Durst looked at in Vt. vanishing
The police chief would not call him even a person of interest in 1971 case.
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - A 2012 tip led investigators to look into whether millionaire real estate heir Robert Durst played a role in the 1971 disappearance and presumed death of a Middlebury College freshman, police said Tuesday.
The tip was not connected with the producers of the HBO show The Jinx, which focuses on the life of Durst, who is facing murder charges in the 2000 death of a woman in Los Angeles, Middlebury Police Chief Thomas Hanley said.
Investigators, until they received that tip, were unaware that Durst had been running a health food store where the student had shopped in the Vermont college town about 30 miles south of Burlington, Hanley said. He declined to describe Durst as a suspect or even a person of interest in the disappearance and presumed death of Lynne Schulze, who was from Simsbury, Conn.
"He is a person that had some proximate connection with a person that is missing here," Hanley said Tuesday. "With some of the other background that we're discovering on this person, we're very interested to find out what that connection is and how far we can go with that connection."
Schulze disappeared Dec. 10, 1971, failing to show up for a final examination. She bought prunes at Durst's store shortly before her disappearance, Hanley said.
Schulze's parents didn't report her missing until the following week, and her disappearance wasn't made public until the next month. Hanley said Schulze's parents initially didn't want to publicize the case because it was hoped that she would return on her own.
Durst is an estranged member of the wealthy New York real estate family that runs 1 World Trade Center. He was acquitted of murder after the dismembered body of a neighbor, Morris Black, was found in a Texas bay in 2001.
He was arrested earlier this month and charged with killing Susan Berman in 2000 before she could speak with former New York prosecutor Jeanine Pirro's investigators about the disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen Durst, in 1982.
He was arrested in New Orleans, where he is being held pending extradition to California.