A federal judge in New Orleans has approved a plea agreement for once-fugitive real estate heir Robert Alan Durst to serve seven years, one month in prison on a weapons charge.
U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt approved the sentence during a hearing in New Orleans on Wednesday. Durst, 72, accepted the sentence as part of his guilty plea in February, which allowed him to avoid a 10-year prison sentence and $250,000 fine.
Instead, he will serve just 85 months in prison and receive a $5,000 fine. Engelhardt said in a statement that once the prison sentence is served, Durst will be subjected to three years of supervised release.
This development finds its roots in March 2015 when the FBI arrested Durst at the J.W. Marriott Hotel on Canal Street in New Orleans due to suspicion that he was about to flee to Cuba. As authorities prepared to remove him from the premise, they discovered that he was in possession of a .38-caliber revolver, which the 72-year-old isn't supposed to have since he is a convicted felon.
On the other hand, this plea deal has no actual bearing on the murder charge that he faces in California. Rather, it simply means that he can be extradited there, where he's charged with the 2000 murder of his female friend, Susan Berman.
The alleged murder might have occurred in 2000, but the whole situation actually stems from 1982 when his first wife, Kathleen Durst, mysteriously disappeared. Prosecutors argue that Berman was murdered to keep her from talking to New York prosecutors about the disappearance, while Durst's attorneys have maintained that he didn't kill her, doesn't know who did and wants to prove it.
The most recent such statement came in a motion filed Monday asking Engelhardt to recommend that Durst serve his time at FCI Terminal Island, Calif., about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The location is near the trial venue and has medical facilities that attorneys say Durst will need due to his "advanced age and serious health considerations, including mobility challenges."
Prosecutors and attorneys in Los Angeles have agreed that he will be there by mid-August.
Now, the question remains: did Durst kill Susan Berman? When Durst was detained at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in 2015, it was on the eve of the finale of a six-part documentary about him called "The Jinx," which described the disappearance of Kathleen, the death of a neighbor in Galveston, Texas, and Berman's death.
At the end of the show, a telling indication of what actually transpired can be heard when he was heard muttering, "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course."
