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Robert Alan "Bobby" Durst (born 1943) is a son of the late New York real estate mogul Seymour Durst, and brother of commercial developer Douglas Durst.

Early life

Durst grew up, one of four children, in Scarsdale, New York and attended Scarsdale High School. He completed his undergraduate degree at Lehigh University and attended graduate school at UCLA.

Durst reportedly witnessed his mother's apparent suicide at age seven; she either fell or jumped off the roof of the Scarsdale family mansion in the presence of her son. According to Reader's Digest, Durst underwent extensive counseling because of his mother's death, and doctors found that his "deep anger" could lead to psychological problems, including schizophrenia.

Durst went on to become a real-estate developer in his father's business; however, it was his brother Douglas who was later appointed to run the family business, which is reportedly worth about $650 million. The appointment, in the 1990s, caused a rift between Robert and his family, and he became estranged. His earlier schizophrenia diagnosis was incorrect.

Fugitive

In 1973, Durst married Kathleen McCormack, who disappeared in 1982. On December 24, 2000, Durst's long-time friend, Susan Berman, was found murdered execution-style in her Benedict Canyon California house. Durst was questioned in both cases, but not charged in either one.

In 2001, Durst was arrested in Galveston, Texas, shortly after body parts of his senior neighbor, Morris Black, were found floating in Galveston Bay, but he was released on bail. Durst missed his court hearing and was declared the nation's first billion-dollar fugitive. He was caught in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at a Wegmans Supermarket, after trying to steal a chicken sandwich and a Band-Aid, even though he had $500 cash in his pocket. A police search of his rented car yielded $37,000 in cash, two guns, marijuana, and Black's driver's license.

These events inspired the 2010 film "All Good Things", the title of which is a reference to a health store of the same name set up by Durst and his wife in the 1970s.

Trial

In 2003, Durst went on trial for the murder of Morris Black. He hired well-known defense attorney Dick DeGuerin and claimed self-defense. During cross-examination by Galveston District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk, Durst admitted to using a paring knife, two saws and an axe to dismember Black's body before dumping his remains in Galveston Bay. The jury acquitted him of murder.

In 2004, Durst pleaded guilty to two counts of bond jumping and one count of evidence tampering. As part of a plea bargain, he received a sentence of five years and was given credit for time served, requiring him to serve about three years in prison.

Durst was paroled in 2005. The rules of his release required him to stay near his home; permission was required to travel.

Second arrest

In December 2005, Durst made an unauthorized trip to the boarding house where he killed Black and to a nearby shopping mall. At the mall, he ran into the presiding judge from his murder trial, Judge Susan Criss. Due to this incident, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles determined that Durst had violated the terms of his parole, and he was returned to jail.. However he was released again from custody on March 1, 2006.

Wikipedia.org

Fugitive millionaire who butchered friend's body acquitted of murder

By Charles Bagli in Galveston, Texas

November 13, 2003

Robert Durst, a New York multimillionaire who admitted that he had butchered his 71-year-old neighbour's body with a saw and dumped the parts into Galveston Bay, has been acquitted of murder.

Durst, 60, told the jury that despite what happened afterwards, the killing had been accidental and an act of self-defence.

For many in court in Galveston, Texas, on Tuesday, it was a surprise ending to a strange trial. When the verdict was read, in a scene televised live nationally, Durst looked stunned, mouth agape as he gazed upward. A tight smile spread across his face, then he hugged his lawyers, softly saying, "Thank you so much."

But the verdict was no stranger than anything else heard over six weeks of testimony: a troubled multimillionaire, living on the cheap disguised as a woman; the unsolved disappearance of his first wife; the unsolved murder of his confidante in Los Angeles; a secret second marriage; a fatal shooting and a grisly cover-up; a nationwide manhunt that ended with a shoplifting arrest.

The New York Times

Mystery Of Robert Durst

(CBS) For seven weeks last year, in the Texas port city of Galveston, Texas, one of the wealthiest men in America was standing trial for the bizarre murder of an elderly man.

Robert Durst, 60, and Morris Black, 71, were neighbors. Durst claims Black came into his apartment, grabbed a gun that Durst had hidden and pointed it at him. Durst then said that they struggled over the gun before it went off, killing Black accidentally.

At Durst’s two-month trial, the jury’s not-guilty verdict, after five days of deliberation, shocked everyone – including Durst himself.

