GALVESTON, Texas — Robert Durst has certainly made mistakes in his life. But the biggest one may have been failing to remove a newspaper label addressed to "Resident" from debris he stuffed into a 42-gallon garbage bag along with pieces of his dead neighbor.

Lawyers for Durst, 60, say the eccentric outcast of a prominent New York family was just defending himself when 71-year-old Morris Black died from a bullet to the head from Durst's .22-caliber semiautomatic gun. That's for jurors at his murder trial to decide later.

But the three men and nine women on the panel may have already concluded one thing after three days of hearing evidence. Police would have been pursuing an ugly mute woman named Dorothy Ciner — actually Durst in drag — if the defendant had taken just a little more care in covering his tracks.

Galveston police were called to 81st Street and Channelview Drive in this Gulf Coast community on Sept. 30, 2001, after fishermen spotted garbage bags floating in Galveston Bay. In the bags and in the water, police found severed arms, legs and a torso of an adult white male, but no head.

Absent a missing person's report, police might never have discovered that the remains were Morris Black's.

But then police found their first real clue, Robert Durst's biggest mistake. Inside one of the bags, according to testimony Wednesday, police found a Galveston County Daily News address label that read "Resident, 2213 Avenue K, Galveston TX."

It did not take police long to go to that address, an apartment house just one block from the main thoroughfare bisecting Galveston Island. Discoveries in the trash can located in an alley behind the house set the course for Durst's arrest.

Durst is escorted from the courtroom during a break Wednesday.

Despite the apparent care Durst took to dismember Morris Black's body and dispose of it —that's not in dispute in the trial — Durst left the handgun, ammunition and hotel parking valet stubs with his name and vehicle information on it inside the trash can for the city to cart away to a landfill.

The trouble was, police beat the regular Thursday trash pickup by four days.

On Wednesday, Galveston police Sgt. Gary Jones spent the entire day identifying and describing numerous photos from the almost 600 items of evidence police collected. Durst stared straight ahead and didn't look at the jury as members quickly passed among themselves photos of Morris Black's cut-up cadaver.

Their mouths closed, jurors showed no emotion as they looked at the images. Reporters covering the trial got to view the photos up close at the end of the day, under a ruling Judge Susan Criss made when the New York Daily News and Houston Chronicle informed her they were calling their lawyers.

Jurors also viewed photos of the $300-a-month apartments Black and Durst shared across the hall from each other. Black died and was dismembered in Durst's apartment, but police also found evidence of blood that had been cleaned up inside Black's sparsely furnished two-room efficiency.

What police did not find in Black's apartment was clothes, documents or fingerprints. Prosecutors contend that Durst thought that, if he removed any trace of Black, no one would ever wonder or care what had become of the cantankerous, confrontational loner who thought everyone was trying to rip him off.

Durst moved closer to the jury to watch a police video of the area where Black's remains were found. He returned to his own seat and stopped watching, however, just before images of Black's naked torso filled the monitor.

Since opening statements began Monday, Durst has become more and more animated. He is talking to his lawyers more often, looking around the room and smiling at lawyers he recognizes in the gallery. Next to Chip Lewis, a tall, muscular lawyer on the defense team, the diminutive Durst looks from behind like a young boy.

A few reporters scrambled out of the courtroom to call their editors after the lead defense lawyer, Richard DeGuerin, mentioned on the record for the first time that Durst will be testifying. The story remains very competitive for the New York press corps, which has been drawn to the case because of Durst's prominent family and an unsolved mystery from his past.

The New York Post reported Wednesday, for example, that Durst had guns and directions to the Connecticut home of a close friend of his first wife with him when he was arrested in November 2001 for jumping bond. The woman, Gilberte Najamy, was the last person to see Kathleen Durst before she returned home to confront her husband about their tumultuous marriage in February 1982.

Kathleen Durst's whereabouts remain unknown, but friends fear she met a similar fate as Morris Black. Durst has always denied any knowledge of what became of his wife, but his lawyers say that the media frenzy sparked by Westchester County, N.Y., prosecutors' renewed interest in the investigation is to blame for Durst's decision to hide out in Galveston as Dorothy Ciner.

Testimony resumes Thursday.