Filmmaker: Police had Durst audio for "many months"
Police arrested Robert Durst Saturday on a murder warrant a day before Sunday's finale of the HBO documentary "The Jinx." His attorney suggested director Andrew Jarecki coordinated with authorities, but Jarecki said police had the key piece of audio "many months" before the finale.
"The truth is we hoped that Robert Durst would be arrested as soon as possible and we were sort of amazed ourselves that he hadn't be been arrested for so long, but the authorities were never communicating with us other than in their normal cordial way," Jarecki said Monday on "CBS This Morning."
Following the 2010 release of Jarecki's fictionalized film about Durst, "All Good Things," the accused murderer asked for an interview with Jarecki. That interview, and a followup a couple of years later, became the basis for "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst." As Sunday's finale showed, the crew was able to capture an apparently shocking admission after their final interview with Durst, though Jarecki said they didn't realize it immediately.
It started when Jarecki confronted Durst with evidence he called a "revelation." The stepson of Susan Berman, a friend of Durst who was found dead in 2000, discovered a letter written by Durst that was strikingly similar to an anonymous note sent to police alerting them of her killing. In addition to similar handwriting, both notes misspelled "Beverly" as "Beverley."
"After sitting down with him we thought, we've got this sort of revelation, which is he was unable to determine which of the two handwritings that we were showing him was his own," Jarecki said.
Following the difficult interview, Durst, with the live microphone still clipped to his shirt, went to the bathroom where he muttered some apparently damning statements, including: "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course."
Jarecki didn't realize what he had at the time, however.
"It wasn't until months later that we had an editor listening to material that we had left behind, thinking, now we have to listen to everything we got," Jarecki said. "We're about to finish the series and we discovered that we had this shocking piece of audio."
Durst's lawyer advised against his involvement in the project.
"What's amazing to me is he came to us knowing what he knew about his life. We didn't know that," Jarecki said. "All we could do is assume that some bad things had happened. We weren't exactly sure what."
Durst has always maintained his innocence in the death of Berman, whose father was an associate of infamous mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.
Berman, 55, a writer who had become Durst's spokeswoman, was shot in the back of the head at her home near Beverly Hills as New York investigators prepared to question her in the unsolved 1982 disappearance of Durst's wife, Kathleen.
After Berman's death, Durst moved to Texas, where he posed as a mute woman living in a boarding house until his arrest in 2001 for the murder of Morris Black, an elderly neighbor of his whose dismembered body was found in Galveston Bay. Durst's attorney argued self-defense and he was acquitted in the 2003 trial.
During those proceedings, Durst hired a psychiatrist to provide insight into his alleged mental health issues.
"When he was in Galveston his defense got a psychiatrist who was prepared to say that he had Asperger's Syndrome and that's why he didn't understand certain things regular people understand," Jarecki said.
Episodes in which Durst talks to himself were captured in the film, though he also displayed lucidity, Jarecki said.
"He's such a bright person that when he does things--you're sitting with him in an interview, and he says something extremely bright and insightful and he shows total command of the fact," Jarecki said. "And then you walk down the street with him to Starbucks and he's in Starbucks sitting on a chair in the middle of Starbucks tying his shoe and just speaking to himself."