When someone is able to evade their crimes for an extended period of time, there’s often a concern that they won’t face the sort of justice that fits what they’ve done to people.
And this isn’t just borne from any pessimism that they’ll ever be caught , but rather just a realistic assessment of what could happen once they are.
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After all, it can not only take years or even decades after a crime has been committed before someone sees an arrest for it, but there’s also the fact that legal proceedings like trials take a long time to complete.
And in that time, it’s not exactly unheard of for a defendant to die of natural causes or under mysterious circumstances before a case is decided.
This seems to be the issue in one of the cases involving convicted murderer Robert Durst in light of recent news regarding his condition.
On the morning of January 10, Robert Durst passed away at 78 after going into cardiac arrest in Stockton, California.
As Chip Lewis — one of his attorneys — told People , “Mr. Durst passed away early this morning while in the custody of California’s Department of Corrections. We understand that his death was due to natural causes associated with a litany of medical issues we had repeatedly reported to the court over the last couple of years.”
This occurred while he was serving a life sentence for the murder of 55-year-old Susan Berman and on trial for the murder of his first wife Kathleen Durst.
Considered the scion of one of New York City’s most powerful real estate families, Durst’s decades-long legal problems seemed to begin after Mrs. Durst disappeared in 1982.
As People reported, Berman served as his unofficial spokesperson after this occurred. However, prosecutors now believe that as the daughter of a Las Vegas mob boss, she had actually helped him cover up the murder of his first wife, whose remains were never found.
Berman was fatally shot in 2000 and Durst was convicted in connection with this death in October of 2021. Prosecutors figure Berman was killed because she knew too much, as she had told Durst — apparently without truth — that investigators in New York and Los Angeles were seeking to interview her.
However, it’s unclear whether either of these cases would have been opened if it wasn’t for a statement by Durst himself.
After another incident that saw him kill and dispose of the remains of 71-year-old Morris Black in 2001, he was the subject of a nationwide manhunt after he skipped out on bail following his arrest.
After he was caught shoplifting a newspaper, a Band-Aid and a $6 chicken sandwich, he plead guilty to bond jumping and evidence tampering. He was sentenced to five years in prison in 2003 after claiming he killed Black in self-defense and tampered with the evidence out of panic.
He would be released on parole for this killing in 2005.
This case would be part of the basis for a 2015 HBO docuseries called The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst , during which he apparently forgot he was wearing a microphone and may have accidentally confessed to Berman and Mrs. Durst’s murders.
In his words, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
h/t: People
