Kathie Durst was ‘frantic’ in fight with Robert Durst the night she vanished and previously called him ‘homicidal,’ jurors hear
LOS ANGELES — Kathie Durst was “frantic” and fighting with her real estate tycoon husband Robert Durst the night she was last seen alive in New York in 1982, a friend testified Monday.
Fadwa Najamy said the “outgoing” young medical student made an unexpected appearance at her family’s regular Sunday evening dinner the night of Jan. 31, 1982.
‘She was upset ... frantic, the way she came in the house,” Najamy testified at Robert Durst’s murder trial in Los Angeles involving charges he killed another woman, Susan Berman, in 2000.
“It was very clear she was not happy, not content and had something to talk about,” she said.
Najamy recalled Kathie saying she had just been in a fight with Robert Durst. A short time later, Najamy heard Kathie on the phone with her millionaire husband.
“I heard her tell him she was on her way home in a pleasant voice and that she loved him,” Najamy, 65, testified. “That’s what victims of domestic violence have to do to survive.”
Najamy’s testimony came after jurors heard pre-recorded testimony Monday from Dr. Peter Wilk, a now-retired surgeon who described a chilling conversation he had with Kathie Durst in 1981.
“She had told me that she thought that her husband might kill her,” Dr. Wilk, who was Kathie’s medical school mentor, said in the videotaped testimony shown on a large screen.
“She was very emotional. She was shaking. She was traumatized. She said that she was going through a divorce, that it was a terrible time,” he recalled.
“She used a word that I have never heard before. She said there was a homicidal side to him and that was shocking to me,” he said. “The concept that somebody would use that word has embedded.”
Robert Durst, 78, is on trial in Los Angeles for Berman’s slaying, not Kathie’s, but prosecutors claim he murdered both women in cases that are inextricably linked.
They claim Durst first murdered Kathie amid a bitter breakup — and then shot Berman nearly two decades later because she had helped him cover his tracks in 1982 and he was worried she was about to tell New York authorities what she knew.
Durst claims he did not kill either woman and does not know who did.
Prosecutors hope to persuade jurors that Robert Durst convinced Berman to pose as Kathie during a crucial call in February 1982 to the Albert Einstein Medical School in the Bronx.
Berman allegedly pretended she was Kathie and told the school’s dean she would miss the first day of a new pediatrics clerkship due to gastrointestinal issues, prosecutors allege.
The call played a major role in the course of the NYPD probe of Kathie’s case because it bolstered Durst’s claim Kathie vanished from Manhattan after traveling there alone by train — not from the couple’s cottage in Westchester.
A second retired physician testified in person Monday about a visit Kathie Durst made to the emergency room at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx just weeks before she disappeared.
Dr. Leslie Hain said she treated Kathie in January 1982 for a badly bruised and swollen left eye. Prosecutors claim Durst had punched her in the face.
Kathie’s friend Janet Finke-Shaw also took the witness stand Monday and recalled a distressing phone call she allegedly received from Kathie in October 1981 describing a violent fight Kathie had with Robert Durst the night before inside the couple’s 16th floor penthouse on Riverside Drive in Manhattan.
“She told me that they had a fight and she tried to escape through the window and he pulled her back in and it was horrifying,” Finke-Shaw said.
“She was crying and she was sad and she was worried,” the friend said. “She just said he had a gun.”
Durst, whose life was famously chronicled in the HBO docuseries “The Jinx,” sat quietly in a wheelchair in the courtroom Monday wearing a light gray suit, white dress shirt and headphones to follow the testimony.
He remains in custody without bail. Kathie Durst has been declared dead, but her body was never found.
The office of Westchester District Attorney Mimi Rocah confirmed last week that it was reinvestigating Kathie’s disappearance as an unsolved homicide.
“At the time that this alleged homicide occurred...we did not have the same understanding of domestic violence, and how that kind of abuse could play into relationships and how it could frankly color law enforcement, and by that I mean police and prosecutors’ perspectives,” Rocah told News 12 Westchester.
“So we will investigate this,” she said. “It is challenging to do it after so long, and we want to do it right. This has been around, and the family obviously wants and needs closure, I think, a whole community wants and needs closure.”
