GALVESTON, Texas — A long, hot Texas summer, the kind that fuses your clothes to your skin, is all that remains before Robert Durst goes on trial in this old port city on the Gulf of Mexico for killing and dismembering an annoying neighbor.

Durst, the meandering black sheep of a rich and powerful New York real estate family, pleaded not guilty by reason of "self-defense/accident." But unlike many self-defense cases that make it to trial, there are no eyewitnesses to what happened between Durst and 71-year-old Morris Julius Black.

Robert Durst when he was arrested Oct. 9, 2001.

Exactly what Durst's story will be is not known, and probably won't be until he takes the stand in his own defense — if he does. Observers can't see how Durst, 60, can avoid testifying if he hopes to win acquittal by claiming self-defense.

When Durst was charged with the killing on Oct. 9, 2001, he did not tell Galveston police anything. They didn't even learn he was the millionaire heir to the New York-based Durst Organization fortune until after he posted $300,000 bail and allegedly fled the state.

He was arrested the following month in Pennsylvania, but police there initially did not know he was one of America's most wanted fugitives. Bald, including his eyebrows, Durst was caught shoplifting Band-Aids and a sandwich despite carrying a large amount of cash.

Durst is back in Texas, but little more than "not guilty" has passed his lips publicly since his arraignment.

Morris Black

A review of the voluminous court file accumulating in an office adjacent to Texas Judge Susan Criss's chambers last week offered no clues to how attorney Dick DeGuerin of Houston will defend the charges.

More than 70 percent of the casefile deals with Criss's ruling that bars DeGuerin, prosecutors and prospective witnesses from New York to California from making out-of-court statements about the case.

The bulk of the remaining file concerns defense motions seeking to keep Durst's eventual jury from ever seeing what police found among Durst's belongings. The motions, which Criss may rule on after pretrial hearings scheduled for July, allege that police affidavits used to get search warrants contain facts that investigators knew to be false.

Among other things, police seized from Durst's cars, apartment and trash several handguns, ammunition, cleaning supplies, garbage bags, a spent bullet casing, numerous sets of gloves, ammonia, marijuana and tens of thousands of dollars in cash.

The defense has already secured a ruling from the judge that bars prosecutors from even mentioning the names Kathie Durst and Susan Berman. But the mysteries surrounding those two women are likely to make Durst's Texas trial a media madhouse.

Kathie Durst, a pretty young medical school student from a middle-class Long Island family, was married to Robert Durst for nine years. She disappeared in February 1982 after the last of their many marital spats, fights that friends have said turned physical and led Kathie Durst to consult a divorce lawyer.

Kathie Durst has been missing and presumed dead since 1982.

Berman, a journalist and author who served as Durst's sometimes spokesperson in the early days of the missing-spouse investigation, was shot execution-style on Christmas Eve 2000 with a .9-millimeter weapon.

A New York State trooper was planning to reinterview Berman before she was murdered in her California home but hadn't even made an initial contact, according to a recent book about Kathie Durst's disappearance.

The trooper and Los Angeles investigators did not even know that Robert Durst was living in a $300-a-month apartment in Galveston — sometimes posing as a mute woman with a name borrowed from a high school classmate — when Morris Black's torso and severed arms and legs were found floating in garbage bags in the Galveston Bay.

The courthouse where the trial will be held later this year.

An autopsy determined that Black was beaten about the chest and suffered a heart attack, but pathologists were missing a key piece of the puzzle when they examined Black's remains. Investigators never located the head of the former merchant, an eccentric who was estranged from his family and who fought with neighbors.

"From what I understand, the defense is going to be that Durst and Black had gotten into an argument and that Black had attacked Durst and Durst defended himself, hence the bruises on the body," said Matthew Birkbeck, author of "A Deadly Secret: The Strange Disappearance of Kathie Durst."

For his book, Birkbeck obtained unparalleled access to investigators in New York and Galveston, who have since been barred from talking to the media.

"It bodes well for Durst that they never found the head," Birkbeck said, explaining that investigators believe Black was shot in the head with one of the handguns police seized from Durst. "They're going to say Black had a heart attack."

Jury selection is scheduled for Aug. 25.