14 DAY TRIAL // Over the weekend, real estate mogul and very controversial public figure Robert Durst was arrested in New Orleans, where he tried to check into a hotel under an assumed name, for the 2000 murder of writer Susan Berman, once his good friend.
Hours later, on the series finale of the new HBO docu-series “The Jinx,” he admitted to this murder and 2 others on camera, when he didn’t realize his microphone was still on. Whether this footage (see video below) will be used as evidence in the court of law is unknown as of the time of writing.
A shocking twist to go with the twist on the series finale
Durst is believed to have killed 3 people: his ex-wife Kathleen McCormack Durst in 1982, whose body hasn’t been found yet, Berman in 2000, and his neighbor Morris Black one year later, whose body was found in pieces, discarded in garbage bags in Galveston Bay.
The night his wife “disappeared,” they had been fighting and she had already confided into friends that he was a very violent man whom she wanted to leave. He was a suspect in the investigation, but managed to convince the cops that he wasn’t the guy they were after.
Berman was executed in her home just days before she was supposed to testify in the reopened case of Kathleen’s murder. She was found with a gunshot wound to the head, after cops received an anonymous tip via traditional mail. This turned out to be the smoking gun in the HBO documentary, because the envelope bore too many similarities to Durst’s writing, something which investigators failed to pick on until now.
Durst was arrested for Black’s murder, and he first claimed self-defense. He described in court the exact ways in which he severed limbs from his old neighbor’s body, chopping him up to be disposed. His attorney claimed he had suffered a trauma that made him unaware of what he was doing, and he would later claim he had no recollection of the murder.
Durst was acquitted.
Sometime later - Gawker pinpoints 2010 as the likeliest date - Durst agreed to sit down with esteemed director Andrew Jarecki for a series of interviews that would be turned into the docuseries “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” premiering in 2015.
He was arrested for Berman’s murder over the weekend, and hours later, on “The Jinx” series finale, HBO included his on-air confession, which he made to himself during a bathroom break.
“That’s it, you’re caught,” he is heard saying (Durst has the habit of talking to himself a lot). “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course!”
HBO and a theory about a disgusting attempt to boost ratings
According to Karecki and HBO, the interview was taped about a couple of years ago, while that last part, of Durst confessing about the murders, was discovered “by accident” just a few months before. Apparently, no one thought to listen to the audio after the taping ended, even though everyone on the production knew of his habit to talk to himself - since he’d done it before, and on the show too.
Gawker believes that most of the segments included on “The Jinx” were taped as far back as 4 years ago, based on evidence taken from the series, particularly references to Durst’s brushes with the police.
The publication doesn’t see how producers could simply not check the audio feed coming from Durst’s microphone. If anything, they made sure he walked out with it on, precisely because they knew he would talk out loud once alone, thinking himself safe.
HBO claimed they turned all evidence to the police, which led to his arrest for murder over the weekend, but if what Gawker is saying is accurate, they sat on the evidence for years, timing its release to the police so that it would coincide with the air date of the series finale.
In all fairness, it does seem like a huge coincidence for the confession to come out just in time, and for them to include it on the finale just hours after his arrest, doesn’t it?