But lead investigator, Det. Cody Cazalas, says he’s rarely had a more clear-cut case of murder. “I believe that he probably walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head,” he says.

“There was nothing to suggest self defense … He never said self defense until after the defense attorneys got the case.”

What made Durst’s claim of self-defense even harder to believe was that after the shooting, instead of calling the police, he chopped up Black’s body, loading the parts into plastic bags and dumping them into Galveston Bay.

“I think he assumed that the tide would take the bags on out to sea. But instead, the bags just stayed right there by the pier,” says Cazalas. “He didn’t panic. Everything he did was cold and calculating.”

The jurors, who were widely criticized for the acquittal, said it proved to be a most difficult decision. But they say they had no choice. While they knew Durst had cut up the body, they weren’t convinced he had actually committed premeditated murder.

Is Durst a cold-blooded killer with a string of victims over more than 20 years? Or is he somehow a victim himself? Last spring, Correspondent Erin Moriarty talked to Durst’s closest friends and the defense psychiatrist who examined him.

*****

The Durst fortune, valued at more than $2 billion, is in the same league as Donald Trump’s fortune. And it’s certainly more than enough for the best legal defense that money can buy.

His high-powered defense team - Dick DeGuerin, Mike Ramsey and Chip Lewis – say that early on, they had difficulty communicating with Durst. So they hired Dr. Altschuler, a well-known Houston psychiatrist, to find out why.

Altschuler says he met with Durst almost on a weekly basis, and spent more than 70 hours examining him. His conclusion: Durst suffers from a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome. It’s a fairly uncommon disorder that leaves a victim’s intellect intact, but limits his ability to interact socially.

“Emotion is very difficult to him. He doesn’t know what happy is,” says Altschuler. “He can feel it, but almost as if he were feeling it as we would feel fingers through a glove. It’s very dulled, at best, to him … His whole life’s history is so compatible with a diagnosis of Asperger’s disorder.”

The jury apparently bought it. They were convinced that Durst, in a panic, dismembered Black’s body.

“It would have been an explanation for some of the inappropriate -- and obviously, it was inappropriate to dismember a corpse -- behavior that Bob went through,” says Ramsey.

*****

If you travel 1,647 miles southwest of New York City, the road ends at the Gulf port of Galveston, Texas.

Durst says he came to Galveston in late 2000 to get as far away as he could from New York tabloid reports that were tying him to another mystery – the 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathie.

“I have no reason to believe that she isn’t dead and that this wasn’t a homicide,” says Jeanine Pirro, the district attorney of Westchester County, N.Y., who is actively investigating the case. “We want to talk to Bob Durst and he won’t talk to us. There’s no one who knows more about what happened to Kathleen, and what her last actions were than Robert Durst. And he won't talk to us.”

In the winter of 1982, Kathie Durst, who’d been married to Robert for 11 years, disappeared. Strangely, Durst waited several days before notifying either the police or his wife’s family.

Did he sound worried? “No, it was almost casual,” recalls Kathie’s brother, Jim McCormick. “And almost rushed, to get the phone call out of the way.”

“He’s a very odd person,” says Kathie’s close friend Ellen Strauss. “He was tossing out her things and trying to rent her apartment – immediately after disappearing.”

Strauss is so convinced that Durst killed her friend that she’s been collecting evidence for years, and storing it in a safe deposit box -- even sharing it with investigators.

“I keep certain items that can’t be reproduced. Every scrap of paper that I wrote in 1982,” she says. “I made a promise, not that I would avenge her, but that I would get to the bottom of it. That’s what friends are for.”

*****

Kathie was just 19 when she left home in suburban Long Island for the bright lights of New York City.

“The apartment she was living in was owned by the Durst Organization, and Bob was apparently some collector of rents,” says McCormick.

Kathie and Robert got along instantly, and within two years, they married.

“She was crazy about him,” says Strauss. “He was quiet and there was that dark side to him. He was always dark and brooding and some women find that attractive.”

Plus, there was the lifestyle Durst’s world-class fortune could buy: going to discos like Studio 54, star-studded parties and exotic travel all over the world.

While Durst worked in the family real estate business, Kathie decided to go to medical school. But her friends say that did not make her husband particularly happy.

“He was very tight with money in terms of going to school. She had to come up with ways to do things on her own,” recalls Strauss. “In spite of the fact of being married to Bob Durst, he was not generous.”

Friends say Durst wouldn’t help cover Kathie’s medical school, and sometimes wouldn’t even pay for home repairs.

