Durst murder trial set to resume
Robert Durst, the Lehigh University graduate arrested in 2001 outside a Wegmans store in Northampton County, is again set to face trial in the death of an elderly neighbor.
LOS ANGELES — It took nearly 15 years for police to arrest New York real estate heir Robert Durst in the killing of his best friend and another five to bring him to trial. After just two days of testimony, jurors were sent home when the coronavirus closed courthouses.
On Monday, more than 14 months later, the jurors are returning to Los Angeles County Superior Court to see if they can complete their assignment. If so, it could be a first for the U.S. legal system.
The length of the stoppage is unprecedented and it’s the highest-profile U.S. case postponed because of the pandemic, Durst’s lawyers say. They have repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — sought a mistrial because they argued the delay harmed his chance of a fair trial.
Durst, 78, has pleaded not guilty to killing his friend Susan Berman, who was shot in the back of the head in her LA home in 2000. Prosecutors say he silenced Berman before she could tell police she helped him cover up the killing of his wife, Kathie, in 1982.
Judge Mark Windham has called back the 23 jurors, including 11 alternates, and plans to question them Monday to see if they can go forward with the case.
What makes the Durst case so unusual is that it was halted after the jury — winnowed from over 400 people — was sworn in and heard four days of opening statements and two days of testimony.
Scott Sundby, a University of Miami law professor, said he looked into trials that were halted due to damaging earthquakes and hurricanes and hadn’t discovered a break as long as the Durst case.
The length of the pause itself was less likely to be a problem because it was not anyone’s fault, Sundby said.
But he said Windham, who is likely motivated to keep the jury intact, would have to be vigilant when screening jurors to make sure they hadn’t been tainted in any way that could violate Durst’s right to a fair trial.
“I think the motivation is most likely that, ‘We spent a lot of time and effort picking a jury and unless I become convinced that this jury cannot be fair, we’re not going to go through that process again,’ ” Sundby said.
Durst, an eccentric worth more than an estimated $100 million, is being held without bail. He is only charged with Berman’s killing but prosecutors are using his wife’s disappearance and neighbor’s slaying in Texas to build their case against him.
He has long been suspected of killing his wife, whose body has never been found, though he’s never been charged and has denied any role in her disappearance.
Berman, a Las Vegas mobster’s daughter who met Durst at the University of California, Los Angeles, served as his unofficial spokeswoman when Kathie Durst vanished. She helped him cover his tracks, prosecutors said.
After New York investigators announced they reopened the case in fall 2000, authorities say Berman told Durst she was going to speak with them about what she knew. She was dead two months later.
Nine months after Berman was killed, Durst fatally shot his neighbor Morris Black in a Galveston, Texas, boarding house, where he had gone into hiding as a mute woman.
Durst was acquitted after testifying Black pulled a pistol on him and was shot as they struggled for the weapon. He said he panicked and butchered the man’s body and tossed it into Galveston Bay.
During opening statements in LA, defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin, who defended Durst in Texas, said Durst didn’t kill Berman and doesn’t know who did. But he said his client had found her body, panicked and bolted.
Durst sent police a cryptic note alerting them to a “cadaver” in the house only to ensure she would be found, DeGuerin said.
He was arrested in New Orleans in 2015 on the eve of the final episode of “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” an HBO documentary in which he was confronted with the cadaver note and a letter he once sent Berman with similar block print handwriting and the city of Beverly Hills misspelled “Beverley.”
Before being shown the letter he had written to Berman, Durst told filmmakers that only the killer could have written the cadaver note.
After the “gotcha” moment, he was later caught on a hot mic saying to himself in a bathroom, “You’re caught! What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”