Durst Says He Lied to Cops About Night Wife Disappeared

Real estate heir Robert Durst testified Wednesday that he has changed his mind many times about whether he actually saw his wife step onto a commuter train for Manhattan on the night she disappeared in 1982, and said he lied to police when he told them he later spoke to her on the phone. “Everyone has asked me that question and I have changed my mind maybe a dozen times," Durst said under questioning from his attorney Dick DeGuerin at his Los Angeles murder trial. “Did I actually see Kathie walk through the doors and onto the train? The answer is no. But there is no place else to go.” Durst, on trial for the 2000 killing of his best friend Susan Berman, has never been charged in the disappearance of Kathie Durst, who was later declared legally dead. But prosecutors have been allowed to present evidence that Durst killed his wife and then killed Berman when she was about to tell authorities what she knew.

He testified that he never saw or heard from his wife again after watching her step onto the train platform in the New York hamlet of Katonah near their home on Jan. 31, 1982, the AP reports. But days later he told a detective investigating her disappearance that he had called her and spoken to her at their apartment in Manhattan, where she had gone because she had medical school in the Bronx the following morning. "That was a lie," said Durst. "I wanted to convince him that Kathie had gotten back." Durst, 78, claimed Kathie had fabricated and exaggerated stories about his abusing her, including a pair of incidents that were dramatized in the film All Good Things starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst and shown to jurors earlier in the trial. (On Monday, he testified that he didn't kill Berman and doesn't know who did.)