The marriage grew strained, and by 1981, most of her friends knew there were serious problems.

“Kathie was being abused by Bob physically. She always said that if anything ever happens to me, look to Bob,” says Strauss.

“The one time I saw the physical violence was when he was impatient to leave my mom’s house in New Hyde Park,” recalls McCormick. “He turned around and walked over and grabbed her by the hair, and pretty much yanked her right off the couch … Just kind of pulled her. I should have ripped his face off.”

In January 1982, Kathie suddenly disappeared. Her friends say it was after a confrontation with her husband, but Durst tells a very different story. He says they had dinner together that night and then he dropped her off to catch a train back to New York City. That’s the last time he says he ever saw her.

”It sickened him that he’s been suspected of killing a woman that he loved very much,” says Durst’s laywer, Dick DeGuerin, who claims his client had no reason to kill his wife. “He has her wedding picture in his cell in Galveston.”

“There were several people interviewed by police at the time who gave written statements that saw her after Bob had last seen her,” adds Durst’s lawyer, Mike Ramsey.

But sources in the investigation have told 48 Hours they question the credibility of some of those witnesses. And, there was another issue: the troubles in the Durst marriage were escalating.

The police have never found Kathie’s body – and don’t have enough evidence so far to charge anyone with her death. But Pirro says her office is not giving up: “You don’t need a body in criminal case. It’s a lot harder without a body, but that’s not going to stop us.”

*****

In the freewheeling beachfront bars of Galveston, Texas, you’ll hear another strange story about Bob Durst -- that when he first came here from New York to hide out from the media, he came disguised as a woman.

His cross-dressing made headlines during the Morris Black murder trial. And his attorneys even used it as part of their defense strategy.

“Why did a rich guy end up in Galveston wearing a wig, masquerading as a woman, and hiding from the world,” asks Ramsey, Durst's attorney. “Well, we have an answer for that. It’s a complex answer. It has to do with a psychological disorder.”

According to Altschuler, it’s a psychological disorder that helps to explain why Durst panicked and chopped up Black’s body in the Texas murder case.

Altschuler says the disorder is called Asperger’s syndrome, the rare form of autism that he says makes Durst act inappropriately in stressful situations.

But Durst’s oldest friends in life know a very different person. “People really have the wrong impression of Bob,” says Stewart Altman, who regularly visits Durst at the Galveston jail.

Altman has been Durst’s friend and at times legal advisor for 40 years. He and his wife, Emily, agreed to talk to 48 Hours. “He’s just a regular guy who happens to have a lot of money,” he says. “I don’t see why people should hold that against him.”

Altman and Durst met in high school in the upscale New York suburb of Scarsdale, where Durst – the firstborn prince of New York real estate royalty – struggled to make friends.

“Socially, Bob was not a great success," recalls Altman. "I always knew Bob had these problems relating to other people.”

(CBS) Robert Durst’s troubles began when he tragically lost his mother at 7. “She was on the third floor and fell off,” says defense psychiatrist Dr. Milton Altschuler. “Or jumped off. She died.”

By 10, he was such an angry child that a family doctor wrote that Durst might be schizophrenic. But Altschuler says the doctor was simply seeing the signs of Asperger’s syndrome.

“Certainly, children who are somewhat autistic, who have Asperger’s, do have a great deal of anger. Because they are really being frustrated a great deal,” says Altschuler.

Jim McCormick, the brother of Durst’s missing wife Kathie, believes that this anger and frustration makes his brother-in-law a dangerous man.

“Devious, deceptive, criminally cunning, contemptuous of civility. This is, you know, the person who doesn’t believe any of the rules apply to him,” says McCormick, who believes that Durst murdered his sister.

“He was already at his full rage, and she was at her full throttle of womanly independence --and that a terrible, terrible fight ensued.”

But the Altmans says Durst has been unfairly accused. “I honest to God think that if there were anything in these accusations, something would have come in the past 20 whatever years,” says Emily Altman.

“I think Bob’s an easy target, because he’s quiet. He’s shy. People sometimes interpret that in different ways.”

Would being a person who doesn’t feel a lot of emotion make him more able than the average person to commit a crime? “No, it makes him, to me, less dangerous,” says Altschuler. “Because most people commit crimes because of emotion. Not because of lack of emotion.”

Even if Durst dismembered a body? “No,” says Altschuler. “Because there’s nothing in his history to indicate a real dangerous past.”