Kathleen McCormack Durst disappeared from her home in Westchester County nearly 34 years ago, on a cold January night, only months before she would have graduated from medical school. It was the beginning of an enduring mystery.
On Monday, Ms. Durst’s mother, Ann McCormack, who is 101, and three sisters — Carol Bamonte, Mary Hughes and Virginia McKeon — filed a $100 million lawsuit against the man they have long suspected of killing her: Robert A. Durst, her husband. The lawsuit contends that Mr. Durst violated the McCormack family’s right to sepulcher, a rarely used New York law granting family members the immediate right to possession of a body for burial.
“The family’s priority has been and continues to be to provide Kathleen with a proper and dignified burial,” Robert Abrams, a lawyer for the McCormack family, said.
The lawsuit contends that Mr. Durst “murdered Kathleen,” 29, his first wife. If successful, the lawsuit would strip Mr. Durst of much of his wealth; authorities put his net worth at about $100 million.
The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Mineola, N.Y., is only the latest development in Mr. Durst’s legal troubles since he agreed to cooperate with the producers of a six-part documentary, “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” that was broadcast on HBO in February and March.
For a long time after Ms. Durst disappeared, Mr. Durst led a carefree, peripatetic life that took him from New York to Los Angeles to Houston and back again, fueled by a constant flow of cash from his estranged family’s real estate empire in New York City.
Mr. Durst, 72, has been in prison in New Orleans since March on a gun charge. He is expected to be sentenced on Dec. 17 to more than five years in prison after acknowledging his guilt in that case, according to people briefed on the negotiations but not authorized to discuss them.
Mr. Durst’s lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, declined to discuss the pending plea bargain. “We’re not going to comment on it until the day it happens,” he said.
