Infamous 'Person of Interest' in Unsolved Murder Case Spotted in Las Vegas

By Cathy Scott

New York real estate baron Robert Durst, who has long been a person of interest in the 2000 murder of Mob daughter Susan Berman and in the 1982 disappearance of his wife first Kathleen Durst, has been seen in Las Vegas on three occasions.

Sin City is where Durst's one-time best friend, Susan Berman, grew up Mob royalty as the spoiled daughter of Jewish mobster Davie Berman.

Durst was spotted by a patron just before Christmas at a Chinese restaurant on Paradise Road near the Las Vegas Strip, at a supermarket on the east side of the valley by a fellow shopper, and at another restaurant in the same vicinity, according to the restaurant's host.

He's tough to miss. Images of Durst wearing wire-rimmed glasses, with salt-and-pepper hair, have been broadcast on TruTV, Nancy Grace, Jane Velez Mitchell, CNN, and on all the national networks.

In 2000, as New York police reopened their investigation into the disappearance of Kathleen Durst, investigators had scheduled an interview with Susan Berman. Durst had reportedly fled New York for Galveston, where he lived in disguise as a mute woman.

Before Berman's police interview was to take place, she was found in her Beverly Hills bungalow, dead from a gunshot wound to the back of her head. Her murder remains unsolved, but police have publicly said Durst, who had been visiting San Francisco where he owns a house, was in California at the time of Berman's murder. LAPD homicide-robbery division publicly said Durst was a person of interest in Berman's case.

Back in Texas, Durst was wanted for questioning when the remains of Durst's next-door neighbor, senior citizen Morris Black, were discovered by a fisherman and his young son floating in Galveston Bay -- except for poor Morris Black's head, which never surfaced. Durst was eventually arrested and charged with Black's murder. In court, he admitted to accidentally fatally shooting Black, and then chopping up the body, bagging the remains and dumping them in Galveston Bay.

Durst hired the best of the best when it came to his defense. Dick DeGuerin, who was named one of the top 100 criminal attorneys in the nation, used a self-defense strategy in court. Jurors bought it; they acquitted Durst of murder in 2003. He pleaded guilty the following year to jumping bond and evidence tampering. In a plea agreement, he received a sentence of five years in prison. With credit for time service, Durst was paroled in 2005.

He bought a high-end, five-family townhouse in Harlem, New York, in 2006. News reports indicated that nearby residents were unhappy with having Durst as a neighbor, especially after a real estate agent told a newspaper that Durst had mentioned renting out part of the property and moving himself into one of the family units.

So far, records at the Clark County Assessors' Office don't indicate that Durst has purchased property in the Las Vegas Valley -- which begs the question: What is Robert Durst doing in Las Vegas?

A second edition of Scott's book, Murder of a Mafia Daughter: The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Berman, is scheduled for re-release in May 2013.

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Is 'Adequate and Competent' Enough?

by Diane Fanning 

Down in Orlando, the Casey Anthony pre-trial hearings are stirring up serious legal questions concerning an indigent defendant’s right to qualified defense counsel. Unfortunately, up until now, this issue has been obscured by the circus-like atmosphere that has surrounded this case since Cindy Anthony called 9-1-1.

Many people are complaining that someone like Casey Anthony does not deserve for a single penny of taxpayer money to be spent paying her high priced attorneys. Part of the reason for this outcry is the long amount of time that has transpired since Caylee Anthony disappeared. When jury selection begins, it will be nearly 35 months since Caylee was last seen alive.

The other part of the objection is the apparent guilt of Casey Anthony. I’ll admit that I found the forensic data and the interviews with Casey to be compelling evidence of her involvement in the death of her daughter. Nonetheless, our judicial system is based on the presumption of innocence. Everyone is entitled to have the determination of guilt be made in a court of law. To strip people like Casey of that right is to imperil all of our civil liberties.

