He will finally have taken his secret to his grave. The rich and sulphurous American heir Robert Durst, recently sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a friend after years of twisted procedures – and suspected of having killed and made his wife disappear in 1982 – died Monday in custody at the age of 78, announced one of his lawyers.
The multi-millionaire died “of natural causes linked to the long list of medical problems that we have repeatedly raised in court over the past two years,” said lawyer Chip Lewis.
Robert Durst was convicted in September by a Los Angeles court of killing his friend Susan Berman with a bullet to the head at the latter’s home in 2000, in Beverly Hills. According to the prosecution, he wanted to prevent her from speaking to the authorities about the disappearance of his wife, whom he is suspected of having killed in 1982. The body of Kathleen Durst has never been found.
“I killed them all”
Robert Durst, who has always denied outright, was officially indicted in New York last October shortly after his life sentence in California. A 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 last episode of a six-part HBO documentary, The jinx.
The series returned to another bloody episode in the life of Robert Durst: the murder of a neighbor, which he then dismembered and thrown into the sea. He had been acquitted of this crime thanks to an army of prestigious lawyers who pleaded a mixture of self-defense, an accidental gunshot and acts committed under the influence of alcohol.
In The jinxRobert Durst seemed to be making an involuntary confession, whispering to himself as he was in the bathroom and his wireless microphone was not turned off: “What have I done?” I killed them all, of course. In an interview with prosecutors after his arrest, he defended himself by asserting that he was under the influence of drugs during the filming of the documentary and that these words therefore meant nothing in particular.