Convicted murderer Robert Durst, 78, dies in prison – Orange County Register

LOS ANGELES – New York real estate heir Robert Durst, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing a friend in her Benedict Canyon home, died Monday in prison.

According to Chip Lewis, one of his attorneys, 78-year-old Durst died of “natural causes related to medical issues that we have consistently reported to the court over the past few years.”

Lewis said attorneys will make no further statements about Durst’s death.

Durst was convicted September 17 of first-degree murder for shooting Susan Berman at her home in December 2000. Prosecutors said Durst killed Berman to prevent her from charging him in the future. a new police investigation into the disappearance of his first wife, Kathie Durst, in 1982.

Durst is the grandson of Joseph Durst, founder of the Durst Foundation, one of Manhattan’s largest commercial real estate firms. Prosecutors estimate that Robert Durst’s share of the family fortune is $100 million.

Kathie Durst was 29 years old when she went missing on January 31, 1982. Her body was never found and she was declared legally dead, at the request of her family, in 2017. Robert Durst Divorced from Kathie Durst in 1990 citing abandonment.

He was never charged in her disappearance despite several attempts to close the case. Investigators reopened the case in 1999, searching a lake and the couple’s home. During his Los Angeles murder trial, Durst repeatedly denied having any involvement in his wife’s disappearance and presumed dead.

Durst has been behind bars since March 14, 2015, when he was detained in a New Orleans hotel room a few hours before airing the final episode of the six-part HBO documentary series “The Jinx: The life and death of Robert Durst,” which examined the disappearance of Kathie Durst and the death in the shooting of Berman and Morris Black, Durst’s then-neighbors in Texas in late 1982.

Durst was tried for the murder and dismemberment of Black, but he was acquitted, arguing that the gun accidentally exploded during a struggle. Prosecutors in that case also allege that Black figured out Durst’s true identity. Durst was in hiding at the time.