On Thursday afternoon, the family of Kathie Durst began the process of filing a wrongful death civil suit against Robert Durst, the 72-year-old subject of the HBO documentary series, The Jinx. The move seems slightly inevitable, given that Durst essentially admitted to having “killed them all, of course” on the show.
Durst is currently in a Louisiana federal prison where he is serving time for gun charges, and awaiting trial for the death of his friend Susan Berman.
From New York magazine:
Kathleen’s family, the McCormacks, have retained criminal lawyer and former Manhattan prosecutor Alex Spiro. This morning in New York county surrogate court Spiro fired the first salvo in a wrongful-death suit against Durst, by filing a petition to have Kathleen’s brother, Jim McCormack, appointed administrator of Kathie’s estate. The current administrator is her mother, Ann Catherine, who is 101 years old and unable to represent the family in these proceedings. “The reason James McCormack wishes to be appointed administrator at this time,” Spiro writes in this morning’s filing, “is to commence a possible wrongful death action against the decedent’s husband, Robert Durst.”
In 1982, Kathie vanished after fighting with Durst in their South Salem, New York house. Durst later told authorities that his wife had traveled back to their Manhattan apartment on her own, but no reliable witness could substantiate the claim.
Because of Durst’s confession on The Jinx, the McCormack family is now able to legally pursue the suit (in New York, there’s a two year statute of limitations unless there is new evidence, which the show provided):
“That, sadly, was the closure we’ve been chasing after for years and years,” McCormack said. “After 33 years of hell—really, there’s no other way to describe what our family has been through—we decided it’s time to sue.”
Contact the author at joanna@jezebel.com.
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