DURST DESCRIBES FINDING PAL’S BODY
Murder defendant also discusses writing ‘cadaver note’
For years Robert Durst denied sending a cryptic letter to police about his best friend Susan Berman’s dead body because even he knew his story sounded unbelievable.
Testifying Monday at his murder trial in Los Angeles, the 78-year-old real estate heir described in detail finding Berman’s body at her home in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, painting a picture of a concerned friend scrambling through the house.
On Dec. 24, 2000, Durst arrived at Berman’s house and found a note on her door that she had left for him, telling him she’d be back from her walk in an hour, he testified. Using keys he said she had sent him months earlier, Durst unlocked her front door and walked inside, only to notice the back door was open, he claimed.
Durst walked out to the backyard, then through a side gate to the front of the house again after hearing “a whole bunch of honking” on Benedict Canyon Drive. Seeing no accident, as he had feared, Durst claimed he turned back to the house and noticed the front door was slightly open, but couldn’t remember if he’d closed it.
He went back into the house through the front door and “hollered ‘Susan’ a few times,” but received no answer, he said.
“I walked down from the front door to the bedrooms and as soon as I got in front of the first bedroom, I did a double-take when I saw Susan lying on the floor on her back with her feet towards the front of the house,” Durst testified. “She was just lying there.” He described squatting over the 55-year-old woman, checking her face to see if she was breathing, then grabbing her upper arms and lifting her torso about six inches off the ground.
“Her head just hung down and I could see that her hair was in some type of liquid,” Durst claimed. “What was going through my mind was that she had fallen backwards, fainted or something, fallen down and hit her head. I also thought maybe someone hit her in the back of the head.
“I did not imagine at that time that she had been shot.”
Durst’s testimony then turned into a series of failed plans, first to call 911 from Berman’s house — the cordless phone was dead, he said, then to flee the house after hearing people outside the house. “I don’t want those people to see me here,” he recalled thinking. Then he planned to call 911 from a payphone but, upon hearing a woman on the other end, decided he didn’t want to use his real name and that his voice would be too recognizable.
That’s when he wrote the infamous note to the Beverly Hills Police Department with a pen and paper he found in his car. Inside the envelope was a handwritten scrawl: “Cadaver, 1527 Benedict Canyon Drive,” Berman’s address.
Blaming the Percocet he had taken a day earlier for a migraine, Durst testified that he has no idea how or where he got the envelope and stamp to send the letter.
For years, Durst and his legal team denied penning the cryptic note, which police assumed had been sent by Berman’s killer, until an abrupt shift in December 2019, when his defense team, in a court filing, acknowledged his authorship.
“It’s a very difficult thing to believe. I mean, I have difficulty believing it myself, that I would write it myself and have not killed Susan Berman,” Durst testified Monday.
Durst and his lawyer also attempted to dispel long-standing speculation that Berman was blackmailing the real-estate magnate over the disappearance of his wife, Kathleen, in 1982.
A $25,000 check written to Berman in 1999 was for her new car, Durst said, and a separate money argument was about his investment in a Broadway show.
“She was always telling me that somebody had telephoned her and wanted to interview her, whether it was a detective or an investigator or a reporter,” Durst said Monday.
“Susan always had stuff to say and I had stopped taking it seriously years before that.”
Durst’s testimony also included his relationship with Morris Black, who he was accused of murdering and dismembering in Galveston, Texas, in October 2001. Durst was previously tried for Black’s murder in 2003, during which he argued he killed the man in self-defense during a struggle over a gun, then admitted to sawing his body into pieces. He pleaded guilty to two counts of bail jumping and one count of evidence tampering and was sentenced to five years, minus time served.
Durst described the two as friendly during Monday’s testimony, frequenting bookstores and a shooting range near Galveston. But he also tried to paint Black as reckless with the gun.
At one point that fall, Durst testified, he caught Morris shooting a gun in his apartment, firing at an eviction notice taped to the wall, when he thought Durst wasn’t home. In another instance, the two went to a shooting range and Morris used Durst’s 9mm pistol.
“It quickly became apparent to me that Morris was not familiar with a 9mm because he would shoot a whole magazine real fast without taking into consideration the kickback,” Durst testified.
“I felt that he was dangerous with the 9mm, so I only let him shoot one magazine and I told him the next time I went to Houston I would buy a 22-caliber pistol that (he) could use for target shooting.”