of Black and Berman seemed "to be intertwined". The murder charge against Durst included the special circumstance allegations of lying in wait and killing a witness to a crime. It was further alleged that Durst had used a handgun to carry out the murder. In May 2019, a motion filed by Durst's attorneys claimed two handwriting samples (the anonymous "cadaver note" to Beverly Hills police, and a letter in 1999 from Durst to Berman), along with other evidence from his 2015 arrests, were obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, thus moving for their exclusion. On May 8, Los Angeles County prosecutors filed an affidavit replying to the motion, charging that Durst was creating an elaborate conspiracy theory between the HBO filmmakers, law enforcement officers, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office to make Durst "incriminate himself". On May 17, Windham granted Durst's defense team a four-month postponement of his trial after they raised concerns about the volume of evidence in the case and conflicts with attorney schedules. On September 3, 2019, Windham rejected an attempt by Durst's attorneys to strip the producers of The Jinx of protection under California's journalist shield law by having them declared "government agents". A number of other procedural rulings also went against Durst. Lewin set another hearing on discovery and other matters for October 28. Additional evidential hearings were held in December 2019 regarding the admissibility of statements Durst made in March 2015 just after his arrest in New Orleans, in an interview with Lewin. In a surprise move on December 24, 2019, Durst's lawyers contradicted his previous statements and filed court documents admitting that Durst wrote the "cadaver note". In all previous statements Durst consistently had denied writing the note, although the handwriting appeared to be similar to his own as is the misspelling of the word "Beverley" contained in a prior letter to Berman that Durst admitted to authoring. During the filming of The Jinx, Durst told the filmmakers that the person who wrote the "cadaver note" was taking a "big risk" because it was something "that only the killer could have written". He told his godson, Howard Altman, "The person who wrote the note killed her". However, in August 2019, Durst's attorneys also argued, "What the note demonstrates is that the person who mailed it was aware that there was a body at the house, not that the individual murdered