GALVESTON, Texas — Plastic bags filled with body parts. A mute woman with a pronounced Adam's apple and obvious wig. A millionaire heir to a Manhattan real estate fortune who lived in a $300-a-month apartment and hung around a homeless shelter.

The stage is set for the start of Robert Durst's murder trial and the macabre drama drawing the tabloid press to the Texas Gulf Coast town of Galveston.

Durst, 60, is charged with killing Morris Black, a crotchety drifter with whom he was known to argue. Black's dismembered body was found inside plastic bags floating in Galveston Bay on Sept. 29, 2001, by a fisherman.

Durst has hired two of Texas' most prominent criminal defense lawyers, Dick DeGuerin and Mike Ramsey of Houston, at a combined cost of $1.2 million, to present the argument that he accidentally killed Black in self-defense.

The lawyers and their star witness, Durst himself, will somehow have to convince jurors that Black attacked Durst or threatened him with significant enough violence to justify what Durst did.

According to court records and accounts of the jury selection process, Durst's lawyers will claim that the son of the late New York skyscraper builder Seymour Durst shot Black in the head in self-defense, tried unsuccessfully to get a Spanish-speaking neighbor to summon help, panicked and decided to get rid of the body.

Although jurors will not hear anything about it, Durst may have had reasons to panic in addition to whatever reasons his lawyers may present.

Nine months before Black's death, someone shot and killed Durst's best friend, writer Susan Berman, execution-style in her California home. During the early 1980s, Berman sometimes fielded questions from the New York press corps about the 1982 disappearance of Durst's first wife, 29-year-old medical student Kathleen Durst.

Galveston Judge Susan Criss has already ruled that jurors cannot be told about the two other unsolved cases connected to Durst. She also placed the strictest of gag orders on the prosecution, defense lawyers and all the witnesses involved in the case.

What jurors will hear once evidence gets under way is that police were led to Durst after finding a receipt with his name on it in one of the bags found in Galveston Bay. The bags also contained the dismembered body parts of an elderly man but no head.

Police tracked the receipt to an apartment house on K Street. The landlord told them that Durst had rented a $300-a-month apartment while posing as a mute woman who went by the name "Dorothy Ciner."

Once they got into the apartment, police found ample evidence that someone had probably died and that someone else had cleaned up a large amount of blood. What they couldn't find was Morris Black, who often had loud arguments with Durst.

A check of police fingerprint records in South Carolina, where Black had been charged with threatening to blow up a utility company, confirmed that the body in the bay was that of Durst's missing neighbor.

Police obtained a warrant that led to the quick arrest of Robert Durst, but investigators didn't take the time to perform a simple Internet search on their suspect. If they had, they would have learned about Durst's past, including the renewed interest the Westchester District Attorney's Office had in finding out what happened to his first wife Kathleen.

Before Galveston police learned that their suspect in Black's death wasn't the down-and-out drifter they thought he was, Durst's second wife paid his $300,000 bond, which was low for a murder suspect. 

Durst apparently fled Galveston, but less than two months later he was picked up by police in Pennsylvania. When he was arrested for shoplifting a sandwich and Band-Aids, Durst was bald, had no eyebrows and was carrying cash, guns and marijuana.

Durst faces life in prison if convicted.

Opening statements are scheduled to begin Thursday. The trial is expected to last four weeks to six weeks.