Robert Durst handed life for murder of best friend

US real estate tycoon Robert Durst has been sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for the murder of his best friend.

Durst, 78, was convicted in Los Angeles Superior Court last month of first-degree murder for shooting his friend Susan Berman in the back of the head at her Beverly Hills home in December, 2000.

Prosecutors said he shot Berman in order to keep her from talking to police about the disappearance of his wife two decades earlier. He has always denied the charges.

However, last month, a jury in Los Angeles took just eight hours to find him guilty of the execution-style killing.

"This crime was a witness killing," Judge Mark Windham said, before reading out the life sentence. "That circumstance ... tremendously aggravated this awful, disturbing crime."

Windham rejected the defense's request for a new trial, saying, "There is sufficient, in fact, overwhelming evidence of guilt."

The killing had been a mystery that haunted family and friends for 15 years before Durst was arrested in 2015 following his decision to participate in a documentary, "The Jinx," which unearthed new evidence and caught him in a confession.

In the show's finale, Durst is heard muttering to himself, "There it is, you're caught" and "Killed them all, of course," apparently unaware that a microphone he was wearing during the recording of that episode remained switched on while he used the restroom during a break in the session.

'A soul crushing experience'

"It has been a daily, soul consuming and crushing experience," said Sareb Kaufman, who considered Berman his mother after his father dated her. "I've lost everything many times over because of him."

Durst, who has numerous medical issues and sat in a wheelchair wearing brown jail scrubs, said nothing. Durst had silenced Berman to prevent her from incriminating him in the reopened investigation of his wife's 1982 disappearance in New York, prosecutors said.

Berman, the daughter of a Las Vegas mobster, had acted as a spokeswoman for Durst after he became a suspect in the wife's disappearance.

Durst, an estranged member of one of New York's wealthiest and most powerful real estate dynasties, was never charged in his wife's case. He was also suspected of killing his neighbor in Texas, who was found dismembered. Durst admitted to the dismemberment but claimed the killing was in self defense. He was acquitted.

He repeatedly denied any involvement in Berman's death, but acknowledged he had written an anonymous letter to police telling them that her body lay in her Beverly Hills home.

Last month, prosecutor John Lewin told the jury there was a "mountain of evidence" that Durst had killed all three people with whose deaths he had been connected.

"Durst is not jinxed. He's a three-time killer who has managed to escape accountability until this very moment," said Lewin.

lc/nm (AP, Reuters)