LOS ANGELES _ Robert Durst discovered the dead body of his close friend Susan Berman after she was shot in the head in her Los Angeles home, his defense attorney said Tuesday, but he did not kill her.
During the long-awaited opening statements in Durst's murder trial, defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin told the jurors that after finding Berman's body before Christmas in 2000, Durst's instinct was to flee.
"When Bob showed up and found her dead, he panicked," DeGuerin told jurors in an eighth-floor courtroom near Los Angeles International Airport. "He wrote the anonymous letter so her body would be found, and he ran," DeGuerin said, referring to the so-called "cadaver note" that alerted Beverly Hills police to Berman's dead body.
"He's run away all his life," DeGuerin added. But the lawyer promised jurors they would hear Durst's side of the story, and that he would testify.
Durst, the heir to a Manhattan real estate fortune, is accused of killing Berman either on the night of Dec. 22 or morning of Dec. 23 in 2000. The Los Angeles County district attorney's office alleges that Durst, 76, shot Berman to prevent her from spilling incriminating information regarding the 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen, whose body was never found.
The defense's presentation Tuesday came after a three-day opening statement by Deputy District Attorney John Lewin, who portrayed Durst as a triple-murderer for killing his first wife, his close friend Berman and Morris Black, his neighbor in Galveston, Texas. Durst was acquitted in Black's killing in 2003 after claiming self-defense, though he admitted dismembering Black's body and disposing of his limbs in the Gulf of Mexico.
DeGuerin, who led the successful defense of Durst in Galveston, began Tuesday by showing the 12 jurors and 11 alternates a white card with the Greek letter pi. The letter also is a legal shorthand for the plaintiff or prosecution, DeGuerin explained.
"The reason I have this in front of you is to tell you: You haven't heard the whole story. You've heard the prosecution side," DeGuerin said. He followed by holding up a card with the Greek letter delta, which refers to the defense. "It's my simple way of illustrating there are two sides to every story."
What led Durst to Berman's home just before Christmas in 2000, the lawyer said, was a tradition among friends. Durst, estranged from his family, had a "pattern" of seeing Berman around the holidays.
"Susy was alone. Bob was not happy with his family. She and Bob were the closest of friends," DeGuerin said.
DeGuerin focused much of his time Tuesday morning chipping away at the prosecution's efforts to link Durst to three killings. He referred to the dismemberment of Black's body in 2000 as "the elephant in the room."
"I know it concerns everyone," he said.
DeGuerin told jurors that the gruesome details of Black's death were separate from Berman's killing, and called its inclusion in Lewin's opening statement a "calculated" move by the prosecution "to obscure everything else." He drew three buckets on a poster board, and labeled each: one for Durst's wife; one for Susan Berman; and one for Morris Black.
"The Morris Black bucket is full. And it's full of bad stuff, bad evidence. And our concern is that the evidence about Morris Black will spill over into those other buckets."
He portrayed Durst as autistic, ailing and unusual.
"Bob doesn't make good decisions. It's part of his makeup," DeGuerin said. He said Durst's "emotional condition" was a mild form of autism that was previously known as Asperger's syndrome.
He listed the symptoms: social awkwardness, a lack of expression of emotion, an inability to read social cues.
Durst, he explained, self-medicated with his social difficulties. He smoked marijuana on a daily basis, drank alcohol and also abused methamphetamine.
He pointed to Durst and outlined his medical problems: esophageal cancer, two spinal surgeries, brain surgery and a general difficulty with walking and maintaining his balance.
Durst, who will turn 77 next month, sat quietly next to his defense lawyers, staring at a tablet displaying a real-time transcript of the proceedings.
DeGuerin suggested that Durst was the victim of "gotcha journalism" in the form of the HBO series "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst." Durst was arrested on the eve of the series' finale, and excerpts of the hours of interviews Durst gave to the filmmakers comprised much of the prosecution's opening statement.
Lewin, the prosecutor, told jurors that Durst's comments captured by "The Jinx" filmmakers amounted to a confession.
DeGuerin, who also agreed to be interviewed and was featured in "The Jinx," said the series was "deviously misleading" and "heavily edited."
"I'll show you how that got us here today," he promised.
