Durst married Debrah Charatan in 2000. He put his second wife in charge of managing his money and moved to Galveston, Texas, where he rented an apartment—while pretending to be a mute woman.
“I wore the wig for the first couple of weeks but it’s a real inconvenience, pain in the tush,” Durst said in the All Good Things commentary. “I don’t know how women do it with the hair in my mouth all of the time. I mean, jogging with it was absolutely impossible and, after a while, I just stopped doing it.”
Morris Black lived across the hall. Durst insisted that Black’s death in 2001 was self-defense, that his neighbor had first pointed Durst’s gun at him, after which they fought and the gun went off, mortally wounding Black. Durst maintained that he removed the head from the body and chopped the rest up in order to dispose of Black’s remains with more ease—and that he got rid of the body out of fear that police simply wouldn’t believe his story.
“I remember the nightmare I went through over the next several days [after shooting Black], trying to decide what to do, deciding I could not go to the police, the police are not going to believe this,” Durst recalled in the commentary. “Nobody’s going to believe that I came down here to Galveston, a rich guy, rented a $300-a-month apartment disguised as a woman and, oh, by the way, my neighbor is lying in my kitchen with a shot in the face from my gun.”
A jury, however, did find him believable—or at least had reasonable doubt of his intent—and found him not guilty of murder in 2003.