LOS ANGELES _ On a cloudy March afternoon in New Orleans, John Lewin, a cold case prosecutor from Los Angeles, met a man he had been investigating for so long he felt he knew his every tic and eccentricity.
The way he saw it, Robert Durst, the real estate heir suspected of three murders, had a way of flatly admitting to behavior that would embarrass most people. He talked openly of having no motivation to succeed in life, of not being "an acceptable human being," of wasting away his days with weed, booze and meth. Durst didn't blush when describing how he posed as a woman named Dorothy _ buying a blouse, wig and handbag at Walmart _ because he couldn't grow a beard fast enough to disguise his appearance.
In the interview room at Orleans Parish Prison that day in 2015, Lewin told him how most people "when they're talking to police, family, anybody, are very much concerned with what other people think of them."
"And so what I noticed, with about 90% of the things you're asked, you are brutally honest, more honest than anyone I've ever seen," he said.
Thus began a nearly three-hour mental chess match that is a primer of Durst's spectacularly weird odyssey from the day his wife disappeared in New York state in 1982 to the upcoming trial for allegedly murdering his friend Susan Berman in Los Angeles two decades ago.
With jury selection set to begin in Los Angeles on Wednesday, the trial is expected to last up to five months, pitting a lineup of elite Los Angeles County prosecutors against the high-end Houston legal team that helped Durst beat a murder charge in Texas in 2003.
Whether Durst testifies, the heart of the trial will center on his words outside court, which have strayed far beyond what any defense attorney would allow.
Against his lawyers' advice, Durst gave some 20 hours of interviews for the HBO documentary series "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst." He was arrested on March 14, 2015, at a hotel in New Orleans, where he agreed to speak to Lewin and ultimately made such a compromising statement that legal experts can't wait to see how the defense team tries to get past them.
But not because they assume it will be impossible: Durst famously told a jury how he beheaded and sawed up the body of his neighbor Morris Black in Galveston, while insisting he had not murdered him _ and was acquitted.
This time, Durst, 76, is charged with shooting Berman in the back of the head at her cottage in Benedict Canyon. Prosecutors plan to show how the killing is tied, in a grisly cascade of events, to the disappearance of Kathleen Durst in Westchester County and the death of Black.
With no physical evidence tying Durst to Berman's death, the government's case hinges on two envelopes: one mailed to Beverly Hills police notifying them of a "cadaver" at Berman's address before her body was discovered, and another sent by Durst to Berman before she died. Both envelopes were addressed in the same handwriting with the misspelling "Beverley Hills."
When Lewin spoke to Durst in 2015, he quickly moved to get him on the record about the envelopes, according to an audio recording of the interview.
"I'm here talking to you today because I truly believe, Bob, I don't think you feel that badly about Morris. That's my view ... . I don't know how you feel about Kathie. Here's what I do know. I know when you killed Susan that was not something you wanted to do. Do you know how I know that?"
"I'm going to stay away from killing Susan," Durst replied.
"So the reason I think that, is because you know that the killer left a note, right? The cadaver note ... Why would you think the killer would have left a note?"
"I'm going to stay away from that."
Lewin paused and backed off. He would come back to it from another direction. He talked about some of the cases he worked on in his 20-plus years. To keep the conversation relaxed, he revealed personal details about himself _ his 170-pound dog, his wife saying he was approaching obesity _ before delving into the bizarre switchbacks of Durst's life.
"There's no question that of any suspect I've ever had, ever dealt with, you are the most interesting," he said. "It's not even close"
