The Jinx makers face questions over when they found Robert Durst evidence

The makers of the HBO documentary series The Jinx came under increasing pressure on Monday to explain how long they had been sitting on the explosive material that contributed to the arrest of their subject, Robert Durst, less than 24 hours before Sunday’s series finale.

Durst, the heir to a New York real estate fortune suspected but never convicted of killing three people over the past 33 years, was picked up on Saturday night in the lobby of a New Orleans hotel where he had checked in under an alias. He had a revolver on him and was reported to be mumbling incoherently when Louisiana state police and the FBI arrested him.

Durst has since been charged with the first-degree murder of his friend Susan Berman – the daughter of a Las Vegas gangster, shot execution-style in her Beverly Hills home in 2000 – and is expected to be flown to Los Angeles shortly. On Monday morning, he waived his right to contest his extradition to California.
The film-makers and authorities in Los Angeles both say that evidence unearthed during the making of The Jinx prompted months of renewed reinvestigation into the Berman murder in the runup to Durst’s arrest. That evidence includes an envelope written by Durst that bears a strong resemblance to an anonymous note sent by Berman’s killer to the police on the day of the murder, and an audio recording of Durst picked up while he was in a bathroom in which he says: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

However, a key interview with Durst in which he was confronted with the envelope evidence – the centrepiece of Sunday’s finale – took place no later than the autumn of 2013, according to a reconstruction of the timeline as presented by the filmmakers.

According to a report in the New York Times, it may have occurred even earlier, in 2012.
That would leave a time lag of anywhere from nine months to two years. While the facts are far from established, media critics wasted no time jumping all over Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling, the producers of The Jinx, and accusing them of dragging their feet because they wanted to generate maximum publicity for the series once it got on the air, not before.

Jarecki told CBS This Morning there had been a lag of “many months” before he and his collaborators discovered the bathroom recording. The New York Times report concurred that the audio recording did not surface until sometime in 2014. Just as the television audience for The Jinx has been primed over six riveting weeks not to believe what comes out of Bob Durst’s mouth, media critics were disinclined to take this at face value either.

Rich Juzwiak of Gawker found it hard to believe the documentary team did not pick up on the audio immediately, particularly since Durst had previously spoken into a “hot” microphone without realising he was being recorded.
“Could it be that Jarecki, Smerling & company sat on Durst’s ostensible confession for the sake of making good TV?” Juzwiak asked. The eminent Houston lawyer expected to take up Durst’s defence, Dick DeGuerin, concurred. “Do I think this is a coincidence?” he said to the Los Angeles Times about the timing of his client’s arrest. “Hell, no.”
Hours after Jarecki’s appearance on CBS, he and Smerling put out a statement saying they would be taking no more questions. “Given that we are likely to be called as witnesses in any case law enforcement may decide to bring against Robert Durst,” they said in a statement, “it is not appropriate for us to comment further on these pending matters.”

In response to repeated requests for comment, HBO told The Guardian: “The filmmakers spent years researching and producing this amazing series and we believe the relevant information was turned over to the authorities in a timely and responsible manner.”

Authorities in Los Angeles have said nothing, although investigators speaking off the record have acknowledged their gratitude to the film-makers for contributing to the case they are building.

The lead prosecutor, John Lewin, is a cold case expert with a reputation as a straight shooter, disinclined to play media games. A law professor who knows him personally, Laurie Levenson of the Loyola law school in Los Angeles, said he would have had a compelling law enforcement reason unconnected to the public relations interest of the film-makers to arrest Durst when they did.

“Here’s a guy who’s acting strangely, using a false ID,” she said. “From a prosecutor’s perspective, if you think he’s done three murders and he’s about to go over the edge, you want to stop him before he does another.”