Robert Durst Murder House (2213 Avenue K)

Robert Durst arrived in Galveston in 2000 under circumstances his defense would later characterize as an attempt to avoid media scrutiny following renewed press coverage of his first wife Kathleen McCormack's 1982 disappearance. He rented an apartment at 2213 Avenue K and presented himself to neighbors as a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner, later identified in arrest documents as Robert Peatman Durst. His neighbor Morris Black, a retired merchant seaman, lived across the hall.

In late September 2001 — the precise date was not established at trial — Durst shot Black. Dismembered body parts were found floating in Galveston Bay on September 30, 2001, and Black's torso was found inside a garbage bag by a fisherman. Durst was arrested in October 2001 in New Orleans after shoplifting a sandwich from a grocery store despite having $37,000 in cash.

At his 2003 murder trial, Durst testified that Black had grabbed a .22 caliber pistol Durst kept in his apartment and threatened him with it; that the gun discharged during the struggle and struck Black in the face; and that Durst then dismembered the body using a paring knife, two saws, and an axe before distributing the remains in Galveston Bay. Black's head was never recovered, leaving prosecutors without the primary forensic evidence needed to contest Durst's account. On November 11, 2003, the jury acquitted him of murder. Durst subsequently pleaded guilty on December 21, 2004, to bail jumping and evidence tampering for dismembering the body; he received a five-year sentence and was paroled in 2005.

The case was the central subject of the HBO documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015), which also revisited the disappearance of Kathleen McCormack Durst and the killing of Susan Berman. In 2021, Durst was convicted of first-degree murder in the killing of Susan Berman in Los Angeles. He died on January 9, 2022, in a California prison while serving a life sentence. Morris Black is buried in Galveston.