New York real-estate scion Robert Durst – who long has stonewalled questions about his wife’s mysterious disappearance in 1982 – forced her to get an abortion in the mid-1970s, her brother claims.
Robert Durst “was like, ‘You’ve got no choice,'” said Kathleen Durst’s brother Jim McCormack in a ABC News television interview. “She was so devastated by that.”
On the show, McCormack and Kathleen Durst’s friends detail Robert Durst’s alleged physical abuse of his wife prior to her disappearance.
The program, “Vanished: The Cold Case of Kathie Durst,” will be aired at 10 tonight.
Four friends said the then-29-year-old Kathleen, a medical student, explicitly warned them about her estranged husband before she vanished.
“It was only weeks before that Kathie had expressed to me that, ‘If anything happens to me, Bob is responsible,'” said her friend Kathy Traystman.
Robert Durst, 57, is the son of wealthy New York developer Seymour Durst. He has denied involvement in the disappearance of his wife, whom he reported missing to police five days after she was last seen, on her way to the couple’s South Salem country house.
The Durst case long has perplexed investigators, and their probe languished for years.
But last December, a seemingly unrelated but equally perplexing unsolved mystery raised cops’ eyebrows.
Author Susan Berman – the daughter of a Las Vegas mobster – was found dead Christmas Eve, shot execution-style in her Los Angeles home.
At the time of her death, The Post reported in January, New York State Police were planning to interview her about Kathleen Durst’s disappearance.
Berman was a longtime friend of Robert Durst, and was in contact with him shortly before her death, investigators said. She reportedly received $50,000 from Durst just months before she died.
“The timing [of Berman’s death] is extremely curious,” Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro told ABC News.
ABC reports that cops wanted to ask Berman what she knew about a phone call that Kathleen Durst supposedly made to let her medical-school dean know she was sick the day after friends saw her for the last time.