The third aspect of the response is an emotional one. On one side of the equation, we have a self-centered, selfish, spoiled young woman. On the other side, an adorable, innocent child, not quite three years old. Your heart must side with Caylee. To make matters worse, the accused murderer has been proven to be a liar, even by her own admission. She has been proven to be a thief by stealing from her own grandmother. She has been proven to care little for her own daughter, as shown by the 30 fun-filled days she spent before being forced to admit that Caylee was missing. It's hard not to despise Casey and nearly impossible to give her the benefit of the doubt. Yet, when it comes to the legal presumption of innocence, it is her right. And, it is in our best interests to ensure that right is not violated.

The issue is much larger and more important than Casey Anthony. It goes to the basic premise of equality under the law. Eighty per cent of the experts in the field of capital case law agree than there is bias in the administration of the death penalty based on social class. In other words, the more money you have to spend on your defense team, the less likely you are to receive the death penalty. That very concept thwarts our principle of equality under the law.

Take the case of Robert Durst. He decapitated his neighbor and claimed self-defense. He had millions at his disposal to buy the best defense team available. In the end, he walked away from the courtroom after the jury bought into the arguments of his attorney. Do you really think the outcome would have been the same if the story had involved a poor man who had no choice but to rely on the adequate and competent counsel of a court-appointed attorney? I certainly don't.

How can we uphold our principles that ensure justice is blind and we are all equal in the eyes of the law?

Ideally, every guilty person would honestly acknowledge their responsibility when charged with a crime, leaving only the decision of how much weight to give to mitigating circumstances when assessing a sentence. But it is not, and never will be, an ideal world. Someone who is willing to take another's life is not going to balk at lying to attempt to save his skin.

Casey Anthony is certainly a case in point. To date, her defense has cost approximately $300,000. Since she was ruled to be indigent in March of this year, the defense has received nearly $40,000 in taxpayer funding, although her legal team has requested far more than that.

Last week, Jose Baez and his team asked for more money for their private investigator (300 additional hours at $40 per hour). Judge Blevin Perry granted only one-fifth of that amount. Perry would not allow any travel expense reimbursement for the new death penalty expert. When the defense asked for $7,500 for a psychological expert, he only granted $2,500. The judge made his position clear: The law requires an adequate defense, not the best defense possible. "I'm not going to write an open check."

WKMG's Tony Pipitone summed up the day in the courtroom: "The law says indigent defendants are entitled to a defense that's competent. But they are not entitled to an O.J. defense unless they can pay for it themselves."

But is that right? Should people like O.J. Simpson be entitled to a better defense than you or I merely because they can afford it? Is that what justice is all about--the size of your wallet

Maybe it's time to think about trial financial reform. The scales should be balanced. Nonetheless, it is unreasonable to expect the taxpayers to shoulder the additional burden of the best defense for the indigent. Maybe we should consider restricting the expenditures of wealthy defendants.

I don't know if that's the answer or if it is even a possibility, but equality under the law requires consideration for all solutions that might lead to the elimination of bias in the courtroom.

Diane Fanning is the author of Mommy's Little Girl: Casey Anthony and Her Daughter Caylee's Tragic Fate.  When the Casey Anthony trial begins next year, you'll find daily updates of the case on Diane Fanning's blog, Writing is a Crime.

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Who Killed Mob Daughter Susan Berman?

by Cathy Scott

An empty shell casing. That was the hardest evidence police found in the murder of mob daughter Susan Berman.

This is a story that begins in old Las Vegas with gangsters and the boys from the Jewish mob. It moves to San Francisco with the movers and shakers, to New York City and the literati, ending in Beverly Hills with the glitterati. It is a story about a path to murder.

Just before Christmas 2000, Susan, a screenwriter and author, was murdered, shot once in the back of the head with a 9-millimeter handgun. Her body was found a day and a half later, face down in her rundown, rented Benedict Canyon home, after neighbors reported Susan's dogs loose in the wooded area. During Susan’s lifetime, she had amassed a small fortune, only to lose it. She died penniless, a world apart from the one she’d grown up in.

She was the daughter of Davie Berman, Bugsy Siegal’s partner at the Flamingo Hotel. She was reared in the lap of luxury and Las Vegas royalty as the daughter of a notorious casino mogul and mob leader. It wasn't until college that Susan learned what her father really did for a living. The murder of Davie Berman’s only child had all the earmarks of a professional hit aimed at a person borne into the criminal underworld. That theory, however, was one of the first to be ruled out by investigators.

