This guy admits shooting a 71-year-old man in the face and dismembering the body and dumping it in Galveston Bay — and he’s acquitted.
See it was self-defense. And anyway, Texas is full of eccentrics:
Asked about the defendant, Deborah Warren, another juror, said: “I wouldn’t ask him to escort my daughter to her senior prom. Durst isn’t the only crazy person in Galveston.”
But wait, there’s more:
On the witness stand, Mr. Durst said that in November 2000, he fled New York for Galveston, a city of 57,000 people at the end of Interstate 45, because he learned that Jeanine F. Pirro, the Westchester County district attorney, had reopened an investigation into his first wife’s disappearance. He said he had feared she would indict him unfairly to further her own political ambitions. Disguised as a mute woman, Mr. Durst rented an apartment for $300 a month and disappeared among the drifters and homeless wanderers of Galveston.
Update: good lord, there’s more.
Durst, who has been estranged from his family since the early 1990s, remains under suspicion in the 1982 disappearance of his first wife in New York state and the 2000 shooting death of her friend Susan Berman, a Los Angeles writer who was set to be questioned about the missing woman. He has not been charged in either case.
This is one strange story.