Caught red-handed: the HBO series that led to the arrest of a murderer
True crime is among the most popular forms of media across film, television, documentary, and podcasting, with HBO accidentally stumbling upon a revelation when the subject of a six-part investigative series unwittingly opened the door for their own incarceration.
Director Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx aired between February and March 2015. Real estate heir Robert Durst reached out to the filmmaker after being enamoured by his narrative feature All Good Things, which had been inspired by Durst and starred Ryan Gosling as his equivalent, David Marks.
Durst had already been charged with murder in the past, but he was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence after killing and dismembering his neighbour Morris Black in 2001. However, suspicions still lingered that he was responsible for not only the unsolved disappearance of his wife Kathie in 1982 but also the execution-style slaying of writer Susan Berman in 2000.
In the fifth episode, Berman’s stepson, Sareb Kaufman, shows the filmmakers a letter posted to his stepmother in 1999, shortly before her death. The handwriting – found among Berman’s belongings – was a match to an anonymous note sent to the authorities alerting them to her death at the hands of a fatal shooting in December 2000. With new evidence having come to light, the net was closing in around Durst.
The day before the sixth and final episode of The Jinx aired, Durst was arrested on a first-degree murder warrant for killing Berman at a hotel in New Orleans, where he’d checked in under a fake name. The information that only came to light because the show had been digging into his personal life and history proved pivotal to securing a conviction against him, with the finale hammering home his guilt to a mind-blowing degree.
The filmmakers took the documents to a forensic examiner who determined that both documents could have only been written by one person, at which point Durst becomes increasingly evasive and hard to reach when Jarecki attempts to interview him again.
When he finally agreed to the second interview, Durst went to the bathroom and remained completely unaware that his microphone wasn’t only on but still recording. Off-camera, he was heard mumbling to himself before saying: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
Even though he’d been arrested in 2015, it wasn’t until 2021 that Durst was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for Berman’s murder. He was subsequently charged with the disappearance of his former wife, Kathie McCormack, but he died at the age of 78 in January 2022 before he could stand trial. If it wasn’t for The Jinx and Durst’s determination to see himself painted in a positive light, he may never have been brought to justice.
