In the United States, his story was popularized by an HBO documentary. The rich and sulphurous American heir Robert Durst was sentenced Thursday, October 14 to life imprisonment by a Los Angeles court, without the possibility of parole, for the murder of her best friend.
The 78-year-old multimillionaire was convicted in September of killing his friend Susan Berman with a bullet to the head at her 2000 home in Beverly Hills to prevent him from speaking to police about the disappearance by his wife, Kathleen, two decades earlier. “This crime is the murder of a witness”, Judge Mark Windham said before handing down the sentence. “This circumstance (…) has greatly aggravated this terrible and disturbing crime”, he added.
During the hearing, Robert Durst, who had pleaded not guilty, remained almost motionless in his wheelchair. Relatives of Susan Berman urged him in court to say where the body of his wife Kathleen is. The prosecution believes that Susan Berman had helped Robert Durst to cover up his role in the murder of his wife Kathleen and that “Bob” Durst ended up killing Susan Berman to prevent her from responding to the New York police officers who were investigating his wife’s disappearance in 1982.
“I killed them all, obviously”
Black sheep from one of New York’s biggest real estate families, Robert Durst was arrested in March 2015 on the eve of the airing of the final episode of a six-part HBO biographical documentary, The Jinx The series revisited another bloody episode in Robert Durst’s life: the murder of a neighbor, which he then dismembered and thrown into the sea.
He had been acquitted of the crime by an army of prestigious lawyers who had pleaded guilty to a mixture of self-defense, accidental shooting and acts of alcohol. In The Jinx, Robert Durst seemed to be making an involuntary admission, whispering to himself as he was in the bathroom and his wireless mic was not turned off: “What did I do? I killed them all, obviously.”
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