Multimillionaire and alleged killer Robert Durst is set to stand trial next year in the death of Susan Berman. At least one of his other friends said this entire situation has been “like a nightmare.”
Emily Altman was one of the people who took the stand in pretrial testimony in anticipation of Durst’s long-awaited trial. The defendant allegedly killed Berman in 2000 to stop her from revealing what she knew about the 1982 disappearance of his wife Kathleen. He pleaded not guilty.
Altman told NBC in an interview for “Dateline” that she couldn’t find a reason not to believe that he’s responsible for murder.
“It’s like a nightmare, and you’re waiting to wake up,” she said. “And at this juncture, I don’t think I’m going to wake up. I may have to face the reality that this is the reality.”
She and her husband have been described as Robert Durst’s friends for decades. Spouse Stewart Altman even introduced the defendant to Kathleen. Through lawyers, the couple tried to stop from having to take the stand.
When Emily Altman testified in 2017, she first said that Durst told her that he’d been in Los Angeles around the time that Berman was killed, according to a Los Angeles Times report from back then. The witness, however, later walked this back, and asserted that she didn’t know if he was in L.A., or just California. She also claimed not to know if she learned this from him, or her husband, and said she didn’t know when she heard this detail in the first place.
“Over the course of years, everything got jumbled,” she said at the time.
Husband Stewart Altman backed up her story.
“She was all upset, all mixed up about her testimony,” Altman said on the stand back in August 2017, according to The New York Daily News.
The Dateline episode is scheduled to air Monday at 10 p.m. ET/9 p.m. CT.
Note: Updated to show the air time for the Dateline episode.
[Image of Durst in 2016 via Jae C. Hong-Pool/Getty Images]
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