‘The Jinx’ Filmmakers Revisit That Robert Durst Confession: “We Screamed”

Jackie Strause
·9 min read
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“Killed them all, of course.”

Those five words were spoken by Robert Durst when the New York real estate heir, who was still mic’d, walked to the bathroom after completing his interviews for the HBO true-crime docuseries The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.

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Durst had been suspected of killing his close friend Susan Berman, who was shot dead in December 2000 shortly after she told Durst that the Los Angeles police wanted to talk to her about Durst’s first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, who disappeared in 1982. He was acquitted for the 2001 murder of neighbor Morris Black, whom Durst admitted to dismembering, claiming he killed Black in self-defense.

Durst’s hot mic confession came in the jaw-dropping Jinx finale that aired March 15, 2015, and captured the nation.

But years before that, it stunned director Andrew Jarecki and executive producer Zac Stuart-Pontier when they and the Jinx team came upon the audio — two years after they first recorded it.

For The Jinx — Part One, Durst himself contacted Jarecki after hearing about All Good Things, the 2010 feature film that Jarecki directed, which was based on Durst’s life and starred Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst.

During a press conference with reporters on Monday — the week leading into the highly anticipated launch of The Jinx — Part Two, which begins to release its six-episode season on Sunday — Jarecki recalled how Durst first contacted him to say, “I hear you made this film about me and there’s this fancy actor playing me, I want to see it.” So Jarecki set Durst up to screen the movie in Santa Monica and, two minutes after he finished watching, the director’s phone rang.

It was Durst, and Jarecki recalled their conversation when speaking to reporters, including The Hollywood Reporter: “I want you to know I liked the movie very much. I cried three times. Kristen Dunst was just like my wife Kathie and you’ve really done your homework on Bob Durst, so maybe we should talk about doing something together.” That led to them interviewing Durst — over the course of 21 hours — and that footage would eventually go on to make The Jinx so riveting and compelling, that it not only led to Durst’s incarceration, but also launched the currently churning genre of true-crime television.

“There was a reluctance because I thought, what more is there? But after the 21 hours of interviews, it was clear he was going to be shockingly candid about a lot of things that he had never said before, and so we were on this other ride,” said Jarecki of The Jinx — Part One. “Sometimes the film just tells you what it is. So, we just dug in and started making it.”

The smoking gun, they thought, was when Jarecki in that finale interview confronted Durst with the infamous cadaver note believed to have been sent by Berman’s murderer and a nearly identical handwriting sample from Durst. In a just-released bonus episode of Jarecki and Stuart-Pontier’s The Official Jinx Podcast for HBO, the filmmakers drill in on the timeline of events from when they filmed that sit-down with Durst — the one that preceded his bathroom confession — to how they found Durst’s shocking audio later on.

In the moment, they said their biggest dilemma was when to turn over the evidence they had uncovered to the FBI. Stuart-Pontier recalls one of their other producers, Marc Smerling, discussing this with their legal consultant Marcia Clark, the former prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial.

“We firmly believe he’s guilty of these crimes. And we found stuff that we’re like, ‘Oh, God,'” Smerling says on a recorded call with FBI special agent Eric Perry. (The filmmakers noted, “We record everything,” before playing the tapes.) The FBI had been tipped that the filmmakers might have the letter, and shared with them that a prosecutor in Los Angeles, L.A. County Deputy District Attorney John Lewin (who would go on to be the prosecutor in Durst’s trial), might be interested in reopening a case against Durst for Berman’s murder.

“The key to this is probably going to be those videotapes of Bob,” Lewin is heard telling the filmmakers on a recorded call from that time. A few weeks later, Jarecki and Smerling flew out to L.A. to show Lewin and his team some of The Jinx footage, officially making them witnesses in the case.

The Jinx, meanwhile, had not yet premiered. So the filmmakers said they were balancing making a film and providing evidence in a murder case. “If you continue to make your film, and you have this evidence, people are going to criticize you. If you hand it over right away, and you don’t do the right thing by the film, people are going to criticize you,” says Smerling in a 2015 unreleased HBO interview played on the podcast. “But we always knew that the letter had to be turned over to law enforcement. That was the right thing to do.”

