Robert Durst, draped in blanket after hospital stay, hears witness describe alleged 'accident on the stairs' phone call
Multimillionaire murder suspect Robert Durst listened to startling new testimony Monday while draped in a huge blanket covering his jail uniform and exposed catheter bag at his California murder trial.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mark Windham refused Durst’s request to delay the day’s proceeding, saying he trusted the jail doctors who determined Durst was good to go following his emergency hospitalization last week for a urinary tract infection and sepsis.
As his blanket slowly slipped off his shoulders, Durst heard Susan Harmon describe for jurors how she allegedly received a distressing call from Durst’s close friend Susan Berman — the murder victim at the center of the Los Angeles trial — in the hours after Durst’s first wife Kathie Durst went missing in New York in 1982.
“I’ve got to tell you this,” Berman allegedly told Harmon, a friend she’d met years earlier in boarding school.
“She said that her friend Bobby had had a fight with his wife. She didn’t know what she was going to do,” Harmon testified. “He’d had a fight, there was an accident on the stairs and that she had to do something.”
Durst, 78, is on trial for murdering Berman inside her Los Angeles home in December 2000.
Prosecutors claim Durst’s motive traces back to Kathie. They claim the wealthy scion of a New York real estate dynasty murdered Kathie to avoid a bitter divorce, drafted Berman to help him cover it up and then shot Berman execution-style nearly two decades later to guarantee her silence.
“She was agitated. It kind of made me agitated,” Harmon said of Berman’s demeanor on the call she received before Kathie’s disappearance started making headlines.
“She called me upset, and she was going to do something about it,” Harmon testified. “She got him out of a pickle.”
Under cross-examination, defense lawyer David Chesnoff confronted Harmon over an interview she gave Deputy District Attorney John Lewin in 2015 during which she stated she felt “a little confused” about some details and might benefit from hypnosis.
Harmon was adamant she only meant she wanted to remember even more, not that she was unsure about the mention of a fight or an accident involving stairs.
“I am not confused about it,” she responded. “What I’m telling you is true.”
The testimony could prove critical if it helps convince jurors Berman knew damaging details about Durst’s alleged involvement in Kathie’s demise.
As his lawyers argued for a trial delay earlier Monday, Durst proved he was following along when he grabbed his catheter bag and held it up for the judge to see.
“This is a critical situation your honor. He shouldn’t be in court. He should be in a hospital,” defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin argued. He said Durst also was having trouble breathing and was so disoriented, he “thought it was March.”
Prosecutors suggested Durst was trying to milk his medical woes to postpone his trial.
“The history is, Mr. Durst is on tape talking about faking dementia. He’s on tape talking about using COVID to get a new jury so he can start over,” Lewin argued as jurors waited outside.
“If you really look at it, the prejudice would be on the people’s side because Mr. Durst looks like a very sympathetic character right now. He’s sitting in a wheelchair. He looks very old and feeble,” Lewin said. “This doesn’t look like someone who’s murdered three people.”
Judge Windham decided to press ahead and even offered to supply the blanket used to cover Durst’s jail attire and catheter bag.
“If he has to go back, he’ll go back,” he said, calling Durst’s fragile medical state a “difficult situation.”
The third homicide referenced by Lewin on Monday was the shooting death of Durst’s Texas neighbor Morris Black in 2001.
Lewin said in his opening statement last year that it was “not an accident” Durst fatally shot Black even though a Texas jury acquitted him on self-defense grounds.
Durst testified in his own defense in Texas, telling jurors he defended himself during a scuffle with Black and then decapitated and dismembered his neighbor in a panic before dumping the body parts in Galveston Bay.
Lewin told jurors that Durst actually killed Black to maintain his cover while hiding out after Berman’s murder.
Durst had disguised himself as a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner while living on the lam in Galveston, and Black had discovered his true identity, Lewin argued.
