Robert Durst’s Galveston House: Morris Black and Acquittal

Robert Durst’s Galveston house was a shabby four-unit boarding house at 2213 Avenue K, where in September 2001 the New York real estate heir shot and dismembered his 71-year-old neighbor Morris Black inside a $300-a-month apartment he had rented while disguised as a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner. A Texas jury acquitted him of murder in 2003 after his lawyers convinced them the shooting was self-defense and the dismemberment a panic response. He was later convicted of a different killing, in California, and died in prison in January 2022.

The House at 2213 Avenue K

The building is a two-story, 2,537-square-foot structure built in the 1930s on Galveston’s East End, near the beach. Once a single-family bungalow, it had been carved into four units: two efficiencies, a one-bedroom, and a two-bedroom, with a shared laundry room and a paved lot.¹ Beige and brown, dingy, unremarkable from the street.² The landlord, Klaus Dillmann, rented the unit Durst took for $300 a month.³

The property has since become a minor stop for true-crime tourists and was sold around 2022 to a limited liability corporation after 66 days on the market.¹

Why Durst Was Hiding in Galveston

Durst signed the Avenue K lease in November 2000, leaving New York as investigators reopened the 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst.⁴ Weeks earlier, his close friend Susan Berman had been found shot to death in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve 2000. Prosecutors would later argue Durst killed Berman to keep her from talking about Kathie.⁵

To vanish, Durst borrowed the name of a former Scarsdale classmate, Dorothy Ciner, and dressed the part: wigs, high heels, lipstick, blue eyeshadow. He pretended to be a deaf-mute woman because his voice, he later said, was too distinctive to fake.⁶⁷ The disguise was not convincing to everyone; one Galveston acquaintance called him the “ugliest drag queen on the island.” Dillmann testified that the tenant he knew as Dorothy Ciner was rarely seen and paid rent months in advance.³

Morris Black and the Killing

Morris Black moved into the apartment across the hall roughly two months after Durst.⁸³⁹¹⁰

On September 28, 2001, Durst shot Black inside his apartment at 2213 Avenue K.¹¹ From the witness stand two years later, Durst said he came home to find Black watching television in his apartment uninvited, feared Black had taken a .22-caliber pistol he kept in his oven, and that during a struggle the gun discharged into Black’s face without Durst pulling the trigger.⁷

What Durst did next was not in dispute. He dismembered Black’s body on his kitchen floor using saws, an ax, hammers, and a paring knife.⁷⁸ He wrapped the pieces in plastic garbage bags; prosecutors said he bought a tarp and additional bags from a hardware store for the job.¹² Durst testified he drank a fifth of Jack Daniels and could not remember cutting up the body.¹³

The cleanup was sloppy. Knife holes in the tarp and linoleum let blood soak into the floor, and police later found blood on the walls and floors of both apartments, in the hallway between them, and on the front sidewalk.¹²¹⁴ Inside Durst’s unit, investigators recovered bloody boots and a bloody knife.⁸ A saw and a gun turned up in his car.¹⁵

How Police Traced the Body Back to the House

On September 30, 2001, a 13-year-old fishing with his father near a rock jetty in Galveston Bay saw garbage bags floating in the water. Inside was Morris Black’s limbless torso. More bags containing limbs were recovered afterward, and the remains were identified as Black on October 5.⁴

Black’s head was never found. Lead investigator Sgt. Cody Cazalas theorized that Durst “panicked and cut one of the bags open and took the head with him.”⁷ Prosecutors argued the missing head was no accident, because without it they could not confirm the trajectory of the fatal bullet.¹⁶

Inside one of the bags, investigators found a scrap of newspaper with a delivery sticker addressed to 2213 Avenue K. That led them to the boarding house, where Black was one of four tenants. The lease across the hall was in Dorothy Ciner’s name, a person who did not exist. The break came from the building’s trash: a receipt from a local eyeglass shop bearing the name “Robert Durst” tied the fictional Ciner to the New York heir.⁷ Investigators also recovered an eviction notice addressed to Black and a .22-caliber handgun registered to Durst. Another tenant, Maria De Hernandez, told police she had seen Durst loading garbage bags into a silver car the night the remains were dumped.⁸

Durst was arrested and charged with murder on October 9, 2001. His wife, Debrah Lee Charatan, posted $300,000 bail the next day, and he immediately fled.¹⁷ Galveston police issued a murder warrant with a $1 billion bond.¹⁸

For nearly two months Durst was a fugitive, shaving his head and using Morris Black’s identity. On November 30, 2001, he was caught shoplifting a chicken sandwich, a newspaper, and a Band-Aid from a Wegmans supermarket in Hanover Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania.⁹¹⁷ He had $500 in cash on him and $37,000 stashed in a rental car, along with two guns and marijuana.¹⁹ Local officers had planned to write a shoplifting ticket until his New York license triggered the fugitive warrant. He was extradited to Texas.

