D.he New York real estate heir Robert Durst has been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for the murder of his close friend Susan Berman. “This crime was a witness murder,” said Judge Mark Windham on Thursday (local time) before the sentence was pronounced. This circumstance complicates the guilt.
The judge rejected a request from the defense for a new hearing: “There is sufficient, even overwhelming evidence of guilt.” Berman’s son Sareb Kaufman also appeared in court on Thursday. With tears he described how he kept wondering how a life at his mother’s side would have been. “Every plan was completely overturned.”
Durst was found guilty in a high-profile murder trial in mid-September. The jury concluded that he killed his close friend Berman with a shot in the back of the head in their Los Angeles home in December 2000.
TV documentary put the case in the spotlight
The trial against the multimillionaire Durst, known among other things from a documentary series on the broadcaster HBO, began in March 2020. According to the court, Durst wanted to prevent Berman from being questioned by the New York police about the disappearance of his wife Kathleen in 1982.
Thirst is also under suspicion when his wife disappears. The real estate heir was arrested in a hotel room in New Orleans in March 2015 – just hours before the final of the HBO television documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” was broadcast Thirst”).
In it, Durst had apparently inadvertently made a kind of murderous confession. The multimillionaire was apparently unaware that the microphone was on when he mumbled to himself, “What the hell have I done? Killed them all, of course. ”Durst’s lawyers argued that the recording had been heavily edited and altered.
The HBO documentary also dealt extensively with the death of a neighbor Thirst in the state of Texas in 2001. The real estate heir shot the man in an altercation and dismembered his body. Two years later, however, he was surprisingly acquitted for self-defense.
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