REVELATION

Robert Durst Admits to Writing ‘Cadaver’ Note in Susan Berman’s Murder Case

The 76-year-old had long denied sending a note to the police that contained the address of Susan Berman, along with the word “cadaver.”

Robert Durst—the 76-year-old millionaire who has long maintained his innocence in the murder of Susan Berman, one of his closest friends—admitted that he wrote a key note alerting police to the location of her body in 2000, The New York Times reported. The Beverly Hills Police Department received the note from an anonymous sender; it contained Berman’s address and the word “cadaver” in big block letters. Durst, whose story became the subject of a 2015 HBO documentary titled The Jinx, has long denied writing the note, which he’s reportedly insisted “only the killer could have written.” But on Dec. 24, his lawyers filed a court document conceding that Durst penned the note. “Bob didn’t kill Susan Berman, and he doesn’t know who did,” his lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, told The New York Times. In a legal filing from August, his lawyers stated that the note shows “that the person who mailed it was aware that there was a body at the house, not that the individual murdered Susan Berman.”

Durst was arrested in New Orleans and charged with Berman’s murder the day before the final episode of The Jinx aired. His lawyers also said in the Dec. 24 filing that Durst was in Berman’s Los Angeles home around the time she was shot in the head and killed. There was reportedly no sign of forced entry, nothing stolen, and no fingerprints or DNA from the killer at the scene. Durst was arrested separately in 2001 on charges of murdering his elderly neighbor, Morris Black. He was acquitted of his murder, but convicted of dismembering Black’s body.