Excerpts from a Ryan Gosling movie and an Emmy award-winning documentary said to incriminate New York real estate heir Robert Durst were played to jurors as his murder trial opened in Los Angeles.
Durst, 76, denies murdering his best friend in 2000 to cover up the killing of his ex-wife, Kathleen McCormack, who vanished 18 years earlier.
He was the subject of a 2015 HBO documentary, The Jinx: The Life And Deaths Of Robert Durst, and a feature film about his marriage called All Good Things, starring Gosling and Kirsten Dunst.
As the trial began yesterday jurors viewed parts of both films including scenes from The Jinx which drew renewed attention to the case.
Durst was arrested in March 2015 the day before the final episode of The Jinx was broadcast. In the documentary, he was captured by microphone muttering off-camera to himself: “There it is, you’re caught,” and “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
Durst is charged with the murder of his long-time confidante, Susan Berman, because of what she might have known about the unsolved disappearance and presumed killing of his wife. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
His defence lawyer Dick DeGuerin objected to showing excerpts from All Good Things. “This is improper,” he said. “What’s on the screen is made up.” In the film, Gosling plays a fictional character based on Durst.
Deputy district attorney John Lewin countered: “You present what you want to present, and I’ll present what I want to present.”
Ms Berman, the daughter of an organised crime figure, was 55 when she was found killed execution-style in her Beverly Hills home.
“She let the killer into her house, she turned her back to them... She wasn’t afraid of them, and then she was executed, shot in the head at very close range,” Mr Lewin told the jury.
Her death came after police in New York reopened an investigation into the fate of Durst’s ex-wife. He insists he had nothing to do with her disappearance in 1982. The trial continues.
