Robert Durst hacked Morris Black into pieces but was not convicted, here's how millionaire escaped murder charges
Last year, jurors at Robert Durst's trial listened intently to the grisly details of how he dismembered the corpse of his Texas neighbor Morris Black in 2001 before dumping his headless torso in Galveston Bay. Disturbing photos of Black's severed limbs were flashed on a screen during the second day of Durst's Los Angeles murder trial on March 5, 2020, as he was charged with shooting his friend and confidante Susan Berman dead in December 2000, the New York Daily News reported.
The 76-year-old real estate heir was previously acquitted of Black's murder in Galveston, Texas, after claiming that he shot his elderly neighbor in the face with his Ruger .22-caliber target pistol in "self-defense".
RELATED ARTICLES
In the courtroom last year, before the trial was postponed due to the pandemic, prosecutors played clips from a 2015 jail interview with Durst, when he chillingly described how he disassembled 71-year-old Black's body with a bow saw and carried away the hacked pieces to cover up the death. “I’ve been told, um, that a surgeon would cut up a body the same way you do a chicken. You go into the joint. And you, you cut around the joint. You get rid of all the ligaments. And then, the thing comes out,” Durst said in one disturbing excerpt played to jurors. “You’re not gonna try to cut through the God-damned bone, like I did,” he added.
According to prosecutors, Durst's role in Black's death is clear evidence of his attempts to clean up "loose ends" by killing anyone who could expose him. He killed Black nearly a year after Berman because the neighbor knew damaging details including that he was hiding out in Galveston under the identity of a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner. A 2003 trial had already established that Durst had indeed chopped up Black's remains and he faced up to 99 years in prison.
Nonetheless, Durst was found not guilty. How was it possible?
How was Durst found not guilty?
Durst's legal team in 2003 was spearheaded by Houston attorney Richard DeGuerin. At the time, DeGuerin laid out an elaborate argument of self-defense, something a jury of eight women and four men shockingly agreed with.
“Morris Black died as a result of a life-and-death violent struggle over a gun that Morris Black had threatened Bob Durst with,” DeGuerin told the jury, as per LA Times. “As they struggled, the gun went off and shot Morris Black in the face.” Mike Ramsey, another defense attorney for Durst, claimed that Durst was subsequently "thrown into a traumatized state similar to an out-of-body experience" stemming from a "previously undiagnosed psychological disorder". “His friend is dead, lying on the floor in a $300 apartment rented by a billionaire in Galveston, Texas, who is dressed as a woman. How much stranger does it get than that, and who will believe him?” Ramsey argued.
Prosecutors tried to paint Durst as a methodical killer based on evidence that he had chopped up Black's body over the course of two days before dropping his remains into the Galveston Bay. Durst, however, claimed he had downed a fifth of Jack Daniels and did not remember hacking Black's lifeless body to pieces. “You were drunk when you were cutting him up?” Galveston County District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk asked Durst, who had taken the stand. “I hope so, yes sir,” Durst replied.
Prosecutors responded by noting that Durst had the presence of mind to file a money order to pay Black's rent for the coming month in order to ward off any attention. “It was nothing but a cold-blooded murder and a man on the run afterward,” Sistrunk told the jurors during opening arguments. However, the jurors would ultimately disagree. After five days of deliberation, they found Durst not guilty of murder on November 11, 2003. No one in the courtroom, not even Durst, could believe what just happened. He proceeded to embrace his lawyers.
“It comes down to reasonable doubt,” juror Joanne Gongora, 49, said after the verdict. “The burden is on the prosecution to show how the event happened, and we didn’t see that. It wasn’t proven.”
The following year, DeGuerin told Texas Monthly that it was "a simple case", referring to the self-defense argument. “It was complicated because Durst is rich, wore a wig, pretended to be a mute woman, and was suspected of killing his wife in 1982. The prosecution couldn’t prove it wasn’t self-defense,” Texas Monthly’s Gary Cartwright noted. “There were only two witnesses, and one was dead."