He says he didn’t kill his wife — but creepy real-estate scion Robert Durst still incriminates himself soundly in a new documentary, admitting during his first-ever on-camera interview that the relationship was violent and that he faked his alibi.
“Oh, yeah,” the twitchy recluse admits in the second installation of “The Jinx,” when asked if he used to beat his blond-beauty wife, Kathie. The HBO six-parter airs on Sundays starting Feb. 8.
“By 1981, our life was half arguments, fighting, slapping, pushing, wrestling,” Durst tells documentarian Andrew Jarecki, his voice matter-of-fact and his eyes blinking nervously.
“It deteriorated from there on,” he said of his 10-year marriage to Kathie Durst, 32, who disappeared without a trace in January 1982.
“It never got better. It got worse and worse.”
Durst — born into the third generation of the family-owned, multibillion-dollar Durst Organization, which co-developed One World Trade Center — has been a suspect in three homicides over the past 30 years, though never convicted.
There was the unsolved 2000 execution-style murder of his confidante, Susan Berman, a potential witness in his wife’s murder.
Then there was the grisly slaying and dismemberment of Durst’s elderly neighbor, Morris Black, in Galveston, Texas.
But Kathie’s case was the first.
In the documentary, Durst describes their marriage’s fairy-tale beginning, but ultimately still leaves the horror-story ending a mystery. “She thought I was good-looking in my little way,” he quips, creepily. “Cute or whatever it was. She was very outgoing and social, got along with people very good. It was perfect, because I don’t get along with people very good.”
The turning point came four years into the marriage, in 1976, when, Durst admits, he forced her to have an abortion.
“I said [to Kathie], ‘I told you from the beginning that I didn’t want children,” Durst tells his documentarians, his voice filling with irritation as he seemed to relive the nearly 30-year-old conversation. “Well, you keep the baby, you’re going to get divorced from me. Period.
Of his alibi lies to cops — that he’d spoken to his wife by phone on the last night she was seen and had a drink with a neighbor in his South Salem mansion — he admits, “I thought that would get [cops] to leave me alone, accept the missing person. Like that.”
Durst never speculates, at least in this installment, on what happened to Kathie, but sticks to the story he told cops: that he last saw her when he dropped her off at the train to the city at Westchester’s Katonah station.
Kathie’s girlfriends do a lot to incriminate Dursrt as well, at one point describing going through the trash from Durst’s South Salem mansion in the weeks after her disappearance. He’d begun throwing out her things, they found, as if he knew she was never coming back.
They also found a cryptic to-do list in Durst’s handwriting, that included the words “bridge,” “dig,” “boat,” and “shovel.”