In the end, it wasn’t the 25 hours of interviews Robert Durst did with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki that undid him and his case; it was the talking to himself after the interviews, unaware that his comments were still being picked up by a hot microphone clipped to his shirt.
Last week, in the penultimate episode of the absorbing documentary series “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” the microphone caught him practicing his answers during his break — until his lawyer told him that probably wasn’t a good idea.
Sunday, the series ended with a shocking audible muttering when, after an interview when Jarecki made his case better than any prosecutor before him, showing him evidence that a letter he send to his friend Susan Berman, a mob daughter in Los Angeles, had exactly the same handwriting (and misspelling of Beverly Hills as Beverley) as an anonymous note sent to police alerting them to a dead body at her address, Durst retired to the restroom. There, still miked, he said to himself: “There it is: You’re caught.” He also said: “What the hell did I do?” And finally: “Killed them all, of course.”
Those victims, as artfully laid out in the compelling series, included Durst’s first wife, in a case from more than 30 years ago, Berman, and a man in Galveston in the same cheap rooming house Durst was living in when he was hiding out down there, impersonating a mute woman.
Yes, it was a strange case that justified the multiple episodes and about 6 and a half hours of television, which ended Sunday with the longest fade to black since “The Sopranos” finale.
This episode may prove to have more resonance than Tony Soprano’s diner date, though: Durst was arrested in New Orleans hours before the finale Saturday night in a hotel where he had checked in under a fake name. News of the collar brought extra last minute attention to the finale, which paid off in spades.
It also proved why Jarecki seemed shaken by the long, five year process, when he met reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour in January.
Describing the feeling of meeting Durst in California years back, Jarecki said, “When you shake hands with him, you are feeling the hand of a very wealthy person. You are feeling the hand of somebody who does not do manual labor. You are feeling the hand of somebody who is confident about shaking your hand, and yet you cannot shake the feeling that no matter what you believe about Bob Durst, whether he had committed murders or not, he admitted to dismembering his neighbor in Galveston, and that is something that is on your mind when you are touching his hand. You can’t you can not feel that when you are when you are when you are touching his hand.
“The fascinating thing about spending a lot of time with him,” the filmmaker said, “is that he is slightly off center about everything, and that means, I think, that he approaches things differently. He answers questions differently. He will often answer a question with a question. It’s not a trick. It is just: the way he thinks is slightly off center.”
In the interviews, Durst also admitted he wasn’t telling the truth under oath in Galveston or to the police in Westchester, N.Y. where his wife went missing. But he kept denying these murders.
And while an interview with Durst could have been the subject of one long film, Jarecki felt compelled to get the full story.
“We needed to interview 100 other people. We got access to material that Bob had no idea we had access to,” he said. “You know, there are tape recordings of Bob Durst’s private conversations with his wife when he is captured in Pennsylvania after he’s been on the run for having been suspected of murdering and dismembering his neighbor in Galveston. He’s caught in Bath, Pennsylvania at a Wegman’s market where he has shoplifted a $5 chicken sandwich and a copy of the New York Times and a single Band Aid, and he’s got $500 on his person and $28,000 in cash outside the Wegman’s supermarket in his car. This is an extraordinary series of events. The very next thing that he does is goes to jail and calls his wife. That’s something I want to hear. I want to know how he explains that scenario to his wife.
“Bob doesn’t have access to that material. No news media have access to that material. So we had to go through in our four year process on this figuring out how we were going to get it, and we got everything. We got the most extraordinary access, and that’s what we’re bringing to the audience,” Jarecki said.
Jarecki had done other documentaries, “Capturing the Friedmans” and “Catfish” most prominently, but he also did scripted films, one of which led him to Durst in the first place.
The 2010 film “All Good Things” about Kathleen Durst’s disappearance, got him a phone call from the subject days before the film’s release. “He had heard good things about the movie and [asked] did I want to show it to him. And I said, yeah, I wanted to show it to him. That phone call was important for a few reasons, including the fact that I was able to start recording the first phone call I ever had with him because he had called someone else to get my number. So I knew that he was going to be calling.”
They got together, Jarecki said, and “he was really open. And he said, you know, ‘Let’s do whatever it is you want to do, and I’m in your hands.’ And I said, ‘OK, well, let’s meet. But, before that, let’s meet at this little recording studio, and I want to have a little dry run with you. Let’s do the audio commentary for the DVD of “All Good Things,”’ which, if you haven’t seen it, I have to say, it is definitely the weirdest audio extra, any extra of any DVD you’ve ever seen.”
I asked Jarecki his reaction to the pre-emptive interview Durst’s brother Douglas gave to The New York Times just before the debut of the series. Jarecki describes Doug Durst as “Bob’s younger brother, and in this sort of Biblical theme here, when Bob was at an age when normally his father would have anointed him as his successor to run this family dynasty, he was passed over for his younger brother, Douglas, which is something that created a lot of rivalry, hence Bob’s line in the trailer and Douglas’s longstanding fear of Bob [when] Douglas says, ‘I’m afraid of my brother.'”
Douglas Durst refused to have anything to do with the making of “The Jinx” and repeatedly sent legal warnings to leave them out of it.
“I thought was so amazing was that they wrote endlessly about the damage to their reputation, about the anticipated cost of this for their business, about how difficult it was going to be for them to rent square feet in their millions of square footage skyscrapers and never mentioned one time, not one time, this missing girl, this beautiful girl who was a member of their family who went missing in 1982, and the family never remarked on it, never addressed [it], never helped her family for a moment to try to do anything.”
The family was in a position to do so, Jarecki went on, saying family and company patriarch Seymour Durst “could have called the mayor — he spoke to him a few times a week. He could have called the governor. He could have tripled the amount of police coverage, and they did none of that.
“They circled the wagons, and they ignored all of it. And yet now, in 2015, they’ve got all the time in the world to write a letter threatening filmmakers for having had the audacity to tell their story. I think it will be interesting to see how that plays out. I’m curious to see if they decide to sue us or whatever it is they decide to do. We’ve obviously done our homework. We’re confident that we’ve treated them fairly. What we say about them they may not like.”
But after the arrest of Bob Durst Saturday, Douglas Durst did issue a message Sunday: “We are relieved and also grateful to everyone who assisted in the arrest of Robert Durst. We hope he will finally be held accountable for all he has done.”