Well That Was One Very Brief Life Sentence


 

Robert Durst will go down in the books as one of the most successful murderers to elude justice in American history.

The heir to a New York real estate fortune has departed this mortal coil, age 78.

He was the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Kathleen, in 1982.

Police investigated, but the case — officially a missing-persons matter — went cold. The wiry and intense Mr. Durst spent much of the 1990s estranged from his family. Then he, too, vanished in October 2000 after authorities, acting on a tip, announced they had reopened the Kathleen Durst case.

Days before investigators were scheduled to meet with longtime Durst confidante Susan Berman, she was found dead at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. — shot in the back of the head, execution-style.

New York authorities tracked down Mr. Durst in mid-2001, only after he had been jailed in Galveston, Tex., in yet another homicide — the shooting and dismembering of Morris Black, his 71-year-old neighbor in a cheap rooming house. Mr. Durst had been hiding in the Gulf Coast city disguised as a mute woman when Black learned his true identity. Arguments and a fight followed, and in a struggle over a handgun, Black was killed.

On Oct. 14, Mr. Durst was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Two days later, he was hospitalized for covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and placed on a ventilator. Two weeks after that, he was indicted by a New York grand jury for second-degree murder of his first wife, almost 40 years after she had disappeared at age 29.

78 years of freedom and privilege and then three months in the slam is a pretty good deal for a triple murderer.

Except for the Galveston homicide, he eluded and confounded police for years. Not until the broadcast on HBO in early 2015 of the high-profile documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” did authorities move in and arrest him in Berman’s murder.

In the final episode of the six-part HBO series, he is heard muttering to himself during a bathroom break, apparently unaware that a microphone attached to his clothing is still live: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

Comments

  1. TrailblazerJanuary 10, 2022 at 5:41 PM

    Real estate moguls, USA football players and many more with Dollars $$ circumvent justice.
    Money talks ; murderers walk and more so , do fraudsters.
    Runnymede was but a illusion of what was needed.
    All it accomplished was an illusion!
    The illusion is more and more apparent today.
    We have become bull shitted into believing we have accomplished our desires whilst the status quo still rules the day.
    We are still serfs!

    TB

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Disaffected LibJanuary 12, 2022 at 1:24 PM

    My father was not highly educated nor what might pass for a deep thinker. However he was passionate about democracy. From an early age it was drilled into my head that democracy is a product of rights and freedoms which, almost always, had been paid for in blood, often more than once. He warned that we didn't have a right or freedom that, unless defended, that was secure. Those who would take these from us knew there was value and power in depriving us of them.

    ReplyDelete

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