LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Robert Durst, the ailing New York real estate scion whose arrest prosecutors say was hastened by his confession to multiple killings in a 2015 TV documentary, faced a jury on Wednesday for opening statements in his Los Angeles murder trial.
Robert Durst sits for opening statements in his murder trial in Los Angeles, California, U.S., March 4, 2020. Etienne Laurent/Pool via REUTERS
After entering the courtroom, Durst, 76, walked slowly to his seat at the defense table, wearing a navy blue blazer, his hair disheveled and a hearing aid tucked behind his ear.
“Ladies and gentlemen, buckle your seatbelts. We’re about to begin,” Judge Mark Windham told the courtroom at the start of the session.
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.
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.
“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,” Deputy District Attorney John Lewin told the 12-person jury and 12 alternates in his opening statement.
Durst has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Berman’s death came a couple of months after police in New York reopened an investigation into the fate of Durst’s spouse, Kathleen, who vanished in 1982. Durst insists he had nothing to do with her disappearance.
‘KILLED THEM ALL’
The circumstances surrounding both cases, and Durst’s 2003 acquittal in the killing and dismemberment of a Texas neighbor, was portrayed in a 2015 Emmy-award winning HBO documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.”
The prosecution’s theory is that Durst killed Kathleen Durst at their cottage outside New York City in January 1982, and Berman helped cover it up.
Durst was arrested on suspicion of Berman’s murder in March 2015, a day before the airing of the final episode, in which Durst seemed to incriminate himself.
He was captured by microphone muttering off-camera to himself: “There it is, you’re caught,” and “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
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 Cynthia Osterman