Robert Durst back in Los Angeles to face charges in 2000 murder of Susan Berman

ByABC7.com staff KABC logo
Saturday, November 5, 2016
Robert Durst back in Los Angeles to face murder charges
Robert Durst, a New York real estate heir, is back in Southern California to attend court on charges that he murdered his friend Susan Berman in 2000.

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Robert Durst, a New York real estate heir, is back in Southern California to attend court on charges that he murdered his friend Susan Berman in 2000.



The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said Durst is in a county jail and is scheduled to be arraigned Monday.



Durst was previously serving time in Louisiana for a federal weapons charge. He was sentenced to 7 years and one month in prison on the charges as part of a plea deal.



He agreed to extradition to California in December 2015.



The Los Angeles Police Department had issued a capital murder warrant for Durst and he was found in a New Orleans hotel. At the time of his arrest, authorities found him in possession of a gun.



The charges against Durst were announced last March, after two years of investigations that led authorities to believe Durst lay in wait with a gun and murdered a witness. Berman was found with a gunshot wound to the back of her head in her Benedict Canyon home on Christmas Eve.



According to authorities, Berman was going to speak with New York police about the disappearance of Kathleen Durst, his wife who disappeared in 1982. Her body was never found and she was declared dead in 2001.



In a criminal complaint filed against Durst, it states that Berman was a witness to a crime and that she was "intentionally killed because of that fact."



The case against Durst gained national attention after he was featured in a six-part HBO documentary series titled "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst" in 2015.



During a tense interview regarding the similarities between his handwriting and an anonymous letter that tipped off police about Berman, Durst stepped away to the bathroom still wearing a live microphone.



"There it is. You're caught!" he whispered to himself. "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course."



A source with the LAPD said an anonymous caller tipped off the department after watching the show and that the tip led the department to Durst.



It is unclear if any information obtained and used in the documentary, such as the bathroom recording, will be used in the Berman murder trial.

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