Recently, MSNBC took a close look at Susan’s case, interviewing friends, family and investigators. I, too, was interviewed, first in Las Vegas, then at a studio in Los Angeles. The producer said he based MSNBC's piece upon my book, Murder of a Mafia Daughter.

Los Angeles Police Department lead Detective Paul Coulter, whom I interviewed at length for the book and who chimed in for MSNBC, had a hunch. Whoever shot Susan in cold blood, he said, had done so by going through her front door. If she’d let someone in, that person was no stranger to her. Everyone knew Susan was careful.

Coulter began investigating everyone she had been dealing with. In the process, he discovered that Susan had rubbed some people the wrong way, including her elderly landlord, Dee Schiffer. Coulter also learned that Schiffer had been in the process of evicting Susan, which Susan had been legally fighting, for not paying her rent.

Susan also had a not-so-perfect relationship with her personal manager, Nyle Brenner, whom police also questioned, going so far as to search his house and office. But they stopped just short of calling him a suspect.

And, of course, there was Bobby Durst, Susan’s lifelong friend, who in the months before Susan’s murder had been living in Texas disguised as, of all things, a mute woman. Susan is believed to be the one who provided an alibi years earlier for Bobby after his wife Kathleen disappeared (that case remains unsolved). Susan loved Bobby like a sibling and would have done anything for him. A few months before her own death, Susan had asked Bobby for money to buy a used SUV and to catch her up on her rent. She sent the letter to his family’s business when she couldn’t locate him. Bobby sent Susan two checks, for $25,000 each, and told her the money was a gift. Susan had been unable to find him because Durst had been traveling, including in Texas.

A few months after Susan’s murder, in 2001, after arguing with Morris Black, an older neighbor in Galveston, Durst shot Black, then chopped up his body, wrapped the pieces in plastic bags, and dumped the remains in Galveston Bay. Durts, released on bail, fled the area. When he was later arrested, found in the trunk of Bobby’s car were two guns, one a 9 millimeter, the same caliber Susan was killed with. But, according to Detective Coulter, “The ballistics test was inconclusive.”

Durst pleaded self-defense in the Black case and his powerhouse attorney DeGuerin ultimately landed an acquittal for his client. Today, Bobby Durst is a free man.

As the lead detective on the case, Coulter, a veteran officer, said he would have done things differently in the Susan Berman investigation had homicide investigators been brought in early to handle the case. His office, in the Homicide-Robbery unit at LAPD’s Parker Center, however, was not given the case until 11 long days after Susan’s death.

In December of this year, a decade will have passed, with police no closer to solving the murder than they were in the winter of 2000.

In my research, I've gotten to know Susan. I walked through the English tudor home on South Sixth Street in downtown Vegas where she'd lived her first 12 years. It was a bright, cheerful house. I imagined her as a child, running down the long hallway into the welcome arms of the father she adored. I drove the route from her Las Vegas home to her Benedict Canyon house in Beverly Hills. I visited the restaurants she frequented in the town she loved and called home during the final 17 years of her life.

I went to the University of California, Berkeley campus where Susan earned her master's degree in journalism and where protests against the war in Vietnam were rampant. Susan made lifelong friends while attending Berkeley--friends in the writing world who later tossed work her way.

I visited her home in Benedict Canyon where she was murdered and found it gloomy and dark. Someone else lives there now.

And, finally, I visited the Home of Peace cemetery in East Los Angeles where Susan’s body is entombed in a marble wall alongside her mother, father, and uncle. A recent visitor had left flowers in bud vases for her mother Gladys, father Davie and her uncle Chickie. Susan's vases, one on either side of her shiny-brass headstone, were empty. I stood there looking at her grave, regretting I had not brought her a flower.

I only wish I could have met Susan face to face. She wanted so much to be famous, to be recognized for her work. Today, long after her death, her work has become well known. There's a long waiting list at public libraries to check out her writings. And her books fetch high prices, in the hundred range, on Internet auction sites. Had she lived to see it, Susan would have been pleased. She no doubt would have chuckled at the irony of it all. She also would have pondered the intrigue of her own murder investigation as it unfolded. That was her forte.

