Robert Alan Durst
Robert Alan Durst (born April 12, 1943) is a son of New York real estate mogul Seymour Durst, and brother of commercial developer Douglas Durst.
He came to media attention in the 1980s when his wife disappeared, and again in the early 2000s when he was the subject of a multi-state manhunt and twice acquitted of murder.
One of four children, Durst grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and attended Scarsdale High School.
He completed his undergraduate degree at Lehigh University and attended graduate school at UCLA. Reportedly, at age 7, Durst witnessed his mother's apparent suicide; she either fell or jumped from the roof of the Scarsdale family mansion. According to Reader's Digest, Durst underwent extensive counseling because of his mother's death, and doctors found that his "deep anger" could lead to psychological problems, including schizophrenia.
Durst went on to become a real estate developer in his father's business; however, it was his brother Douglas who was later appointed to run the family business. The appointment in the 1990s caused a rift between Robert and his family, and he became estranged.
In 1973, Durst married Kathleen McCormack, who disappeared in 1982. Her case remained unsolved for 18 years when New York State Police reopened the criminal investigation. On December 24, 2000, Durst's long-time friend, Susan Berman, who was believed to have knowledge of McCormack's disappearance, was found murdered execution-style in her Benedict Canyon California house. Durst was questioned in both cases but not charged.
According to prosecutors, he moved to Texas in 2000 and began cross-dressing to divert attention from the disappearance of McCormack.
In 2001, Durst was arrested in Galveston, Texas, shortly after body parts of his elderly neighbor, Morris Black, were found floating in Galveston Bay, but he was released on bail. Durst missed his court hearing and was declared the first billion-dollar fugitive in the US. He was caught in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at a Wegmans Supermarket, after trying to shoplift a chicken sandwich, Band-Aids, and a newspaper, even though he had $500 cash in his pocket. A police search of his rented car yielded $37,000 in cash, two guns, marijuana and Black's driver's license.
These events inspired the 2010 film All Good Things, the title of which is a reference to a health store of the same name set up by Durst and his wife in the 1970s. Two Law & Order episodes also gave different but very interesting takes on the murders. Season 14, episode 17, "Hands Free", and season 1 episode 19 of Law & Order: Criminal Intent titled "Maledictus".
In 2003, Durst went on trial for the murder of Morris Black. He hired defense attorney Dick DeGuerin and claimed self-defense. During cross-examination, Durst admitted to using a paring knife, two saws and an axe to dismember Black's body before dumping his remains in Galveston Bay. The jury acquitted him of murder.
In 2004, Durst pleaded guilty to two counts of bond jumping and one count of evidence tampering. As part of a plea bargain, he received a sentence of five years and was given credit for time served, requiring him to serve about three years in prison.
Durst was paroled in 2005. The rules of his release required him to stay near his home; permission was required to travel.
In December 2005, Durst made an unauthorized trip to the boarding house where Black had been killed and to a nearby shopping mall. At the mall, he ran into the presiding judge from his murder trial, Judge Susan Criss. Due to this incident, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles determined that Durst had violated the terms of his parole, and he was returned to jail. He was released again from custody on March 1, 2006.
In 2011, it was reported that Durst had purchased a townhouse in Harlem, and his family confirmed that he was living there at least some of the time.
In July 2014, Durst was arrested after turning himself into police following an incident in a CVS drugstore in which he allegedly exposed himself without provocation and urinated on a rack of candy. He then left the store and casually walked down the street. Durst was charged with criminal mischief and is currently awaiting trial. If convicted of the misdemeanor charge, he may serve up to a year in prison and may be subject to a $2000 fine.
Robert Durst, Troubled Scion of Real Estate Family, Is Acquitted of Trespassing
By CHARLES V BAGLIDEC. 11, 2014
Robert A. Durst this week in New York during a break in his trial on trespassing charges. He was found not guilty on Thursday. Credit Mike Segar/Reuters
Robert A. Durst, the eccentric member of a New York real estate family whose life has taken a bizarre and twisted path, found himself in a courtroom again this week. After a two-day bench trial, he was found not guilty of trespassing on Thursday at the residences of his brother and other relatives on West 43rd Street.
“I felt like kissing my lawyers,” a small, frail-looking Mr. Durst, 71, said as he left the courtroom. “The judge made the only decision I thought was fair.”
