(Bloomberg) -- Robert Durst talked about “Igoring” his younger brother Douglas, the head of the Durst Organization, in a conversation with his wife, a jury in Robert’s murder trial heard.
That was an apparent reference to Robert’s dog Igor, killed in a 2010 film by a fictionalized version of the multimillionaire heir of a New York real-estate dynasty.
Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney John Lewin, on the third day of his opening statement in the murder trial, returned to his theory that Robert had planned to murder Douglas, whom their father put in charge of the company that has stakes in New York properties including One World Trade Center.
Durst is on trial for the 2000 murder of his friend, Susan Berman. Prosecutors are attempting to present a picture of Durst to the jury of a man willing to kill when backed into a corner, claiming he murdered his first wife Kathie, his neighbor in Texas, considered killing his own brother and then murdered Berman to keep her from talking about Kathie’s disappearance in 1982. Her body was never found.
Durst has denied all the accusations and was acquitted of his neighbor’s murder by a Texas jury that accepted Durst killed him in self-defense and chopped up his body with a bow saw because he panicked.
In a December 2001 phone call from prison to his second wife, Debrah Charatan, she and Durst discussed his plans of “Igoring” his brother and how Robert “screwed” them up.
“I suspect he doesn’t even suspect now,” Durst is heard saying in a recording played to the jurors -- apparently in reference to his plans.
Durst was in a Pennsylvania prison at the time. He had jumped bail in Galveston, Texas, where had been arrested on suspicion of killing his elderly neighbor. Durst was arrested in Pennsylvania when he tried to shoplift a sandwich at a supermarket, even though he had thousands of dollars in cash in his car.
In the recorded prison calls, Durst also told his wife he had been to Douglas’s house while on the run and had been driving around in places where he grew up.
Last week, Lewin told jurors that when Durst was arrested in Texas, after he had killed and dismembered his neighbor with a bow saw, police found a brand new and unused bow saw in his car. Durst bought it after having dumped his neighbor’s body parts in Galveston Bay and Lewin, without saying who, suggested to the jury that Durst meant to use the new bow saw in another murder he was planning.
In the 2010 movie “All Good Things,” a fictionalized character based on Durst kills his dog Igor. Durst later asked the director, Andrew Jarecki, “how could you think that I would do something like that to Igor?”
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