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 Durst, 76, is charged with the December 2000 murder of his
long-time confidant, Susan Berman, a writer he is accused of
fatally shooting because of what she might have known about the
unsolved disappearance and presumed killing of his wife two
decades earlier.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said
prosecutors planned to deliver opening statements on Wednesday,
after the judge and attorneys for both sides spent two weeks
selecting 12 jurors and 12 alternates for a trial expected to
last about five months.
Durst, confined to a wheelchair and suffering from what his
lawyers describe as a number of “severe” health problems, has
pleaded not guilty. If convicted he faces a maximum sentence of
life in prison.
Berman, 55, the daughter of an organized crime figure and author
of the 1981 memoir "Easy Street: The True Story of a Mob
Family," was found slain execution-style in her Beverly Hills
home.
Her death came a couple of months after police in New York were
reported to have reopened an investigation into the fate of
Durst’s spouse, Kathleen, who was a medical student when she
vanished in 1982.
Durst, the estranged, multimillionaire grandson of a Manhattan
real estate magnate, has insisted he had nothing to do with her
disappearance. He was never prosecuted in the New York probe,
which led to lurid tabloid coverage and a movie on the Lifetime
channel.
The circumstances surrounding both cases, as well as Durst’s
2003 acquittal in the killing and dismemberment of an elderly
Texas neighbor, gained wide attention in a 2015 Emmy-award
winning HBO documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert
Durst."
'KILLED THEM ALL'
The prosecution’s theory is that Durst killed Kathleen Durst at
their cottage outside New York City in January 1982, and that
Berman helped cover it up, going so far as to place a telephone
call pretending to be Durst's wife to help facilitate his alibi.
No body was ever found.
Durst is accused of killing Berman to silence her as a potential
witness against him when the case was reopened.
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Durst was arrested on suspicion of Berman’s murder in March
2015, one day before the airing of the final episode, in which
Durst seemed to incriminate himself after being confronted with
a key piece of evidence.
He was captured by microphone after the interview muttering
off-camera to himself: “There it is, you’re caught,” and “What
the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
In court papers filed months later, prosecutors said they had
moved quickly to secure Durst’s arrest upon learning he had
“confessed to killing multiple people” in the documentary and
might try to run once “The Jinx” finale was broadcast.
In ordering Durst to stand trial, the judge said in 2018 that
Durst’s “cryptic” remark caught on mic “operates as a succinct
confession” absent an explanation from the defendant.
Durst told authorities shortly after his arrest that he smoked
marijuana daily and was under the influence of methamphetamine
during his interview for “The Jinx.”
The prosecution's evidence includes a cryptic note Durst is
accused of having mailed to police after Berman's murder
anonymously notifying them of a "cadaver" at her address.
The envelope misspelled Beverly Hills as "Beverley Hills," a
quirk "The Jinx" filmmakers found on another envelope they said
Durst has once sent to Berman.
Defense attorneys have argued that prosecutors lacked any
physical evidence such as fingerprints or DNA evidence linking
him to the murder scene.
(Reporting by Rachel Parsons in Los Angeles; Writing by Bill
Tarrant; Editing by Steve Gorman and Lincoln Feast.)
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