Robert Durst of HBO's true crime series The Jinx gets seven years on illegal weapons charge
Mary Papenfuss
Murder suspect Robert Durst poses at the beginning of an interview for HBO's The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.
HBO
Quirky US criminal suspect Robert Durst has been sentenced
to seven years on a weapons charge in the wake of an explosive true
crime HBO series that apparently caught him in a multiple-murder
confession.
Durst was charged with the 2001 murder of a Texas neighbor whom he
dismembered before tossing the body parts into a Galveston bay. He was
acquitted by a jury because defense attorneys said Durst had killed in
self defense. He is also a suspect in the murder of his long-missing
wife, and in the death of confidant Susan Berman.
The troubled heir of New York real estate scion Seymour Durst was the focus of a fascinating six-part HBO series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. The programme examined Durst's grotesque dismemberment of his neighbor and questions surrounding the other two deaths.
At the end of the series, Durst walks into a bathroom, still wearing a
live microphone, and asks himself: "What the hell did I do?" He
answers: "Killed them all, of course."
Durst, 73, was arrested by the FBI at the request of California authorities in New Orleans in March 2015 just before the last HBO episode was aired. He has been in jail there ever since and has now finally been sentenced for illegal possession of a .38-caliber pistol as
part of a plea deal. He'll serve his time in a prison outside Los
Angeles, where he is to be arraigned in late summer on a murder charge
in Berman's death, the New York Times reports.
Prosecutors say Durst shot Berman in the back of the head in 2000
because she threatened to reveal what she knew about his role in the
disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen, 18 years earlier.
Before New Orleans US District Judge Kirk Engelhardt approved Durst's
plea-deal sentence on the weapons charge, and his transfer to
California, a frail and shrunken Durst said in court that he had been
looking forward to "get to Los Angeles for almost a year to enter my
not-guilty plea" on the murder charge, the Times reported.
He will serve his sentence on Terminal Island outside LA, a
minimum-security prison with facilities to deal with inmates with
various health issues.
"He didn't kill Susan Berman," said Durst's attorney Dick DeGuerin, who is interviewed in The Jinx.
Robert Durst of HBO's true crime series The Jinx gets seven years on illegal weapons charge
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