A pretrial hearing will be held Monday in the case of real estate heir Robert Durst, 76.
The defendant will face a jury in January because he is accused of murdering his friend Susan Berman, 55, in December 2000. Authorities in Los Angeles, Calfornia say he killed her with a gunshot to the back of her head.
Ugly allegations trailed Durst for years. His wife Kathleen Durst disappeared in 1982. He allegedly abused her during their relationship, and didn’t report her missing until five days later.
Then-Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro reopened the missing persons case in November 2000, suggesting it was a homicide.
Durst was acquitted in 2003 of murdering neighbor Morris Black although he admitted to cutting up the victim’s body. His defense at trial argued he killed the man out of self-defense while fighting with him over a gun.
Durst was later profiled in docuseries The Jinx. In the conclusion of the show, he was famously caught on a live mic while using the bathroom.
Audio showed him apparently admitting to murder.
“What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course,” he was depicted as saying.
His defense said this year that the statement was edited out of order. Here’s what he said in the transcript, according to The New York Times [emphasis ours]:
[Untelligible.] I don’t know what you expected to get. I don’t know what’s in the house. Oh, I want this. Killed them all, of course. [Unintelligible.] I want to do something new. There’s nothing new about that. [Inaudible – possibly “disaster.”] He was right. I was wrong. The burping. I’m having difficulty with the question. What the hell did I do?
Durst was arrested in Berman’s death the day before the final episode aired.
[Image via Pool/Getty Images]
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