“The Jinx” director Andrew Jarecki says the timing of Robert Durst’s arrest had nothing to do with Sunday’s finale, which included an off-camera confession from Durst saying he “killed them all.”
“No, of course not,” Jarecki said on “Good Morning America” on Monday when George Stephanopoulos asked about possible “deals” with police. “A.) We don’t have that kind of power. We’re not in charge of the arrest timing, and we had no idea of the arrest timing.”
“I was on the phone with our main contact in law enforcement at 4 o’clock in the morning two nights before,” Jarecki continued. “And I was saying, ‘I’m uncomfortable, I have security, my family’s uncomfortable, and I feel that this arrest should be made, but I understand that you need to what you need to do. But tell me where we are.’ I didn’t get any color on it.”
Durst, heir to a New York real estate fortune, was arrested on Saturday in New Orleans on murder charges. He’s being held on a first degree murder warrant issued in Los Angeles County for the 2000 death of Durst’s friend, Susan Berman.
Just before Durst made the apparent confession in a bathroom, where his microphone caught him talking to himself, Jarecki showed Durst a never-before-seen letter discovered by Berman’s stepson, Sareb Kaufman.
Kaufman said the letter, which he believes Durst sent to Berman a year before her death, carried similarities to an anonymous note sent to police the day Berman died, a letter authorities say only Berman’s killer could have written.
Durst has denied killing Berman, but police have long believed he had a motive, allegedly wanting to silence her over the 1982 disappearance of his wife, Kathleen — another alleged crime of which he has long been suspected, but never charged.
Durst’s lawyer, Chip Lewis, told Fox News’ personality Judge Jeanine Pirro on Sunday that he was “underwhelmed” by the audio of his client saying, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
“My overarching thoughts are I was a bit underwhelmed, given the lead-up and the build-up to this new development,” Lewis said. “Your honesty would lead you to say things under your breath you probably didn’t mean.”
Durst was also charged in the 2001 shooting death and dismemberment of Morris Black — Durst’s neighbor in Galveston, Texas — but he claimed self-defense and was later acquitted.
“The Jinx” led the Los Angeles district attorney to re-open the investigation into Berman’s death last week.
HBO said in a statement, “We simply cannot say enough about the brilliant job that Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling did in producing ‘The Jinx.’ Years in the making, their thorough research and dogged reporting reignited interest in Robert Durst’s story with the public and law enforcement.”