Susan Berman

Early life

Berman was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1945, the only child of the former Betty Ewald, a traveling dancer who had adopted the stage name Gladys Evans, and Davie Berman. Her father was born into a Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine, during the Russian Empire, the son of a former rabbinical student. Berman moved with her parents to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1946. Berman always maintained that her father — a mob figure who replaced Bugsy Siegel at Las Vegas' Flamingo Hotel after Siegel's gangland murder — died under mysterious circumstances on an operating table when Berman was twelve, but all indications were that he died of a heart attack during surgery. She also believed uncertainty surrounded her mother's presumed suicide by overdose a year later.

Berman grew up in Las Vegas and, later, in Hollywood, California, where high school classmates included Jann Wenner and Liza Minnelli. She received a bachelor of arts degree in 1967 from UCLA, where she met Robert Durst. In 1969, she graduated with a master of arts in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. At age 21, 25 and 30, Berman was paid a total of $4.3 million by the Mafia for her father's interests in casinos and other properties.

Career

Berman was a novelist and author of two memoirs. Her first memoir, Easy Street, detailed her life as a mobster's daughter. While representing her in the 1970s, the William Morris Agency talked with several Hollywood producers interested in adapting the book into a screenplay. The movie rights were ultimately sold for $350,000, but no film project ever got off the ground. For a time, Berman attempted to finance a musical based on the Dreyfus affair, in which Durst declined to invest.

In San Francisco, Berman also wrote for various media, including The San Francisco Examiner, Francis Ford Coppola's City Magazine, the Westinghouse Evening Show on KPIX-TV and the People show on CBS. Berman was a contributing writer for New York, Cosmopolitan and Family Circle. She also wrote Driver, Give a Soldier a Lift! and Lady Las Vegas, accompanying the 1996 release of an A&E documentary, for which she was a co-writer and nominated for a Writers Guild of America award.

At the time of her death, she was working on a project for Showtime with attorney Kevin Norte. Entitled Sin City, it was being planned as Showtime's version of the HBO hit The Sopranos.

Personal life

Berman lived just off the Sunset Strip on Alta Loma Road in West Hollywood for several years prior to her final residence in Benedict Canyon. Her manager Nyle Brenner later told the Los Angeles Times that "many details of Ms. Berman's personal life are unclear" and added "she had been married once in the 1980s, and later helped rear the two children of a boyfriend." She was married only once, to a Mr. Margulies, in June 1984 at the Hotel Bel-Air; Durst walked Berman down the aisle. Margulies died of a heroin overdose in 1986. Berman kept close ties to friends on Alta Loma Road, at the Las Vegas Strip and in New York City, including Durst.

Murder

Berman was found murdered execution style with a 9mm handgun on Christmas Eve, 2000, in her rented Benedict Canyon home, and was presumed to have been dead at least a day.

On March 14, 2015, Durst was arrested in New Orleans on a first degree murder warrant issued out of Los Angeles. Although Durst's presumed victim was not immediately named by authorities, the Los Angeles Times first reported that he had been detained in connection to Berman's slaying. Three days after his arrest, Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey said that if convicted, Durst could face the death penalty in California for "special circumstances of murder of a witness and lying in wait." Durst was transferred to and arraigned in California in early November 2016.

Various published accounts, including Murder of a Mafia Daughter by author Cathy Scott, have reported possible connections between Berman's murder and the 1982 disappearance of Durst's first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst. Berman became a confidante of Durst, an heir to a New York real estate fortune, at UCLA in the late 1960s, and came to know Kathleen after later moving to New York. In a review of Scott's book, True Crime Zine wrote that "detectives came to suspect one of [Berman's] long-time friends but have never been able to charge him with murder." Durst was also considered a prime suspect in his wife's disappearance, but was never charged in the case.

Berman initially acted as a media spokesperson for Durst, and is believed to have facilitated his public alibi. She supplied a deposition in the case in 1982, which Durst faxed to investigators after her murder.

Berman had remained Durst's friend and received two large cash gifts totaling $50,000 from him in the months before her death; Berman had last written to Durst on November 5, 2000, expressing hope that her financial entreaties would not ruin their friendship. Earlier in 2000, New York State Police, at the request of Jeanine Pirro, the district attorney at the time in New York's Westchester County, had re-opened an investigation into Kathleen's 1982 disappearance, and was urged by Kathleen's friends to contact Berman for an interview. Berman was killed weeks after the re-opened investigation was publicized.

Durst's March 2015 arrest warrant mentioned a previously undisclosed typewritten letter, mailed from New York on January 9, 2001 to a West Los Angeles police station, titled, "Possible motive for Susan Berman murder." The letter said Berman suspected Durst was involved in his wife's disappearance, and specified that Durst was planning to visit Berman in late December. Berman biographer Scott told the New York Post in February 2017, before witnesses were to testify against Durst in a pre-trial hearing, that the evidence points to his guilt in Berman's murder.

Berman was interred at Home of Peace Memorial Park in East Los Angeles, California.

Nonfiction

Fiction

In popular culture

In the 2010 film All Good Things, the character Deborah Lehrman, portrayed by Lily Rabe, is inspired by Susan Berman. The film depicts Lehrman being murdered by the character Malvern Bump, who is inspired by Morris Black. It is implied that Bump murders Lehrman on the orders of David Marks, inspired by Durst, in order to prevent her from revealing incriminating information about Marks.