How He Was Acquitted

The trial opened in Galveston in the fall of 2003 before Judge Susan Criss. Durst faced up to 99 years.¹³ His lead attorney was Dick DeGuerin, with co-counsel Mike Ramsey and Chip Lewis. Durst paid DeGuerin $1.8 million.²⁰

DeGuerin called his approach “embrace the ugly baby,” meaning own the worst facts up front.²⁰ He put Durst on the stand as the first defense witness, letting the jury hear the self-defense account before the prosecution could frame it. Durst testified the gun went off during a struggle after Black pointed it at him.⁷ Because the head was never recovered, the defense argued prosecutors could not prove how the bullet struck or who pulled the trigger.¹⁶

DeGuerin worked to defuse the dismemberment. He asked jurors to promise they would separate the killing from the cleanup.²⁰²¹²²

District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk called it a “cold-blooded murder” and pointed to a money order Durst tried to file for Black’s rent after the killing, which prosecutors said was meant to suggest Black was still alive.¹³ Cazalas testified that a bullet hole in the back of the skull would have been powerful evidence against self-defense, but the missing head left that question unanswered.¹⁶ Cazalas said he personally believed Durst “probably walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head.”²¹ Under Texas law, the state carried the burden of disproving self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.

On November 11, 2003, after five days of deliberation, a jury of eight women and four men found Durst not guilty. Juror Joanne Gongora said the verdict came down to reasonable doubt about how the shooting happened.¹³ The New York Times attributed the outcome partly to the “stunning strategies of the defense team” and to a Galveston jury pool historically receptive to self-defense claims.²³ Judge Criss later said Durst “decided he would act crazy in court,” including pretending to have conversations with invisible people, but that she found him “very cold and calculating.” She noted the defense had lowered his chair and dressed him in oversized clothing to make him look smaller.²²

What Happened After the Acquittal

Durst still faced charges for jumping bail and tampering with evidence. On September 29, 2004, he pleaded guilty to two counts of bail jumping and one count of evidence tampering and received a five-year sentence with credit for time served.²⁴ He was paroled in 2005 and served an additional four months after violating parole by returning to the Avenue K boarding house where he had killed Morris Black.¹⁹

The Galveston acquittal did not end his legal exposure. In 2015, after HBO’s The Jinx captured him on a hot microphone muttering, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all of course,” he was arrested for the 2000 murder of Susan Berman.²⁵ On September 17, 2021, a Los Angeles jury convicted him of first-degree murder, finding he killed Berman to keep her from talking about the 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst. He was sentenced to life without parole on October 14, 2021.²⁶ A Westchester County grand jury indicted him for Kathleen’s second-degree murder on November 1, 2021, but he died before trial.²⁷

Robert Durst died on January 10, 2022, at age 78, at a state prison hospital facility in Stockton, California. His attorney said the cause was natural, related to longstanding medical issues.⁵

1
Realtor.com. Murder Houses: What Happened to the Homes of Convicted Killer Robert Durst’s Alleged Victims
2
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Los Angeles Times. Durst Trial
4
CBS News. Robert Durst Case Timeline
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6abc. Robert Durst Dies
6
ABC13. Prosecutors: Durst Lived Life as Dorothy in Galveston
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ABC News. Robert Durst Killed Neighbor
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Texas Monthly. Durst Case Scenarios
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Oxygen. Robert Durst Trial: Morris Black
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Myplainview. Forensics Expert: Gun Used to Kill Millionaire’s Neighbor
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Expert Institute. Robert Durst Case Draws Attention From Expert Witnesses
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New York Post. Lam Sandwich: Arrest of Millionaire Fugitive Durst
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ABC News. Robert Durst Arrest
19
NBC Philadelphia. Robert Durst Pennsylvania Shoplifting
20
Texas Monthly. The Verdict
21
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Los Angeles Times. Judge Q&A
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New York Times. Durst Verdict Tied to Local Mores and a Shrewd Defense
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NBC News. Durst Plea Agreement
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ABC7 News. Robert Durst Says in HBO Finale He Killed Them All
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New York Times. Robert Durst Trial Sentence
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Westchester County DA. District Attorney Rocah Releases Report of the Investigation Into the 1982 Murder of Kathleen Durst