Susan Berman was careful to keep her doors and windows locked, but had no fear of her close friend Robert Durst when he showed up at her Benedict Canyon home late one night in December 2000, so she let him in, a prosecutor told jurors on Tuesday.
“She turned around, she took a few steps, and he basically blew her brains out,” Deputy Dist. Atty. John Lewin said in his opening statement at Durst’s murder trial.
Fourteen months after the trial was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, it started over again on Tuesday at a Los Angeles County courthouse in Inglewood.
Ten witnesses testified in early 2020, but memories fade, so Superior Court Judge Mark Windham invited prosecutors and defense attorneys to give jurors a reprise of opening arguments.
Durst, a gaunt 78-year-old Manhattan real estate heir, sat hunched in his wheelchair as the prosecutor accused him of shooting Berman in the back of the head in a plot to cover up the alleged 1982 murder of his first wife Kathleen Durst in New York.
Durst has not been charged with murdering his wife, whose body was never found after she disappeared. But Lewin said prosecutors would nonetheless show that Durst killed her so that jurors could understand the motive behind his murder of Berman.
After a 14-month pandemic-induced hiatus, Robert Durst will finally stand trial for the 2000 murder of Susan Berman.
Durst has said previously that when Berman was killed, he was aware New York investigators had reopened the investigation of his wife’s murder and were following new leads. Prosecutors say he feared that Berman, a friend from their days as students at UCLA in the 1960s, would provide incriminating evidence.
Lewin told jurors Tuesday that prosecutors would show that Berman knew her killer and let him into her house because she trusted him.
“There was no ransacking,” he said. “There was no struggle. Nothing, in fact, was taken that day other than Susan’s life. Her purse with credit cards, with ID and cash was on the kitchen counter.”
Burglars, he added, steal things. “They don’t just walk in and execute somebody and leave.”
Five years after HBO’s ‘The Jinx,’ Durst will stand trial in the 2000 killing of Susan Berman at her Benedict Canyon home.
Defense attorney Dick DeGuerin was expected to argue later Tuesday that Durst did not kill Berman.
When the trial opened last year, DeGuerin said Durst discovered Berman’s dead body at the house and fled in panic. De Guerin also acknowledged that Durst wrote an anonymous letter alerting Beverly Hills police to Berman’s “cadaver” at the house.
Durst had previously denied writing the “cadaver note” in video interviews that the prosecutor played for the jury on Tuesday. Lewin showed jurors a 2012 video of Durst saying that “only the killer could have written” the note to police.
“As with a lot of the evidence in this case,” Lewin said, “it’s going to come right from the defendant’s own mouth.”
One of the key sources of prosecutors’ video evidence in the trial is likely to be excerpts from the 20 hours of interviews that Durst gave for the HBO documentary series “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.”
