LOS ANGELES _ Robert Durst, the eccentric New York real estate scion whose brushes with the law have made him repeated tabloid fodder, made his first court appearance in Los Angeles on Monday and pleaded not guilty to a murder charge in the execution-style slaying of his friend, writer Susan Berman.
Durst, 73, entered the courtroom in a wheelchair, sporting a neck brace, wearing a blue and white striped shirt and khaki pants.
"I do want to say here and now though I am not guilty," he said in a hoarse voice. "I did not kill Susan Berman."
Durst is accused of carrying out the December 2000 shooting of Berman, a confidant who had befriended him while they attended classes at UCLA, because she was a witness to a crime.
Berman, a writer whose father was a noted Las Vegas mafia figure, had acted as an unofficial spokesman for Durst after he became a suspect in the disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen. Berman was shot execution-style in her Benedict Canyon home after New York authorities reopened their investigation into Kathleen's disappearance and were preparing to interview Berman.
Durst has frequently denied any involvement in Berman's killing or his wife's vanishing.
After the hearing he will be transferred to the custody of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and held in either the downtown Men's Central Jail or the Twin Towers facility, depending on the outcome of a medical screening, according to Capt. Jeff Scroggins, an agency spokesman.
Speaking to reporters before he entered the packed courtroom, Durst's attorney, Dick DeGuerin, said his client has been dealing with several medical issues and is recovering from a spinal fusion surgery he underwent in Louisiana earlier this year. Durst is also a cancer survivor and has struggled with hydropencephalitis, a condition that involves brain swelling.
DeGuerin said he has been relishing the chance to plead Durst's case in court.
"We're happy to be here," he said outside the airport courthouse. "We've wanted to be here since March" of 2015.
The millionaire was arrested in connection with Berman's death last year when FBI agents found him at a New Orleans hotel. When he was caught, agents discovered he had a firearm and marijuana.
Durst was sentenced to seven years and one month in prison on weapons charges in New Orleans. As part of the deal, he was allowed to be transferred to Los Angeles to face the murder charge. He was flown from Louisiana on Friday.
A murder trial, likely to be one of the most anticipated in recent Los Angeles history, will probably begin a year from now, DeGuerin said.
Last year's arrest marked the bizarre collision of a true-crime documentary and a years-long LAPD investigation into Berman's killing. Durst, who had faded from the spotlight after he was acquitted of murder in Texas in 2003, was launched back into the national consciousness when he became the subject of a six-part HBO documentary, "The Jinx."
The series explored what happened to Durst's first wife and Berman, as well as the complex legal drama that unfolded in his Galveston, Texas, murder trial over the killing and then dismembering of his neighbor, Morris Black. At the time, Durst was living in Galveston under an assumed identity as a mute woman in a threadbare apartment that rented for $300 a month.
DeGuerin, who will represent Durst again in the Berman trial, successfully argued that Durst killed Black in self-defense, dismembered the body and hurled the remains into a bay while traumatized over the fact that he had shot his neighbor.
In the HBO series' closing episodes, filmmakers revealed they had uncovered a letter that Durst sent to Berman one year before her death. The note had several similarities to an anonymous letter sent to Beverly Hills police in 2000 that tipped them off to Berman's body. The envelopes on both misspelled "Beverly" as "Beverley."
Director Andrew Jarecki confronted Durst with the note in the series' final scene. Durst, possibly unaware he was still wearing a live microphone, then disappeared into a nearby restroom and muttered what some have interpreted as a chilling confession.
"What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course." Durst muttered.
"There it is, you're caught," he said at another moment. "What a disaster."
Durst was arrested on a murder warrant issued in Berman's killing on March 14, 2015, one day before the finale of "The Jinx" aired on HBO.
The LAPD had been trying to link Durst to Berman's death for years, and denied that Jarecki's discovery of the letter played a pivotal role in the decision to arrest Durst last year.
"We based our actions based on the investigation and the evidence," LAPD Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese told the Los Angeles Times last year. "We didn't base anything we did on the HBO series."
LAPD detectives had traveled to Galveston in April 2002, while Durst was awaiting trial in the murder case there, and obtained a court order that forced Durst to provide a handwriting sample that investigators could compare to the cadaver note.
Court records show that an LAPD handwriting analyst initially concluded it was "highly probable the letter was written by Berman's former manager, Nyle Brenner. The records show that the analyst later changed his mind about Brenner and concluded that it was "probable" that Durst had written it. However, investigators had no way to prove he was in Los Angeles at the time of Berman's death.
The case languished until 2014, when a detective with the LAPD's elite Robbery-Homicide Division re-interviewed a lab supervisor involved in the initial forensic analysis who admitted she had not properly reviewed the analysis that initially pointed detectives toward Brenner, according to the records.
A fight over the validity of the various handwriting analyses will likely be a key issue at the trial.
It's a legal battle Durst's attorneys are fervent to begin.
"Bob Durst didn't kill Susan Berman and he doesn't know who did," DeGuerin told the Times on Friday. "He's eager to get to trial to prove it."
