The jury in Robert Durst’s Los Angeles murder trial was presented on Thursday with an old interview the real estate heir gave in which he described dismembering a body like a chicken. Durst is on trial for allegedly killing his friend, Susan Berman, in 2000. According to the New York Daily News, one of the jurors reportedly covered her mouth as prosecutors played a 2015 jail interview of Durst, in which he described how he dismembered his Texas neighbor Morris Black’s body in 2001. “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,” the 76-year-old said in an excerpt shown to jurors. “You’re not gonna try to cut through the goddamned bone.” Durst was acquitted of Black’s murder after claiming that Black was shot in the face by accident—and in self-defense—during a scuffle. He spent a short time in prison after pleading guilty to tampering with evidence.
Prosecutors claimed that Durst’s actions in Black’s death were an example of his tendency to clear “loose ends” by killing people. The lawyers allege that Durst killed his wife, Kathie McCormack Durst, in 1982, then killed Berman out of fear that she would meet with officials who were reinvestigating McCormack’s disappearance. They also claim he killed Black because Black knew that Durst was hiding out in Texas and living undercover.
Read it at New York Daily News
