Two months before she went missing, Kathie Durst received a call from her husband’s mistress.
On the other end of the phone was Prudence Farrow — the sister of Mia Farrow, a yoga instructor and the muse behind the Beatles song “Dear Prudence.”
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| Prudence Farrow (front left) with Beatles Ringo (center) and Paul (right) and their wives at an Indian ashram in 1968. |
She was also married and lived in a Durst-family-owned brownstone on West 43rd Street.
“Prudence wanted Kathie to give Bob up,” Eleanor Schwank, a college
friend of Kathie’s, told The Post in June 1982. She wanted him all to
herself, friends said.
Prudence Farrow Bruns is lucky Kathie refused — she might be one of the few women to be intimate with Robert Durst who lived to tell about it.
Durst was arrested a day before the March 14 final installment of an
HBO documentary series about him, “The Jinx,” where he was caught on a
microphone whispering to himself, “What the hell did I do? Killed them
all, of course.”
Durst, 71, was charged with the murder of his confidante Susan
Berman, who was killed execution-style at her home in Beverly Hills in
December 2000.
Photo:Prudence Farrow battled Kathie Durst (left) Over Robert Durst in 1982.Photo: HBO
Back then, Kathie Durst, 29, was living in mortal fear of her husband of 10 years.
Three weeks earlier, she was treated at a Bronx hospital for facial
bruises. The couple had fought bitterly, Kathie told Schwank, and her
husband pummeled her. Kathie was demanding a divorce and a $250,000
settlement — a modest amount for a real-estate scion with millions.
She was also fed up over Durst’s three-year affair with Prudence, the
then-34-year-old sister of a Hollywood star and daughter of Maureen
O’Sullivan — Jane in the Tarzan movies.
The slim brunette had also had her own brush with fame when she was
19 — accidentally ending up at the same Indian ashram as The Beatles.
John Lennon wrote “Dear Prudence” for her after he was dispatched to
coax her out of her meditation hut. The lyrics — “Won’t you come out to
play?” — were a comment on her fanatical devotion to the discipline.“She’d been locked in for three weeks and wouldn’t come out, trying
to reach God quicker than anybody else,” Lennon said. As Prudence
herself noted years later, “I wanted to be immersed fully in the
divine.”
Shortly after the song was released, Prudence married Albert Bruns, a
New York teacher. By 1980, however, it was widely known that she was
dating Robert Durst, the handsome heir apparent to a real-estate dynasty
that owned most of Times Square.
“He was thrilled to be dating the woman who had been the inspiration
for his idol John Lennon’s song,” according to author Marion Collins in
“Without a Trace.”
After years of wandering between California and Texas, often dressed
as a woman, Durst in 2001 killed and dismembered Morris Black in
Galveston.
Two years later he was acquitted of murder, convincing a jury that he shot his elderly neighbor in self-defense.
At the end of his trial, Prudence told police investigators that she was worried Durst might come after her.She said Durst became enraged when she tried to break off their
relationship back in 1982, days before Kathie went missing, according to
published reports.
John Lennon wrote “Dear Prudence” for her after he was dispatched to coax her out of her meditation hut.
Today, Prudence, 67, lives in the Florida Panhandle with her husband
of nearly 50 years, off a dirt road in a mobile home hidden behind thick
vegetation.
The home doesn’t even have a mailbox — seemingly the perfect place for a person who does not want to be found.
The mother of three and grandmother of four earned a Ph.D. in
Sanskrit studies from UC-Berkeley and worked as a schoolteacher and film
producer.
When visited by The Post last week, Prudence politely explained that
she was teaching a class at home in transcendental meditation and that
her student was waiting.
She then said, “I’m really sorry, but I have no comment.”
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