All evidence points to Susan being cut down by someone she not only knew, but who was a trusted friend she welcomed into her home. That irony, too, however tragic, would have piqued Susan's interest. It’s a sad case, and sadder still that Susan’s killer has not been brought to justice. Who, indeed, killed Susan Berman?

Cathy Scott is currently working on a 2nd edition of Murder of a Mafia Daughter, digging deep, seeking answers, to questions still raised in the case.

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Terrorists on Trial

by Diane Dimond

So, the so-called 9/11 Gang of Five will go on trial in a federal court as opposed to before a military commission. The bottom line question then has to be: Are you ready for the possibility that Khalid Sheik Mohammed or any of his fellow collaborators might walk free on a sly defense attorney’s manipulation of our system?

Don’t think it couldn’t happen?

Millionaire Robert Durst walked free even after he admitted to killing a neighbor and cutting up his body. In my opinion O.J. Simpson got a free pass too after taking the lives of his ex-wife, Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman. I could cite other cases in which juries, again in my opinion, did not come to the right conclusion. Take it from me it happens.

As you sit reading this column there are American lawyers preparing and strategizing how to secure the freedom of Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd Al-Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmad Al-Hawsawi, and Waleed Bin Attash. This, after Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) has repeatedly proclaimed he was the mastermind who planned the attacks onAmerica that claimed nearly 3000 lives that horrible day in September 2001. KSM gleefully brags about hating and murdering Americans. His followers, some of whom will be in court with him, do the same. This is what they live for – to kill us – and to go down in history as martyrs.

Let me be perfectly clear about why I think these trials should have been conducted in a military court: September 11, 2001 was not the beginning of some temporary crime wave. What happened at the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon and over the skies of Pennsylvania wasn’t just a criminal act – it was an act of war. Don’t be fooled just because these terrorists don’t wear proper military uniforms. These men, who will go on trial in New York soon, aren’t mere criminals. They are enemy combatants and should be treated as the soldiers they are.

Being brought before a civilian court these men will be afforded all the rights and privileges they excoriate America for. The fact that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (read that: water boarding) was used on some of them as our agents tried to extract vital information will be used as a reason to try to toss out crucial evidence. Their long detention in secret locations and then at Guantanamo Bay will surely be highlighted as their defense attorneys try to play the “poor-them” card. And it goes without saying these defendants will try to use our open justice system as a platform to spew their warped sense of how the world should be. Even with the most diligent judge at the helm there will most likely be anti-American outbursts in the courtroom. Their free-of-charge American lawyers, will stage-manage the system toward mistrial by demanding classified information be released to “prove their case.”

America will bend over backward and spend multiple millions of dollars to demonstrate we can stage a secure and fair trial for even our most vilified enemies. We’ll hire the accused the best available lawyers and some believe this will show the rest of the world we are virtuous people. But guess what? The radical Muslim world will still call us “The Great Satan” and worse.

I have to wonder how any American defense attorney could feel comfortable taking such a case so I called my friend Mickey Sherman who wrote a book entitled, “How Can You Defend Those People?” As a defense lawyer Sherman firmly believes every human being deserves good representation in court no matter what they’ve done. But even he admitted to me he would never agree to go to court with these terror loving jihadists. He called the Gang of Five “the defendants we love to hate.” Sherman believes any lawyer that takes one of the terrorist cases will be vilified and do permanent damage to both their professional and personal life.

Defense Attorney Ron Kuby, never a man to shy away from representing controversial figures (he practiced with the late William Kuntsler), calls the whole trial process into question. “KSM has been standing before a military commission admitting he did it, saying he wants the government to kill him. The government wants to kill him. The mockery comes,” according to Kuby (photo left), “because the military commission didn’t accept the guilty plea in the first place…the trial becomes a long form of assisted suicide.”

In the end the defendants will likely be glad to admit in civilian court what they did and say they are ready to die. The question then becomes what does the court do? Does it give the terrorists what they want most in life – death? Or are they sentenced to what I see as their worst nightmare – life – in an American maximum security prison?

