When “The Jinx” aired in 2015, it was a sensation. The astonishing story of mega-rich Robert Durst and his crimes, it not only included evidence that he was guilty of one murder, but his confession that he was guilty of killing three people.
Arrested the day before the final episode aired, Durst was convicted of murder and sent to prison, where he died in 2022. So how could there be more to the story? All the surprises are over, right?
Wrong. “The Jinx: Part 2″ (which debuts Monday at 8:10 p.m. on HBO) is compelling TV that will grab you, surprise you and make you angry.
It is, in part, the story of Durst’s arrest and prosecution — and that alone would make it worth watching. But it’s also the story of how Durst for decades avoided conviction for killing his wife, Kathie, in 1982; his friend, Susan Berman, in 2000; and his neighbor, Morris Black, in 2001. (Durst claimed self-defense and was acquitted when he was tried for killing Black — even though he chopped up his body.)
“We would always say when we were making Part 1, ‘How do you kill three people ... and get away with it?” director/executive producer Andrew Jarecki said in a teleconference. “It takes a village. It’s easy to say … Bob Durst is a crazy guy, and he did all these terrible crimes. But if you pull the camera back, you realize that there was a constellation of people who looked the other way or helped in some way. …
“This season, the show gets so much into the issue of complicity, and sort of pulling the camera back to try to understand who was helping Bob along the way.”
Surprisingly, a number of those people agreed to be interviewed. Some of them clearly not only suspected Durst was a killer, but they knew. And they did nothing. Well, some of them actively aided him. Like the woman who stuffed $118,000 in a package and sent it to Durst as he went on the run from authorities. It is infuriating.
“There’s a lot of sort of cavalier attitude in that first season by people who have done some potentially bad things,” Jarecki said. “I would say in Part 2, more people have done more bad things. And they’re now, in some way, being held accountable for that.”
If being exposed on HBO is being held accountable, that is. Prison sentences would seem more appropriate.
(Getty Images/HBO) Andrew Jarecki is the executive produce of "The Jinx" and "The Jinx: Part 2."
Victim and perpetrator
The filmmakers make good use of recordings of Durst’s phone calls while he was behind bars. They also acquired a recording of Berman making a phone call nine days after Kathie Durst disappeared “and both of our jaws were on the floor,” said executive producer Zac Stuart-Pontier, That recording that makes it clear that Berman was helping Durst come up with an alibi.
It also lends credence to the theory that Durst killed Berman because she knew too much about what happened to his wife.
“You will probably be surprised by many things during the course of these episodes,” Jarecki said — and he’s right. The revelation about Berman is “a very powerful surprise” because we feel sympathy for her, he said, “and yet, is it possible that a victim can also be a perpetrator?”
Yep.
(The first four of six episodes were provided to critics. And, we were assured, there are more surprises to come in the final two episodes.)
(Etienne Laurent/EPA via AP, Pool) Real estate heir Robert Durst sits during his murder trial in Los Angeles in 2020.
It took two years?!?!?
It’s not part of the “The Jinx: Part 2″ — at least not in the first four episodes — but the most astonishing thing to come out of the teleconference was that the filmmakers had audio of Durst’s inadvertent confession for two years before they realized it.
In the final episode of “The Jinx,” the filmmakers confronted Durst with the so-called “cadaver note,” which seemingly proved he killed Berman. Durst went into the bathroom, apparently forgetting he was still wearing a mic, and said to himself, “There it is. You’re caught. … What a disaster. … What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
But his was only one of several mics that were on, and Jarecki said he and Stuart-Pontier were “chatting away” while Durst was in the bathroom. Nobody paid attention to what he was saying until two years later, when an editor was “cleaning up audio tracks” and heard it.
“We thought the whole idea of Bob coming to me and wanting to talk was, in a way, a confession,” Jarecki said. “Now we had an actual, literal confession.”
In “Part 2,” there’s a stunning scene — of a group of victim’s relatives and law enforcement personnel watching that first-season episode — that you’ve got to see.
(HBO) Convicted killer Robert Durst died in prison.
What was Durst thinking?
For Jarecki, the “most amazing thing” about “The Jinx” is that Durst agreed to talk to him. That he called the filmmaker and sat down for 21 hours of interviews over several years even though “he knew he had killed three people.” That Durst thought “this is an exoneration story or something.”
Durst felt he was “being mistreated because” he’d “never been convicted of murder. And he didn’t really stop to think, ‘Well, I did kill them.’ It was a strange little twist in Bob’s mind that he always did feel maligned.”
Jarecki admitted he felt a certain sympathy for Durst and his “strange humanity.”
“I don’t think Bob was a bloodthirsty killer,” he said. “I don’t think of Bob as being like Jeffrey Dahmer or somebody who just has, like, bloodlust. I always think that, for Bob, murder is not preferred, but it is one of the possible means of conflict resolution. … He tries not to do it, but sometimes it has to happen. … And so when he died, I still felt sad, even though I knew what happened to him had to happen.”
