Robert Durst's murder trial: "Everything is riddled with lies"

The closing arguments in the murder trial against real estate heir Robert Durst are among the most bizarre California has ever seen.

In front of the jury, the prosecutor Habib Balian held up a latex mask with a gray head, which the accused had disguised himself with, for several minutes last week.

Later, the lawyer showed the jury the photo of a cockroach in a soup cup.

“You can no longer tell which spoon of the soup is spoiled and which is not.

Everything is riddled with lies ”, compared prosecutor Balian Durst's statement with the pest.

During the almost 60 days of the trial, he had already gone far.

Durst, who has had to answer for the murder of his college friend Susan Berman in a Californian court since last year, is said to have killed three times.

In 1982, prosecutor Balian summed up in his closing argument, he murdered his wife Kathleen McCormack.

The 29-year-old medical student, who at the time disappeared under mysterious circumstances in New York and was pronounced dead in 2017, wanted to get a divorce.

Almost 20 years later, Durst struck for the second time, according to the indictment.

The day before Christmas, he allegedly visited his former classmate and confidante Berman at her home on Benedict Canyon in Los Angeles and killed her with a head shot.

Murder as an act of concealment

The motif? Berman, the daughter of the Ukrainian-American mafioso David Berman, wanted to blow thirst. She is said to have given him an alibi after the alleged murder of his wife in early 1982, when she said she was on a call to the University in New York, where Kathleen McCormack was studying at the time. The fatal shots that Durst fired at his neighbor Morris Black almost 20 years later were also an act of cover-up, according to prosecutors. Black had allegedly discovered that the deaf-mute woman who lived next to him in Texas was actually Robert Durst. After Black's death, Durst sawed up the body and sank the body parts in Galveston Bay. During a criminal trial in 2003, the jury believed that he had acted in self-defense.

Durst's second murder trial, on the other hand, threatens to end in life imprisonment.

The seventy-eight-year-old had not only admitted to lying out of habit during his testimony in the Los Angeles Superior Court.

He had incriminated himself again and again in the past few weeks.

“Most of what I'm saying is true.

But there are certain things that I'm not telling the truth about, ”admitted Durst.

A note from the killer

One of the lies was the so-called corpse letter. A letter had been received by the Beverly Hills police after Berman's death in December 2000. On a slip of paper the word "Cadaver" was written next to Berman's address, on the envelope "Beverley Hills Police". While filming "The Jinx", a documentary about Durst's life, a letter was discovered in 2015 that the millionaire heir had written to Berman years earlier - in almost identical handwriting and with the same misspelling of her Beverly Hills residence. After years of denying having written the “Cadaver note” and his thesis that only Berman's murderer could have written it, Durst had admitted to having sent the note to the Beverly Hills Police Department himself.

"You can ignore everything else," said prosecutor Balian for the jury. “It is certain that we have a note from the murderer, which only the murderer could have written and which the accused himself says must have come from the murderer. At the same time he testified, 'I wrote the carcass note and envelope that only the killer could have written.' ”Balian also reminded the jury of the testimony of a friend of the slain. If something happened to her, Berman had confided, “Bobby” was the culprit.

Durst's defense accused the public prosecutor's office of showmanship and crude theories. The photos of Black's dismembered body? An attempt by the prosecution to convict the jury despite the lack of evidence. "If you leave the emotions aside, it becomes clear that there is no evidence," admonished defense attorney Dick DeGuerin the jury. The lawyer did not mention the “cadaver note”, probably the clearest piece of evidence against his client, in his closing argument. Rather, DeGuerin drew the picture of an old, frail defendant who, after contracting bladder cancer, wanted to help solve the murder of Berman from a wheelchair. The defense attorney admitted that the son of New York real estate mogul Seymour Durst was doing himself a disservice by testifying for almost three weeks:“I wouldn't blame anyone for calling Bob Durst a liar. But just being a liar doesn't make him a murderer. "

After nearly five months in the Inglewood courthouse, the jury withdrew to deliberate Tuesday. “Bob Durst is not crazy. He's not a mad serial killer who kills for the kick. Don't let this narcissistic psychopath get away with it, ”Prosecutor John Lewin told them on their way.