Durst is charged with the first-degree murder of her close friend and confidant, Susan Berman, in 2000, at her Beverly Hills home, hours before she set out to talk to investigators about the mysterious disappearance of her first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, who was last seen in 1982.
The defendant sat in a wheelchair, wearing a gray blazer and a white shirt, as the arguments were over and Judge Mark Windham sent the court to the jury room. The nine women and three men began deliberations shortly after noon, local time.
Durst, 78, positioned himself in his defense during the sensational trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court. He denied killing Berman and said he found her on the floor of his bedroom with a fatal shot to the back of the head.
In the final conclusions, prosecutor Habib Balian told the jury that the case was simple: Berman knew Durst had killed his wife and was helping to cover him up, according to the prosecutor.
Balian pointed to one of the strongest witnesses in the state, a lifelong friend of Durst and Berman, Nick Chavin, who testified that the defendant had told him, “It was her or me,” referring to Berman. “I had no choice.”
“These nine words sum up the whole case,” Balian told the jurors.
McCormack Durst was declared legally dead in 2017. Her body has not been found and no one has been charged in this case.
Attorney Dick DeGuerin, in the end, portrayed his client as a sick and unfortunate old man harassed by prosecutors whose case was circumstantial at best.
“If you come to two or more reasonable conclusions about where circumstantial evidence leads you, you should say‘ not guilty, ’” DeGuerin said.
He added, “If you’re still wondering, ‘What happened to Kathie?’ On? When? How? Then it is a reasonable doubt. You can’t guess. You have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. ”
DeGuerin told jurors that they were not expected to like or even believe Durst, whose cross-examination exposed multiple lies he made over the years, but being a liar did not make him a murderer.
“I think it can be seen in the 14 days of Bob Durst in the testimony that the compass is not pointing north,” DeGuerin said. “It’s unusual. And I don’t think you need a psychiatrist to tell you.”
His testimony lasted three weeks
Chief Prosecutor John Lewin, a cold case specialist at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, argued loudly and sometimes mockingly with Durst during his testimony.
In the rostrum Durst denied the murder of his first wife and later of Berman. But in interrogation, Durst stated that he would be perjured if he had killed them.
“Did you kill Susan Berman?” Lewin asked Durst, who was sitting sunk in the wheelchair a few feet away.
“No,” Durst countered in a weak but emphatic voice.
“But if I had, I’d be lying about it, wouldn’t I?” Lewin asked.
“Correct,” Durst replied.
Lewin urged Durst to admit that he perjured himself five times during the trial, which resumed in May after a 14-month delay due to the pandemic.
Durst’s testimony lasted for three weeks, with much of the cross-examination turning into a disputed dispute with Lewin.
There was little physical evidence of Berman’s unresolved death. There were no eyewitnesses or any murder weapons.
A key piece of evidence was the so-called “corpse” note, a cryptic letter sent to police with Berman’s address and the word “corpse” on caps that carried detectives on his body.
The filmmakers confronted Durst with another letter he once mailed to Berman, with a letter almost identical to the “corpse” note. In both, Beverly Hills was misspelled as “BEVERLEY.
In a court case, the real estate mogul’s lawyers late last year reversed the course and acknowledged that Durst wrote the anonymous note. “That doesn’t change the fact that Bob Durst didn’t kill Susan Berman,” DeGuerin said at the time.
He had previously been acquitted of murder
Durst’s decision to take a stand in his own murder trial had worked for him in a previous case.
In 2003, Durst testified in Texas that he had fatally shot a neighbor, Morris Black, in self-defense and admitted that he cut the body with surgical precision and left it in Galveston Bay. He said he panicked, while prosecutors said he wanted to steal the man’s identity and escape the investigation into his wife’s disappearance.
The Texas jury, which heard Durst impersonate a dumb woman while hiding in Galveston, accepted his self-defense claim and acquitted him of murder.
Durst’s second murder trial is one more chapter in an unusual life that reached a massive audience through the miniseries “The Jinx.”
He was arrested in New Orleans the night before the broadcast of the last episode of the show. In his final moments, Durst went into the bathroom, apparently unaware that the microphone was still on, and made a series of comments that became infamous.
“Here he is. He’s trapped,” he said in a series of seemingly unrelated sentences. “I was right. I was wrong.”
“What the hell did I do? Of course, I killed them all,” he said in what viewers widely interpreted as a confession. But transcripts of the audio recording in court revealed that the citations were spliced and edited to have a different order and context, The New York Times reported. Durst has said he was “very into methamphetamine” during the recording of the documentary.
Durst has long claimed he had nothing to do with the disappearance of his wife.
McCormack Durst was on his way to New York School of Medicine when he disappeared in 1982. Prosecutors said his disappearance was preceded by marital problems and physical abuse by Durst.
“I’ve been running away from the truth for 39 years,” Balian told jurors last week. “Don’t let it run away from the truth anymore.”
CNN’s Stella Chan and Cheri Mossburg contributed to this report.