On the last Sunday of January 1982, Kathleen McCormack Durst arrived unannounced at a friend’s dinner party in Newtown, Connecticut. It was January 31, and Gilberte Najamy noticed her friend seemed anxious and was dressed, oddly for her, in red sweatpants. At some point that evening the phone rang. The call was from Kathie’s husband, Robert Durst, heir to one of New York’s biggest real estate fortunes. Kathie left to drive back to the couple’s lakeside cottage in South Salem, New York. She was 29, a fourth-year student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, months away from becoming a doctor. No one outside her marriage ever saw her again.

A Fortune, a Marriage, and a Health Food Store

Robert Durst was born in 1943, the eldest son of Seymour Durst, whose Durst Organization owned and managed office towers across Manhattan. He met Kathleen McCormack, a dental hygienist from Long Island, in 1971, when she rented an apartment in a building his family owned. They married in 1973 and, for a while, ran a health food store in Vermont called All Good Things. By the early 1980s the marriage was failing. Friends later described arguments, an abortion Kathie said she had been pressured into, and at least one emergency room visit. Kathie had enrolled in medical school and told people close to her that she wanted a divorce and a settlement. Najamy would later say Kathie left instructions with her: if anything happened, look at Bobby.

The Disappearance of Kathleen McCormack Durst

Durst waited five days before reporting his wife missing, on February 5, 1982. He told police he had put Kathie on a train to Manhattan from Katonah on the night of January 31 and later spoke to her by phone after she reached their apartment. A doorman initially thought he had seen her; the sighting fell apart under scrutiny decades later. The investigation stalled, and Kathie’s medical school classmates graduated without her. Some of her belongings turned up in a trash compactor at the couple’s Manhattan building weeks after she vanished. She was declared legally dead in 2017. Cases in which a husband controls the narrative of a wife’s disappearance have a long, troubling history — the Susan Powell case in Utah followed a strikingly similar script nearly three decades later.

Susan Berman and the Cadaver Note

In November 1999, Westchester County reopened the Kathie Durst file. Investigators wanted to talk to Susan Berman, a writer and daughter of a Las Vegas mob figure, who had acted as Durst’s unofficial spokeswoman in 1982 and remained one of his closest friends. They never got the chance. On December 24, 2000, Berman, 55, was found shot once in the back of the head inside her home on Benedict Canyon Drive in Los Angeles. Days earlier, someone had mailed the Beverly Hills police a note giving her address and a single word: “cadaver.” The sender misspelled the city as “Beverley.” Los Angeles has produced its share of infamous unsolved killings, from the Black Dahlia onward, and for fourteen years Berman’s murder seemed destined to join that list.

Galveston: A Dismembered Neighbor and an Acquittal

By 2001 Durst was living in a $300-a-month Galveston, Texas rooming house, sometimes posing as a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner. That September, garbage bags containing the dismembered body of his 71-year-old neighbor, Morris Black, were found floating in Galveston Bay. Durst was arrested on October 9, 2001, posted $250,000 bail, and disappeared. Six weeks later he was caught in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, after shoplifting a chicken salad sandwich from a supermarket while carrying hundreds of dollars in cash; police found roughly $37,000 more in his rented car. At trial in 2003, Durst admitted cutting up Black’s body with saws and an axe but claimed the shooting happened during a struggle over a gun. Black’s head was never recovered. On November 11, 2003, a jury acquitted him of murder.

The Jinx and Four Words in a Bathroom

The 2010 feature film All Good Things, loosely based on his life, prompted Durst to approach director Andrew Jarecki for interviews. The result was HBO’s six-part documentary The Jinx, which aired in early 2015. During production, Berman’s stepson found a 1999 letter Durst had written to her — with the same “Beverley” misspelling as the cadaver note. Confronted on camera, Durst stepped into a bathroom with his microphone still live and muttered, “Killed them all, of course.” On March 14, 2015, the day before the finale aired, FBI agents arrested him at a New Orleans Marriott, where he had checked in under a false name with a revolver, a latex mask, more than $42,000 in cash, and maps that included Cuba.

Conviction, a New Indictment, and Death

Durst’s Los Angeles murder trial, delayed by the pandemic, ended on September 17, 2021, when a jury convicted him of first-degree murder for executing Susan Berman to keep her from talking to New York investigators. On October 14, 2021, he was sentenced to life without parole. Weeks later, on November 1, a Westchester County grand jury indicted him for second-degree murder in Kathie’s death — the charge her family had waited almost forty years to see. It never reached a courtroom. Durst died of cardiac arrest on January 10, 2022, at a hospital near Stockton, California, at age 78. Because his appeal was still pending, his conviction was vacated as a matter of California law, and the New York charge died with him.

The Civil Case and The Jinx – Part Two

Kathie’s three sisters pressed on in civil court, suing Debrah Lee Charatan — the real estate broker Durst secretly married in 2000 and the heir to an estate once estimated at $100 million — for wrongful death, arguing she had helped him stay ahead of the law for decades. HBO’s follow-up series, The Jinx – Part Two, which premiered April 21, 2024, aired Durst’s recorded prison calls and turned a spotlight on Charatan. But in May 2026, a federal judge in New York dismissed the lawsuit, ruling the family had not shown the financial harm state law requires, while acknowledging the loss was devastating. Charatan keeps the estate. Long-dormant cases can still break open, as the arrest in the Gilgo Beach murders proved, but for the McCormacks the courts have now closed nearly every door.

Why This Case Still Matters

Robert Durst was questioned about three deaths across three states over four decades, and money shadowed every chapter: the $250,000 bail he forfeited, the $42,631 in his hotel room, the $100 million estate his widow inherited. The case became a landmark in how documentary filmmaking can reshape a prosecution — the letter that unlocked the Berman murder surfaced because of The Jinx, not because of police work. It also shows the limits of that reckoning. Durst was convicted of only one murder, was never tried for his wife’s death, and died before Westchester prosecutors could put their evidence in front of a jury. For families of the missing, verdicts can arrive too late to mean everything they should.

Kathleen McCormack Durst’s body has never been found, and somewhere between a dinner party in Connecticut and a cottage in South Salem, the last hours of her life remain unaccounted for.

Related Cases

• Gilgo Beach — a decade of Long Island murders finally traced to a suspect
• The Susan Powell case — a Utah mother vanishes and her husband tells the story
• The Black Dahlia — Los Angeles’s most famous unsolved murder, still open

Sources

• Wikipedia — Robert Durst
• News 12 Westchester — Judge dismisses wrongful death lawsuit filed by Kathie Durst’s family
• NPR — Robert Durst indicted in the 1982 murder of his wife
• NPR — Robert Durst, real estate heir, dies in prison at 78
• Westchester County DA — Robert Durst indicted for the 1982 murder of Kathleen Durst
• The Hollywood Reporter — The Jinx Part Two finale and Debrah Lee Charatan

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