Real estate heir Robert Durst convicted of murdering his friend Susan Berman | Robert durst

Durst was convicted of first degree murder on Friday after a Los Angeles jury deliberated for about seven hours over three days. Berman was shot at close range at her Beverly Hills home in December 2000, when she was ready to tell police how she helped cover up the murder of Durst’s wife.

Berman, the daughter of a Las Vegas gangster, was Durst’s longtime confidante who told friends she provided him with a fake alibi after his wife went missing.

The verdict marked the first homicide conviction of a man suspected of killing three people in three states in nearly 40 years. Durst’s Curious Tale gripped viewers of the hit TV documentary The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, which chronicled his wife Kathie’s disappearance in 1982, Berman’s cold-blooded murder in Los Angeles. 18 years later, and the violence 2001 Death of a roommate in Galveston, Texas, where Durst lived undercover as a deaf-mute woman.

Throughout the trial, prosecutors painted a portrait of a wealthy narcissist who didn’t think the laws applied to him and ruthlessly dumped people in his path. They intertwined evidence of Berman’s murder with the alleged death of Kathie Durst and the 2001 murder in Texas.

The trial had been in preparation for five years, since Durst’s arrest on the eve of the airing of the last episode of The Jinx. The HBO documentary included interviews with Durst that contributed to the charges against him.

The conviction marks a victory for authorities who have sought to put Durst behind bars for murder in three states. Durst has never been charged with the disappearance of his wife, who has never been found, and was acquitted of the murder in Galveston, Texas, where he admitted to dismembering the victim’s body and throwing it away at the sea.

Durst’s escape from justice has seen some remarkable twists and turns. Durst has fled the law on several occasions, disguised as a mute woman in Texas and staying under a pseudonym in a New Orleans hotel with a latex mask from her shoulders to her head for an alleged getaway. He jumped on bail in Texas and was arrested after stealing a chicken sandwich in Pennsylvania when he had $ 37,000 in cash and two handguns in his rental car.

He then joked that he was “the worst fugitive the world has ever encountered”.

Durst later came to deeply regret her decision to appear on The Jinx after it aired on HBO in 2015, calling it a “very, very, very big mistake.”

In the documentary, Durst made several damaging new statements on camera, particularly about the Berman case. One of the most incriminating pieces of evidence involved the so-called “cadaveric” note, an anonymous note sent to the police directing them to Berman’s lifeless body.

Durst, who was so confident he couldn’t be logged into the note, told the filmmakers that “only the killer could have written” the note, which only contained the address of Berman’s house in Beverly Hills and the word “corpse”.

The filmmakers confronted him with a letter he sent to Berman a year earlier. The handwriting was the same and Beverly Hills was misspelled as “Beverley” on both. He couldn’t tell the two apart.

The hangover moment provided the climax of the film as Durst stepped out of the camera and muttered into a live microphone in the bathroom, “Killed them all, of course.”

During 14 days of testimony so punitive that Judge Mark Windham called it “devastating,” Durst denied killing his wife and Berman, although he said he would lie if he did. He tried to explain the note and what prosecutors said was a confession for a while unsupervised.

Durst admitted on the witness stand that he sent the note and that he was in Los Angeles at the time of Berman’s death. He said he sent the note because he wanted Berman to be found, but didn’t want anyone to know he had been there because it would look suspicious.

He admitted that even he found it hard to imagine that he could have written the note without killing Berman.

“It’s very hard to believe, to accept, that I wrote the letter and didn’t kill Susan Berman,” Durst said.

A prosecutor said this was one of the truest things Durst had said amid a ton of lies.

Jurors began hearing testimony in March 2020 before taking a 14-month hiatus during the pandemic. The case resumed in May.

Durst, 78 and frail, is at risk of dying in prison as the jury also found him guilty of the special circumstances of waiting and murdering a witness, carrying a mandatory life sentence. Windham has set a sentencing hearing for October 18.

Andrew Gumbel contributed reporting