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Stream It Or Skip It: 'How I Caught My Killer' Season 2 on Hulu, A Docu-Series About The Clue That Dead People Have Left Behind That Help Put Their Killers Away
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Stream It Or Skip It: 'The Jinx - Part Two' On HBO, A Continuation Of The Hit Docuseries About Robert Durst
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Stream It Or Skip It: 'What Jennifer Did' On Netflix, A True Crime Doc About A Woman Whose Life of Lies Makes Her The Prime Suspect In Her Mother's Murder
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Stream It Or Skip It: 'Last Stop Larrimah' on Max, A True Crime Doc About A Town of Quirky Locals, And One Of Them Is A Killer
When The Jinx first aired in 2015, everyone wanted to talk about the docu-series’ dramatic final scene: in the show’s final moments, Robert Durst seemingly admits to murdering multiple women when he says he “killed them all, of course.” The whispered soliloquy rocked the true crime world at the time, but Durst’s attorneys are now arguing that his remarks were manipulated and taken out of order by filmmakers Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling, and Zac Stuart-Pontier. According to the New York Times, which obtained a copy of the transcript from Durst’s The Jinx interview, Durst’s legal team hopes to use the transcript as part of “an effort to cripple his prosecution,” which has accused him of murdering longtime friend Susan Berman in 2000 (Durst was charged in 2015; he has denied all allegations).
In the final episode of The Jinx, Durst meets with producers for an in-person interview. The producers confront him with an envelope that appears to have the same handwriting as the infamous, anonymous note that pointed police to Berman’s body. Durst denies that he wrote the note to police, and after the interview, he goes to the bathroom, where he begins talking to himself — without realizing that his microphone is still one. “There it is, you’re caught,” he says. Durst continues to quietly talk to himself. “What the hell did I do?” he asks. “Killed them all, of course.” The shot fades to black, and the end credits roll.
But according to Durst’s attorneys, that’s not actually what happened. A transcript from Durst’s 2012 interview with Jarecki, Smerling, and Stuart-Pontier shows that Durst said, “Killed them all, of course” before “What the hell did I do?” not after, as the docu-series suggests. Durst’s legal team has accused the filmmakers of sacrificing the truth in the name of entertainment value. As Durst’s lawyer Dick De Guerin said in a recent interview, “We’re here today because the purpose of the producers of The Jinx was to win an Emmy, not to actually document Bob’s story. This is show business. It’s not a documentary.”
Durst’s seeming confession ignited a media frenzy, which intensified when viewers learned that the real estate heir had been arrested for Berman’s murder the night before the finale aired. The Los Angeles County District Attorney charged him with first-degree murder, with the trial set to begin in September 2019. According to the New York Times, Durst’s attorneys plan to call The Jinx filmmakers as witnesses and to “suggest that they cooperated so closely with the police that they became, in effect, ‘agents for law enforcement.'”
The Jinx producers have defended their decision to shift the order of Durst’s statements. “We put the line ‘killed them all’ at the very end of the last episode to end the series on a dramatic note, not to link it to any other line,” Stuart-Pontier told the New York Times. “It didn’t occur to us that other journalists would connect it with ‘What the hell did I do?’ There are actually 10 seconds between the two lines, and I think the experiences of reading it and hearing it are very different.”
