Kathleen McCormack Durst

Case background and investigation

Kathleen McCormack, known as Kathie, married New York real estate heir Robert Durst in 1972. By early 1982 she was 29 years old and in her final year at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a few months from graduating, according to NBC's Dateline. Relatives and friends have said the marriage was troubled and that she was preparing to seek a divorce; her brother has said publicly that Durst was abusive toward her.

She was last seen on Sunday, January 31, 1982. According to Wikipedia's account, she arrived that evening at a gathering at a friend's house in Newtown, Connecticut, and then left to return to the couple's cottage in South Salem, in Westchester County. Robert Durst told police that he later drove her to a train station so she could travel to Manhattan, and the early investigation focused on the city. No body has ever been found.

The New York State Police reopened the investigation in 1999. Durst was never charged during that period and denied any involvement. At the request of her family, a court declared Kathleen Durst legally dead in 2017.

In two other cases Durst did face trial. According to Wikipedia, a Texas jury acquitted him in November 2003 of murdering his Galveston neighbor Morris Black. In September 2021 a Los Angeles jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of his friend Susan Berman, who was shot in 2000, and he was sentenced in October 2021 to life without parole. ABC News reported that prosecutors in that case argued he killed Berman because he feared what she might tell investigators about Kathleen's disappearance.

After taking office in January 2021, Westchester County District Attorney Miriam Rocah set up a Cold Case Bureau that took up the matter again. A criminal complaint was filed against Durst in October 2021, and on November 1, 2021 a grand jury indicted him for murder in the second degree. Durst, then 78 and in poor health, died on January 10, 2022 while in the custody of California corrections authorities, before he could be brought to New York. The charge was therefore never tried, and he is presumed innocent of it as a matter of law. Wikipedia notes that his conviction in the Berman case was vacated because his appeal was pending when he died.

Later in January 2022 the District Attorney's Office released a report on its investigation. It said that witness statements had discredited the account that Kathleen was last seen in Manhattan and that investigators had been misled by it for years, and it described evidence of domestic violence and a handwritten note found in the South Salem home. In May 2026, News 12 reported that a federal judge dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit her family had filed against Durst's widow.