During his cross examination in his own murder trial, Robert Durst was confronted with an affair he had with Prudence Farrow, Mia Farrow’s sister, in the months leading up to the disappearance of his late wife, Kathie Durst.
Attorney John Lewin questioned the real estate heir who is on trial for the murder of his friend and confidante, Susan Berman, who was found dead in her Los Angeles home in 2000. However, the prosecutor has spent most of this week questioning Durst about his relationship with Kathie Durst, digging into accusations that Durst physically and mentally abused her and forced her to get an abortion, which caused a rift in their marriage.
Durst testified that his affair with Farrow began a little before his marriage to Kathie Durst and continued until a little after she disappeared. It’s been reported that the two had a three-year affair although they were both married. In previous conversations with detectives and attorneys, which were replayed by Lewin when Durst seemed to contradict previous statements, Durst said that Farrow told him at one point that she would not pursue a relationship with him if he was married to Kathie. He wanted to pursue a relationship with Farrow in December 1981, and Kathie did not like that. Kathie Durst disappeared a month later.
“How did it get resolved?” Lewin asked. “Kathy disappeared,” Durst responded, to which Lewin said, “yes, that is how it got resolved, isn’t it?”
During his testimony, Durst also said he kept thinking about Kathie Durst for a year after her disappearance, wondering what had happened to her, but after a year, he wouldn’t let himself think about it any longer. Lewin then asked Durst whether he thought Kathie Durst, who was legally declared dead in 2016, was alive. Durst has long been suspected of killing Kathie Durst, although he’s maintained his innocence.
“Probably she is dead,” Durst said. “There is no evidence that she’s living, so based on that, she’s dead.”
When pressed about her disappearance, Durst said, “I did not kill Kathie and I did not dismember her. Thinking about dismembering her makes my skin crawl.”
Durst has pleaded not guilty to the 2000 murder of Susan Berman. His trial first began on March 4 but was soon postponed to April 6 due to the pandemic. By late March, a spokesperson for the Superior Court of California said that the proceedings would be delayed once again to May 26. The date had been postponed for a third time to June 23, and then again to July.
He was arrested in March 2015 by FBI agents in New Orleans, one day before the finale of HBO’s “The Jinx,” which chronicled Durst’s life and the death of three people close to him — Berman, his first wife, Kathie Durst, and a neighbor in Galveston, Texas.
Robert Durst was previously acquitted of murder in Texas after he said he killed and dismembered his neighbor, Morris Black, in self-defense in September 2001.
You can watch his first part of Thursday’s testimony above, and you can watch the part about Prudence Farrow at the 35-minute mark.
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