Susan Berman: Who Is The Journalist Robert Dust Murdured?

Susan Jane Berman, born May 18, 1945, was an American journalist, novelist, and the daughter of Jewish-American gangster David “Davie” Berman. She wrote about her late-life discovery of her father’s involvement in organized crime.

Berman became a close confidante of billionaire Robert Durst, who was accused of murder in the 1982 disappearance of his wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst. Berman was discovered dead at her house in Benedict Canyon, California, a Los Angeles suburb, on Christmas Eve 2000.

Durst was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in her death in 2015. In September 2021, he was convicted of her murder.

Susan Berman was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1945, as the only child of Betty Ewald, a touring dancer who went by the stage name Gladys Evans, and David “Davie” Berman.

Berman always claimed that her father, a major Jewish-American organized crime figure who took over Las Vegas’ Flamingo Hotel after Bugsy Siegel’s 1947 gangland murder, died on an operating table under mysterious circumstances when she was twelve, but all indications were that he died of a heart attack during surgery.

Susan Berman also thought that ambiguity surrounded her mother’s suspected overdose suicide a year later.

Berman grew up in Las Vegas and subsequently in Hollywood, California, where she attended the Chadwick School and had classmates and friends including Jann Wenner and Liza Minnelli.

Berman graduated with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1967, when she met Jewish-American real estate heir Robert Durst. She earned a master of arts in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969.