Robert Durst has been beating the odds for close to 40 years – escaping scrutiny for the disappearance of his first wife, going un-investigated for years for the cold-blooded murder of one of his best friends and, most startlingly, winning acquittal in a murder trial in Texas in which he admitted shooting the victim and dismembering the body with a bow saw and a paring knife.
But time, and luck, may be running out for the notorious black sheep of a high-profile New York real estate family.
Durst, now 78 and serving a long prison sentence, is facing one last murder trial where the evidence pointing to his guilt is not only compelling but has grown stronger since his dramatic cat-and-mouse arrest in a New Orleans hotel six years ago.
That trial, for the 2000 murder of his friend and confidante Susan Berman, restarted in Los Angeles this week after an unexpected 14-month hiatus brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Nobody is daring to call it a slam dunk – that’s the phrase the Texas prosecutor used in the 2003 murder trial where Durst walked free.
But the alibi that Durst maintained for years – that he was hundreds of miles away at the time of the Berman killing – has collapsed. He has also admitted penning an anonymous letter alerting police to the dead body at Berman’s home – a letter that, while Durst was still sticking to his alibi, he acknowledged could have been written only by the killer.
An old friend of both Durst’s and Berman’s, the former advertising executive Nick Chavin, is likely to be the prosecution’s most powerful witness. Chavin says Durst confessed Berman’s murder to him in 2014. Chavin’s testimony is already on the record – taken in advance of the trial because prosecutors were worried what might happen to him if they waited. “It sounds ridiculous,” Chavin said in 2017, “but yes, this was my best friend, who killed my other best friend.”
Durst and his charismatic, high-priced lawyer Dick DeGuerin, are hoping to poke enough holes in the evidence to establish reasonable doubt, just as they did in Texas 18 years ago. Yes, Durst was at Berman’s Benedict Canyon home in the hills above Los Angeles, DeGuerin said in his opening statement on Wednesday. Yes, Durst wrote the note tipping off the police. But he did not kill Berman.
Durst merely discovered the body after she had been shot, execution-style, in the back of the head, DeGuerin told the jury, and then panicked. “Bob Durst did not kill Susan Berman and he doesn’t know who did,” DeGuerin said.
In DeGuerin’s account, Durst was a bumbling, even clumsy innocent man around whom chaos inexplicably erupted from time to time. Because he had autistic tendencies (an assertion the prosecution disputes), he did not communicate with others normally. And because he had a tendency to panic, he did things, like hacking up a body after killing a man in self-defense, that might strike others as odd.
“He doesn’t make good decisions,” DeGuerin conceded.
Above all, DeGuerin insisted, the evidence against Durst can’t be trusted. The Jinx, the sensational HBO documentary about Durst that aired in 2015 and triggered his arrest, was an extended, dishonest piece of gotcha journalism, DeGuerin said. And Chavin, who has admitted lying to investigators for seven months before deciding to turn on his friend, is not a reliable witness.
‘Everything starts with Kathie’
The prosecution is arguing that understanding the full context of Durst’s story is crucial, and that includes the disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathie, in 1982.
“Everything starts with Kathie Durst’s disappearance and death at the hands of Mr Durst,” John Lewin, the deputy district attorney, said in his own opening statement.
Durst was never formally under suspicion in the case, in part because Kathie’s body was never found. She was not declared officially dead until 2017.
But according to the prosecutor, Berman helped muddy the timing of Kathie’s disappearance by impersonating her in a phone call to the dean of the medical school where Kathie was a student.
When friends of Kathie’s piled pressure on the local district attorney’s office to reopen the case in 2000, prosecutors allege, Durst assumed – wrongly, as it turned out – that he was under criminal investigation and that Berman was about to be questioned by the Los Angeles police.
In short order, he arranged a perfunctory wedding with his girlfriend at the time, Debrah Lee Charatan, and rented out a room in Galveston, Texas. “It was a marriage of convenience,” Durst later told his sister in a recorded phone conversation while in police custody. “I had to have Debrah to write my checks. I was setting myself up to be a fugitive.”
Before heading to Texas, he flew to California and, as he has now admitted, went several hundred miles out of his way to visit Berman in Los Angeles before driving back up north to the San Francisco airport.
Chavin, in his testimony, said that for Durst, “It was her or me. I had no choice.”
Once in Texas, Durst passed himself off as a mute woman, calling himself Dorothy Ciner. According to prosecutors, his roommate, Morris Black, saw through the disguise and asked so many questions he ended up shot and dismembered.
The Jinx and the trial
According to Durst and his legal team, Black and Durst had fought over a gun and Durst killed Black in self-defense.
When it comes to Berman, DeGuerin said, Durst “had no motive and nothing to gain” by killing her.
Much has changed for Durst since his previous trial, when he was less known than now and DeGuerin was able to argue that the suspicions swirling around him were prejudicial and should be kept out of the trial.
Durst’s fortunes changed dramatically, in fact, after he agreed to sit for dozens of hours of interviews for The Jinx. Through Berman’s stepson, the film-makers found a letter from Durst to Berman using the same block capitals and the same misspelling of the “Beverly” in “Beverly Hills” as the anonymous note written to the police after her killing. They also caught Durst on a hot mic saying: “What did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
As the six-part show reached its climax, police trailed Durst from a home in Houston to New Orleans and arrested him at a hotel where he had checked in under an alias. He was charged and later convicted on firearms charges and has remained behind bars while simultaneously awaiting trial in Los Angeles for the Berman killing.
DeGuerin was scathing about The Jinx in his opening statement, feasting on the fact that three apparently damning sentences Durst uttered during the final episode were edited together out of order to sound more powerful than they were.
Still, the show provides a wealth of on-the-record material that is likely to be used against Durst as the trial proceeds. The publicity surrounding the show also prompted investigators to dust off their old notebooks and enabled Lewin and his team in Los Angeles to review old evidence and establish new lines of inquiry.
Getting Chavin to turn on his friend was perhaps their biggest coup. Durst’s 2019 admission that he wrote the letter to the police (consisting of Berman’s address and the single upper-case word “CADAVER”) was another a major victory.
In court this week, Durst cut a sad figure – sitting in a wheelchair in a shabby suit and following proceedings through the court recorder’s notes on an electronic tablet because of hearing problems. According to his lawyers, he has bladder cancer and is barely fit to stand trial at all.
But Durst has also indicated he intends to testify in his own defense – a highly unusual move that defense attorneys rarely recommend. In a case expected to last weeks or even months, it’s not clear when that testimony might come, but Lewin, the prosecutor, appears to be looking forward to it.
“Get your popcorn and candy and a lounge chair,” he told the jury. “It’s going to be a while.”