A New York prosecutor will seek an indictment in the coming weeks against millionaire real estate heir Robert Durst for the death of his ex-wife, Kathie Durst, who disappeared in 1982, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Friday. .
Westchester District Attorney Mimi Rocah decided in recent days to take the case to a grand jury in the next few weeks or two, according to the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and did so on condition of anonymity. . The grand jury process is expected to take about a month, the person said.
Kathie Durst’s disappearance has overshadowed 78-year-old Robert Durst for years, featured in an HBO documentary in which he appeared to admit to killing people and culminating last month with his conviction in California for murdering an informant who, according to prosecutors, it helped him cover up the murder of Kathie Durst.
A message seeking comment was left on Friday with the Westchester district attorney’s office, which previously said it has reopened the investigation into Kathie Durst’s death. In a statement issued after Durst’s conviction last month, a spokesman for Rocah’s office said their investigation was ongoing.
Durst’s attorney, David Chesnoff, said: “I do not respond to rumors.”
Robert Durst is incarcerated in Los Angeles and is scheduled to be sentenced on October 14 for the murder of his friend Susan Berman in 2000. His conviction for first degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Durst, the eccentric heir to a New York City developer family, is now sick and frail. He sat in a wheelchair throughout the trial, spoke slowly in a strained, husky voice as he testified in his own defense, and read his attorney’s questions on a tablet with live transcripts because he had a hard time hearing.
Los Angeles prosecutors say Durst shot Berman at his Los Angeles home in December 2000 as he prepared to tell police about his role in Kathie Durst’s death. She had told friends that she provided him with a false alibi after his wife disappeared, prosecutors said.
“He is a narcissistic psychopath. He killed his wife and then he had to keep killing to cover it up, ”Assistant District Attorney John Lewin said after Durst’s conviction in the Los Angeles case.
Kathie Durst was 29 years old and in her last months of medical school when she disappeared on January 31, 1982. She and Robert Durst, who was 38 at the time, had been married for almost nine years and lived in South Salem, near Connecticut. border. His body was never found. At the request of her family, she was declared legally dead in 2017.
Robert Durst told police that on the night of her disappearance, he put her on a train to New York City, had a drink with a neighbor, and then spoke to Kathie Durst on the phone while she stayed at her Manhattan apartment. They had been fighting earlier in the evening, he said. A few weeks before that, Kathie Durst went to the hospital with facial injuries that she said were caused by Robert Durst.
In the 2015 HBO documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” he admitted that he made up the details about seeing his neighbor and talking to Kathie Durst on the phone, and said he did it because he was “hoping it would all go away. he “.
In the same documentary, after the filmmakers confronted Durst with evidence linking him to Berman’s murder, he turned away from the camera and muttered to himself into a live microphone in the bathroom: “He killed them all, for course “.
Robert Durst, who divorced Kathie Durst in 1990 on the grounds of abandonment, has never been charged with her disappearance despite various efforts over the years to close the case. Authorities reopened the case in 1999, searching a lake and the couple’s home.
While all of that was going on, Durst fled to Galveston, Texas, where he was accused of killing a neighbor, Morris Black. Durst then cut up Black’s body and threw it into the sea. Durst claimed in self-defense that he and Black were fighting for control of a weapon, and was acquitted. He was convicted of destroying evidence for discarding body parts.
Durst, who testified at the Los Angeles trial, denied killing Kathie Durst. After her medical school called to report that she hadn’t been to class, he said he thought she was “somewhere having fun” and suggested that perhaps drug use was the culprit.
“It hadn’t occurred to me that something had happened to him,” Durst testified in August. “It was more like: what had Kathie done to Kathie?”
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Associated Press reporters Brian Melley and Andrew Dalton in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Reference-toronto.citynews.ca