just a month after his conviction he was diagnosed with Covid-19 and three months later he died. Still, in November 2022 a grand jury in New York indicted him for murder in the death of Kathie McCormack Durst, who was only presumed dead in 2017, after her mysterious disappearance in 1982. That mystery, with Durst’s death, seems now be insoluble.

Now, in 2024, the second part of the documentary The Jinx premieres on MAX on April 21. After the unexpected success, in 2015, the team continued their investigation and found more hidden material, such as Durst’s prison phone calls and new interviews. Furthermore, they launched the podcast “Serial”, where The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst had great prominence, reviving interest in the case.

In six weekly episodes, Andrew Jarecki reports on his eight-year investigation after Durst’s arrest, with new material that promises to put an end to one of the most unbelievable trajectories in real life. And who knows, maybe we’ll finally find the answers to how it all started.

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