A popular jury in the American city of Los Angeles has found American millionaire Robert Durst guilty on Friday of the murder of his girlfriend Susan Berman. The 78-year-old heir to the Durst Organization’s New York real estate empire shot the woman more than 20 years ago with a bullet in her head.
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Susan Berman was a close friend of Durst’s. In 2000, she was killed at her home on Christmas Eve, the eve of a testimony about the disappearance of Kathleen McCormack, the real estate millionaire’s first wife. Although he was never prosecuted for this, Durst is a suspect in this unsolved 1982 disappearance case.
The millionaire confessed to murdering and dismembering his neighbor when he lived in Galveston, Texas in 2001. He said he acted in self-defense and in 2003 a jury acquitted him of the facts.
Durst was arrested in March 2015, on suspicion of Berman’s murder, just before the final episode of the six-part HBO documentary series “The Jinx: The Life And Deaths Of Robert Durst” was scheduled to air. During the filming for the series, he is said to have talked his mouth out about the murders he committed more than ten years earlier.
In the series, Durst speaks candidly about the disappearance of McCormack, Berman’s unsolved murder, and the death of his neighbor Morris Black. After the interview, in which he was confronted with new evidence, he walked into the hotel bathroom and muttered to himself, “This is it. You’re there. What the hell have I done? Killed them all, of course.”
Durst was not in court on Friday to hear the jury’s decision after the five-month trial. He had come into contact with someone who had contracted COVID-19.
According to American media, Durst will know his sentence on October 18.
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