Robert Durst, the New York real estate heir charged with murder after famously spilling his guts into an open microphone in the HBO documentary series The Jinx, has some mildly weird Dallas connections, as revealed by NBC's Today Show and Candy Evans' local real estate blog, Candy's Dirt.
Linda Walker Zevallos, a Dallas real estate agent, took to the NBC morning program Wednesday to describe the time she spent dating Durst shortly after her divorce.
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During their relationship, Durst behaved in a totally normal fashion for an eccentric millionaire who is suspected in the disappearance of his first wife and another murder in California. He also admitted he dismembered a neighbor in Galveston after shooting the man in 2001, but that was after he and Zevallos stopped dating. (Durst claimed self defense and was acquitted of murder by a Texas jury.)
The day after Zevallos and Durst met on a Dallas-bound airplane and Durst asked her out, Zevallos' told Candy's Dirt, Durst sent her $500 worth of orchids, in hopes that Zevallo's maybe from the day before would turn into a yes.
After Zevallos and Durst began dating, Durst once kicked her under the table when she ordered the same entree as Durst at a restaurant. On a trip to another restaurant, this time with Zevallos' 13-year-old son, Durst claimed to remember mid-drive that there were two guns sitting in the back seat. All totally normal.
Durst's apartment at the Centrum Building on Oak Lawn Avenue was also appointed in a manner consistent with its being occupied by a rational human being. The second bedroom of the Centrum apartment had a concrete floor and a stand with a saw on it, Zavallos told Today. The floor was necessary, Durst told the building's owners, because he worked with a lot of chemicals.
During the time Durst and Zavallos were dating, he told her about the trouble his friend Susan Berman was having, and that he might have to visit her in Los Angeles. Zevallos says she and Durst broke up in 2000. Later that year, Berman was shot in the back of the head.
Durst, in possession of more than $40,000 in cash, a latex mask, 5 ounces of weed, a .38, a fake I.D. and a UPS tracking number for a package with another $100,000 in it, was arrested in New Orleans on March 14 on felony drug and weapons charges. Los Angeles police have also charged him with Berman's murder.