After showing the videos, Jarecki says Lewin was confident they had enough evidence. They wanted the original letter, which Jarecki retrieved from a safe box from J.P Morgan bank in Manhattan. Lewin told Jarecki it typically takes him five to 10 years to file a cold case, so the filmmaker said he went back to work in the editing room on The Jinx. They brought on a new editor, Shelby Siegel, who they assigned to watch all of the Durst interviews to see if there was any final footage to add into the show.

And that’s when the discovery happened.

“I still remember my heart racing and [Jarecki] taking out the letter and walking [Durst] through it. And I’m just on the edge of my seat. And as I’m watching it, the camera that I’m watching cuts off and right when it cuts off, the audio continues. And then, I hear the door open, and then I hear ‘There it is you’re caught,’ and I just scream,” recalled Siegel of catching the beginning of Durst’s confession.

“It was amazing, ‘you gotta hear this, you gotta hear this, you gotta hear this, there it is, you’re caught,'” recalled Stuart-Pontier of the moment. “And I’m like, ‘Wow,’ like I couldn’t believe it, it was so cool in a way, ’cause it had sort of been there the whole time.”

They call Jarecki to share the news. The director, in a recorded call, is stunned. “The whole idea of, you know, that we’ve been talking about this film as a confession and it’s always been figurative. Now it’s literal,” he says.

Stuart-Pontier explains why they couldn’t hear the audio previously.

“So the interview was over. Bob was still wearing his microphone, Andrew’s still wearing his microphone. And the sound’s still being recorded. But we’re all buzzing about in a loud room as Bob gets up and goes into the bathroom. So Bob’s in there and he’s talking to himself really quietly and the two of their microphones are smashed together on different tracks but in the same recording,” he says. They play the clip in the podcast, so listeners can hear for themselves. “Once Andrew’s audio got turned off, we could hear just Bob by himself in the bathroom.”

Siegel continues, “When he said, ‘Killed them all of course,’ I mean, again we screamed, I’m pretty sure I squeezed Zac’s hand. Like it was, it was incredible, It felt like it was impossible that that’s what he
was saying.”

Stuart-Pontier adds, “I always imagine that he’s looking at himself. That he’s standing there in the bathroom. He just, like, washed his hands, he splashed water on his face. And he’s looking at himself. And he’s saying that to himself. It’s a powerful thing. I mean, he’s like, looks at himself in the mirror and says, ‘You’re a murderer.'”

The case was not filed yet. They soon looped Lewin in on the discovery. The prosecutors leave with the audio in hand and return to L.A. “We then interviewed all the players, and we interviewed Shelby and we interviewed everyone else and we came to realize, it really was just an oversight,” says Habib Bailian, Lewin’s second in command. “Some things just do get missed, right? The making of a film is a very complicated process, it turns out.”

All this happened just months before the premiere of The Jinx. “We had managed to keep [the re-investigation] hidden for two years,” says Lewin. (One week before The Jinx finale aired, The New York Times reported that the Los Angeles County D.A. had reopened its investigation into Durst’s role in Berman’s death.)

So once The Jinx releases, and the clock is ticking. “Our problem was, we were concerned he was going to flee,” says Lewin.

And, as Jarecki points out, Lewin was right.

The premiere of The Jinx — Part Two will explore at what point during season one Durst did flee, to the JW Marriott hotel in New Orleans where he was ultimately apprehended and arrested. And the follow-up episodes will track Durst’s fate from there on, as Jarecki and his team’s cameras never stopped rolling.

In September 2021, Durst was convicted for the first-degree murder of Berman, including the special circumstance that he killed her as a witness because of what she might reveal about what happened to Durst’s first wife, Kathie, whose body was never found. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Two months later, he was indicted on the charge of second-degree murder in Kathie’s killing. However, he died while in custody of the California Department of Correction, in January 2022, at age 78 before a trial could begin.

The Jinx — Part Two launches at 10 p.m. Sunday on HBO and Max. Read THR‘s premiere postmortem interview with Jarecki and Stuart-Pontier, where they break down Durst’s arrest coming the day before the season one finale.

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