Berman always maintained that her father—a major Jewish-American organized crime figure who took over the Flamingo Hotel after Bugsy Siegel's 1947 gangland murder—died under mysterious circumstances on an operating table when she was 12, but all indications are that he died of a heart attack during surgery.

Berman grew up in Las Vegas[1] and, later, in Hollywood, California, where her classmates and friends at the Chadwick School[4] included Jann Wenner and Liza Minnelli.

[5] Berman received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she met American real estate heir Robert Durst.

Berman lived just off the Sunset Strip on Alta Loma Road in West Hollywood for several years prior to her final residence in Benedict Canyon, in Los Angeles.

Her manager, Nyle Brenner, later told the Los Angeles Times that "many details of Ms. Berman's personal life are unclear" and added "she had been married once in the 1980s, and later helped rear the two children of a boyfriend."

[13] Berman kept close ties to friends on Alta Loma Road, at the Las Vegas Strip, and in New York City, including Durst.

Berman was found murdered, execution style with a 9mm handgun, on Christmas Eve 2000 in her rented Benedict Canyon home, and was presumed to have been dead at least one day.

[14] Three days after his arrest, Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey said that, if convicted, Durst could face the death penalty in California for "special circumstances of murder of a witness and lying in wait.

[13][20][21] Earlier in 2000, the New York State Police, at the request of then-Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, had reopened an investigation into Kathleen's disappearance, and was urged by the missing woman's friends, without apparent success, to contact Berman for an interview.

[21] Durst's 2015 arrest warrant mentioned a previously undisclosed typewritten letter, mailed from New York on January 9, 2001, to a West Los Angeles police station, titled, "Possible motive for Susan Berman murder."