The strange and perpetually morose Robert Durst, 78, a wealthy real-estate heir who was identified as the likely killer of three persons by Andrew Jarecki‘s The Jinx miniseries six years ago, has been found guilty of the murder of Durst’s friend and confidante Susan Berman in December 2000.
Posted on 3.16.15: The Jinx director Andrew Jarecki has visited CBS This Morning to discuss the timeline of his interviews with real-estate heir and accused murderer Robert Durst.
Durst was arrested in New Orleans only last Saturday night, or less than 24 hours before the airing of the final Jinx episode, “The Second Interview,” during which an audio recording is heard of Durst muttering that he “killed them all” — a presumed reference to his late wife Kathie Durst, who disappeared in 1982, as well as Durst’s murdered friend Susan Berman, who was shot in December 2000, along with Galveston rooming-house resident Morris Black, who died in ’01 after an altercation with Durst.
This startling recording and other incriminating information (particularly the two envelopes with the word “Beverley” printed in highly similar block-letter handwriting, delivered in ’99 and ’00) was shared with Los Angeles law enforcement authorities “many months” ago, Jarecki said this morning. Jarecki’s first sit-down interview with Durst happened over a three-day period in 2010, he explained, and then a follow-up happened “a couple of years later” or sometime in 2012.
In a N.Y. Times interview posted today (3.16) Jarecki says his team discovered Durst’s bathroom audio confession on 6.12.14, or roughly 9 months ago. Is that what Jarecki means by “many” when he says he passed this evidence along? And yet L.A. officials decided that this obviously damning evidence wasn’t enough to motivate an arrest until last Saturday night? They weren’t inclined to arrest Durst nine months or six months or three weeks ago? Or next week or six months from now? They waited until a day before this fascinating HBO series reached its revealing, historic conclusion?
“The truth is we hoped that Robert Durst would be arrested as soon as possible and we were sort of amazed ourselves that he hadn’t be been arrested for so long, but the authorities were never communicating with us other than in their normal cordial way,” Jarecki stated. “They were going through their investigation.”
Jarecki transcript: “We actually interviewed Bob Durst two times. The first time was for about three days back in 2010, and we were surprised that he made a whole bunch of admissions and said things that were kind of shocking and we thought we would go back to them again at some point. We went back to them again a couple of years later [i.e., 2012] to show him this new evidence that we had discovered [i.e., the envelopes] and we thought we were done at the end the interview. [Durst] reacted in a strong way to the material that we showed him and then he got up and said goodbye and we thought that was the end. But his microphone kept recording. We always leave the microphone on him. He knows that and he went to the bathroom while it was recording.
“It wasn’t until months later that we had an editor listening to material that we had left behind, thinking ‘now we have to listen to everything we got, we’re about to finish the series,’ and we discovered that we had this shocking piece of audio.”
