HBO may have aired the shocking finale of its critically praised six-part docuseries The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst on Sunday, but this story might be just beginning.
For the uninitiated, Andrew Jarecki’s six-part series centered around a trio of murders that Robert Durst, who was once the heir to the Durst real estate fortune, had been linked to that stretched as far back as 1982. Durst has been connected to the mysterious disappearance of his first wife Kathie Durst back in 1982, as well as the murder of his friend and confidant Susan Berman; Durst was also acquitted in the death of Morris Black in 2003.
You couldn’t buy the type of publicity that HBO got over the weekend for the finale of The Jinx. On Saturday, Durst was arrested in New Orleans for the murder of Berman and brought to Los Angeles. In the finale of The Jinx, Durst appeared to confess to her murder – and the two others – while he was speaking to himself in the bathroom; his microphone was still on.
“Killed them all, of course,” Durst was caught on tape saying to himself as the credits rolled.
Jarecki told CBS This Morning in an interview on Monday that it had been “months” between that final interview with Durst – Jarecki had gotten his hands on a piece of evidence that appeared to incriminate Durst and asked him about it – and when they went back and found the audio of Durst’s confession, which came after Jarecki and his crew had left the room.
“We always leave the microphone on him, he knows that. He went to the bathroom while it was recording,” said Jarecki. “It wasn’t until months later that we had an editor listening to material that we had just sort of left behind thinking, ‘well now we’ve got to listen to everything we’ve got, we’re about to finish this series.’ And we discovered that we had this shocking piece of audio.”
The timing of Durst’s arrest led to speculation that it was a coordinated effort between Jarecki, HBO and the LAPD, which all parties have rejected. In a separate interview with the New York Times, Jarecki said they gave the evidence they gathered to law enforcement as soon as they discovered it and simply said the timing of the arrest a day before the finale was a coincidence.
On Monday afternoon, Jarecki canceled all remaining media appearances, explaining that with them likely to be called as witnesses for the case, it was no longer appropriate to comment on the story.
