10:26 AM MST on Tuesday, November 11, 2003

By BRUCE NICHOLS / The Dallas Morning News

GALVESTON, Texas - A jury acquitted New York millionaire Robert Durst on Tuesday of a murder charge in the slaying and dismemberment of a neighbor whose body parts were found in Galveston Bay in September 2001.

When the verdict was read, Mr. Durst’ mouth flew open, he breathed hard, closed his eyes and lowered his head. Then he swallowed hard and looked at the jury.

His lawyers shook his hand and hugged him.

Mr. Durst, 60, an heir to a Manhattan real estate fortune, testified during the trial that he shot Mr. Black by accident, in self-defense, after Mr. Black pulled a gun on him. He said he cut up the body and threw pieces in the bay - he said he didn’t know why the head wasn’t with it when fishermen found it - because he thought no one would believe him.

The case attracted national interest because of the wealth and prominence of Mr. Durst’s family and unsolved investigations into the disappearance of his wife, Kathie, in 1982 and the shooting death of one of his women friends, Susan Berman, in Los Angeles in 2000. Mr. Durst has not been charged in either case and has denied any involvement.

One of Kathie Durst’s friends who’s convinced that Mr. Durst killed her expressed devastation at the outcome.

“Justice will not be served again,” said Eleanor Schwank, now living in Matagorda, Texas, and working as a nurse. “The prosecution was really weak .. and the defense was absolutely brilliant.

“They [prosecutors] had absolutely a golden case land at their feet and they blew it,” she said.

Lawyers on eilther side did not immediately comment.

Testimony in the case lasted nearly six weeks. The jury began deliberating at 4 p.m. last Wednesday.

Defense lawyers Dick DeGuerin and Mike Ramsey presented witnesses who testified that Mr. Black was an angry, sometimes violent man who yelled at children on the street, often complained at the library and suggested it might burn down and threatened a social worker at the hospital.

Prosecutors argued that Mr. Durst shot Mr. Black, cut up his body and separately disposed of his head as part of a plan to steal his identity and avoid investigators seeking information about the disappearance of his wife and the death of Ms. Berman.

District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk and his assistant, Joel Bennett, showed jurors evidence that Mr. Durst lied repeatedly during his life, about his education, his employment, his name and even whether he was a man or a woman.

Fishermen spotted the partial remains of Mr. Black in plastic bags floating in Galveston Bay Sept. 30, 2001. His head has never been found.

Trash found in the bags with the arms, legs and torso included a flier with the address where Mr. Black and Mr. Durst rented apartments.

Confirming that the incomplete remains were those of Mr. Black presented a challenge, but a fingerprint from the body was used to confirm his identity based on an earlier arrest in South Carolina for threatening to blow up a utility office in a dispute with customer service.

Mr. Durst had rented the apartment posing as a woman, using an assumed name, but police found an eyeglasses appointment notice for Mr. Durst under his real name in garbage out back.

After the slaying, Mr. Durst went to New Orleans, but returned to Galveston where he was arrested Oct. 9, 2001, and charged with murder. But, before police knew he was wealthy, he posted $300,000 bail and fled. He was rearrested in Pennsylvania two months later after shoplifting a sandwich with $500 in his pocket and $38,000 in the trunk of his car.

The case stirred big headlines in the New York tabloids because New Yorkers are fascinated when the mighty are brought low, said Leslie Snadowsky, the New York Post correspondent who covered the trial.

The case involves a New York millionaire whose wife disappeared mysteriously, who cross-dressed and posed as a woman and lived on the cheap, apparently to try to disappear, Ms. Snadowsky said. He also had drug and alcohol problems.

Galveston is a mysterious place to many New Yorkers, who through newspaper coverage have come to see it as the “gritty, grimy” place where I-45 dead-ends at the Gulf of Mexico and where people have come to hide throughout history.

“In addition to all that, there’s the blood and guts and gore and bizarre behavior of this guy who’s a New York millionaire,” she said. “New Yorkers are so cynical ... and like making fun of people.”

The prosecutors “were terrible,” said Matt Birkbeck, author of a book about the unsolved disappearance of Kathie Durst.

E-mail bnichols@dallasnews.com