A Los Angeles jury found New York City real estate scion Robert Durst guilty of the murder of his best friend, Susan Berman. It was the final chapter in a 20-year-old case that still remains a bit of a mystery.
Berman was set to talk to investigators in 2000 about another mystery, the disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, last seen in 1982. But authorities found Berman dead in her home from a gunshot wound to the head.
McCormack Durst was declared legally dead in 2017; her body was never found.
Robert Durst is the son of New York City real estate tycoon Seymour Durst, who is credited with creating a $500 million New York real estate empire. After inheriting his father’s millions, Durst lived in Texas for several years, leasing a condo at The Centrum on Oak Lawn at Cedar Springs.
The agent who briefly dated him, Linda Zevallos, once wanted to use the bathroom in Durst’s Centrum condo, but Durst stopped her from using the powder room near the kitchen, saying it was dirty.
It had a strange “sculpture” on display.
“The floor was concrete,” says Linda, “and there was a saw in there, on a stand.”
Linda never saw any pets or animals.
Confessions to Friends
Prosecutors allege Durst shot Berman in the head. No one witnessed the shooting, but the prosecution relied on testimony of friends who said Durst had admitted to the killing… and a cryptic note sent to authorities that misspelled “Beverly Hills” as “Beverley.”
They said Durst confided to Berman he had killed Kathleen, and she helped him cover his tracks. On the stand, Durst denied murdering his first wife and, later, Berman. But under cross-examination, Durst testified he would perjure himself if he had killed them. Lewin (lead prosecutor) prompted Durst to admit he perjured himself five times during the trial, which resumed in May after a 14-month delay due to the pandemic. There was little physical evidence in Berman’s unsolved death. There were no people who witnessed the shooting and no murder weapon. In closing arguments, prosecutor Habib Balian pointed to one of the state’s strongest witnesses, a longtime friend of both Durst and Berman, Nick Chavin, who testified the defendant had told him, “It was her or me,” referring to Berman. “I had no choice.””Those nine words sum up the entire case,” Balian told jurors. Another key piece of evidence was the so-called “cadaver” note, a cryptic letter sent to police with Berman’s address and the word “cadaver” in caps that led detectives to her body.In the 2015 HBO documentary “The Jinx,” Durst said the letter could have been sent only by Berman’s killer. Defense lawyers had previously denied Durst wrote the note, and they unsuccessfully tried to exclude from trial handwriting evidence about it.Filmmakers confronted Durst with another letter he once mailed Berman, with nearly identical handwriting to the “cadaver” note. In both, Beverly Hills was misspelled as “BEVERLEY.”In a court filing, lawyers for the real estate mogul late last year reversed course and acknowledged Durst penned the anonymous note. “This does not change the fact that Bob Durst did not kill Susan Berman,” DeGuerin (Durst’s defense attorney) said at the time.
Durst is 78 and is in quarantine after having been exposed to COVID-19 by a driver.
Durst had many Texas connections. After living in Dallas, he apparently moved to Galveston. In 2003, Durst was acquitted of the murder of a Galveston neighbor as “self-defense.”
That killing took place in Galveston after his year in Dallas. Allegedly, the victim’s body was cut up cleanly and a sharp attorney got him off.
The judge who presided over the case, former Texas District Court Judge Susan Criss, now an attorney in private practice, says she found the cleanly severed head of a cat on her doorstep shortly after the trial. She also believes Durst “practiced dismemberment techniques on the seven dogs he owned, all of which were Malamutes named ‘Igor.'”
Durst lived in Dallas in the late 1990s at the Centrum on Oak Lawn. Dallas Realtor Jill Crowder Lucas showed him around town:
“In March 1998, I showed residential high rises to a new lease client from New York. After driving him around in my car for two days, and showing him 8 plus high rise buildings … he chose a unit at the Centrum on Oak Lawn in Dallas and signed a one-year lease. That client is now on every TV news channel in the world and featured on a HBO Special … the infamous accused murderer Robert Durst. Obviously, I met him after he fled New York and before he moved to Galveston! Kinda’ gives me chills!“
“He has to be accountable …”
With the sentencing, we wondered: is Linda Zevallos breathing a huge sigh of relief?
I reached out to her. Linda says she is so relieved that justice finally prevailed.
“He still has a lot of funds available,” she says. “Very relieved, yes. He was very controlling. I wasn’t dating Robert, but he would tell me, for example, I need to wear a size 6. I’m glad Susan Berman got justice and he has to be accountable for it.”
Linda Walker Zevallos (at the time, an Ebby Halliday agent) was going through a divorce in the late 1990s, before she got into Real Estate. She went to New York City for a national newspaper convention. She flew back to Dallas first class and sat right next to Durst.
“I asked if I could read his newspaper once he had finished it,” she said. “He said of course. Then we started to talk. We talked about my divorce. He was very nice but he did say one weird thing.”
Linda said that Durst advised her to break into her estranged husband’s office to steal his financials for the divorce.
On the plane, he also told Linda a friend of his ex-wife was missing.
“We didn’t have Google back then,” says Linda, “so I thought it was maybe a little strange, but never researched it.”
Next Durst asked her if she had a car at the airport if she could give him a ride home. She couldn’t. Once off the airplane, Durst asked Linda if she would go out with him sometime.
“I’m in Dallas and I don’t know anybody,” he told her.
Linda said she would have to think about it, as she was in the midst of her divorce.
The next day Robert Durst sent Linda $500 worth of orchids. His phone number was on the card, asking her to call him.
A Whirlwind Romance
Eventually, he called and asked her to lunch. He was living at the Centrum, where they met. He offered champagne (Linda said it was too early) and walked across the street to Eatzi’s for lunch.
“He was as nice as he could be,” she said. After lunch, they got stuck in a torrential rain downpour. They were sopping wet, trying to duck out of the rain under awnings, but it had been a very pleasant lunch. She left after they got back to the Centrum.
“He was interested in me,” says Linda. “He called me shortly after that.”
In his apartment, Linda says he had real estate “things” all over the walls. He had a place in San Francisco and New York. At first, he told Linda he was a labor lawyer, then he told her that his father had built office buildings in Times Square.
Next Durst called and said he wanted to take Linda to a nice place for dinner, perhaps Stephan Pyles’ then-restaurant in the Centrum building. It happened to snow that day, and school was closed, which meant Linda had to stay home with her 13-year-old son. She canceled.
“He got furious, really mad,” says Linda. “He said ‘I cannot believe you people in Dallas when it snows you just stop.'”
He cooled down later after finding that the restaurant had closed, too.
“I think he has a real hard time handling rejection,” says Linda. “he just cannot bear it.”
She moved. Durst called her from San Francisco and New York City until November; she never answered.
“He could be really nice and then really mean,” says Linda. “When the house I was going to rent fell through, Bob offered to let my son and me live in his high rise.”
Durst also only writes in green ink, according to Linda. Now with him facing whatever sentence a 78-year-old man receives for first-degree murder, he may not find green writing pens so readily available.
