Cold Case: Friends and family have a strong sense of who killed Susan Berman. So why do the authorities seem so lost?

By Cathy Scott

Photos by Bill Hughes

When Susan Berman lived in Las Vegas in the 1940s and '50s, her father delivered slot machines to Flamingo hotel-casino rooms so his school-aged daughter could pass the time gambling and ordering room service. As the heir to a wealthy casino operator, Berman enjoyed the life of a spoiled, indulged child. She wanted for nothing.

But the high-society lifestyle of the former Las Vegan (now dubbed the Mafia Princess) would be short-lived. Years later, her desert roots would haunt her. Now, her supporters say they are haunted by the turn of events that took her life.

Susan Berman's world first toppled when she was 12 and growing up in Las Vegas. Her father, Davie Berman, a Jewish Mobster who once partnered with Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, died during surgery in 1957. Her mother Gladys committed suicide the following year.

The rest of her life, all Berman wanted was for her father to be remembered for his contributions to Las Vegas. She wrote about her father in two memoirs, 1981's Easy Street and 1996's Lady Las Vegas. She never got over losing her father. She sought solace in a surrogate figure -- a young man named Robert "Bobby" Durst, whom she met during her college years.

All Berman's friends and family want is for her killer to be charged, tried and convicted for her 2000 murder.

At the time of her death, Berman lived in the Beverly Hills community of Benedict Canyon. The 55-year-old journalist, author and screenwriter was gunned down gangland style just before Christmas 2000. Police were summoned to her home after neighbors reported that her dogs were loose.

Officers found Berman's lifeless body inside, lying on the hardwood floor of her rented home.

Her neighbor Marvin Karp said Berman was killed on the Friday night of Dec. 22, "because the dogs were outside early Saturday morning. And they barked all night."

One suspect -- and, according to police, the only serious one to date -- is Berman's former college classmate Bobby Durst. She called him her brother and her best friend. They had much in common. Berman was from Las Vegas royalty and lost her parents at a young age. Durst was a multimillionaire and the eldest son of a rich New York real estate family.

Like Berman, Durst's mother committed suicide when he was a child.

Durst told investigators he was in the Hamptons with his second wife for the holidays when Berman was gunned down. But Durst's wife, Debra Lee Charatan, couldn't remember if the couple spent Christmas together in 2000.

Durst's celebrity lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, offered up a different alibi: Durst, he said, was on a plane Christmas Eve day -- headed from San Francisco to New York -- when Berman's body was discovered. About the same time police were arriving at Berman's home, DeGuerin said, Durst was on a plane.

Besides owning property in New York, Durst also owned a home in San Francisco.

The problem with the San Francisco alibi -- which was true -- is that Berman had been dead for two days when her body was discovered. Instead of providing an alibi for his client, DeGuerin unwittingly placed Durst in California at the time of Berman's murder, just up the coast from the crime scene.

Sixty-year-old Durst was recently acquitted of killing a man in Texas. He admitted to slaying 71-year-old Morris Black, dismembering the body, putting it in plastic trash bags and then throwing it into Galveston Bay. Within days, a 13-year-old boy fishing with his father found Black's floating torso.

In November, a jury ruled that Durst killed Black in self defense. (He explained that he disposed of the body out of fear.) Durst was off the hook -- at least for that killing.

The Berman and Black cases aren't the only investigations linked to Durst. His first wife Kathleen, 29 and a medical student, disappeared without a trace the night of Jan. 31, 1982. Durst told police he put her on a Manhattan-bound train at a Katonah, N.Y., station, so she could return to classes in the city the next day. He remained at their cottage near South Salem in Westchester County, N.Y. Five days later he reported her missing.

"I am not judge and jury," said Guy Rocha, a friend of Berman, "but based upon my impression, [Durst] is responsible for three homicides. What happened to his wife, and what happened to Susie? What's Susie's whole connection to this?"

When the investigation into the disappearance of Durst's first wife reopened in 2000, he headed south to Galveston. There, he masqueraded as a mute woman and lived in a rundown apartment.

After being arrested for Black's murder in 2001 and posting a $300,000 bond, Durst left Texas and became a fugitive. He was found six weeks later in Pennsylvania, when -- with $500 in his pocket -- he was caught shoplifting a sandwich, a Band-Aid and a newspaper.

