General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst is a six-part HBO true-crime documentary series, directed, written, and produced by Andrew Jarecki, that investigates Robert Durst, an heir to a New York real estate fortune, and his connection to the 1982 disappearance of his wife Kathie and the killings of Susan Berman and Morris Black. It debuted on HBO in 2015, won Emmy Awards for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and for picture editing, and ended with an apparent on-microphone confession by Durst that coincided with his arrest for murder.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Six-part HBO documentary series, roughly five hours total, directed by Andrew Jarecki³
First broadcast	Debuted on HBO in 2015¹
Subject	Robert Durst, scion of a New York billionaire real estate family, linked to three deaths over three decades²^•⁴
Finale moment	Durst, recorded on a live microphone after an interview, mutters "Killed them all, of course"⁵
Arrest	March 14, 2015, in New Orleans, on the eve of the final episode's broadcast⁶
Awards	Six Primetime Emmy nominations; wins for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming²
Sequel	The Jinx - Part Two, six episodes, debuted April 21, 2024, on HBO and Max⁷

Spoilers

The finale and the arrest

In the final episode, Jarecki confronted Durst with the handwriting evidence, then recorded him. After the interview, Durst, still wearing a live body microphone, went to a restroom and muttered to himself, "Killed them all, of course."⁵^•¹⁴ According to the filmmakers, the producers did not realize for two years that they had the confession on tape.¹⁵

Durst was arrested on March 14, 2015, in a New Orleans hotel, the day before the finale aired, and charged with Berman's murder.⁶^•¹⁶ Court filings state that before the broadcast he had traveled to New Orleans and attempted to flee to Cuba.¹⁷ The filmmakers said they had handed evidence, including the recording and the handwriting sample, to police months earlier.⁵

The cases

The series examines three deaths associated with Durst. His first wife, Kathie McCormack Durst, disappeared in 1982 and was last seen alive on January 31 of that year; her disappearance remains unsolved. Susan Berman, Durst's longtime friend, was killed on December 23, 2000, in Benedict Canyon, California. Morris Black, Durst's neighbor in Galveston, Texas, was killed and dismembered in 2001, with body parts found in the bay near Galveston.⁶^•⁸

Durst had already faced a jury once before the series aired. In 2003 he was tried for Black's murder in Texas; his attorney Richard DeGuerin argued that he had killed and dismembered Black in self-defense, and Durst was acquitted, as the jury was permitted to consider only murder rather than lesser charges such as manslaughter.⁶^•²⁶

Production and background

Director Andrew Jarecki came to the subject through fiction first. He directed the feature film All Good Things (2010), loosely based on Durst's life and Kathie's disappearance, starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst; Durst contacted Jarecki after the film, and later agreed, against his lawyers' advice, to roughly twenty hours of interviews for the documentary.⁹^•¹⁰ Jarecki had earlier directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003) and, before filmmaking, founded the ticketing service Moviefone, sold to AOL in 1999 for $388 million.¹¹ Marc Smerling wrote, produced, and served as cinematographer on the series.¹²

A central piece of evidence was handwriting. Before Berman's body was found, an anonymous note to police gave her address with the word "cadaver" in block letters. The filmmakers located an envelope Durst had sent Berman a year earlier with identical handwriting and the same misspelling of Beverly Hills as "Beverley" on both pieces of writing.⁸^•¹³

Legal aftermath

In September 2021, after a five-month trial in Los Angeles County with only eight hours of jury deliberation, Durst was convicted of first-degree murder in Berman's death. Prosecutors argued he shot Berman in the back of the head to keep her from telling New York police about his wife's death; jurors also upheld special-circumstance findings that he lay in wait and killed her because she was a witness. Under California law the conviction carried life in prison without the possibility of parole; prosecutors did not seek the death penalty. The 78-year-old Durst, who had spent 15 days on the witness stand in combative exchanges with Deputy District Attorney John Lewin, was absent from the courtroom when the verdict was read because of coronavirus exposure.¹⁸ A prosecutor said at trial that Durst would have escaped accountability had the filmmakers not unearthed the cadaver note evidence.¹³ Durst died in 2022.¹⁹

Reception and criticism

The series drew large audiences and critical praise, and it is credited, alongside the podcast Serial, with driving the boom in true-crime documentary.²⁰ It also provoked sustained criticism. News organizations questioned the chronology of events, pressing the filmmakers on when they received the handwriting evidence, when they discovered the confession, and when they alerted authorities; court documents suggested the confession was edited and played out of sequence.²¹^•¹⁵ Critics including Richard Brody of The New Yorker objected to the stylized reenactments, arguing that the series blurred the line between Jarecki's depictions of past events and archival records of them.²² Commentators also asked where journalism ends and entertainment begins in a work whose filmmakers seemed certain of their own conclusions.²³

The series' real-world impact placed it in a small group of documentaries credited with influencing criminal cases, alongside Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988) and HBO's Paradise Lost films.²⁴ A 2020 study of prospective jurors recruited from a Facebook page dedicated to the series found that about 92 percent reported Durst was guilty and 77 percent said he would have a difficult time convincing them otherwise, illustrating concerns about pretrial publicity.²⁵

The Jinx - Part Two

A six-episode continuation, The Jinx - Part Two, debuted on HBO on April 21, 2024, and streamed on Max. The filmmakers continued investigating for eight years after the original series, drawing on hidden material, Durst's prison phone calls, and interviews with people who had not previously come forward. Durst, who died in 2022, refused to be interviewed by Jarecki after his arrest, so the new episodes center on his 2021 trial, the witnesses around him, and prosecutor John Lewin's handling of the reopened cold cases.²^•⁷^•¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026