In late 1971, Durst met dental hygienist Kathleen McCormack. After two dates, he invited her to move into his home in Vermont, which she did in January 1972.[10] After his father pressured him to return to New York to work at the Durst Organization,[18] the couple moved to Manhattan, where they married on April 12, 1972.[10][19]
At the time of her disappearance, McCormack was a medical student in her fourth and final year at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, hoping to become a pediatrician—she was only a few months short of earning her degree.[20][21] She was last seen by someone other than Durst on the evening of January 31, 1982,[22][23] when she appeared unexpectedly at a dinner party, thrown by her friend Gilberte Najamy in Newtown, Connecticut. Najamy noticed that McCormack seemed upset and was wearing red sweatpants, which Najamy found odd, as she never dressed so casually in public. After receiving a phone call from her husband, McCormack left for her cottage in South Salem, New York.[24][21][22]
Although the couple was known to have fought that evening,[19] Durst initially maintained that he had placed his wife on a commuter train to New York City at Katonah rail station, had a drink with a neighbor and spoken to his wife at their Manhattan apartment by telephone later that evening. “That’s what I told police,” he later said. “I was hoping that would just make everything go away.” Durst subsequently admitted he just went home and went to bed.[25]
McCormack and Najamy were scheduled to meet the next day at The Lion’s Gate, a Manhattan pub. When McCormack failed to appear, Najamy grew concerned and repeatedly called police over the course of several days. Later that week, Durst reported his wife missing. Both a doorman and the building superintendent at the couple’s apartment on Riverside Drive claimed to have seen McCormack at the building on February 1, the day after she was last indisputably seen. However, the doorman admitted he had only seen her from behind and from half a block away, and thus could not be certain that it was her.[24] A private investigator hired by Durst’s lawyer later reported that the doorman said he had not seen McCormack arrive at all, and might not have been working the night she disappeared.[26][27] Only three weeks after Durst had reported his wife missing, the superintendent on Riverside Drive found some of her possessions in the building’s trash compactor.[28][29]
Three weeks before her disappearance, McCormack had been treated at the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx for facial bruises.[30] She told a friend that Durst had beaten her, but did not press charges over the incident.[24] McCormack asked Durst for a $250,000 divorce settlement.[31] Instead, he cancelled her credit card, removed her name from a joint bank account and refused to pay her medical school tuition.[32] At the time of McCormack’s disappearance, Durst had been dating Mia Farrow’s younger sister Prudence for three years and was living in a separate apartment.[10][31][33] He initially offered a $100,000 reward for his wife’s return, then reduced the reward to $15,000. When one of McCormack’s friends and her sister learned that she had been reported missing, they broke into her South Salem cottage, hoping to find her. Instead, they discovered the residence ransacked, McCormack’s mail unopened and her belongings in the trash.[21]
Investigation and aftermath
After McCormack’s disappearance, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) stated that Durst had claimed to have last spoken to her when she called him from the Riverside Drive apartment. He maintained that the last time he had seen her was at Katonah station,[34] where she was planning to board a 9:15pm train to Manhattan. He also claimed that on February 4, the supervisor at McCormack’s medical school telephoned him to say she had been absent from class all week after calling in sick on February 1. Whether McCormack herself had made that call is unknown.[35]
Durst divorced McCormack eight years after her disappearance, claiming spousal abandonment.[19][36] In 2016, McCormack’s family asked to have her declared legally dead, a request that was granted the following year.[37][38] Her mother, Ann McCormack, attempted to sue Durst for $100 million, alleging that he had killed her daughter and deprived her parents of the right to bury her.[39][40] McCormack’s parents have since died. Her younger sister, Mary McCormack Hughes, also believes that Durst murdered her.[41] The New York State Police quietly reopened the criminal investigation into McCormack’s disappearance in 1999, searching the South Salem cottage for the first time.[19] The investigation became public in November 2000.[19][24][33]
In August 2019, a wrongful death lawsuit against Durst, filed by another of McCormack’s sisters, Carol Bamonte, was dismissed on the grounds that she had waited too long to sue.[42] In 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals had revised the date of McCormack’s death to match the date she disappeared in January 1982.[43] On May 17, 2021, during Durst’s trial for Berman’s murder, Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocah announced that McCormack’s disappearance had been reclassified as murder and would be reinvestigated.[44] In October 2021, shortly after Durst’s first-degree murder conviction in the Berman case, Westchester County prosecutors announced they would empanel a grand jury to explore charges against Durst in the McCormack case. He was officially charged with her murder on October 22, 2021.[45]
Credit by : Reddit.com