The HBO docuseries’ filmmakers appear to have fudged The Jinx’s timeline — did they also withhold evidence from the police?
Robert Durst
HBO
In the finale of The Jinx, director Andrew Jarecki prepared to confront the HBO docuseries' subject, Robert Durst, with the seemingly damning evidence the production had turned up: a letter from Durst to his late best friend, Susan Berman, that matched not only the handwriting but the misspelling of "Beverley" on a note Berman's presumed murderer sent to police in 2000.
Talking to the camera, Jarecki confessed to being nervous. "I think Bob is a lot more volatile than I've ever thought before," he said. Then, he added: "For years, I've been saying to people, 'I'm not afraid of him, I don't feel fear.' But at the same time, you know, you can't help consider that if you're about to let him know that you're potentially becoming the enemy."
Leading up to this dramatic showdown, The Jinx laid out what appeared to be a precise order, and one thing seemingly led to another. In the previous episode, Durst stalked the home of his brother in front of cameras. Then in the finale, we were shown Durst putting Jarecki off repeatedly — until he was arrested and needed the filmmakers' help, which brought him back to them for the final interview.
So of course Jarecki was right to be on edge heading into that interview. The Jinx is, after all, the story of a man who allegedly murdered three people, two of whom he is thought to have killed because they backed him into a corner. And on that day when he did confront Durst, Jarecki did indeed extract a creepy on-camera reaction from the accused murderer. He also got an even creepier off-camera one, in the form of Durst's "killed them all, of course" audio mumblings that served as The Jinx's haunting, shocking ending, which exploded as a news story after the finale aired.
But at some point during that day — the day when Jarecki, The Jinx's co-writer–cinematographer Marc Smerling, and the rest of its production team were geared up to confront Durst, a man they were now sure, after exhaustive research and evidence-finding, was a murderer — they also appear to have taken time to do something else: film Robert near the workplace and home of his estranged brother Douglas Durst, who, as Jinx viewers know, is afraid of Robert.
The assumption that these events took place on the same day comes from the fact that Jarecki and Durst are wearing the same clothes in the interview footage and footage outside Douglas Durst's home and a Durst Organization office building (as reported by BuzzFeed News' Anne Helen Petersen). We first saw footage of them from that day — without knowing any context — in a small snippet in the premiere of The Jinx. But it was used most extensively in the episode before the finale, titled "Family Values," in which Durst skulked around 1133 6th Ave. in Manhattan, a building owned by the Durst Organization where Robert's office once was, and also around W. 43rd St., where Douglas Durst and other Durst family members live. (Douglas Durst, the family's second son, runs the Durst real estate empire, and one thesis of The Jinx is that his ascension over Robert upended a natural order.)
Andrew Jarecki
HBO
There was no reason to distrust the chronology of the series' layout. Why would we? Though it was illustrated with artful re-enactments, The Jinx was presented by HBO's respected documentary division; Jarecki had devoted years of his life to investigating Robert Durst; and in the most dramatic turn possible, one that couldn't have been scripted, Durst was arrested in New Orleans on Saturday, March 14, the day before the finale, to face charges for Berman's murder. But as soon as the finale ended, its timeline seemed to fall apart. The New York Times' Charles Bagli, the foremost expert on Robert Durst and a talking head in The Jinx, published an in-depth story about Durst's arrest and The Jinx's discoveries that included the assertion that "more than two years passed after the interview before the filmmakers found the audio" of Robert Durst's bathroom confession.
How could that be? In the finale, we first saw Durst ducking a second sit-down with Jarecki & Co., meaning they could not confront him on camera with the evidence of the envelope; then we saw that Durst's arrest (which occurred in August 2013) meant that suddenly the filmmakers had "a lot of leverage" on Durst, as Jarecki put it, even if the reasoning wasn't quite clear and we didn't hear any quid pro quo. Nevertheless, this leverage seemed to lead directly to Durst then calling Jarecki to say, "I am ready to be filmed if you're still interested in doing that."
The rest is twitching, burping, seemingly confessional history. But if that arrest was in August 2013 — an easily google-able fact — and it took them two years to find the audio, according to Bagli, then obviously something was off. Bagli confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the "second Durst interview took place in 2012," but the audio "was not discovered until last year."
Representatives for Jarecki and Smerling did not respond to a detailed outline of what would be in this story. A representative from HBO sent this statement: "We simply cannot say enough about the brilliant job that Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling did in producing The Jinx. Years in the making, their thorough research and dogged reporting reignited interest in Robert Durst's story with the public and law enforcement. Most importantly, we believe the relevant information was turned over to the authorities in a timely and responsible manner."
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