Susan monica my favorite murder trial#

The next morning, when she rattled them all off, her father sat silently, then asked, “What about the state capitals?” But he also had exacting standards, once challenging her to memorize the (then) 48 states. He doted on her, reading nightly bedtime stories and inviting Elvis and Liberace to sing at her birthday parties. “He seemed the most normal of fathers to me,” she wrote. Aside from occasional kidnapping drills, she was largely ignorant of the dangers of her father’s world. When she got bored, she would run to the front desk, ask for a key to an empty room, and order tomato soup and chocolate ice cream from room service.

A painting of her in braids hung in the lobby. (Las Vegas Review-Journal/Associated Press)īerman grew up at the Flamingo Hotel, which her father helped run after its owner, infamous gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, was murdered. He cut up the body after drinking a fifth of Jack Daniels, Durst testified, saying he had decided not to go to the police because he didn’t think they would believe him.

Durst had decamped to the Gulf Coast town and was living disguised as a mute woman after learning about the reopened New York investigation.ĭurst claimed that Black threatened him during an argument and that a gun went off while Durst was defending himself. In an interview, Clark, 76, said she had suspected Durst in the slaying since the early 2000s, when she learned that he had publicly admitted to dismembering Morris Black, a neighbor in Galveston, Texas. “It has bothered me and haunted me virtually every day for 20 years,” Berman’s friend Christianne Clark said of her death. Durst’s lawyers said the acknowledgment didn’t “change the fact that Bob Durst did not kill Susan Berman and doesn’t know who did.” A mile-a-minute talker, she was, at once, manipulative and prone to phobia - of bridges, of elevators, of eggs - but also brilliant, big-hearted and, above all, loyal.įor years, Durst publicly denied writing the note, but his defense team made a bombshell reversal in 2019, saying in court papers that they’d made the “strategic decision” to acknowledge he’d written the note.

As the severity of the health crisis crystalized, the legal proceeding - then only a handful of days into a process expected to take five months - was paused.ĭefense attorneys argue that the “unprecedented delay” has made it impossible for their client to receive a fair trial, and while the judge denied their request for a mistrial, both sides were allowed to deliver a new round of opening statements that began Tuesday, with prosecutors arguing that Berman knew her killer and let him into her home because she trusted him.įriends have described Berman as the type of person to show up at your doorstep in a kimono asking to use the bathtub, or to drop off Jell-O and roasted chicken when you were sick.

Susan monica my favorite murder trial#

Jurors began hearing opening statements in Durst’s trial on March 4, 2020, the day California confirmed one of the first deaths from COVID-19. The multimillionaire, 78, whose trial has resumed after a year long interruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, vehemently denies killing his close friend, and his defense team has long argued that the prosecution resulted from television hype surrounding “The Jinx,” not from evidence.