Robert Durst

Robert Alan Durst (April 12, 1943 – January 10, 2022) was an American real estate heir and murderer. The eldest son of New York City real estate magnate Seymour Durst, he gained attention as a suspect in the unsolved 1982 disappearance of his first wife Kathleen McCormack, the 2000 murder of his longtime friend Susan Berman, and the 2001 killing of his neighbor Morris Black. Acquitted of murdering Black in 2003, Durst did not face significant further legal action until his participation in the 2015 documentary miniseries The Jinx led to him being charged with Berman's murder. Durst was convicted of the murder in 2021 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He was charged with McCormack's disappearance shortly after his sentencing, but died in 2022 before a trial could begin. Early life Robert Durst was born in New York City on April 12, 1943, and grew up in Scarsdale, New York. He was the son of real estate magnate Seymour Durst and his wife, Bernice Herstein. His paternal grandfather, Joseph Durst, originally a Jewish tailor from Austria-Hungary, immigrated to the United States in 1902 and eventually became a successful real estate manager and developer, founding the Durst Organization in 1927. His three younger siblings were Douglas, Tommy and Wendy Durst. When Robert was seven, his mother committed suicide by jumping from the roof of the family's Scarsdale home; he later claimed that, moments before her death, his father walked him to a window from which he could see her standing on the roof. In a March 2015 New York Times interview, however, his brother Douglas denied that Robert had witnessed her death. As children, Robert and Douglas underwent counseling for sibling rivalry; a 1953 psychiatrist's report on ten-year-old Robert mentioned "personality decomposition and possibly even schizophrenia". Durst attended Scarsdale High School, where classmates described him as a loner. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1965 from Lehigh University, where he was a member of the varsity lacrosse team and the business manager of the student newspaper, The Brown and White. He enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) later that year, where he met Susan Berman, but eventually withdrew from the school and returned to New York in 1969.