Robert Durst Early Life, Career, Relationship & Film Career

May 14, 2022 ReachingWorld

Real estate scion Robert Durst became well-known after his first wife went missing and he was cleared of killing a man in Texas. In 2015, he was charged with killing a friend he had known for a long time.

How did Robert Durst live?

Robert Durst was born into a well-known family in New York City in 1943. Over time, he became known for being involved in strange and bad things. Kathleen, his young wife, went missing in 1982, and Susan Berman, his longtime friend, was found dead in 2000. Durst was arrested for the death of a Texas man in 2001, but he was found not guilty of murder even though he admitted to cutting up the body. In 2015, the eccentric millionaire was arrested and charged with killing Berman after new evidence from the documentary The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst came to light.

Early Life:

Bernice and Seymour Durst had Robert Alan Durst on April 12, 1943, in New York City. In 1902, his grandfather Joseph moved from Austria to the United States. He had few things and even less money. By 1915, the patriarch of the Durst family had saved enough money to buy his first property in New York. In 1927, he set up the Durst Organization as a legal business.

Real Estate Business:

Seymour kept the business going and grew it, making a name for the family in the real estate business. Bernice fell off the roof of the family’s house and died in 1950. This was the first bad thing to happen to young Durst. At the time, newspapers said Bernice was confused because of the asthma medicine she was taking, but there were many rumors that she had killed herself.

Graduate:

Durst went to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania to study business and economics after he graduated from Scarsdale High School.

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Where Did Durst First Wife Go?

In 1965, after getting his degree in economics, Durst moved to the west coast and started a doctoral program at UCLA. There, he met Susan Berman, who was the daughter of a Las Vegas mobster and would show up later in Durst’s messed-up history.

Leave Job:

Durst quit UCLA in 1969 and moved back to New York. In 1971, he met Kathleen McCormack, a dental hygienist. They moved in together quickly and got married in 1973. They seemed to be happy together. But Durst became more and more possessive of Kathleen and hurt her until she disappeared in early 1982. Investigators talked to Durst and followed different leads, but they were never able to find his wife.

Divorce:

Durst got a divorce in 1990, and he moved in with his new girlfriend, Debrah Lee Charatan, who would later become his second wife. During this time, he kept working for the family business until he and his siblings had a fight. He moved around the country for the greater part of the 1990s. He came back for a short time when his father died in 1995.

Susan Berman Death:

In 2000, the disappearance of Kathleen Durst came up again, and the Westchester County, New York district attorney and police were going to talk to Berman about it. But Berman was found dead in her L.A. home just before the interview was supposed to happen.

Pretending to be a Mute Woman:

Durst soon ran into trouble in Texas, where he was hiding from the media by pretending to be a mute woman. He was the most likely person to have killed Morris Black, a Galveston neighbor whose body parts were found in a nearby bay in 2001. When he was put on trial in 2003, Durst said that Black had been shot while they fought over a gun, and he even admitted that he had cut Black’s body up in a panic. But he was found not guilty of murder and only got a short jail sentence for lesser charges.

A documentary about “The Jinx” and an Arrest:

After he got out of prison, Durst sold his share of the family business and got into more trouble with the law, mostly for small crimes. In 2014, he went into a CVS in Houston and urinated on a rack of candy. He later pleaded guilty to criminal mischief because of this.

Films:

Director Andrew Jarecki was interested in Durst’s strange life story. His 2010 film All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling, showed the troubled millionaire in a barely dramatic way. Later, Jarecki co-wrote and directed the six-part documentary The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, which was made up of hours of interviews.

Durst was arrested in New Orleans:

A lot of the evidence that was found in The Jinx helped the police finally catch Durst. Durst was arrested in New Orleans for killing Berman on March 14, 2015, the day before the finale of The Jinx aired. Soon after, he was charged with having more guns, and later that same year, his first wife’s family sued him for wrongful death.

Court in Los Angeles:

In November 2016, a weak-looking Durst finally went to court in Los Angeles to defend himself against the murder charge against Berman. He said, “I want to say right now, I’m not guilty.” In February of the next year, a series of conditional hearings began, and the first hearing was set for October 2017. But in September of that year, a judge in L.A. County Superior Court said the hearing would be moved to April 2018.

Officially Declared Dead:

In the meantime, Kathleen Durst was officially declared dead in the spring of 2017, 35 years after she went missing. Soon after her death, her family started more legal action. In May, they sued Durst’s second wife, Debrah Lee Charatan, and in October, they sued the NYPD to get them to give them documents about the investigation into her disappearance.

Kathleen Life:

Kathleen’s life got more attention when The Lost Wife of Robert Durst, a movie on Lifetime, came out on November 4, 2017. The movie is based on Matt Birkbeck’s 2002 book A Deadly Secret: The Strange Disappearance of Kathie Durst. Daniel Gillies plays the troubled real estate scion, and Katharine McPhee plays the wife who disappeared in 1982.