Everything to Remember from ‘The Jinx’ Season 1

Proma Khosla
·6 min read
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Nearly ten year after the Emmy Award-winning first season, “The Jinx” is remarkably back on HBO. Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling, and Zac Stuart-Pontier’s engrossing docuseries about the string of murders connected to Robert Durst built to a now-infamous climax, and will return with more story to tell April 21.

Before that, it’s worth revisiting the 2015 series and decades of headlines it interrogates. “The Jinx” gripped its audience with mounting evidence against Durst and a scintillating narrative structure, but also quickly came under fire for manipulating the timeline and even Durst’s hot mic recordings for dramatic effect. In 2015, IndieWire’s Matt Brennan pointed out that “The Jinx” set an impossible standard for documentary drama — one that the series itself had arguably not cleared in the first place. Jessica Kiang wrote that “This is not Jarecki’s gotcha so much as it is a self-initiated, cloudily motivated performance piece of Durst’s, that got way out of hand.”

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Nine years later, “The Jinx” Season 2 will enter an all-but saturated true-crime library, populated not only by “The Keepers,” “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” and the recent “American Nightmare,” but by the subgenre that includes “American Vandal,” “Only Murders in the Building,” and “Based on a True Story.” The new episodes will be scrutinized for how they tell an ongoing story, but also as a sophomore season when many might argue that it was best not to say more.

Who is Robert Durst?

The notorious documentary subject — who died in 2022 — was born into a New York real estate family. “The Jinx” specifically examines Durst’s relationships to father Seymour and brother Douglas (he had two other siblings), and the death of their mother Bernice in 1950. In “The Jinx,” Robert Durst describes his father inviting him to watch Bernice while she stood upon the roof of their home, eventually jumping and falling to her death, while Douglas Durst believes this was embellished and maintains that the children were not witnesses.

The two brothers had a frictious relationship well into adulthood, captured in “The Jinx” when Douglas Durst’s security team refuses to interact with Robert and the documentary crew, and eventually has Robert arrested for trespassing in New York City. Durst owned a small business in Vermont for a few years, but did not subsequently inherit the family business as expected. It went to Douglas, the second born, and Durst took legal action resulting in $65 million to be bought out of the family trust.

The Murders

In 1973 Durst married Kathleen McCormack, but accounts from those who knew the couple said in “The Jinx” that their marriage grew increasingly volatile over the years. McCormack claimed that Durst beat her and asked for a divorce, in response to which he took measures to restrict her financially; they essentially separated while remaining legally married. After an argument on January 31, 1982, Durst told police that he dropped her off at the train station and they spoke later in the night, but McCormack was never seen again. Durst reported her missing after one week, and three weeks later, items that belonged to her were found in their Manhattan apartment’s trash compactor. Durst divorced her eight years later (citing “spousal abandonment”), and though no body was ever found, she was declared legally dead upon request by the McCormack family in 2017.

The next death, and the smoking gun in “The Jinx” Season 1, was that of Durst’s old friend and classmate Susan Berman, the daughter of a New York City mobster who offered an alibi for Durst when Kathleen disappeared. In “The Jinx,” former District Attorney Jeanine Pirro (now a host at Fox News) claims that she and the LAPD were getting ready to speak with Berman about the night Kathleen went missing, but on December 24, 2000, she was found dead in her home, shot in the back of the head. The McCormack case was reopened, and Durst fled to Texas to avoid questioning.

It was there in Texas in 2001 that Durst once again found his way into the spotlight for a gruesome death, this time his elderly neighbor Morris Black, who was found in pieces. After being initially suspected and then released on bail, Durst was arrested for shoplifting, which led to a police search of his car and discovery of Black’s driver’s license. Durst claimed self-defense in the Black case, saying that they tousled over a gun that went off and that he was only guilty of later dismembering the body. He was found not guilty of capital murder.

The Ultimate Twist

It’s not often that a television documentary crew becomes part of the story they’re telling, and part of what made that serendipity so coveted over the past decade is how “The Jinx” unfolded, even with its muddled aftermath. After Durst praised Jarecki’s 2010 film “All Good Things,” he agreed to be interviewed by the filmmaker, and the crew for “The Jinx” began looking into the sinister stories swirling around Durst for so much of his life.

While looking through old items for the docuseries, Susan Berman’s stepson Sareb Kaufman uncovered an old letter from Durst, one which he instantly recognized as the same handwriting on a note sent to the Beverly Hills police by Berman’s killer. That revelation marks the end of Episode 105, and 106 takes place mostly with Jarecki and his team as they plan Durst’s next interview and how to ask the right questions to elicit any hint of a confession.

At the same time, the letter Kaufman found was delivered to the Los Angeles County District Attorney, and Durst ended up being indicted the night before “The Jinx” finale for Berman’s murder. The episode ends with him talking to himself on a hot mic, including the chilling “Killed them all, of course.”

Legalities

Along with murder, Durst has been convicted of bail jumping, tampering with evidence (they never found Morris Black’s head), and parole violation. Kathleen McCormack’s family tried to sue Durst multiple times over the years, first her mother claiming that Durst killed McCormack, and then sister Carol who filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2019 that was dismissed for the timing nearly 30 years after McCormack’s disappearance. In 2021, the disappearance was reclassified as a murder and the case reopened (as a result of Durst’s role in the Susan Berman murder). Durst was charged with his ex-wife’s murder on October 22, 2021, nearly 40 years after she went missing.

“The Jinx – Part Two” premieres April 21 on HBO.

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