Durst defense starts attack on Black

[TexasStooge]

This guy should not be confused with Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst.

GALVESTON, Texas (Court TV) — Meet Morris Black.

Loud, confrontational, paranoid, stubborn, threatening, miserly. And very much dead.

Lawyers began Tuesday to paint for jurors a portrait of the man multimillionaire Robert Durst is accused of killing two years ago while the two were neighbors in a low-rent apartment house.

Attorneys for Durst, who was posing as a mute woman and paying a mere $300 a month for his apartment, claim that Black was such a menace that Durst feared for his life when the two neighbors wrestled for control of a gun.

No one won the fight. Black ended up dead and Durst faces life in prison if his team of high-priced defense lawyers cannot persuade jurors the shooting was an accident or something less than murder.

Durst's behavior was odd — even his lawyers concede that — but Morris Black's came a close second.

Though only paying $310 a month for his two-room apartment across the hall from Durst, Black believed he was paying for other people's electricity and didn't like it a bit. Klauss Dillmann, a Galveston landlord who owned the apartment house on Avenue K where Black died, listened to most of Black's complaints in loud, late-night phone calls and finally agreed to drop Black's rent by $10 a month to cover the cost of a porch light regulated by Black's meter.

Black still wasn't happy, and he went poking around in a circuit box tripping the switches.

Testifying for prosecutors on Tuesday, the second day of Durst's murder trial, Dillmann described Black as a "difficult" man who trusted no one. By contrast, Dillmann had an ideal tenant across the hall from Black, a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner.

"A good resident is one you never see," Dillmann explained, bringing laughter from most in Judge Susan Criss's courtroom, including Durst.

Dillmann rarely saw Ciner, the brother-in-law who visited from time to time, or Durst. In fact, they were all the same person, but Dillmann never knew or suspected that until he read it in the newspaper after Durst was arrested.

"Mr. Durst, as Ms. Ciner, was very convincing as a middle-aged woman," said Dillmann in a heavy German accent, explaining that he didn't recognize his new tenant's frosted hair as a wig.

"She wasn't my type," Dillmann said later. "Looked liked a middle-aged woman with a flat bust ... I felt sorry for the poor thing."

The defense hopes jurors feel sorry for Durst too. They want the panel of three men and nine women to conclude that the prosecution has no evidence to establish that Durst willfully and intentionally shot Morris Black.

The prosecution's case is partly forensic and partly circumstantial. A blood spatter expert is expected to challenge the defense's version of the "life and death" struggle for Durst's gun.

Prosecutors' best evidence, however, is Durst's attempt to conceal the death by cutting up the body, throwing away the gun and forging a money order in Black's name so that Dillmann would not come around looking for the rent.

The prosecution called two other witnesses to the stand Tuesday to testify about the intensive ground and underwater search for Black's head after garbage bags containing his legs, arms and torso floated to the surface of Galveston Bay on Sept. 30, 2001.

Divers performed a methodical grid search for the head, but never found it. The defense, during cross-examination of the witnesses, contended that the divers did not look very far from the dump site and surmised that the head was carried away by the currents of the Gulf of Mexico.

Durst is expected to testify later in the trial that Black fired Durst's .22-caliber pistol inside Durst's apartment twice before the day of the killing. On redirect examination of the landlord, however, prosecutor Kurt Sistrunk established that neighbors never reported hearing gunshots.

Sistrunk tried to shake the defense's claim that Black got into beefs with just about everyone he met.

"He never threatened me in any way," Dillmann told the jury. "I didn't have the feeling that he wanted to do harm to me in any way."

Testimony resumes Wednesday. The trial is expected to last four to six weeks.

[GalvestonDuck]

Divers performed a methodical grid search for the head, but never found it. The defense, during cross-examination of the witnesses, contended that the divers did not look very far from the dump site and surmised that the head was carried away by the currents of the Gulf of Mexico.

I feel for anyone swimming out here who may happen upon that bag. Ugh! I thought about it a few weeks ago when I was kayaking and scuba diving out off Jamaica Beach and the water was so clear.