Robert Durst
Accidentally confessed: US real estate heir sentenced to life imprisonment for murder
Robert Durst sat motionless in a wheelchair while the verdict was being delivered
© Myung J. Chun / AFP
The US real estate heir Robert Durst faces life imprisonment. About a month after the guilty verdict, the sentence is now announced.
New York real estate heir Robert Durst has been sentenced to life imprisonment with no early release for the murder of his best friend. The court was convinced that Durst shot his girlfriend Susan Berman to prevent her from testifying about his wife’s disappearance some 20 years earlier.
“This crime was a witness murder,” said Judge Mark Windham on Thursday when the sentence was handed down. This circumstance made thirst’s guilt even more difficult.
The judge rejected a request from the defense for a renegotiation: “There is sufficient, even overwhelming evidence of guilt.” Durst himself sat motionless in a wheelchair while the verdict was being delivered.
“You murdered me too, the person I was”
The son of Susan Berman, who was murdered by Durst, also attended the trial. With tears he said that he kept wondering how his life would have been if his mother were still alive. “Every plan was completely overturned. You also murdered me, the person I was,” he countered the 78-year-old.
Durst was found guilty in a high-profile murder trial in mid-September. The jury concluded that he killed Berman with a shot in the back of the head in their Los Angeles home in December 2000. Investigators are convinced that he wanted to prevent Berman from being questioned by the police about the disappearance of his wife Kathleen in 1982.
Thirst is also under suspicion in the case of his missing wife. The real estate heir was arrested in a hotel room in New Orleans in March 2015 – just hours before the final of the HBO television documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” was broadcast Thirst”).
In it, Durst had apparently inadvertently made a kind of murderous confession. The multimillionaire was apparently unaware that the microphone was on when he mumbled to himself while going to the toilet: “What the hell have I done? Killed you all, of course.” Durst’s lawyers argued that the recording had been heavily edited and altered.
The HBO documentary also dealt extensively with the death of a neighbor Thirst in the state of Texas in 2001. The real estate heir shot the man in an altercation and dismembered his body. Two years later he was surprisingly acquitted for self-defense.
Berman’s family summoned thirst to reveal the location of his wife’s body at the verdict on Thursday. There is still no trace of Kathleen Durst to this day.