Judge Ann E. Scherzer, in Manhattan Criminal Court, also vacated 13 orders of protection obtained by members of his family, although she noted that Mr. Durst now “on notice” to steer clear of his family’s property.
The charge was relatively minor, but the trial lifted a curtain on a bitter and painful dispute that has roiled one of the city’s most prominent real estate families for nearly a quarter-century.
Members of the Durst family, which owns over a dozen commercial and residential towers on the city’s skyline, are clearly fearful of Robert Durst, instructing security guards at their buildings to be on the lookout for their long-estranged relative.
For Mr. Durst, the charges represented yet another legal challenge for a man whose first wife disappeared in 1982. In 2001, a jury in Texas acquitted him of murder charges in the shooting death of a neighbor, whose body he carved up into pieces he tossed into Galveston Bay.
Mr. Durst has served time in prison for bail-jumping, a parole violation and gun charges. But he said the verdict on Thursday was a vindication.
“I’m not spending my time running around 43rd Street wanting to shoot my brother,” he said outside the courtroom after the verdict, as his lawyers cringed.
His brother Douglas Durst is not so sure.
Although the two brothers have been at odds their entire lives, Douglas became more fearful of his brother in 2001, when Robert was on the run from murder charges in Galveston.
Douglas learned that Robert, while eluding a nationwide search for 45 days, had pulled into the driveway of Douglas’s estate in Katonah, N.Y., with two loaded handguns in his car.
There was no confrontation, and Robert Durst later insisted he was contemplating suicide, not shooting his brother.
During the same period, their younger brother, Thomas, who lives in California, sought round-the-clock protection from Robert.
Robert Durst is the eldest son of Seymour B. Durst, who turned the family’s real estate business into an empire. But before his death in 1995, Seymour Durst turned the company over to Douglas. Robert Durst largely cut off contact with his family and subsequently took $65 million to settle a claim for his share of the family fortune.
The trespassing charges arose from episodes in 2012 and 2013 when Robert Durst walked along 43rd Street, in front of townhouses owned by Douglas and other relatives. No Durst family members testified.
Security guards from the Durst Organization quickly arrived, asking Robert Durst to move away. At one point, he struggled to mount the steps of one of the townhouses and peer through the windows, all of which was captured on security cameras.
Some of Mr. Durst’s friends had insisted that he negotiate a plea on the trespassing charge, rather than risk a maximum of 15 days in jail. He, however, wanted a trial and considered testifying in the case. His lawyers, he said, advised against testifying.
Mr. Durst’s lawyer, Steven M. Rabinowitz, argued in court that the security guards never gave Mr. Durst a clear and specific order to stay away from the Durst homes, including the steps.
His client’s actions were “more consistent with someone just taking a stroll,” Mr. Rabinowitz said, than a deliberate act taken by someone who knows he is not supposed to be there.
He did not say why Mr. Durst chose to “stroll” so far from his home in Harlem, about five miles to the north.
Contrary to statements by his lawyer, Mr. Durst acknowledged in an interview that he knew exactly which houses on 43rd Street were owned by the Durst family. His father, he said, had once put him in charge of those buildings. “I was a disaster doing big deals,” he said. “So Seymour gave me all those buildings to manage.”
Next week, he will be court in Texas to answer charges that he urinated on a cash register and candy stand after picking up a prescription at a local CVS. He said the episode was related to a medical condition. He expects to pay a $500 fine and $147 in restitution to the drugstore.
Susan Berman
Susan Berman (1945–2000) was an American journalist and author who was the daughter of Davie Berman, a mob figure in Las Vegas. She wrote about her late-in-life realization of her father's place in a criminal empire. She was murdered execution style with a nine-millimeter hand gun on Christmas Eve 2000 in Benedict Canyon, California. In 2010, Lily Rabe played the character Deborah lehrman inspired by Susan berman in All good things movie.
She received a bachelor of art's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1967 and a master of art in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969.]
Berman's father Davie was born into a Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine during the Russian Empire. Her grandfather was a former rabbinical student.[2] Berman's father was a mob figure who had replaced Bugsy Siegel in Las Vegas at the Flamingo Hotel after Siegel's murder by the mob. Berman always maintained that her father died mysteriously on an operating table when she was 12. Berman also believed her mother Gladys' overdose suicide a year later was under mysterious circumstances.
