News

The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office has announced a deal to extradite eccentric New York real estate heir and former Trinidad resident Robert Durst to Los Angeles stand trial for murder, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Durst, whose time in Trinidad was recounted in the Journal’s June 25 cover story, “Robert Durst’s Ghost,” stands accused of killing his friend Susan Berman, who was found on Christmas Eve of 2000 in her Benedict Canyon Home lying dead with a single, close range 9 mm gunshot wound to the back of the head. As Geoffrey Dunn reported in his piece for the Journal, investigators believe Durst had left his Trinidad home a few days earlier, driving south.

Durst, 72 and the subject of the widely popular HBO documentary The Jinx, is currently awaiting trial on a federal weapons charge in New Orleans. The deal reached with Los Angeles prosecutors will have him extradited to Los Angeles by Aug. 18 to stand trial for Berman’s murder, but is contingent on him first reaching a plea deal in his federal case.

“Once we get our case resolved in New Orleans, then we will work on getting him, Bob, to California where he can be brought to trial,” Durst’s attorney, Dick DeGuerin, told the Times. “We’re hoping to get it resolved and get him there as soon as possible. … He recognizes that that’s the main case, that’s everything. He’s been amenable to being extradited since Day One.”

There has been widespread speculation connecting Durst to the 1997 disappearance of Karen Mitchell in Eureka, and the Eureka Police Department reopened the case after Durst's arrest. But EPD Chief Andy Mills said this morning that there has been no movement in the case to report.