Jurors in the murder trial of real-estate scion Robert Durst will return to a Los Angeles courtroom on Monday for the first time in more than a year.
The high-profile case was halted for 14 months — an unprecedented amount of time — because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, Judge Mark Windham plans to question the panel of 23 jurors, including 11 alternates, in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Monday about whether they can continue with the case.
Durst, 78, is accused of shooting longtime pal Susan Berman in the back of the head at her Beverly Hills home in 2000. He has pleaded not guilty.
The jury — winnowed from over 400 people — heard four days of opening statements and two days of testimony before being sent home on March 12 of last year, when the pandemic closed courthouses and sparked a state-wide stay-at-home order.
Prosecutors argued that Durst executed Berman to stop her from telling authorities that she helped him cover up the killing of his first wife Kathie Durst, who disappeared in Westchester in 1982.
Although her body was never found, Durst, who is worth an estimated $100 million, has long been suspected of killing Kathie.
When New York prosecutors reopened the case in 2000, Berman — a Las Vegas mobster’s daughter who knew Durst since college — warned him she was going to tell them what she knew. She was dead two months later.
Nearly a year after Berman was killed, Durst fatally shot and dismembered his neighbor Morris Black in Galveston, Texas, to prevent him from disclosing his whereabouts to investigators.
A jury acquitted Durst of murder after he testified that he’d acted in self-defense.
Los Angeles prosecutors said they would prove that Durst committed all three slayings, which are intrinsically connected.
During opening statements, defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin said that Durst didn’t kill Berman and doesn’t know who did. But he said his client found her body, panicked and bolted.
The defense has repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — sought a mistrial, arguing that the yearlong delay harmed their client’s chance of a fair trial.
They submitted a list of proposed questions for Windham to ask the returning jurors, including whether they read or heard about the case during their break and can remain impartial.
The attorneys also want to know if COVID-19 altered the lives of the jurors in a way that prevents them from serving another four to five months.
The defense recently submitted a motion asking the judge to push off the trial further, arguing that Durst is suffering from a slew of health issues, including cancer.
The eccentric millionaire has been jailed since his 2015 arrest — which was spurred by admissions he made in the HBO documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.”
His lawyers want him to be released on bail into an outside medical facility.
Durst is estranged from his family, who own the Durst Organization, a Manhattan real-estate company.
With Post wires