On Dec. 23, 2000, someone mailed the Beverly Hills Police Department a single sheet of spiral notebook paper, across which were printed an address and a word in big block letters: “cadaver.”
The address belonged to Susan Berman, who was shot and killed at her home the same day the note was sent. Police found her body the next day, but it would be another 15 years before a suspect was arrested: Robert Durst, a real estate scion who has been dogged by murder suspicions for nearly four decades.
Mr. Durst, who is scheduled to face trial in February, has long insisted that he did not kill Ms. Berman, one of his closest friends, and did not write what has become known as the “cadaver note.”
In 2015, he told the producers of “The Jinx,” an HBO documentary that turned his story into a national sensation, that the writer of the note had taken a “big risk” because it was something “that only the killer could have written.”
His defense lawyers have repeatedly tried to block testimony from forensic document examiners who say the handwriting on the note matches Mr. Durst’s. The judge in the case also rejected the lawyers’ attempt to identify Ms. Berman’s personal manager as the author of the note and the killer. Then, in a court document filed on Christmas Eve, the lawyers suddenly reversed course, acknowledging that Mr. Durst was the author of the note.
It is the first time that either Mr. Durst or his lawyers have conceded that he was in Ms. Berman’s home, or even in Los Angeles, around the time that someone put a 9-millimeter handgun to the back of her head and fired, killing her instantly. But they continue to deny that Mr. Durst, a millionaire who will turn 77 during the trial, was involved in her murder.
“Bob didn’t kill Susan Berman, and he doesn’t know who did,” said Dick DeGuerin, Mr. Durst’s lead defense lawyer, in an interview.
Mr. Durst has been in jail since 2015, when he was arrested in New Orleans and charged with Ms. Berman’s murder just hours before the final episode of “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” aired on HBO. The authorities said they suspected that he was about to flee the country.
The upcoming trial, which could last as long as five months, is expected to refocus the media spotlight on the long, complicated story of Mr. Durst, once considered the heir apparent to a vast New York real estate empire. Already, NBC’s Dateline, ABC’s 20/20 and CNN Headline News are planning episodes.
The police in Los Angeles found Ms. Berman’s body in 2000 after neighbors notified them that her back door was ajar and her terriers were running free. There was no sign of forced entry. Nothing had been taken, and no fingerprints or DNA were found from the killer.
Prosecutors contend that Mr. Durst killed Ms. Berman because he feared that she was about to tell the authorities what she knew about the 1982 disappearance and murder of Mr. Durst’s first wife, Kathie McCormack Durst, in New York, five months before she would have graduated from medical school.
Ms. Berman, who friends say was fiercely loyal to Mr. Durst, was his spokeswoman and media adviser at the time. Prosecutors and witnesses say she also made a critical call while posing as Kathie Durst that redirected New York police detectives away from the actual crime scene and hobbled the investigation.
The “cadaver note” that arrived at the Beverly Hills police department became a key piece of evidence in Ms. Berman’s death. After clearing various suspects, the Los Angeles police got a court order in 2002 for handwriting samples from Mr. Durst to compare with the block lettering on the note.
By then, Mr. Durst was in jail in Galveston, Texas, charged with the killing and dismembering of Morris Black, a man who had lived across the hall from him. The two men became friendly after Mr. Durst left New York in 2000, when the authorities reopened the investigation into his wife’s disappearance.
Mr. Durst testified during the trial in 2003 that he and Mr. Black had struggled over Mr. Durst’s gun. As they fell to the floor, the gun went off, Mr. Durst said. He told the jury that he had resorted to dismemberment because he thought no one would believe it was self-defense. The jury acquitted him.
With the murder investigations in Los Angeles and New York stalled, Mr. Durst could have laid low, but in 2010 he made a decision to talk to journalists and filmmakers. He gave the producers of “The Jinx” access to his private papers, urged friends to talk to them and gave them more than 20 hours of filmed interviews.
The producers discovered new evidence, including a letter that Mr. Durst had written to Ms. Berman in 1999. In her address on the envelope, he had misspelled the first word in Beverly Hills as “Beverley.” The address on the envelope of the cadaver note included the same misspelling, in similar lettering, with the first word of the Beverly Hills Police Department written as “Beverley.”
“The Jinx” filmmakers confronted Mr. Durst with the earlier letter and its similarities, but he denied writing the cadaver note.
Although his lawyers now acknowledge that his denial wasn’t true, a legal brief they filed in August indicates that they will likely argue that the note could have been written by someone other than Ms. Berman’s killer. “What the note demonstrates is that the person who mailed it was aware that there was a body at the house, not that the individual murdered Susan Berman,” the brief stated.
In interviews in 2015 and 2016 with The New York Times, one of Mr. Durst’s friends, who requested anonymity out of fear of legal entanglements in the case, said Mr. Durst had privately acknowledged finding Ms. Berman’s lifeless body when he went to her home on Dec. 23, 2000, and did not want her dogs to gnaw on it. But he fled after writing and mailing the cadaver note because he did not think anyone would believe he was innocent, the friend said.
But Mr. Durst also told John Lewin, the Deputy District Attorney, the filmmakers and his godson, Howard Altman, something very different. “The person who wrote the note killed her,” Mr. Altman said, recalling Mr. Durst’s words while he was in jail in Galveston.
Asked about those statements by his client, Mr. DeGuerin replied: “He said a lot of things that I don’t think are correct.”
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Robert Durst, Subject of ‘The Jinx,’ Admits Writing Key Note in Murder Case - The New York Times
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