Reason for Doubt

"Iwouldn't ask him to escort my daughter to her senior prom," explained one of the jurors who in mid-November acquitted Robert Durst of murdering his quarrelsome neighbor, Morris Black. Durst, of course, is the eccentric heir to a billion-dollar real estate business, a man who, according to the New York Times, spent time "living on the cheap disguised as a woman" while running from the law. The trail of weirdness that stretches behind him like the tail of a particularly bright comet includes "the unsolved disappearance of his first wife; the unsolved murder of his confidante in Los Angeles; a secret second marriage; a fatal shooting and a grisly cover-up; a nationwide manhunt that ended with a shoplifting arrest."

The case itself was not a complicated one in the annals of criminal law. Durst maintained that Black pointed a gun at him, that he tried to defend himself but the gun went off and Black was shot in the head and died. Since Black's head has never been found, jurors were deprived of the forensic clues that might have settled exactly how the death occurred. This made the case against Durst somewhat circumstantial, always confounding to prosecutors in their attempt to prove murder rather than accident. There were no witnesses, the evidence was ambiguous, and, most damning of all, the victim was by all accounts an odd, edgy man with no immediate relatives to weep for him in the front row of the gallery.

It must be said that Durst, too, is an odd, unsympathetic character--estranged from his family and linked with one too many wives or acquaintances gone unaccountably missing or dead. No one showed up to weep for him in the courtroom either. Indeed, this case attracted attention not just because the Durst family is as rich and well positioned in the New York social scene as Sunny and Claus von Bülow before them but because Durst actually confessed to dismembering Black's body. Panic drove him to it, Durst says, and panic advised him further to chuck the pieces and parts into the nearest body of water, where most of them were found bobbing sometime later. His lawyer is on record reflecting that "Bob was horrified at some of the things he did."

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