appeal". On September 24, Durst's lawyers filed a motion with Windham to request a new trial. The reasoning was basically the same as they gave in Durst's trial defense: no physical evidence was presented, witnesses for the prosecution were not to be believed, and the entire prosecution case was nothing but an unproven theory. On October 14, 2021, Durst was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for Berman's murder. The request from Durst for a new trial was denied by the court in view of the abundance of evidence of Durst's guilt. Following the murder conviction, Durst's legal team immediately filed appeals in the California legal system. As such, Durst's appeals may be dismissed by the California Court of Appeal, and the conviction set aside, as his death prevented the appeals from being heard. Other cases Days after the Berman murder, police were reportedly examining connections between Durst and the disappearances of 18-year-old Lynne Schulze from Middlebury, Vermont, and 16-year-old Karen Mitchell from Eureka, California. Investigators were also considering possible connection between Durst and the disappearance of 18-year-old Kristen Modafferi, who was last seen in San Francisco in 1997. Schulze, a Middlebury College freshman, visited Durst's health-food store on December 10, 1971, the day she disappeared, and was last seen that afternoon near a bus stop across from the store. DeGuerin characterized the Schulze investigation as "opportunistic" and said he would not permit his client to be questioned by Vermont police. Author and investigative journalist Matt Birkbeck reported in 2003, and again in his 2015 book A Deadly Secret, that credit card records placed Durst in Eureka on November 25, 1997, the day Mitchell vanished. Mitchell may have volunteered in a homeless shelter that Durst frequented; Durst, dressed in women's clothing, had visited the Eureka shoe store owned by Mitchell's aunt. Mitchell was last seen walking to work from her aunt's store and possibly speaking to someone in a stopped car; a witness sketch of Mitchell's presumed abductor resembles Durst. Although the FBI ultimately could not connect Durst to the Long Island serial murders (in which some victims were disposed of in a similar manner to the Black killing), the bureau created an informal task force in 2012 to work with investigative agencies in jurisdictions where Durst was known to have lived in past decades, including Vermont, New York, and California. In the wake of his recent