Robert Durst: Berman murder trial opens with jury watching The Jinx
Jurors have watched clips from an Emmy-award winning documentary and a feature film about Robert Durst, a New York real estate heir charged with murdering his best friend to cover up his killing of his ex-wife.
Durst, 76, was the subject of an HBO documentary in 2015 called The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst that drew renewed attention to the case after prosecutors alleged he had confessed to the killings in an unguarded moment caught on a microphone.
At the first day of his murder trial in Los Angeles, the jury was played the clip in which Durst allegedly mutters: “There it is, you’re caught,” and: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
He was arrested in March 2015, the day before the final episode of The Jinx aired.
Durst is charged with the December 2000 murder of his long-time confidant, Susan Berman, because of what she might have known about the unsolved disappearance and presumed killing of his wife two decades earlier.
Durst has pleaded not guilty. If convicted he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
In the courtroom on Wednesday, Durst wore a navy blue blazer, his hair dishevelled and a hearing aid tucked behind his ear.
Durst’s lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, objected to the jury being shown more clips, this time from the 2012 film All the Good Things, an account of his marriage starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst.
“This is improper,” DeGuerin said. “What’s on the screen is made up.”
But John Lewin, deputy district attorney, countered: “You present what you want to present, and I’ll present what I want to present.”
Berman, 55, the daughter of an organised crime figure and author of the 1981 memoir Easy Street: The True Story of a Mob Family, was found killed execution-style in her Beverly Hills home.
“She let the killer into her house, she turned her back to them … She wasn’t afraid of them and then she was executed, shot in the head at very close range,” Lewin told the jury in his opening statement.
Berman’s death came after police in New York reopened an investigation into the fate of Dursts wife, Kathleen, who vanished in 1982. Durst insists he had nothing to do with her disappearance.
The circumstances surrounding both cases, and Durst’s 2003 acquittal in the killing and dismemberment of a former neighbour in Texas, were portrayed in The Jinx.
DeGuerin helped Durst get acquitted in the Texas murder trial, when Durst testified that he had dismembered and disposed of his neighbour, Morris Black, but his death had been an accident in a struggle over a gun.
The prosecution’s theory is that Durst killed his wife at their cottage outside New York City in January 1982 and Berman helped cover it up.
Prosecutors have alleged that just days after Kathleen Durst’s death her
husband enlisted Berman, whom he had met as a student at UCLA in the 1960s, to act as his media spokeswoman and to help him cover up the killing. At one point they claim that Berman posed as Kathie Durst in a phone call to her medical school to demonstrate that she was still alive.
The trial is expected to last up to five months.