on February 4, the supervisor at McCormack's medical school called him and said that she had been absent from class all week after calling in sick on February 1. Whether it was indeed McCormack who made the call is uncertain. Durst divorced McCormack eight years after her disappearance, claiming spousal abandonment. In 2016, McCormack's family asked to have Kathleen declared legally dead, a request that was granted the following year. Kathleen's mother, Ann McCormack, attempted to sue Durst for $100 million, alleging that he killed McCormack and deprived them of the right to bury her. McCormack's parents are now deceased. Her younger sister, Mary McCormack Hughes, also believes that Durst murdered her. The New York State Police quietly reopened the criminal investigation into the disappearance in 1999, searching Durst's former South Salem residence for the first time. The investigation became public in November 2000. In August 2019, a wrongful death lawsuit against Durst filed by another of McCormack's sisters, Carol Bamonte, was dismissed on the grounds that she had waited too long to file the suit. In 2018, U.S. Court of Appeals had already revised the exact date of McCormack's death to match the day she actually disappeared in January 1982. On May 17, 2021, during Durst's trial in the Berman murder, Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocah announced that McCormack's disappearance had been reclassified as a murder and would be reinvestigated. In October 2021, shortly after Durst's first-degree conviction in the Berman case, Westchester County prosecutors announced they would empanel a grand jury to explore charges against Durst in the McCormack case. Durst was officially charged in her death on October 22, 2021. Murder of Susan Berman Susan Berman, a long-time friend of Durst's who had facilitated his public alibi after McCormack's disappearance, was the daughter of David Berman, a reputed gangster who in the late 1940s operated the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. On December 24, 2000, Berman was found murdered execution-style in her home in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, California, after her neighbors called the police to report that her door was open and one of her fox terriers was loose. A few days later, a letter addressed to the Beverly Hills Police Department, postmarked December 23, contained Berman's address and the word "cadaver". On the envelope "Beverly" was misspelled as "Beverley". Durst is known to have been in northern California days before Berman