I say give them life.

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Murder of 'Mob Princess' Susan Berman Remains A Mystery

The following is an excerpt from Cathy Scott's latest book, The Rough Guide to True Crime, released by Penguin Books in August. Susan Berman is the subject of an earlier book by Scott titled Murder of a Mafia Daughter: The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Berman (Barricade Books), due out in a second edition early next year.

by Cathy Scott

The life of a journalist and author who spent her adult years writing about her mob roots ended dramatically, like a character in one of her books. Susan Berman, 55, was murdered in her Beverly Hills, California, home. She was shot execution-style by an unknown assailant just as New York state police were scheduling an interview about a decades-old unsolved missing-person's case.

Berman’s body was found on December 24, 2000, inside her rundown rented house in the woodsy Benedict Canyon neighborhood, where she lived with her three dogs. The front door had been left wide open – there were no signs of a forced entry or struggle, no signs of a sexual assault, and no items had been stolen from the house.

Susan had lived what she once described as a perfect childhood, despite being the daughter of a Jewish mobster. In the 1930s and '40s, her father, Davie Berman, was part of the same crime syndicate as Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and mob kingpin Meyer Lansky. Working with Lansky, considered one of the shrewdest gangsters to ever walk the streets of 20th-century New York, gave Davie the opportunity to learn from the mob's top echelon. After all, Lansky was known as Lucky Luciano’s right-hand man and the mob’s financial mastermind.

As a trio, Berman, Siegel and Lansky pioneered the development of Las Vegas from a sleepy desert cow town to a thriving gambling Mecca. Nevertheless, the gangsters soon found themselves in an uneasy alliance with the Italian Mafia, who moved in on the Jewish mob’s territory. Davie, who co-owned the famous Flamingo Hotel and Casino with Siegel and Lansky, ran the place after Siegel was murdered in 1947 (in the Beverly Hills home of his mistress, Virginia Hill). Only in 1951, after the highly publicized and televised Kefauver Committee hearings of the US Senate’s investigation into organized crime, did the public become aware of the extent of Jewish involvement in the underworld.

Susan was unaware of her father’s underworld dealings until she became an adult, but her Las Vegas childhood was not exactly normal. Her father had slot machines installed in Flamingo Hotel rooms so his daughter could pass the time gambling and ordering room service. Susan enjoyed the life of a spoiled, indulged child. She wanted for nothing. Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Liberace performed at her birthday parties. Davie drove fancy new Cadillacs. To his Susie, he was the world. What Susan did not know then was that when mob families were feuding, her family was in danger. During times of mob unrest, Davie piloted Susan away to Los Angeles, flying out of McCarran Field to the Los Angeles airport, and then to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for two or three days. He told Susan they were short vacations. Bodyguard Lou Raskin, a mountain of a man, lived with the Bermans so he could watch over Davie’s precious daughter. Susie remembered the trips as wonderful outings. She fell in love with Los Angeles.

The high-society lifestyle of the “Mafia Princess”, as the media called her, came to an abrupt end in 1957, when she was twelve. That year her father died during intestinal surgery. Only a few months later her mother Gladys committed suicide by taking a barbiturate overdose. Her Nevada childhood would haunt Susan for the rest of her life. In the ensuing years, what Berman wanted most was for her father to be remembered for his contributions to the development of Las Vegas. She wrote about Davie in two memoirs, 1981’s critically acclaimed Easy Street and 1996’s Lady Las Vegas. There was speculation after Susan's death that perhaps digging into Davie’s mob past was what got Susan killed. When police, responding to reports of dogs running loose, found Susan’s lifeless body on the floor of her rented house, they also noticed a 1920s Chicago Police “WANTED” poster for her father. Combined with the cause of death – a single gunshot wound to the back of the head – it was not surprising that detectives wondered if Susan had been whacked by the Mafia. That notion was soon debunked when they realized the mobsters of her father’s era would be between 90 and 100 years old. Moreover, nothing Susan was working on was anything she would be killed over.

