The murder of Susan Berman

The case was reopened by a television series, and the evidence that convicted Durst was a letter, a friend's changed account, and his own admissions. For fourteen years the only lead was the anonymous "cadaver" note sent to Beverly Hills police, postmarked December 23, 2000, which police believed Durst had written but could not prove; investigators knew he was in California then but never put him at the house. According to Los Angeles magazine and LAist, in the fifth episode of HBO's "The Jinx" in 2015, Berman's stepson produced a 1999 letter from Durst to Berman found among her belongings; the block lettering on its envelope appeared identical to the note's, and both misspelled Beverly Hills as "Beverley." Confronted with the two side by side in the finale, Durst went to the bathroom still wearing his microphone and was recorded saying, "What the hell did I do? Killed them all of course." The Los Angeles district attorney reopened the case, and FBI agents arrested Durst at a New Orleans hotel on March 14, 2015, the day before the finale aired. In February 2017 a longtime friend of both Durst and Berman, an advertising executive then 72, testified at a pretrial hearing that at the end of a dinner in 2014 Durst had said of Berman, "It was her or me. I had no choice." He said Berman had told him years earlier that Durst was responsible for Kathie's disappearance, that she had asked him to protect Durst, and that this was why he had stayed silent; he acknowledged it took months of talks with prosecutors before he disclosed the remark. That testimony was replayed to the jury hours before deliberations. Durst himself testified for fifteen days in 2021. He admitted writing the cadaver note, admitted having lied about it for years, and admitted being in Berman's house, saying he had found her dead on the floor and panicked. He conceded it was "a very difficult thing to believe" that he had written the note without killing her. Prosecutors argued that Berman had helped give him a false alibi in 1982 and that he silenced her before she could tell New York investigators what she knew. The jury found the special circumstances of killing a witness and lying in wait.