Hello and welcome back to Sword and Scale Daily.

I'm your host Ryan Williams.

It's Friday, March 6th.

Coming up on Sword and Scale Daily, the trial of Robert Durst for the 2000 murder of Susan

Berman, opened in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

In Virginia, a NASA employee is charged with the murder for allegedly shooting his next

door neighbor, falling a long-standing dispute.

Finally, in Louisiana, federal judges are hearing the appeal of Thomas Steven Sanders,

a death row inmate who admitted to the 2010 murders of a 12-year-old girl and her mother.

All this and more, coming up on Sword and Scale Daily.

On Wednesday, 76-year-old Robert Durst went on trial in Los Angeles for the 2000 murder of Susan

Berman. Robert Durst, made notorious by the 2015 HBO docu series about his life, The Jinks,

is a suspect in the 1982 disappearance of his wife, Kathleen McCormick Durst, and in the

2000 murder of his close friend, Susan Berman. In 2003, he was acquitted of the 2001 murder of

his Galveston neighbor, Morris Black, on the basis of self-defense. Susan Berman was discovered

dead inside her Los Angeles home on December 24, 2000. A neighbor called 911 when he saw that

Berman's dogs were alone in the yard and her car was parked in the driveway with the back door

white open. Officers found Susan Berman lying on the floor of her residence in a pool of blood.

She had been shot in the head. There were no signs of a break in her burglary. Nothing was taken.

The case remained unsolved. In 2015, the night before the final episode of The Jinks aired,

LAPD arrested Durst for Berman's murder. He has been in custody ever since his arrest.

During Wednesday's opening statement, Deputy District Attorney John Lewin stated,

...