Crime & Safety
'The Jinx' Murder Trial: Durst Continues Changing Stories
The wealthy Westchester native accused of killing a friend who had lied for him about killing his wife did kill a neighbor while in hiding.
INGLEWOOD, CA — Having admitted that it was he who found his close friend's body and tipped off police, Robert Durst said at his trial for murder that he thought Susan Berman’s killer was still at her home when he found her dead.
The heir to a New York real-estate fortune, Durst had maintained for years that he wasn't even in California when Berman was found Christmas Eve dead from a single gunshot to the head.
The Scarsdale native, the subject of an HBO documentary, Durst was arrested in 2015 for one of the three killings linked to his name.
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At the trial, which is in its second week, Durst said Berman had been lying when she told others that she had provided an alibi for him in 1982 by pretending to be his wife Kathie Durst in a phone call to her employer.
Berman died in 2000 as New York State Police and Westchester County officials sought to question her about Kathie's disappearance from their home in Bedford.
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In the one death he has stood trial for so far, he cited self-defense (successfully—he was acquitted) as his reason for shooting elderly Morris Black, cutting him into pieces and throwing the body parts into Galveston Bay while he was living there in 2001 under an assumed name disguised as a woman.
Before that trial in 2003, he jumped bail, touching off a national manhunt that ended when he was caught shoplifting a sandwich (he had $520 in his pocket and $37,000 in the car, as well as Black's driver's license).
Durst was again in court in 2014—in Texas where he took a plea deal after he urinated on a counterful of candy bars and a cash register while picking up a prescription at a CVS, and in New York City—where he was acquitted of trespassing at his estranged relatives' residences and the judge vacated the orders of protection they had against him.
FBI agents arrested Durst in 2015 over Berman's death after he checked into a New Orleans hotel under an assumed name.
His trial in California continues. SEE: 'The Killer Was In The House,' Durst Testifies
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