A longtime friend of Robert Durst testified Thursday he asked the New York real estate scion about the 2000 murder of their mutual friend, Susan Berman, in Los Angeles and Durst responded that he “had no choice.”
“Bob said, ‘I had to. It was her or me. I had no choice,”‘ Nathan “Nick” Chavin told Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mark E. Windham.
Chavin said the conversation took place after a 2014 dinner, during which Durst said he wanted to discuss Berman and his first wife, Kathleen Durst, who disappeared in 1982 and has never been found. Chavin said he asked Durst about his long-missing wife, but he got no response.
Asked if he still felt a bond with Durst, Chavin said, “It sounds ridiculous, but yes.”
“This was a best friend who admitted to killing my other best friend,” Chavin testified.
Durst is charged with the December 2000 murder of Berman, with prosecutors theorizing that Durst killed Berman because police in New York were about to question her in a renewed investigation into the disappearance of Kathleen Durst.
Chavin testified earlier Thursday that after Kathie Durst’s disappearance, Berman told him that Durst had confessed to killing her.
Chavin — whose identity had been kept secret from the public until he was called to the stand Wednesday — testified that he initially didn’t believe Berman.
“I said, `No, he didn’t.’ She (Berman) said, `Yes, he did,”‘ the witness said.
He said Berman told him there was nothing they could do for Kathie Durst and that they needed to protect their friend, Robert Durst.
“It was closer in time to when Kathie disappeared,” he said.
“When she told you Bob had told her that he had done it, was she clear about that?” Deputy District Attorney John Lewin asked.
“Yes,” the witness responded.
Chavin — who was again accompanied to court by a security team — testified that he found it very hard to believe what Berman had told him.
“I couldn’t believe that he would have committed a crime like that,” Chavin said.
Chavin, an advertising executive, testified that he didn’t want to believe Durst had killed his wife. He said he asked Berman how she knew, and she responded “because he told me.”
“Has Bob Durst himself, has he ever told you that he killed Kathie?” the prosecutor asked.
“No,” Chavin responded, noting that he believed Durst confided more in Berman.
The 72-year-old man testified that he was later “flabbergasted” to learn about Berman’s death during a phone conversation with a New York Times reporter.
He said he related the conversation with Berman to a writer friend of hers at a memorial service for Berman that Durst did not attend, then spoke to police from New York about it when they re-opened their investigation into Kathleen Durst’s disappearance.
Chavin said he told investigators that Berman had interjected that Durst “didn’t mean to do it” when she told Chavin what Durst had told her.
Following Berman’s death, Chavin said he subsequently thought a “great deal” about whether Durst might have been involved in his first wife’s disappearance.
“I began to doubt my own feelings,” he said.
He said he was in “extreme shock” and “disbelief” after learning that Durst had dismembered his neighbor, Morris Black, in Galveston, Texas, in 2001, because he believed Durst was not capable of such of hands-on violence. Durst was tried for but eventually acquitted of Black’s killing.
Chavin said he had once considered Durst to be his closest friend, but Durst stopped talking to him after Chavin told Durst about a meeting he had with Durst’s brother, with whom Durst had not gotten along since they were children.
“Years went by and then the next time I heard from him was a phone call from Galveston, Texas,” Chavin said.
Chavin is one of two witnesses that have been called to testify in advance of a hearing — tentatively expected in October — in which the judge will be asked to determine whether there is enough evidence to require Durst to stand trial for Berman’s killing.
In testimony Wednesday, Chavin described a rocky relationship between Durst and his first wife, saying Kathleen Durst told him she was afraid of him.”
“She was having a terrible time with her marriage,” he said.
The prosecution’s first witness, Dr. Albert Kuperman, testified Tuesday that he received a telephone call from a woman claiming to be Kathleen Durst around the time the woman disappeared in 1982. The woman said she was ill and would not be showing up for a medical “clerkship” she was set to begin that day.
Kuperman, 85, said he now is not certain if the woman on the phone was actually the fourth-year medical student. Prosecutors have suggested that it could have been Berman who made the call, pretending to be Kathleen Durst, at Robert Durst’s request in an apparent attempt to cover up his wife’s disappearance.
The judge allowed prosecutors to question Kuperman and Chavin early in order to preserve their testimony in case they are not available by the time of the preliminary hearing or trial — with prosecutors suggesting the witnesses might be killed. Their testimony has been videotaped — something that will only be shown to a jury if they are not available to testify later.
“That man kills witnesses … When pushed into a corner, he murders people,” Lewin said last month of the defendant.
Defense attorneys objected to the early questioning of witnesses, countering that their client does not pose any threat to anyone who might testify in his murder case.
“Mr. Durst is in custody. Mr. Durst is in a wheelchair,” one of his attorneys, David Chesnoff, told the judge, noting that he believes his client’s jailhouse telephone calls are tape-recorded by authorities.
The murder charge against Durst includes the special circumstance allegations of murder of a witness and murder while lying in wait, along with gun use allegations. Prosecutors, however, are not seeking the death penalty.
Durst was arrested March 14, 2015, in a New Orleans hotel room, hours before the airing of the final episode of the HBO documentary series “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” which examined Kathleen Durst’s disappearance and the killings of Berman and Black. He has been long estranged from his real-estate-rich family, known for ownership of a series of New York City skyscrapers — including an investment in the World Trade Center. Durst split with the family when his younger brother was placed in charge of the family business, leading to a drawn-out legal battle.
According to various media reports, Durst ultimately reached a settlement under which the family paid him $60 million to $65 million.
—City News Service