Susan Berman was known affectionately as a "Jewish Mafia Princess." In 1981, Berman published the memoir Easy Street about life as the daughter of a mobster. Susan Berman was represented in the 1970s by the William Morris Agency, who talked with several Hollywood producers interested in adapting Berman's book into a screenplay. The movie rights were purchased from Berman, but the film project never got off the ground.
Various published accounts, including Murder in Beverly Hills by author Cathy Scott, have reported possible connections between Berman's murder and the 1982 disappearance of Kathie Durst—the wife of Berman's college friend and heir to a New York real estate fortune Robert Durst.[3] In a review of Scott's book, True Crime Zine wrote that "detectives came to suspect one of (Susan's) long-time friends but have never been able to charge him with murder."
Durst was considered a prime suspect in his wife's disappearance, along with another person of interest, but he was never charged in the case.
Berman remained a friend of Durst after the disappearance of his wife, and Durst gave large cash gifts to Berman in the months before Berman's death. Almost two decades after Kathie Durst's disappearance, New York State Police, at the request of Jeanine Pirro, the district attorney at the time in New York's Westchester County, contacted Susan to interview her about the Durst case. She was killed within a few days of the query.
Berman lived just off the Sunset Strip on Alta Loma Road in West Hollywood for several years prior to moving to her last residence in Benedict Canyon. Nyle Brenner, Berman's manager, said to the Los Angeles Times days after the murder that "many details of Ms. Berman's personal life are unclear" and added "she had been married once in the 1980s, and later helped rear the two children of a boyfriend." Her only husband, Mister Margulies, died of a heroin overdose.] She kept close ties to friends on Alta Loma Road, where she once lived, the Las Vegas Strip and in New York City, including Durst.
Berman was a novelist and author of two memoirs. She was a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner and also wrote for Francis Ford Coppola's City Magazine, the Westinghouse Evening Show on KPIX and the "People" show on CBS. She was a contributing writer for New York, Cosmopolitan and Family Circle.
According to Online Nevada Encyclopedia, "Despite neuroses and irrational anxieties, Berman was a versatile writer in many literary genres.",
She wrote Driver, Give a Soldier a Lift! and Lady Las Vegas, which accompanied the 1996 release of an A&E documentary for which Berman was a co-writer and for which she was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award.
At the time of her death, she was working on a project for Showtime with attorney Kevin Norte. The title of the project was Sin City and was being planned as Showtime's version of the HBO hit The Sopranos.
Seymour B. Durst, Real-Estate Developer Who Led Growth on West Side, Dies at 81
By ALAN S. OSER
Seymour B. Durst, a Manhattan real-estate investor and developer who combined a passion for city history with an equally strong distaste for government involvement in land-use affairs, died yesterday at New York Hospital. He was 81.
Mr. Durst had a stroke on May 12 and did not regain consciousness, said his son Douglas.
First as a member and later as president of the family real-estate firm, the Durst Organization, Mr. Durst became perhaps the leading assembler of the parcels of land on which office buildings were developed in east and west midtown over the last 40 years. "I've spent most of my life buying buildings and canceling leases and negotiating to get tenants out," he once said in an interview.
As developers, Mr. Durst and his brothers in the Durst Organization built first on the East Side and then on or near the Avenue of the Americas in the West 40's, on sites assembled by Seymour Durst. The West Side buildings were the fulfillment of his expectation 25 years ago that Manhattan growth would move to west midtown from east midtown, where his father, Joseph, was active before him.
Joseph Durst, a garment manufacturer who arrived from Austria in 1902, founded the business in 1927. During the Depression, he bought mortgages and leases on East Side commercial buildings. Seymour joined the firm in 1940 and took the title president after his father died in 1974.
The Dursts developed five office buildings on Third Avenue in the East 40's during the 1950's and 60's. Four of them -- all known by their addresses, Nos. 655, 675, 733 and 825 Third Avenue -- are still owned by the Dursts.
While the Third Avenue development was proceeding, Seymour Durst began buying property in west midtown, especially between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue and between 42d Street and Rockefeller Center. In one period, about 1965 to 1975, he owned or held options on about 10 acres of midtown land.
