Durst Acted Strangely After Wife’s Disappearance, Jury told
Durst Acted Strangely After Wife’s Disappearance, Jury told
(Bloomberg) -- Robert Durst was cold, dismissive and not all that alarmed after his wife’s disappearance in early 1982, her brother told jurors at Durst’s murder trial.
James McCormack took the stand Thursday in Los Angeles and described his sister Kathie’s troubled marriage to Durst, an estranged member of one of New York’s most prominent real-estate dynasties, and her still-unsolved disappearance.
Durst, 76, is accused of killing his longtime friend and confidante Susan Berman in December 2000. Prosecutors claim Durst got Berman to help him cover up his wife’s death and later murdered her to keep her from talking to the New York State Police, which had reopened the investigation of Kathie Durst’s disappearance.
McCormack said he learned about his sister’s disappearance when he got a call from Durst, asking “Jim, have you seen Kathie?”
The call was almost casual and Durst didn’t seem alarmed and didn’t seek help, McCormack testified. When McCormack called in the following days and weeks for updates about his sister, Durst would be a cold and “rudely dismissive,” he said.
Within two months of his wife’s disappearance, Durst asked her family to pick up her belongings from the couple’s lakeside cottage in South Salem, New York, McCormack said. When they arrived, they found hardly any of Kathie’s possessions and Durst dismissed questions about where her things were, her brother said.
McCormack said he believed his sister was dead. “There’s no doubt in my mind that she died on Jan. 31, 1982,” McCormack said.
Durst’s lawyers said in opening statements Tuesday that the reclusive millionaire found Berman’s body on the floor of her Beverly Hills home but didn’t kill her. They said he “panicked” and fled the scene. He later sent a note to the police that there was a “cadaver” at her address.
“Bob Durst didn’t kill Susan Berman, and he doesn’t know who did,” Durst’s lead lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, said Tuesday.
Durst similarly claimed to have “panicked” after killing his elderly neighbor Morris Black in Galveston, Texas in 2001. A jury accepted his claim that he shot Black accidentally and acquitted him in a 2013 trial.
Durst is a scion of the family behind the Durst Organization, one of Manhattan’s largest commercial property owners with stakes in buildings including One World Trade Center.
To contact the reporter on this story: Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles at epettersson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Anthony Lin
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