One person of interest to the police was Berman’s University of California classmate Bobby Durst. She regularly referred to him as her brother and her best friend. They had much in common. Durst was a multimillionaire and the eldest son of a rich New York real-estate tycoon family. Like Berman, Durst’s mother committed suicide when he was a child, falling from the roof of the family mansion while her son watched.

Durst’s wife, Kathleen McCormack, went missing in 1982; he was questioned about the disappearance but never charged with any crime. In 1999, Kathleen’s parents went to court and had their daughter declared dead, even though no body was ever found. It cleared the way for them to settle her estate. But it also cleared the path for Durst to remarry, which he did.

Questioned about Susan’s killing, Durst told investigators he’d spent the holidays in the Hamptons with his second wife at the time Berman was gunned down. But Durst’s wife, Debra Lee Charatan, did not corroborate her husband’s claim. 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, where Durst owned a home, 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. The problem with that alibi was that police said Berman had been dead for two days when her body was discovered, which meant Durst was not off the hook. 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. Durst, 57 at the time of Susan’s death, was not charged in connection with her murder.

Three years later he was, however, tried for killing Morris Black, an elderly neighbor of his in Galveston, Texas. Durst had moved to that state for fear of being indicted in New York by the Westchester County district attorney, who had reopened the investigation into Durst's first wife’s disappearance. He lived in disguise, masquerading as a mute woman and renting a $300-a-month apartment. Morris Black, 71, a bad-tempered former seaman, lived across the hall.

Black’s body was butchered and stuffed into garbage bags that were found floating in Galveston Bay. Durst was arrested and charged with murder. He posted a $300,000 bond and then jumped bail, leaving the state and thus becoming a fugitive. He was found six weeks later in Pennsylvania, when – despite having $500 in his pocket – he was caught shoplifting a chicken sandwich, a Band-Aid and a newspaper. At trial, Durst admitted the killing, but claimed self defense.

In a shock verdict, the jury acquitted him.

If Durst had admitted to killing Morris Black, then what about Susan Berman, her friends asked. Could he have killed Susan … and his first wife, Kathleen, too? Medical student Kathleen, 29, was last seen on Jan. 31, 1982. Durst told police he’d 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, Westchester County. Five days later, he reported his wife missing.

At the time, Susan Berman acted as Durst’s unofficial spokeswoman, fielding telephone calls from the media so Bobby did not have to deal with them. 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 Susan in fact made that call; they believe Susan knew too much about Kathleen Durst’s disappearance – and that’s what got her killed. Susan, so her confidants said, could be pushy. Perhaps, they surmised, Susan had pushed too far. After all, she’d contacted Bobby and asked for a loan so she could buy a used SUV. Instead, Bobby Durst sent her two separate checks for $25,000, telling her in a note that they were gifts, not loans. Still, the investigation of Durst by Los Angeles police detectives went cold. Authorities named a second man, Nyle Brenner, Susan’s manager, as a person of interest in the case. That probe too went nowhere.

No eyewitnesses to Susan’s murder ever came forward. Susan’s killer simply escaped into the night. At the scene, investigators found the casing of a spent bullet used in a 9mm handgun. It was the best evidence they had. After Durst was arrested in the Black case and police found a 9mm 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 were inconclusive.

According to the lead detective, Paul Coulter, he would have done things differently had homicide investigators been called in to handle the case from the start. His office, however, was not given the case until a few days after a news release was issued – eleven long days after the murder. As a result, reporters across the globe began calling the LAPD for information. That was when higher-ups handed off the case to the Robbery-Homicide unit.

“It’s very difficult, because we weren’t there from the get-go,” Detective Coulter said in a telephone interview. Jerry Stephens, Coulter’s partner on the case, retired in mid-2003. Another detective, Jesse Linn, replaced Stephens and paired up with Coulter in the investigation. Later, however, no one seemed to be investigating the murder. There were no new clues or leads.

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

When she came of age, Susan 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 to foreclosure. Still, for years she kept up a facade and wanted to be treated as if she had money. She was a wealthy Mafia daughter and a respected writer – but she ended up struggling and penniless, living in squalor while she waited for a big movie deal, until she was shot to death in the back of the head, her murderer never apprehended.

Photos courtesy of CourtTV.

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