Robert Durst: DA says investigators ‘guided’ by husband’s false narrative in search for missing wife, Kathie

Police investigating the disappearance of Kathleen McCormack Durst in 1982 had “tunnel imaginative and prescient” that led to “missed alternatives” of their quest for solutions, particularly by tailoring their quest for solutions primarily based on a story supplied by the sufferer’s husband, now-deceased actual property inheritor Robert Durst, New York officers mentioned Wednesday. 

Westchester County District Lawyer Mimi Rocah mentioned throughout a Wednesday afternoon press convention that investigators have been wrongfully “guided by Durst’s model of occasions.” She made the revelation whereas saying that her workplace would launch the investigative report associated to McCormack Durst’s disappearance. 

Noticeably absent from the occasion was the household of McCormack Durst, which has been outspoken about looking for justice for Kathleen, generally known as “Kathie.”

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The D.A.’s workplace’s Chilly Case Bureau resumed the investigation into McCormack Durst’s disappearance when Rocah took workplace final January and a grand jury returned an indictment towards her husband, an inheritor to the Durst actual property fortune, on November 2021. 

Rocah mentioned the workplace launched the report within the wake of Durst’s demise earlier this month, “as a result of a public trial is now not doable.” 

“The report summarizes information not topic to grand jury secrecy that have been gathered through the investigation into Kathie Durst’s disappearance, and it sheds some mild on why it took almost 40 years to cost Robert Durst for her homicide,” Rocah mentioned. 

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The district lawyer went on to elucidate that Durst made “quite a few statements” to authorities that investigators and proof later debunked. She mentioned legislation enforcement had obtained a number of experiences involving Robert Durst’s alleged violence towards his spouse – “together with with a gun” – and had obtained bodily proof from the couple’s Salem, New York, house. She mentioned investigators had discovered “overwhelming proof” that Kathie McCormack Durst was a sufferer of home abuse.

Investigators had additionally obtained witness statements that contradicted Durst’s personal explanations of his spouse’s whereabouts. 

Rocah described how one eyewitness report, which indicated that McCormack Durst was in Manhattan – and “falsely steered that she was alive” – was debunked 20 years later when a brand new investigator took a recent take a look at the case.  

“This name was in reality a ruse that Durst had orchestrated utilizing his pal, Susan Berman,” she mentioned. 

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Rocah mentioned she was not “placing blame wherever,” however mentioned the case demonstrates “the hazard of tunnel imaginative and prescient.”

“Some missed alternatives by legislation enforcement officers directing the early levels of the investigation could have contributed to delays in bringing the costs on this case,” she mentioned. “We are able to and should study from these investigations.” 

After Rocah’s press convention, an lawyer representing McCormack Durst’s household mentioned his purchasers “weren’t invited” to – and even knowledgeable about Wednesday’s occasion.

“There’s completely little doubt that Robert Durst murdered Kathie in South Salem, New York, on January 31, 1981,” lawyer Robert Abrams mentioned in a press release supplied to Fox Information Digital. “The proof to show this past an affordable doubt has been out there for nearly forty (40) years.”

Abrams went on to accuse a number of individuals, together with some unspecified members of Durst’s household, of being concerned in “a prison conspiracy to assist Robert Durst keep away from prosecution.” 

“In the present day, the Westchester County District Lawyer has sanctioned these unlawful acts and tried to elucidate away how cash, energy and affect allowed a killer to flee justice,” Abrams wrote. 

He additional known as on Rocah to resign.

Abrams later added: “We ask the general public to think about why the present Westchester DA and her predecessors stay unwilling to inform the reality about why it took almost forty years for Robert Durst to be charged.”

Robert Durst was convicted in September of killing Berman, his longtime greatest pal, at her Los Angeles house in 2000. McCormack Durst’s case was a frequent subject of debate for prosecutors, who argued that he killed Berman out of worry that he would incriminate the lady in his spouse’s demise. 

Durst’s attorneys have been interesting his conviction when he died. Durst was additionally charged – however in the end acquitted – within the demise of a person in Texas. 

McCormack Durst’s stays have by no means been recovered.