When Kathleen Durst disappeared, Berman acted as her friend's unofficial spokeswoman, dealing with the media so Bobby Durst didn't have to. That period, Berman supporters believe, led to her death two decades later.

The dean of Kathleen Durst's college told investigators that a woman identifying herself as Kathleen called in sick to school around the time of her disappearance. Friends and family believe Berman made that call.

Relatives believe Berman knew too much about Kathleen Durst's disappearance -- and that's what got her killed.

"If Susan liked you, you were a friend for life, no matter what you did," said Dave Berman, who was a year older than his cousin.

"Knowing Susie like I did," he said, "I believe at the time of Kathleen's disappearance, Susie -- as Bobby's publicist -- helped him with his alibi."

Rosalie Bruce, a Berman cousin who lives in Las Vegas, agreed. She said she feels strongly that Durst killed her cousin because of this connection.

"I think that Susie put too much pressure on Bobby," she said. "She knew too much and I think she held it over his head."

Berman, she added, could be "pushy."

Kathleen Durst's dormant missing person's case was reopened nearly two decades after her disappearance.

Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro began the investigation anew, along with New York State Police, after a tipster suggested that Bobby Durst killed his wife and dumped her body in Westchester. Authorities also received information that Kathleen had not gone to Manhattan the day she disappeared.

Dave Berman said his cousin never mentioned Bobby Durst to him until shortly before her death. She told him Durst had given her money. She said he mailed her "several checks."

Police have said the checks totaled between $50,000 and $100,000.

Dave Berman, a former horse trainer who lives in Crooked River Ranch, Ore., spoke to his cousin three days before her death. "She said Bobby was visiting," he recalled. "I got the impression he was there then or she was expecting him in a day or so."

Dave Berman has yet to be interviewed by police.

In the mid-1990s, Susan Berman worked on an A&E Television special about Las Vegas titled "Gamble in the Desert." She became fast friends with Guy Rocha, an archivist for the state of Nevada who helped her with the documentary.

Like Berman's family, Rocha said he wants to see justice.

"What strikes me is why the LAPD hasn't pursued this more aggressively," Rocha said, "particularly knowing of the checks linking her to [Durst]. That in and of itself requires them to do more. They need to find who killed Susan Berman. If it wasn't Bobby Durst, then say why. There's an injustice right there."

The Berman investigation, Case No. 000825485, is now a cold one at Parker Center, where the Los Angeles Police Department's Homicide-Robbery Division is housed. Berman's murder was one of 548 committed within LAPD's jurisdiction in 2000.

The lead detective, Paul Coulter, said he would have done things differently had homicide investigators been involved at the beginning of the Berman investigation. His office wasn't given the case until a few days after a news release was issued -- 11 days after the murder -- and reporters across the globe began calling the LAPD for information.

"It's very difficult, because we weren't there from the get-go," Coulter said during a telephone interview.

Jerry Stephens, Coulter's partner on the case, retired in mid-2003. Another detective, Jesse Linn, has since been assigned with Coulter to the investigation.

In the book Homicide Special: On the Streets with the LAPD's Elite Detective Unit, author Miles Corwin writes that "when a gangster's daughter, brought up in Las Vegas, takes a bullet, veterans Jerry Stephens and Paul Coulter trace clues scattered across the country to one of Manhattan's wealthiest real estate magnates."

The book, however, doesn't point out that Durst had not been arrested or charged with Berman's murder.

In fact, police have not interviewed Durst about the murder. Coulter said Durst's attorney, Dick DeGuerin (who is representing Sandy Murphy in the second trial of the Ted Binion case), has been interviewed by LAPD detectives several times.

Also, Coulter said he has shared information with out-of-town investigators on the other cases linked to Durst.

"Obviously, we've been exchanging information," he said. "New York has their case, we have ours, and Texas had theirs."

When asked if he and his partner were any closer to finding Berman's killer, Coulter responded: "Closer? Maybe a little bit. I mean, it's an old case. Things move at a snail's pace sometimes. But, hopefully, eventually you get there."

He said he works the investigation in between his other homicide cases.

"I'm not actively working on this case," he said. "I'm working on one from the weekend. But, yeah, I do work on it."

As for Durst, Coulter said: "We've always called him a person of interest."