On the sites that the Durst Organization itself developed now stand 1133 Avenue of the Americas, on the west blockfront from 43d to 44th Street, 1155 Avenue of the Americas, on the west blockfront from 44th to 45th Street, and 114 West 47th Street. They are part of a portfolio of 4.5 million square feet of office buildings owned by the Dursts. In addition, the firm's holdings include 60 residential buildings with 500 apartments and an assortment of commercial buildings, nearly all on land that the Dursts view as potential redevelopment sites.
Fifteen midtown sites that Seymour Durst assembled were redeveloped by other builders. When Mr. Durst decided to hold an assemblage but had no quick prospect of finding a tenant for a new building, he would sometimes clear the site and build small stores -- he called them "taxpayers" -- to produce quick revenue until the market turned up.
Unlike most developers, Mr. Durst gave public voice to his views on governmental affairs and found varied and even quirky ways to do so. Appalled by the growth in the national debt, for example, he established a "national debt clock" on one of his taxpayers on the Avenue of the Americas near 43d Street. It electronically reports an estimated second-by-second growth of the national debt, and each American household's average share of it.
He tirelessly wrote articles and letters to the editor and took out pithy newspaper advertisements criticizing or poking fun at governmental intervention in the real-estate market. In the 1980's, he tried in court to block the New York State Urban Development Corporation from taking any land for the Times Square redevelopment project, now under way.
In particular, Mr. Durst decried the drastic decline in private housing development in New York City over the last 20 years, which he ascribed primarily to irrational zoning regulations. He considered it absurd, for example, that New York keeps so much land in Manhattan zoned for manufacturing when there is little likelihood it can ever be developed for that use.
In 1984, he collaborated with Andrew Alpern, an architect, on a book called "Holdouts!" (McGraw-Hill), detailing celebrated cases in which stubborn property owners thwarted developments. The accounts of how P. J. Clarke's, the saloon, was left standing when 919 Third Avenue was built at 55th Street in 1984, and how a Chock Full o' Nuts coffee shop tied up development from 1967 to 1980 at 135 Broadway, are retold in piquant detail.
Mr. Durst's interests ranged further. In the early 1970's, he and Irving Kahn, a financier, founded the New York City Job and Career Center, teaching job skills to thousands of high school students.
In semiretirement, he devoted himself to his passion for New York City history, expressed in a collection of 10,000 books, maps, prints, signs and other items that evolved as the Old York Library. It takes up most of the five-story town house on East 61st Street where he lived in recent years.
He also had a principle in real-estate investment: don't buy anything you cannot walk to. The walk to 10th Avenue and 42d Street may have been a little farther than usual, but it took him to one of his most notable assemblages -- 82 parcels on the block between 42d and 43d Streets, from Ninth to 10th avenues -- put together over 25 years. He sold them in 1974 to HRH Construction Company, which built a large middle-income residential project, Manhattan Plaza.
Another assemblage, still owned by the Dursts, is the land on the west side of Avenue of the Americas from 42d to 43d streets. In typical patient Durst fashion, he chose to build retail stores as an income-producing holding action.
Mr. Durst, who is remembered by colleagues for his courtly manners even in difficult negotiations, insisted on paying only what he considered reasonable prices for land and holding it until natural market growth caught up, rather than paying top price for land that nearby development had already made more valuable.
But during the slow-growth 1970's, those natural forces often brought pornographers as subtenants in his older buildings in the West 40's. The administration of former Mayor Abraham D. Beame attacked him as a coddler of pornographers.
"We closed 100 pornography shops," Mr. Durst said then. But to demonstrate how difficult the eviction procedure could be in court, he sold one building to a woman who was already operating a notorious massage parlor in it. "Let the city evict her, since they weren't helping us to do it," he said.
In the end, she defaulted on a large second mortgage from the Dursts. They recovered the building and demolished it as part of the site for a building for the United States Trust Company of New York, at 114 West 47th Street.
Mr. Durst was born in Washington Heights. He graduated from the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, the Bronx, in 1931 and the University of Southern California, where he majored in accounting, in 1935. In 1940, he married Bernice Herstein, who died in 1950 at age 32. He never remarried.
Besides Douglas, of Manhattan, Mr. Durst is survived by two other sons, Robert, of Manhattan, and Thomas G., of Ross, Calif.; a daughter, Mrs. Wendy Durst Kreeger of Larchmont, N.Y.; a sister, Alma Durst Askin of Manhattan; a brother, David M., of Chappaqua, N.Y., and eight grandchildren.