Just days after an HBO documentary rocketed Robert Durst’s sensational murder case into the spotlight, old stories are beginning to surface that could link him to more disappearances.
He was already charged on Saturday in the shooting death of his friend, Susan Berman in California in 2000. But investigators may now also be eyeing him in the disappearances of 18-year-old Kristen Modafferi and 16-year-old Karen Marie Mitchell, both of whom were last seen in different Northern California towns in 1997, CBS News reports.
It’s unclear how seriously the authorities are looking at those cases, but Durst’s apparent connection to them is intriguing.
Modafferi disappeared on June 23, 1997 after leaving work for the day at a coffee shop in a San Francisco mall, SF Gate reports. Durst reportedly owned a home in the city at the time — he reportedly owned as many as nine residences in the late 90s — and a 2003 Galveston County Daily News article reports that an investigative journalist who wrote a book about the disappearance of Durst’s wife Kathleen believed Durst knew something about Modafferi.
Mitchell was last seen on Nov. 25, 1997 leaving her job in Eureka. Witnesses said she left in a blue sedan driven by a 60-70-year-old man with light gray or sandy blonde hair. Gawker points out a 2003 article that lists friends of Durst who only knew him to drive such a sedan. The friend said Durst lived near and may have even visited Mitchell’s place of business.
There’s also a composite sketch of the sedan’s driver that could resemble Durst, though he was never charged in the case.
Durst maintains his innocence in Berman’s death, wasn’t charged for the 1982 disappearance of his first wife Kathleen and was acquitted of murder in the dismemberment of his elderly neighbor, Morris Black. But in an oddly timed finale in HBO’s “The Jinx,” Durst appeared to say he “killed them all” into a hot mic.
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