MURDEROUS MILLIONAIRE MONSTER

Robert Durst alleged bid to murder brother Douglas Durst introduced at trial

By Nancy Dillon

New York Daily News
March 9, 2020

Robert Durst’s own words dogged him again Monday, when jurors heard him on a recorded jail call allegedly saying he’d planned to kill his Manhattan mogul brother Douglas Durst.

“I was planning on Igor-ing BM,” Durst said in the 2001 phone conversation recorded by a Pennsylvania jail and played on the third day of opening statements at his Los Angeles murder trial.

Deputy District Attorney John Lewin told jurors that “BM” was code for Douglas Durst and “Igor-ing” was a reference to a series of dogs belonging to Robert Durst that were all named Igor and allegedly disappeared mysteriously.

“Mr. Durst is discussing the fact that he had screwed up his plan to kill Douglas,” Lewin told the jury.

Durst, 76, is on trial for allegedly murdering his best friend Susan Berman in Los Angeles in December 2000.

Prosecutors claim he shot Berman in the back of her head to prevent her from telling New York authorities what she knew about the disappearance of his first wife Kathie Durst in 1982.

They claim Durst killed Kathie amid a “nasty” divorce and that he also killed and dismembered Morris Black in 2001 to keep the Texas neighbor from blowing his cover while he lived undercover as a mute woman in Galveston.

Durst was acquitted of Black’s murder at trial after claiming he accidentally shot his neighbor in the face in self-defense.

Douglas Durst, now the head of the Durst family real estate empire in New York, is expected to testify at the expected five-month trial over Berman’s death now underway in Los Angeles.

In a rare interview with the New York Times in 2015, Douglas said before Kathie vanished, Robert Durst had a series of seven Alaskan Malamute dogs.

He said they all disappeared, mysteriously, within six months of his older brother owning them. All of the dogs were named Igor.

“We don’t know how they died, and what happened to the bodies,” Douglas said. “In retrospect, I now believe he was practicing killing and disposing his wife with those dogs.”

In a motion filed early Monday, Lewin argued for the right to bring up Durst’s alleged plot to kill his brother saying it was linked to Kathie’s disappearance. The judge granted the request.

The motion pointed out that when Durst jumped bail in Galveston and ended up back in custody on Nov. 30, 2001 for shoplifting a sandwich from a Pennsylvania supermarket, authorities found a note in his car that said, “What DD is doing to me puts me in the same place as what Kathy did to me.”

Lewin also told jurors Monday that when he interviewed Durst in a New Orleans jail in March 2015 after his arrest on the Berman murder warrant, Durst talked about the 2010 film “All Good Things,” a fictionalized version of his life.

“What was the thing that bothered you most about ‘All Good Things’?” Lewin asked Durst in the recorded clip played Monday.

“Oh, killing the dogs,” Durst responded.

Highlighting that response for jurors, Lewin said Durst “never complained about the fact that the movie depicted him as murdering three people.”

“What the evidence will show is that Bob Durst killed Kathie Durst in the midst of a nasty divorce, that he killed Susan Berman because he was afraid that Susan Berman was going to reveal what she knew” and he killed Black to eliminate “a problem,” Lewin said shortly before concluding his lengthy presentation.

He called Durst’s alleged crimes “cruel, illegal, immoral, homicidal, but not crazy.”

Durst’s defense team, led by Texas-based lawyer Dick DeGuerin, is expected to present a five-hour opening statement on Tuesday, DeGuerin told The News as he left the courtroom.