New York real estate heir Robert Durst arrived in Los Angeles on Friday and will be arraigned next week on a murder charge in the 2000 slaying of his friend Susan Berman, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said.
The arrival of Durst, who is scheduled to appear at the Airport Courthouse Monday afternoon, marks the latest chapter in a legal saga that was reinvigorated last year when the New York aristocrat was featured in the HBO documentary series “The Jinx.”
Durst, 73, had been due to be transferred to Southern California by Aug. 18 from a federal prison in Louisiana, where he had pleaded guilty to a weapons charge.
“We have been ready for some time. I’m glad we’re going to start proceedings,” Durst’s attorney, Dick DeGuerin, told The Times on Friday. “He’s going to get his day in court.”
DeGuerin said he expected a preliminary hearing in the case to take place in the spring and for the trial later in 2017. Durst was booking into the Los Angeles Police Department jail Friday at 1:20 p.m.
Durst has insisted he had nothing to do with Berman’s fatal shooting.
The six-part HBO series explored the disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathie, who went missing in New York in 1982, and the slaying of Berman, a writer who was found dead in her Benedict Canyon home in 2000. Police believe Durst killed Berman because she planned to speak to New York prosecutors about Kathie’s disappearance.
In 2003, a Texas jury acquitted Durst even after he admitted killing his neighbor, chopping the body into pieces and then dumping them into Galveston Bay.
Durst at the time was living in Galveston under an assumed identity as a mute woman in a threadbare apartment that cost $300 a month. At the sensational trial, Durst’s legal team, spearheaded by DeGuerin, laid out an elaborate argument of self-defense. “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 jurors and they would believe him.
Before the series finale of “The Jinx,” Durst disappeared from his Houston condo, prompting a manhunt that ended in New Orleans. Federal prosecutors filed a weapons case against him after FBI agents found a loaded revolver in his hotel room there.
Durst pleaded guilty to a weapons charge and was sentenced in April to seven years and one month in federal prison
In a letter to a Times reporter, Durst wrote that he is eager to come to Los Angeles to defend himself.
“I’d rather be going to California on my own, but I’m anxious to get to trial to prove I didn’t kill Susan Berman,” Durst wrote. “You couldn’t print what I think about ‘The Jinx.’ I didn’t kill Susan Berman, and I don’t know who did.”
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Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.
