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Sixteen years ago almost to the day after the murder of writer Susan Berman, Robert Durst appeared in a pre-trial hearing for the murder of his longtime friend’s murder.
Berman’s body was discovered just before noon on Christmas Eve 2000 after neighbors alerted police her dogs were running loose and the back door of Berman’s Benedict Canyon house, near Beverly Hills, was ajar.
But it took 14 years for the accused killer to be brought to justice.
The latest in the murder of Berman, a writer and daughter of Jewish mobster Davie Berman, was recently revealed in a transcript from a law enforcement interrogation of the real estate heir taken while Durst was in custody after his 2015 arrest.
When John Lewin, a Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney, told Durst that he knew he killed Berman, Durst responded with, “I’m gonna stay away from killing Susan.”
Smart move, since the evidence against Durst is damning.
After the release in 2015 of the second edition of my book Murder of a Mafia Daughter, Lewin, along with two homicide investigators, interviewed me about evidence in the case that is included in the book, which broke the story that Durst was in California at the time of Berman’s murder.
It shows that at the same time police were arriving at Berman’s house on Dec. 24, 2000, Robert Durst was on a plane taking him from northern California to New York City, attorney Dick DeGuerin told me. Durst owned property in San Francisco, where he regularly stayed, and which was a mere five-and-a-half hour drive to Berman’s Benedict Canyon home.
Furthermore, Durst’s attorney offered up what he called an “alibi” for his client. “He was on an airplane when Susan’s killing occurred,” said DeGuerin. “Mr. Durst was on his way to New York from northern California. He has an alibi.”
Rather than an alibi, however, it placed Durst in California at the time Berman was killed. Also, Berman had told friends and a cousin that Durst planned to visit her during the holidays and planned to drive her to San Francisco, where she once lived.
In Lewin’s interrogation of Durst, he told him he knew why he killed Berman, citing what has become known as a “cadaver note” mailed by the killer to police—before Berman’s body was found. It informed police that a cadaver was inside her home. Durst’s answer? “I’m gonna stay away from (talking about) that.”
Another smart move by Durst, who is 73 and has hydrocephalus and cancer of the esophagus, and appeared in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Dec. 21 in a wheelchair. Durst earlier pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in Berman’s death.
The motive in killing Berman is believed to be because she knew too much about the 1982 disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathie, so Durst silenced her. Berman, 55, was shot in the back of her head shortly after New York police reopened its investigation into Kathie’s disappearance. Durst was also prosecuted in the murder and dismemberment of a Texas neighbor, Morris Black, for which Durst claimed self-defense. A jury acquitted him. Since then, Durst lived a free man, with houses in northern California, Texas and New York—until his March 2015 arrest in Berman's case.
When asked by Lewin about the handwriting on the envelope that’s part of the prosecution’s case against Durst, he answered, “Well, I knew that my handwriting was my handwriting. And I knew I had written a whole bunch of letters to Susan.”
One of those letters Durst sent to Berman is a match to the cadaver letter handwriting and includes the misspelling of “Beverley” on the envelope for Beverly Hills, the same as on the cadaver letter envelope. Durst appears to understand that the handwriting samples add up to strong forensics evidence against him.
Durst’s trial is expected to begin in mid-2017.
