Robert Durst, the New York millionaire facing first-degree murder charges in the wake of an explosive television documentary about his life, has been transferred to a jail catering to mentally impaired inmates 70 miles from New Orleans, where he was arrested over the weekend.
According to court filings, the sheriff of Orleans Parish insisted on the transfer on Tuesday night because of concerns that Durst was suicidal.
“Medical staff of the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office has determined that the Defendant raises several risk factors for acute mental illness,” the filings say. However, it is clear from the context that suicide is the only risk factor and that Durst can be transferred back to the Orleans Parish prison as soon as he is “no longer a risk to himself”.
A sheriff’s lawyer said the decision had no bearing on Durst’s mental competence to stand trial for the murder of his friend Susan Berman, who was gunned down in her home in Los Angeles more than 14 years ago.
The transfer, which was opposed by Durst’s lawyers, further complicates efforts by prosecutors in Los Angeles to extradite to California as quickly as possible. On Tuesday, a judge in New Orleans ordered that Durst should stay in Louisiana at least until the beginning of next week following the discovery in his hotel room of a .38-calibre revolver and a personal stash of marijuana.
It remains unclear whether the hold-up will benefit the authorities in Los Angeles, who now have more time to gather evidence in the Berman case and have already arranged for a search of Durst’s principal residence in Houston, or if it will provide opportunities for the defence to argue that the prosecutors are on a fishing expedition and do not have the evidence to justify holding him, much less putting him on trial.
Durst’s lead attorney, Dick DeGuerin, has already announced he will use next Monday’s bail hearing as an opportunity to challenge the legal basis for the arrest.
Durst’s lead attorney, Dick DeGuerin, has already announced he will use next Monday’s bail hearing as an opportunity to challenge the legal basis for the arrest.
The Los Angeles police, who have insisted the arrest is based on their own investigative work, not the documentary, countered DeGuerin on Wednesday with a disclosure reported by the Los Angeles Times that it had two handwriting experts ready to identify Durst as the author of an infamous note sent by Berman’s killer to the Beverly Hills police on the day of her murder.
The note became the centerpiece of the documentary series because the film-makers found an envelope stamped with Durst’s name and office address whose block-letter writing closely resembled the note sent by the killer. When confronted with the envelope in the final episode, Durst stepped into a bathroom with his microphone still on and appeared to acknowledge that he’d been caught.
The handwriting is likely to feature in the trial Durst’s California prosecutors hope to stage, and equally likely to be contested by his lawyers who can point to an entirely different identification made by an expert working for the Los Angeles police in the early days of the Berman investigation.
Back in 2002, according to the documents made public on Wednesday, an expert matched the handwriting to Susan Berman’s manager and close confidant, Nyle Brenner. That identification was later rejected as substandard work.
In New Orleans, Blake Arcuri, the lawyer representing the Orleans Parish sheriff, said Durst’s transfer was a matter of standard procedure, in the absence of a similar facility in New Orleans itself. “He is not getting treated differently than any other inmate,” Arcuri told the Los Angeles Times. “This is not a media circus.”
Durst’s medical records are under court seal. A lower court judge denied the sheriff’s petition to move Durst to the mental health facility in St Gabriel, near Baton Rouge, but the ruling was overturned in an appeal hearing.
Durst’s lawyers expressed concern mostly about ease of access to their client, although they also told the court they did not believe their client suffered from “an acute mental illness”, according to the court filings. The New Orleans prosecutors planning to charge Durst with crimes relating to the gun and the marijuana took no position on the question.
The high-profile repercussions of the case continue to be felt, meanwhile, across the country. Authorities in remote Humboldt County, in northern California, announced they would take another look at Durst in connection with the disappearance of a teenage girl, Karen Mitchell, in 1997.
Durst owned a home in the area at the time and frequented some of the places where Mitchell was seen shortly before she vanished. A manhunt for her body proved futile.
Authorities made similar inquiries in 2003, after Durst was put on trial for a different murder in Texas. Andrew Mills, the police chief in Eureka, the county seat, acknowledged in an interview with the local paper he was dealing with a “potential possibility”, not even a proper lead, but would consult with investigators in the Berman case in case anything cropped up.
