Robert Durst, the 78-year-old real estate heir-turned-convicted killer, has been charged with second-degree murder in the 1982 death of his first wife.
The charge was made in a criminal complaint filed Tuesday by a New York State Police investigator in Lewisboro, New York. The one-page complaint alleges that on or about Jan. 31, 1982, Durst killed his wife at their shared home in Lewisboro.
It comes four days after the Westchester District Attorney Mimi Rocah empaneled a grand jury to hear testimony in the murder of Kathie Durst to determine whether charges should be filed. Rocah did not announce the investigator’s Tuesday filing, but her office issued a statement after reporters found it.
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“The Westchester County District Attorney’s Office can confirm that a complaint charging Robert Durst with the murder of Kathleen Durst was filed in Lewisboro Town Court on Oct. 19, 2021. We have no further comment at this time,” Rocah’s office said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Durst was sentenced to life in prison last week for the 2000 killing of confidante Susan Berman, who Los Angeles prosecutors said helped Durst cover up his wife’s death.
The conviction came after a decades-long media frenzy over Durst, culminating in the HBO docuseries The Jinx, in which Durst seemingly admitted to killing Berman and others (an admission later revealed to be the result of multiple clips spliced together). His wife’s body has never been found.
Born Kathleen McCormack, she was last seen in January 1982 when the couple spent the weekend at their South Salem, New York, cottage. Durst said his wife, who was 29, had boarded a train for Manhattan to begin her clinical rotation the next day, but she never arrived for it. Durst divorced her in 1990, citing abandonment, and her family had her legally declared dead in 2017.
Durst was acquitted of the 2001 killing of his neighbor, Morris Black, in Texas but was convicted of tampering with evidence after he admitted to chopping up Black’s body and dumping it in Galveston Bay.
Durst has been on a ventilator for the last week after he contracted COVID-19, his lawyer told The Daily Beast on Saturday.
