Crime Story Editor

You can find part three of this story here. Links to all of CRIME STORY'S coverage of the Robert Durst trial are here. On the last night of her life, Dec. 22, 2000, Susan Berman picked up her friend Richard Markey, and drove her Isuzu —an SUV rebuilt by her mechanic to replace the LeBaron — to dinner at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica. Then, they took in a movie, “Best in Show.” She dropped him off afterward, at about 10:30 pm, Markey said, “and that was the last time I saw her.” At home in Benedict Canyon, Berman, 55,...

You can find part two of this story here. Links to all of CRIME STORY'S coverage of the Robert Durst trial are here. By 1983, Susan Berman was back in Los Angeles, having embarked on her new career as a screenwriter, and working on the script for “Easy Street.” She rented a house in Beverly Hills and bought a Chrysler LeBaron convertible. “It was very important to her to maintain an image,” said television writer Carol Mendelsohn, who worked with Berman during the last year of her life. She and Lynda Obst would spend five years trying to develop a suitable...

2020 was the first full year of Crime Story's existence and we thought it would be fitting to mark the end of that year with a list of some of our most memorable posts. We begin with eleven memorable interviews from The Crime Story Podcast with storytellers who have produced stories in the world of crime and justice. Here they are in no particular order: David Simon Homicide, The Corner and The Wire This is my 4-Part conversation with David Simon.  David and I met when he came in to HBO to pitch The Corner as a television series. The Corner is a book that he wrote with Ed Burns about...

You can find part one of this story here. Links to all of CRIME STORY'S coverage of the Robert Durst trial are here. Susan Berman burnished her father’s reputation. “By the time I knew him he was a legitimate hotel owner in Las Vegas, as legitimate as he could be,” Berman wrote in her 1996 book, Lady Las Vegas. Famous for his brains,  style and skillful diplomacy between rival mob factions, he was known as the ‘Kissinger of Vegas’,” she wrote. Though the description may be on point, it betrays Susan’s penchant for hyperbole, as Kissinger didn’t become a commanding...

Links to all of CRIME STORY'S coverage of the Robert Durst trial are here. It had all the elements of a classic Susan Berman article or screenplay: Celebrities, the scion of a New York real estate family, tightly held secrets, an anonymous note alerting police to the location of a “cadaver,” and a bi-coastal mystery. Only this time, the victim was Berman herself, the funny, manipulative, raconteuse with an exotic past who could talk as fast and as long as she could write. Berman, with her trademark dark, shoulder-length hair and bangs drawn across her eyes like window shades, was well...

In June of 2017, a woman named Ginger Banks posted a YouTube video asserting that well-known adult film performer Ron Jeremy was known to have committed multiple acts of sexual assault against a number of women. In November of that year, EJ Dickson published a piece in Rolling Stone Magazine that recounted numerous other rumors and allegations against Jeremy. In that article adult performer Jessica Drake alleged that, while she herself was never assaulted by him, it was widely whispered that Jeremy was a sexual predator and that, because of his legendary everyman status, his predation was widely tolerated...