L.A. County prosecutors rested their case Tuesday against Robert Durst, wrapping up months of testimony aimed to prove the real estate heir killed his best friend to cover up his alleged role in his wife’s disappearance nearly four decades ago.
While Durst is charged only with the 2000 murder of Susan Berman inside her Benedict Canyon home, the prosecution has spent 11 weeks walking the jury through the other deaths that have marked Durst’s life: the 1982 vanishing of his wife, Kathleen, and the killing of his neighbor, Morris Black, in Texas in 2001.
Prosecutors have alleged Durst shot Berman, his longtime confidante, more than 20 years ago to stonewall a resurgent investigation into Kathleen’s disappearance. Durst once told Berman — an author and college friend who sometimes functioned as his media spokeswoman — that he had killed his wife; Berman also said she helped him arrange a false alibi shortly after Kathleen vanished, several witnesses have testified.
Durst’s 2015 arrest in New Orleans drew widespread media attention, coming one day before the finale of an HBO documentary series, “The Jinx,” that reinvigorated national interest in the New York aristocrat’s checkered legal history.
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