Robert Durst answered questions during his testimony today about his relationship with his first wife Kathleen McCormack Durst who mysteriously disappeared in 1982.
The couple married in 1973, and the following year, they acquired a home, he said in a Los Angeles courtroom.
Durst, who is donning a plastic face guard and is seated in a wheelchair, went on to say that his close friend Susan Berman stayed with them for six months in a townhouse in Manhattan. Berman, he said, was working on a book about her life.
Asked to describe the living arrangements, Durst said, “talking to the jury makes me nervous.”
He said Berman and his first wife got along well.
Durst is on trial for the first-degree murder of Berman in her Beverly Hills home in 2000. Berman had helped handle Durst’s public relations after his wife’s disappearance in 1982, something which prosecutors believe led to Berman’s murder.
So, what happened to McCormack in 1982?
McCormack, Durst’s first wife, was on her way to Albert Einstein Medical School in New York when she mysteriously vanished. Durst testified years later that he put her on a train to head into the city that evening. “That was the last time I ever saw her,” he said.
However, McCormack had told her close relatives and friends that her husband had begun to abuse her physically during their marriage.
Despite a cloud of suspicion over the years, Durst had never been arrested in the disappearance.
Recently, more evidence has surfaced in the case, though. In a 2017 pretrial hearing for Berman’s case, Nathan “Nick” Chavin told the court that Berman told him Durst killed McCormack.
He also testified of marital problems festering until McCormack “said she was afraid” of Durst.
“On one occasion, she cried,” Chavin said. “She was appealing to me as Bob’s friend to understand she was having a terrible time with her marriage.”
Moreover, one of Berman’s friends, Hollywood producer Lynda Obst, said Berman told her that she had played a role in covering up Durst’s wife’s disappearance, according to cold-case specialist John Lewin.
In 1982, when McCormack was supposed to arrive at Albert Einstein Medical School, a school official received a call from a woman saying she was McCormack. The woman said she was sick and wouldn’t make it in.
“Susan Berman disclosed she made the call,” Lewin said.