At first, police thought Berman was killed by the Mob. After all, the FBI had labeled her father "a trained killer." But that was in the 1930s and '40s. Davie Berman, like so many other Mobsters, legitimized himself when he moved to Las Vegas.

Police later determined that Berman's murder was not a Mob hit.

"Her level of information about the Mob wasn't to the point where someone would want to kill her," said former Nevada Gov. Bob Miller, a childhood friend of Berman. "The initial reports about it being a Mob hit didn't make sense."

There was no robbery, no ransacking of Berman's home, no sign of a struggle, no argument coming from inside her home alerting neighbors. The lights were off in her wooded but run-down home, where she lived with her two dogs. The house was barren. She'd been struggling financially and was being evicted.

No eyewitnesses came forward. Her killer simply escaped into the night.

At the scene, investigators found the casing of a spent bullet used in a 9-mm handgun. It was the best evidence they had.

After Durst was arrested in the Black case and police found a 9-mm handgun in the trunk of his car, LAPD investigators traveled to Texas and did ballistics tests on the gun to see if it matched the casing found at Berman's house. The tests, investigators have said, were inconclusive.

The irony of Berman's death was not lost on investigators. She had gone from being a wealthy Mafia daughter to a respected writer -- only to end up struggling and penniless, shot to death in the back of her head like a Mob associate.

But she didn't have any recent or new information that would have caused gangsters to want her dead. She hadn't been writing about anything that would have irritated today's Mobsters. And based on the condition of her home, she wasn't on the take from the Mob.

"Her house was in disrepair," Coulter said. "She was pretty down-on-her-luck. A lot of the furniture she had was given to her by friends. It was pretty sparsely furnished."

Life had not always been a struggle for Berman.

Susan Jane Berman, nicknamed Susie, was born in Minneapolis on May 18, 1945. Two months later, her mother took her from the Tri-City area to Southern Nevada aboard a Union Pacific coach car. Her father arrived in Las Vegas months earlier to prepare for the family's relocation. The town, still a dusty and isolated outpost, had a population of just 16,000 -- but it was on the brink of becoming a gambling boomtown.

Susie Berman lived in a world of privilege: the best schools, the best restaurants and the best entertainment the Las Vegas Strip had to offer. She was lavished with expensive toys and gifts from the highest rollers and most famous clientele.

Berman was born into Mob royalty. Her father, she wrote in Easy Street, was "one of the founders of the Syndicate, a trusted partner of Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Bugsy Siegel."

She grew up playing with children of hotel-casino owners and managers. One was Miller, who went on to become a two-term governor of Nevada.

Patrick Bailey, who grew up on Seventh Street three doors away from the Bermans, has been following the murder case from Washington state. He, too, would like to know who killed his childhood friend.

It was a memorable time, he said, growing up with Susan.

"At one of Susie's birthday parties, limos took us out to the Flamingo [hotel-casino] to see Spike Jones," Bailey said.

Later, at Davie Berman's funeral, "I told her how sorry I was about her dad. We hugged, and that was the last time I actually saw her."

Susan Berman's cousin Dave Berman said when she came of age she was given a trust of $5.25 million -- which, over the years, she squandered on overspending and bad investments. She purchased three homes, and lost them all. She wasn't good with money, Dave Berman said, which was why she asked Durst for help.

Still, she wanted to be treated as if she had money.

"She could be plumb broke, but she'd be wearing $400 shoes," Dave Berman said. "She'd walk into a restaurant, and she treated it like everybody should bow and scrape to her."

Today, Robert "Bobby" Durst remains in custody in Texas on a charge of bail-jumping and is being held on a $2-billion bond. Prosecutors there have indicated that they'll try him on that charge.

In the meantime, on Feb. 12 a grand jury returned an indictment against Durst on evidence tampering (for disposing of Black's body parts).

Durst has not been charged with Susan Berman's murder or Kathleen Durst's disappearance.

Meanwhile, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro told the Houston Chronicle that the investigation into Kathleen Durst's disappearance is "an active case" and "a high priority for my office."

That gives at least one Berman friend faith that justice will eventually prevail.

"It looks like New York investigators are on to something," said Rocha. "If we have any hope, our hope is centered on the New York investigation."

Cathy Scott is a local freelance writer and author of Murder of a Mafia Daughter, which details the Susan Berman case.