Millionaires Who Murder: Robert Durst’s Net Worth
Robert Durst, son to Seymour Durst and consequentially a multi-millionaire, has such an unbelievable story that he’s the focus of a new HBO series.
In 2005, when Robert Durst took his family to court for not allowing his second wife to inherit his trust in the event something happened, it was revealed that Durst has access to a trust fund worth $43,000,000. The result of the law suit gave him a total sum of $65,000,000, but completely severed ties between him and his family and removed him from any stake in the company.
Certainly, his estranged relationship with his family and thus the Durst Organization is a result of the numerous controversies that have riddled Durst’s life. He’s 71-years-old currently, and yet he is still constantly having run-ins with the law. His accused offenses range from misdeamors, like urinating in public, to full-out murder.
The first suspicions of homicide by the hand of Durst began in the early 1980s, when Durst’s 28-year-old wife Kathleen disappeared and never resurfaced. She’s presumed dead, and Durst is the main suspect but has never even been charged.
In 2000, when police began to look into Kathleen’s disappearance once again, the woman they were looking to speak to, a long time friend of Durst’s named Susan Berman, was found dead. She was shot execution style. Again, Durst is a suspect but has never been charged.
Here’s where things get really weird: following Berman’s death, Durst moved to Texas where he began posing as a mute woman. Here, he admitted to murdering one of his neighbors, the elderly man named Morris Black . He admitted to shooting the man dead and than dismembering his body and dumping the parts into a river. He paid $250,000 bail and skipped town. Six weeks later he was found after he pilfered a sandwich and a couple other small items from a CVS with hundreds of dollars in cash on his person and $37,000 in his car. He then paid $1,800,000 for a stellar defense team and was acquitted from all murder charges in self-defense, though he did serve time for skipping bail and weapon charges.
An astounding 13 family members have restraining orders against him after he creepily looked into all of their security cameras late at night. His brother, Douglas Durst, who his father chose to take over the family business as opposed to Robert, admitted to hiring a bodyguard to protect himself against Robert. Just even ignoring all of this, let’s not forget he had no problem dismembering a human body. By anyone’s account, Robert Durst is a dangerous man.
And yet, he’s a wealthy one, which undoubtedly helps the obvious criminal remain a free man. In 2011, he sold several New York properties for double their worth and added $21,500,000 to his fortune. Certainly, his legal troubles probably cost him a pretty penny, especially since he paid the maximum for top-notch attorneys, as evident by the fact he hasn’t been charged for the majority of his crimes. Still, add in the money he already earned by his familial ties throughout his life and the $65,000,000 lump sum, and Durst has nonetheless amassed an impressive fortune.
At the end of the day, Robert Durst is estimated to be worth just under $100,000,000.
If you are as fascinated by Robert Durst’s story as we are, check out the HBO mini-series that runs now through the end of March. It is based on over twenty hours of interview with Durst himself, and is supposed to be his side to the story. Since he’s clearly a psychopath, we have a feeling that The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst will not be the chain of events as they actually happened, but we can agree it will make for an interesting watch.
