American real estate heir, Robert Durst has taken the stand to deny killing his best friend at his trial on Monday.
Gatekeepers News reports that Robert Durst on Monday took the stand at his California murder trial and instantly denied killing his best friend, who according to prosecutors was about to disclose to investigators Durst’s involvement in the 1982 disappearance of his wife.
To open the testimony, Durst’s attorney Dick DeGuerin asked the 78-year-old,
“Bob, did you kill Susan Berman?”
Durst immediately answered “No”.
“Do you know who did?” DeGuerin asked.
Durst who struggled to hear strained to speak and appeared extremely frail as he sat in a wheelchair instead of a witness chair, answered “No, I do not”.
In 2000, Berman was shot in the back of the head and killed in her Los Angeles home. Until her death, Berman was Durst’s best friend for decades and also acted as his de facto spokesman after the disappearance of his wife, Kathie, who was later declared dead, though nobody was found.
The real estate heir was arrested on a warrant in Berman’s killing in New Orleans in 2015 on the eve of the airing of the final episode of “The Jinx”.
The Jinx is an HBO documentary series about him in which Durst made several seemingly damning statements.
After DeGuerin bluntly asked if he killed Berman, the attorney then backtracked to the beginning of Durst’s life.
Durst’s mother committed suicide by either jumping or falling from the top of their home when he was 7 years old.
He testified that his grandfather woke him in the middle of the night to look at “mommy on the roof” just before her death.
Durst further stated that his father, real estate magnate Seymour Durst, chose to remain in the family home, despite the trauma it caused him.
According to him, “I kept begging my father to move, but he never sold the house where his wife died.”
Durst, however, noted that he did all he could to get away after that, “I ran away from everywhere.”
Although Durst is charged with just one killing, prosecutors have been allowed to present evidence from the Texas case. There, he testified that his Galveston neighbor Morris Black was killed in a struggle after entering his home with a gun. Durst described chopping up and disposing of the body from the stand, but the jury found him not guilty of murder.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have also been allowed to present evidence that he killed his wife. Durst has never been charged in her disappearance and has denied having anything to do with it.
The New York real estate heir, however, spent much of Monday’s testimony describing the happy early years of their marriage after meeting her when she worked at a dentist’s office just out of high school.
According to Durst, they got married on his 30th birthday, in 1973. “Kathie was ecstatic. I was ecstatic. We were both very much in love,” he said.
While they shun the family business, he and Kathie opened a small general store in Vermont where they sold health food and other supplies.
Durst said, “You could have any kind of toothpaste you wanted, as long as it was Colgate.”
He also described meeting Berman in graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles in the 1960s, adding that the two struck up a close, decades-long friendship.
“We both had trust funds,” Durst said.
However, the questioning was neither able to address Kathie Durst’s disappearance nor the details of Berman’s death when court ended for the day.
Durst is set to return to the stand on Wednesday.
