Robert Durst, convicted murderer and disgraced real estate heir, dies at 78

Robert Durst, the convicted murderer and disgraced multimillionaire real estate heir, has died. He was 78.

Durst died in a California hospital while serving a life sentence for the murder of Susan Berman, his friend and confidante who prosecutors say helped him cover up the killing of his first wife.

He was accused of second-degree murder in the disappearance of McCormack, who went missing on 31 January 1982 at age 29. Her body was never found and she was declared legally dead in 2017 at the request of her family.

The Berman case marked the first homicide conviction for Durst, who has been linked to the deaths of three people in three states over four decades, and came six years after the documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst again brought the multimillionaire into the spotlight.

He obtained an economics degree from Lehigh University in 1965, and later entered a doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met Berman. Durst dropped out and returned to New York in 1969, where he became a developer in the family business. But his father passed him over to make his younger brother, Douglas, the head of the Durst Organization in 1992.

Robert Abrams, the attorney for the family of Kathleen McCormack Durst, said the investigation into Durst would continue.

The Associated Press contributed