Robert Durst indicted on murder charge in 1982 death of his wife in South Salem

A Westchester grand jury has indicted millionaire Robert Durst in the killing of his wife Kathie, who disappeared from their South Salem cottage following an argument nearly four decades ago.

The 78-year-old Scarsdale native is currently in a California state prison hospital facility. He is serving a life sentence following his conviction in September for first-degree murder in the December 2000 fatal shooting of his best friend, Susan Berman, at her Los Angeles home.

Jurors agreed with Los Angeles prosecutors that Berman helped Durst cover up the killing of his 29-year-old wife and that he sought to silence her when he learned investigators were taking a fresh look at Kathie's disappearance.

Guilty: Durst convicted in friend's slaying

Disappearance: Durst details wife's final days

Robert Durst: A timeline

The grand jury in Westchester County Court heard evidence in the case over two weeks and charged Durst with second-degree murder on Monday afternoon. It makes no mention of how Kathie Durst was killed but accuses her husband of intentionally killing her. 

The indictment was handed up to state Supreme Court Justice Barry Warhit, who signed an arrest warrant that will be lodged with California prison officials as Durst's extradition is sought.

Jim McCormack, Kathie's older brother, said the indictment is "really all about Kathie and not me and my sisters" but that it was validation for their decades-long push for Durst to be held accountable.

"I'm ecstatic," McCormack said in a phone interview Monday evening. "We've waited a long time for this. It's been 40 years of suffering you can't believe."

Durst suffers from a variety of medical conditions including bladder and esophageal cancer. Whether he would fight extradition was unclear. One of his lawyers in the LA case, Dick DeGuerin, said last week that he was not representing Durst in New York and it could not immediately be determined who might be Durst's lawyer in the Westchester case.

Westchester District Attorney Mimi Rocah said the investigation was "reinvigorated" 10 months ago when she took office and started a Cold Case Bureau. The bureau is headed by Assistant District Attorney Laura Murphy, who led the presentation of the case to the grand jury

Rocah said Kathie Durst's disappearance left her family and friends "with pain, anguish and questions that have contributed to their unfaltering pursuit of justice for the last 39 years."

"For nearly four decades there has been a great deal of speculation about this case, much of it fueled by Robert Durst’s own highly publicized statements,” she added. “An indictment is a crucial step in the process of holding wrongdoers accountable for their actions.”

Kathie Durst's body has never been found. And until two weeks ago there had never been a criminal charge related to the case. When Durst was reported to have contracted COVID-19, a criminal complaint charging him with second-degree murder was filed Oct. 19 in Lewisboro Town Court even as the grand jury was hearing the case.

Her disappearance came as Kathie was pursuing a divorce following what her relatives and friends described as abuse at the hands of her husband. 

The couple met in 1971 when Kathleen McCormack was a 19-year-old tenant in a building owned by Durst's family. They moved to Vermont to run a health food store but returned to New York and married on Robert Durst's 30th birthday in 1973.

But the relationship frayed, with Durst increasingly abusive and at one point forcing Kathie to get an abortion as he was adamant about not having children. In the late 1970s she decided to become a doctor and enrolled at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.

She was just months from graduation when she disappeared on Jan. 31, 1982 following a weekend at their Hoyt Street cottage along Truesdale Lake.

The case against Durst in Westchester was always going to be a circumstantial one as no physical evidence was ever recovered. But prosecutors are likely to use the LA prosecution as a roadmap as that included extensive evidence related to Kathie's disappearance.

That will include how Durst threw out his wife's school books and other possessions soon after she went missing; how Kathie's sister and brother-in-law found a note in the cottage's trash that read "town dump, bridge, dig, boat, other, shovel or ?" that investigators have long considered a reference to disposing a body; and how collect calls were made to the Durst Organization from near the Pine Barrens in New Jersey two days after the disappearance.

Durst was known to call the office collect. His own testimony in the LA trial had him house shopping in Connecticut and figuring out how to use a computer at the South Salem cottage — far from South Jersey.

Neither the cottage nor the lake were searched until a state police investigator, Joseph Becerra, took a new look at the disappearance in 1999.

Until then, it had been a New York City missing person case almost entirely because of what Durst told detectives when he reported her missing. He insisted that he put his wife on a train in Katonah on that Sunday night so she could return to their Manhattan apartment. 

And a woman purporting to be Kathie Durst called the medical school the following morning to say she was ill and would not make it in for her first day of a pediatric clerkship.

Authorities believe Berman made that call. She was living in New York at the time and served as Durst's unofficial spokesperson in the days after he reported his wife missing.

Berman wasn't the only one Durst killed after learning in the fall of 2000 about the new investigation.

He had rented apartments in New Orleans and Galveston, Texas under assumed names, trying to lay low, posing at times as a deaf, mute woman. In September 2001, he shot and dismembered a cantankerous neighbor, Morris Black, dumping his body parts in Galveston Bay. 

But when the bags surfaced and receipts linked the body to Durst, he was arrested. He posted $300,000 bail and fled, getting caught seven weeks later only because he shoplifted a sandwich, a newspaper and bandages at a Wegman's in Pennsylvania.

Two years later, Durst was acquitted of murder after testifying that he had struggled to wrest the gun from Black after he had pointed it at him and it went off. But he served prison time for weapon possession and disposing of the body.

Durst was the black sheep of a multi-billion dollar Manhattan real estate empire. Although the eldest child in his family, he was passed over for leadership of the Durst Organization in favor of his brother Douglas, in the 1990s, cementing an estrangement that continues. He eventually received more than $60 million to settle a lawsuit brought against his brother and family trusts.

His undoing began a decade ago when he agreed to cooperate with the producers of "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst," a six-part HBO documentary that aired in early 2015. 

Durst was arrested on the LA murder charge that March on the eve of the airing of the final episode, which concluded with Durst in a bathroom wearing a hot mic and saying "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course."

But those two sentences were not said together or even in that order, but had been edited out of a rambling monologue, so it was unclear whether they had been taken by jurors as a confession.

More significantly for Westchester prosecutors, the documentary also included Durst's admission that he lied to NYPD detectives when he told them on Feb. 5, 1982, that he had spoken with his wife by phone once she had returned to Manhattan. He acknowledged wanting to keep the focus of the case on Manhattan and away from South Salem.

McCormack over the years has assailed Durst but also expressed the hope that he would find it in his conscience to share what happened to Kathie that night.

"It's like my mom said on The Jinx: 'Bob, what did you do with her? Where is she,'" McCormack said. "That's what we want."

Twitter: @jonbandler